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Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

fakespot.com

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Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#71

Post by mdaniel »

causi wrote: post #45
purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

Still no way to change UserAgent on Firefox Mobile.

The irony doesn't escape me that if they'd just turn off the extension restriction there are like a thousand extensions that would do that and more for any audience where such a thing still matters

I haven't tried to build Firefox for Android in a really long time but I wonder what the level of effort would be to just track the release tags with such a patch applied (i.e. the world's shallowest fork)

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#72

Post by blowski »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Normally I'd say... "They'd better write it in the bylaws that Mozilla isn't allowed to buy any more companies" but a system for identifying fake content on the web might (unlike all the other Mozilla acquisitions such as the thoroughly pizzled Pocket) improve the web browsing experience.

I agree with your comment, but I’m curious what “pizzled” means.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#73

Post by blacksmith_tb »

bcx wrote: post #15

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…

Stats vary a lot by source, for example[1] puts FF and Safari neck and neck (which seems optimistic to me, as much as I like FF).

1: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#74

Post by tornato7 »

kivlad wrote: post #31

I'm saddened by the sudden and intermittent disappearance of ReviewMeta, which prided itself as not inserting affiliate links into their site/extension. Reading this news leads me to believe that this is a perfect fit in accordance with Mozilla's overall mission, making this a good outcome for something that could've easily been exploited by a bad actor making the acquisition.

I'm upset to hear that ReviewMeta is gone. They had much better detection than FakeSpot, in my opinion.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#75

Post by pjmlp »

jdwithit wrote: post #20
purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.

I still use Firefox, however it has long stop being relevant in browser support matrixes for project acceptance delivery.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#76

Post by capitainenemo »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #73
bcx wrote: post #15

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…

Stats vary a lot by source, for example[1] puts FF and Safari neck and neck (which seems optimistic to me, as much as I like FF). 1: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... 5.59% for Firefox in the desktop category. (mobile is tough for any alternative browser - chrome has a hard time on iOS although I'm sure only being a skin over webkit doesn't help)

Desktop is a better market to compare anyway, if including Edge. Is Microsoft even trying anymore on mobile?

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#77

Post by tornato7 »

ve55 wrote: post #13

How do they expect to lead in identifying fake content when the problem is intractable if adversaries are even somewhat competent? You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.

The problem is not intractable if the analysis of reviews is statistical and reputation-based instead of content-based. They can look at how many reviews were added over time, how the product page has changed over time, if the reviewers are genuine users or if they only leave 5-star reviews on a handful of sketchy products, etc.

Of course, it would be much easier for Amazon to do this, because they could look at IP addresses, purchase history, mailing address, etc. - but it's in their best interest to let the spam continue, apparently.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#78

Post by dokem »

purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

I use firefox everyday at work and home and can't think of a single thing that 'needs' to be fixed from a user perspective. It loads up the internet and is fast. So I don't think defining Mozilla's vision as 'fix a bunch of random issues' is very wise. Gnome key-ring support and porting to rust? How is that going to grow the user base?

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#79

Post by lucideer »

Aeolun wrote: post #29
notatoad wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the general state of firefox suggests that they are not large enough to do more than one thing.

What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.

Not sure how much of this is living in a bubble or selection bias of negative experiences in common but my own impression of the firefox userbase is that a significant portion of it are using firefox as a "least worst" browser, rather than one they are actually very happy with.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#80

Post by kjkjadksj »

bcx wrote: post #15

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…

Its amazing how consistently poor safari adoption has been.
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