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OK I'll step up, senior dev of 30 or so years, and sick to death of the likes of Google ad-men trying to ruin things - how do I help? That said, keeping up with changes in JS/ecma seems hard. Whats the answer?
Ads aren't very important really, if you want to help, I recommend donating all your money to those in need and volunteering at a local homeless shelter, soup kitchen, or anything of the like.
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I would pay for a browser that was 100% ad- and tracking-free. I pay for an email account. I pay for YouTube. I pay for several streaming media services. I get that people are used to browsers being free, but no reason that can't change.
You are very rare. Most people are not like you. Apple tried this with iOS 2 and 3. Minor versions cost users roughly 5-10 USD per update. Therefore many users did not install the latest OS on their devices. The cost, although small, was a barrier for many people. Apple quickly pivoted and now all software updates are free of charge to all supported devices. If Mozilla starts charging for Firefox, I predict either pe…
If firefox asked me once a month "Enjoying the entire internet? Is it worth $1 to you?" I'd press the button often.
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I pay for Orion through Kagi. I would gladly contribute to the salaries of developers to maintain the Firefox project.
Orion isn't available for Linux.
Mozilla has been working with Meta on this. "For the last few months we have been working with a team from Meta (formerly Facebook) on a new proposal that aims to enable conversion measurement – or attribution – for advertising called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA." https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attri...
We owe Meta nothing. I have zero reason to donate my data to them.
"Google/Firefox claim their tracking features are not "tracking" because they use something called "differential privacy". I don't have room to explain this class of technology, but I sincerely consider it to be fake." Differential privacy is not fake, although quite complex to do in practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy
According to Mozilla[1], Firefox's implementaion uses the "Distributed Aggregation Protocol" (DAP)[2]. Individual browsers report their behavior to a data aggregation server, which in turn reports aggregate data to an advertiser's server using differential privacy. But the aggregation server still knows the behavior of individual browsers, so basically it's a semantic trick to claim the advertiser can't infer the behvior of individual users by defining part of the advertising network to not be the advertiser.
Now, Mozilla says the data aggregation server they use is run by the Internet Security Research Group[3], which is a non-profit, so perhaps the social incentives truely are aligned in this case to ensure individual user behavior isn't shared with advertisers. But it's disingenuous to claim user privacy is protected absolutely by technical measures when in reality it's only protected by social measures.
Finally, ad conversions can easily be measured without cookies by serving unique URLs with each ad, so what's even the point of this technology? I'm not clever enough to discern any ulterior motives (if there even are any), but the complexity of the approach is suspicious to me, since ostensibly a much more obvious solution would suffice.
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
[2]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ppm-dap
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Security_Research_Gro...
It is obvious why Firefox does this though; they have no income otherwise like Google does. Firefox users somehow think that using is "supporting" Mozilla/Firefox, but it is not, and they would not pay for the browser, or pay a subscription free. Privacy-friendly ads are a reasonable way for Mozilla to survive long-term -- if they are indeed privacy-friendly. Ultimately you probably either need a clean-room NGO that…
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I pay for Orion through Kagi. I would gladly contribute to the salaries of developers to maintain the Firefox project.
I also pay for Orion, but can’t use it much until the multi-container support is working well. Right now Firefox is the only browser that does this right. Upvoting you in the hopes that more people in this thread will put their money where their stated principles are and help support a privacy focused browser with clear funding sources so that Orion doesn’t go the way of Opera.
What’s your Firefox use case that Orion doesn’t handle? (Sincere question; that wasn’t meant as “it works for me so stop complaining!” snark.)
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OS updates are not comparable. Apple charging for updates is idiotic because as a user I don’t have a choice to go use a different OS.
You do have a choice, just keep using the OS version you have. Just like using the an older Firefox version. Adding security updates and new features costs time and money.
Q: How many people are using a web browser on a daily basis worldwide as their main window to the collective infosphere? A: Billions. Q: What fraction of the corresponding GDP would it take to fund a serious browser-as-public-good initiative that would develop this technology to its full potential without the perverse constraints of adtech business models? A: 0.0001%? Too small to compute? The idea that critical comm…
A publicly-funded equivalent of MSIE 6, heroically made 100% secure and private, would be a disaster for the web. And that's a pretty likely outcome if it's designed by a government committee and prioritizes safety above all.