This is the first time where I got a visceral feeling that maybe this isn't the browser I knew and loved anymore. It's not like I'm uninstalling and switching to something else, but I do feel bummed out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144
I feel similarly to you...long-time user, bummed out by stuff like this. Sometimes it feels like Firefox would be a lot better off without Mozilla occasionally making deals like this.
This is includes settings for removing or disabling all the integration with Mozilla services and their ads.
See for example: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
Maybe that arrangement led to the stagnation of Firefox, without malicious intent from any party. Hanlon's razor, yadda yadda
I don't want my browser to be a vector from which you push your blogs, Mozilla. I want a browser that isn't Chrome
I'm inching closer to using the Duck browser full-time. If you haven't tried it, give it a shot to see if it works for you.
It's not as customizable as Chrome or Firefox, but it gets the job done if you don't do a lot of heavy lifting with your browser.
Right now, I'm 60% Safari, 10% Firefox, and 30% Duck. And I use Firefox less and less lately.
But as a Firefox user from the very beginning, I still keep tabs on it, hoping that it will improve enough for me to return to it. Things like this, however, strongly indicate to me that Firefox is just lost and will never find its way back.
Mozilla were stupid enough to try and sneak this Roboto stuff in, probably as part of the requirements or intentions of the ad campaign, rather than be transparent about it. Stupidity rather than malice.
The VPN ad is a targeted decision comingffrom within the non-profit. I sort of get it, Mozilla is desperate for income because Google is keeping them afloat, barely anyone who donates cares about anything but the browser, and the for-profit ventures aren't gaining much success.
Once you get into corporate politics it's the exact opposite.
God help you if you ever get into the nuts and bolts of governmental, or gasp intergovernmental politics.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
They've made it clear they don't believe their own language about privacy and user choice. They've compromised one product to advertise another. And perhaps worse, they doubled-down about it in Bugzilla with corporate doublespeak, which to me is the tell that they'll absolutely do it again.
It's amazing how apt the trust-thermocline analogy is.
Edge is available on Windows, Linux and macOS, so it would probably do. But that would allow one of Google's biggest competitors to drop an under-performing product and lobby for antitrust against Google. Unlikely to happen, but a risk Google might not want to take.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
I do want to like Brave, as it is Firefox II in spirit, but the combo of web3 crap, Chromium and the fact that it still pings outbound (with it all 'off') puts me off entirely.
Maybe it's time for me to fork KHTML and do what needs to be done.
There's such a marginal difference between the quality of the two browsers, and Chrome is held back in what it can be by the necessity of furthering Google's commercial interests. The only limit Firefox has had is that they can't abuse the trust of their users. Firefox had to voluntarily (and often aggressively) inflict a huge amount of reputational and functional damage on itself to reduce its market share to the place that it has.
edit: it's important to say that they didn't really backslide technically; it's user-hostile (management) decisions that have hurt the browser, not anything to do with the skill of Firefox developers.
Firefox is the only "credible" competitor, although Firefox's only profitable customer is Google itself.
IIRC, didn't Mozilla lay off some R&D team that was doing some promising work on modernizing and improving its browser engine?
I'm not sure I agree. The Mr. Robot "promotional easter egg" was done by installing an add-on via the Shield Study system. This system is enabled by default, and it is intended to allow the Firefox devs to run A/B tests with browser features.[1] This sort of system already makes some non-trivial minority of users bristle. For Mozilla to co-opt it specifically for an advertising campaign perfectly validates the concerns of that group of people. So then we get a thread on HN[2] in which several Firefox devs post about how badly they and their colleagues felt about the whole debacle, and how it would undoubtedly lead to many internal conversations. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that happened, and apparently[1] Shield Studies now require some level of scientific rigor behind them before they are deployed. But unfortunately, the marketing department still seems to be willing to sacrifice the ever-diminishing good will their remaining users seem to place in Mozilla as the steward of Firefox the browser. It doesn't feel to me like they fully appreciated the lessons of 2017.
It is questionable, and being declared a search engine monopoly would be far worse for Google than Chrome being a browser monopoly. They only make Chrome to push their search/ad network.
The writing was on the wall as KDE moved to first QtWebkit and then the Blink based QtWebEngine.
So they spend all of Mozilla’s money on various BS like Pocket and now VPN to try to make more money so they can further increase their already high salaries, instead of reinvesting into Firefox - hence the anti-user intrusive ads, the reduction of head count while paying themselves millions of dollars.
If you mean would it be better or worse if they did a more traditional pop-up ad promotion for Mr. Robot like they did for their VPN service...I dunno, unfortunately I've grown to expect new Firefox releases to have found excuses for promoting Mozilla services, even though I've done a fair amount of work to try to disable all that nonsense.
At the end of the day, it's all pretty gross really. What I'd really like is a way to pay Mozilla actual money in a way that ensured it was directed solely at development of Firefox in exchange for not doing any of this stuff to me. But for some reason this doesn't seem possible.
I mean if it wasn't an add-on at all. If it was a piece of javascript or even C++ contained directly inside the program, that triggered on the same about:config setting. A traditional easter egg.