• paultimate14@lemmy.world
    31613·
    3 months ago

    I’ve seen predictions of Firefox’s downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.

    It’s really easy to see the headlines saying things like “Firefox is tracking it’s users and violating their privacy!!!” And panic. But digging into the latest “scandal” (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.

    One of the main criticisms is that it’s opt-out instead of opt-in. Which… I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren’t going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.

    I don’t fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It’s good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.

    But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.

    • FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.orgEnglish
      926·
      3 months ago

      For whatever reason Lemmy seems to have an anti-firefox agenda. They make some good points but most of the posts on Lemmy are just pure emotion, speculations, and FUD.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
      465·
      3 months ago

      If they were violating people’s privacy, it would be completely unacceptable to make it opt-out.

      But they aren’t. They are doing things that some people believe they’ll want to violate people’s privacy in the future to do in a different way.

      • naught101@lemmy.world
        17·
        3 months ago

        I didn’t know what it was, so I looked it up. Their description is here:

        https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/

        It sounds interesting… It also sounds like it will fail, because Mozilla seems to think that trackers are primarily interested in collecting ad stats, and that targeted advertising is less critical, but I think in reality it’s the other way around, and advertisers won’t accept such a limited solution.

        • Starbuncle@lemmy.caEnglish
          171·
          3 months ago

          I see no benefit to this because it will never be used instead of traditional tracking. It will just be a way for advertisers to get data from people who are blocking normal trackers and get even more data from people who aren’t.

        • marcos@lemmy.world
          6·
          3 months ago

          Oh, I wish them the best and hope they succeed.

          But I also think they’ll fail. And not even for that one reason, I think there are enough advertisers not interested on tracking to make it succeed. I just think they’ll flounder it. What is too bad, because they are the ones best positioned to make it.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
      335·
      3 months ago

      The sanest take yet. If this were reddit and gold meant anything, you’d deserve it

    • jqubed@lemmy.world
      2810·
      3 months ago

      I was an early adopter of Firefox 20+ years ago. It started going downhill more than 15 years ago and I bailed to Chrome when that launched. It really was better than Firefox at the time. Then Chrome got worse and I wound up back on Firefox, not because Firefox had gotten better in that time but because everything else had gotten worse than Firefox in the intervening time. Also, if going from 48% market share in 2009 to a barely relevant <5% in 2024 doesn’t count as a downfall I’m not sure what does.

    • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      3 months ago

      The most fragile thing to me is their funding stream, which may even serve as a source of enshittification demands, implemented as subtly as possible.

    • drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      107·
      3 months ago

      PPA works for ad networks and not users. I don’t care about your ‘moderate take’ about a technology invented by the actual opposition who would strip-mine your corpse for minerals if they were given the opportunity just because it’s not as evil as it could be. It is still evil technology that works against you.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
      63·
      3 months ago

      Oh so tracking cookies should be the same, find the settings menu to opt out since the majority of the population just clicks to accept everything.

    • cm0002@lemmy.worldOP
      2018·
      3 months ago

      I’m just following the warning signs, in the last year:

      There’s the news of the opt-out only on tracking as you brought up. Then they fired one of their open source executives because he had the audacity to get cancer. Then they acquired an ad company because “we’re built different and we can fix her and totally not get corrupted by ads in the process”. Then the AI shit oh and ofc the news where they almost sucked Putin’s dick and pulled FF from being accessible in Russia for a day or 2

      And a bunch of other stuff that I’m probably forgetting about. And that’s just within the last year.

      Google and Chrome were great to! Until they weren’t. FF probably won’t ever actually die, not for a while at least. But the User and Privacy first aspects certainly will. They’ll probably succumb to enshittification and become like any other corporate browser like Chrome or Edge for years to come.

      • paultimate14@lemmy.world
        443·
        3 months ago

        Ah I just searched for Firefox news and the PPA thing was the only one that came up.

        As for firing the executive, I can’t find anything about him being specifically relayed to being open-source anything. Steve Teixeira was their Chief Product Office briefly- he only was hired in 2022 and left the company a few months ago, and prior to that he worked for Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. So I don’t think this can really be framed as some attack on open-source or privacy. If the allegations are true that they discriminated against him for having cancer that’s shitty of course, but Mozilla has of course claimed that they did not and it’s going to court. They didn’t fire him either- they asked him to take a demotion to Senior VP of Technology Strategy and he chose to leave instead.

        Yes Mozilla bought an ad company. They’re called Anonym and their stated goal is to provide an advertising service that can exist profitably without violating privacy. I hate ads- I block as many as I can and I use a pi-hole. I avoid ad-supported services as much as possible. I’m also privileged enough that I can afford to pay for a subscription to a lot of stuff or just buy physical media to rip and store on my own server. But there was a time when I was a broke college student stuck using campus Internet and playing by their rules, so the safest option I could afford was just to watch ads. Ads can be an ethical business model that helps improve the lives of low-income households. For people with legal or ethical concerns about piracy, or additional restrictions on their Internet, or who just lack the technical skill.

        It’s certainly fair to keep an eye on Anonym and Mozilla in this regard, but I haven’t seen anything objectionable there yet.

        Similar for the Mozilla AI. It seems it’s still in it’s infancy and I’m not a fan of companies jumping on the air bandwagon in general, but at the very least Mozilla has identified the problems with other AI’s and is looking to create a better alternative. If they get caught stealing training data, releasing tools to allow high schoolers to make deep fake revenge porn, tell people to start putting glue in their pizza cheese, or some other crap like that then they should absolutely be criticized for it. But none of that has happened yet that I’m aware of.

        I also can’t find exactly what you’re referring to with Russia. The closest thing is that it looks like there were some extensions that were made to work around Russian state censorship. The Russian government passed a law in March banning such workarounds. In response, Mozilla took down 5 extensions, reviewed them, and then decided to reinstate them in June. Not quite ideal, but still seems like reasonable action to me.

        It’s fair and a good thing to criticize Mozilla and Firefox. But it seems like you’re trying to spin every single move they make as a sign the sky is falling.

        And I also know that there are both states and corporations paying people to go on the Internet and push propaganda. Firrfox has a lot of enemies. You cant just blindly believe every article saying they are succumbing to enshittification.

    • jqubed@lemmy.world
      792·
      3 months ago

      This process has been underway since the project switched their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox. Early Firefox was lightweight with limited features and the idea that you would add your own as extensions for the features you wanted. Then it started gaining traction and the Mozilla developers started forcing features in that should’ve been extensions. It’s been downhill ever since!

      • cley_faye@lemmy.world
        15·
        3 months ago

        Even better, they took actual extensions and made them built-in and impossible to remove. The work was already done to keep a lightweight browser with extra features in option, and they reverted it.

      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
        143·
        3 months ago

        A few months ago people would have still downvoted your comment, but the message has made it to everyone now. Mozilla and with that Firefox is an endangered species that needs to be steered back into safety.

  • cley_faye@lemmy.world
    681·
    3 months ago

    It’s been going for years now. We just don’t want to move away because, frankly, there’s little viable alternatives.

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
    471·
    3 months ago

    i think that the first sign of enshitification is its leaders and it seems like it’s already here.

    i’m wondering what browser to switch to next.

    • cm0002@lemmy.worldOP
      614·
      3 months ago

      This is a 100% handmade meme by me lol

      I actually did consider putting IE, but then I realized IE never went through enshittification it was just always shit lmao so it didn’t fit

      • Cagi@lemmy.ca
        13·
        2 months ago

        IE had a near monopoly on browsing for a long time after Netscape Navigator enshittified (the true first door).

  • cqst@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    323·
    3 months ago

    There will be no improvement with browsers until the introduction of one with a strong copyleft license.

    • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
      13·
      3 months ago

      I’m curious, how would copyleft license improve the quality of browser development? That is really about funding and management.

      • unemployedclaquer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        5·
        3 months ago

        Chromium is fully entrenched. “strong copyleft”? Even Microsoft bent to the will of Chromium. And Firefox is just a silly thing where people like me hang on

        • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
          2·
          3 months ago

          If I remember correctly it’s under a copy left license which makes sense given it’s ultimately a derivative of KHTML.

          • unemployedclaquer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            KHTML is a discontinued browser engine that was developed by the KDE project. It originated as the engine of the Konqueror browser in the late 1990s, but active development ceased in 2016. It was officially discontinued in 2023. Built on the KParts framework and written in C++, KHTML had relatively good support for Web standards during its prime. Engines forked from KHTML are used by most of the browsers that are widely used today, including WebKit and Blink

            • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
              1·
              3 months ago

              Yes, blink is the engine Chromium uses. Since KHTML was an open source project any project based on it will have to be open source, unless of course it’s just used as a library. Even in that case though blink the engine is forced to be open source even if the browser as a whole isn’t. GNU licenses are considered infectious because anything containing any GNU code automatically and legally becomes open source. So KHTML being unmaintained is irrelevant.

    • el_abuelo@programming.dev
      3·
      3 months ago

      Ok I’m probably just a simpleton who doesn’t get it…but is this comic really suggesting that HTML5 I’d a negative thing, and worse, is the drumbeat of a tyrannical web?

      I mean really…HTML5 is one of the best things to happen to the Web and the W3C is imo the essential glue holding things together.

      Browser inconsistencies are so few and far between now it makes building an inclusive Web much easier, you can almost do it by accident.

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    15·
    3 months ago

    zen browser (hardened) or forked librewolf that is designed to be fast is nice (my distro has this browser called cachy browser its based on librewolf with some compiler optimizations and its nice)

  • RangerJosie@lemmy.world
    12·
    3 months ago

    Noooooo.

    I like my Extensions.

    The internet isn’t worth having without Ublock, Ghostery, Scriptmonkey, etc.

  • Iheartcheese@lemmy.world
    4332·
    3 months ago

    Firefox users were too cocky and wouldn’t shut up about how amazing it is. The universe took them down a peg.

    Do you hear that Linux users?

    • abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      361·
      3 months ago

      Do you hear that Linux users?

      There’s only one Firefox, there’s fucktonnes of Linux Distros. I am even willing to move to fucking Arch if push comes to shove.

      • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
        151·
        3 months ago

        Librewolf, Mullvad, Tor, Snowwassel… There’s more than one Firefox. Surely if some fucked up AI integration was included, one of them would just disable it.

        • exu@feditown.comEnglish
          82·
          3 months ago

          None of them have the manpower or money to maintain a browser engine.

          For reference, Opera stopped years ago and even Microsoft gave up.

          • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
            9·
            3 months ago

            You’re correct, that’s why they are not maintaining a browser engine.

            They are forks of Firefox with relatively small changes, like default configs, telemetry disabled or Firefox sync and pocket removed.

        • LostXOR@fedia.io
          10·
          3 months ago

          I’d like to see Linus’s response if anyone tried to enshittify the kernel.

        • rand_alpha19@moist.catsweat.com
          6·
          3 months ago

          UNIX-like operating systems that utilize kernels other than Linux exist. FreeBSD, Plan9, etc. Not to mention that the Linux kernel isn’t developed by a single person or even a single organization. Mozilla’s governance structure is totally different.

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
    11·
    3 months ago

    Hey! Why not add an AI assistant that summarizes each page I visit! It would be awesome 😎. But only if the computation is done off-site. I don’t want to bother my computer cpu too much…this page depicts 7 consenting adults engaging in what would otherwise be described as an Australian cum slut gangbang clusterfuck with a 3 finger twist and large bottle of rum up the asshole…

    Joe! Joe! Come here quick! Remember the dude from yesterday? Yeah, cum slut cluster fuck? Exactly! Look he’s asking for it again! I think he likes it. Why don’t we send his information to the appropriate authorities?

    …ring ring! Yes? Is this the guy who really likes Australia cluster fuck videos? Ehhh, why would you ask such a thing?..well I am the authority on this topic! I wrote the book, see?..and another page …and another page… Yeah, it’s mostly photos of me and my 6 male friends. Oh! Ah!.. Can I help you? Well I didn’t bring my 6 friends with me but do you have sex guy friends? Oh I said sex, didn’t I. Yeah I do have sex friends! Wait a minute, did Mozilla Firefox sent you after they shared my most intimate searches thru the NSA AI servers? Gosh darn it! Well it doesn’t matter, what’s done is done. I guess I’ll just take my pants off, go ahead and get more comfortable too. You want anything to eat while we wait here for my six friends? One of them is really fat, is that okay? I mean he’s really, like you know, morbidly obese sort of fat. I hope you are okay with his girth.

    And Soo the user had a great time thanks to Mozilla Firefox. The end! She was never found until the x-ray, when her body was found biologically fused and bonded to the user’s friend’s body along with two other doctors from previous visits. It was pretty bad. It was big news in Australia 🦘.

    I gotta go sleep 💤😴💤💤.

  • jbk@discuss.tchncs.de
    178·
    3 months ago

    the so called end-of-world “enshittification”: anonymized telemetry

    good way to see who’s paranoid ngl

    • Starbuncle@lemmy.caEnglish
      82·
      3 months ago

      It’s not about where it is, it’s about where it’s going. Tech companies love the slow burn. Chrome kept getting progressively worse and now they’re at the point where they’re blocking ad blockers at the browser level. Windows got away with nags to use MS Office products and now they’re leaping into start page ads and integrated AI shit you can’t remove. Mozilla is starting to enshittify, just like MS and Google did all those years ago.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
      88·
      3 months ago

      It’s not just that, it’s the AI bullshit they’re adding too that will absolutely have forced data scraping eventually since we’re “using their product.” They’ll have some bullshit excuse like “we don’t take your browsing data, just the data of any interaction with our AI product for training purposes.”

      • jbk@discuss.tchncs.de
        106·
        3 months ago

        You know because…?

        This blind hate of AI is also a great sorta red flag. Currently afaik it’s only for auto image captions and some not even released (?) feature. Not all AI is the hostile copyright ignoring AI like gpt and shit