Pocket, cliq, Push Notifications for Mozilla Blog without user consent, Mr robot, Firefox Suggest etc they are littered with mistakes and scandals and have never improved their governance or process.
I can give them a pass on technical decisions like Thunderbird or breaking extensions but when it's purely commercial it has to be judged differently.
Seems like a good record to me.
Which is the scale of Mozilla "badness" compared to the rest, even you.
And especially in the ligh of the good things they do.
You can be a critic, but be so in balance with the good things, otherwise you are making doing good something so ingrate a lot of people will give up.
If you thing doing the right thing is easy, you have not been doing a lot of it.
Problem is that Chrome is massive. If Chrome decides it will go left, most of websites will go left.
If you want to compare with Google the list is way more subjective.
Is there any threshold for mendacity that if crossed would bother you?
I mean, Chrome (including Chromium, IIRC) literally collects and ships a bunch of tracking data to Google THE FIRST FUCKING TIME YOU LAUNCH THE APPLICATION.
Context matters. If Firefox did the Pocket nonsense in an environment where we had multiple decent free (as in freedom) browsers, then I'd grab my pitchfork. As it stands, I just can't feel the righteous indignation your comment is trying to rouse. It's truly NOTHING compared to the other options.
It's also about the loss of trust.
That particular incident, for example, was completely unnecessary. It involved a significant display of unbelievably poor judgment, and a total lack of foresight. It shouldn't have happened.
The fact that it did happen, despite it being such an obviously bad idea, raised a lot of questions and doubt.
It causes people to wonder what other incidents, which could potentially be far worse, might happen in the future.
It's remembered years later because it involved such a major loss of trust for so many people.
It's remembered now only by a very small, though vocal, minority.
All valid concerns, but why post about them on the internet? Especially when it's nothing concrete--you used the words "questions", "doubts", and "might happen"? If someone is taking the effort to post FUD (literally) about Mozilla and "trust", why the hell aren't they using that same effort to post about Google or Microsoft and "trust"? Aren't those obviously much bigger problems?
Again, it's not wrong, per se, but I feel like it's bordering on some kind of astroturfing for people to complain about the fucking Mr. Robot non-story that happened years ago when TFA is about Mozilla at least signalling the right thing while Google is trying to be overtly evil YET AGAIN. I can actually type "Fuck Google" faster than I can type "Mr. Robot", so I'd have to have some kind of weird agenda or priorities to bring up Firefox's Mr. Robot thing.
There is no perfect option right now, and Mozilla will never be that perfect option because they are human and at least three people working there probably want to make some money.
So yeah, lets just keep making them irrelevant so in ten years I won't have a choice and be FORCED to use the browser that says ad blocking is stealing and spoofing your user agent is a violation of the CFAA and all this other blatantly user hostile shit.
It's such clear whataboutism, to have ANYTHING to hold against the only web browser that isn't actively controlled by the people with billions of dollars a year incentive to actually harm how you use the web.
"Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page" (>>36077360 )
"Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage" (>>36085642 )
That's another incident that just shouldn't have ever happened to begin with, in my opinion.
They killed Weave (aka Sync 1.0; which was somewhat weird but simple enough to comprehend, reimplement and self-host), replacing it with an NIH-reeking over-engineered abomination that's the very antithesis of standard, open or public. Most people just ignored it as "that's Mozilla own infrastructure, they don't have to make it open, design it well, think of others, or anything else". I could not.
They tried to push a fundamentally flawed Persona/BrowserID standard that continued the trend to remove users from their "own" identities while claiming it's a pro-user pro-privacy move. I can see the logic, but I'm of firm opinion that it would've done more harm than good. I'm glad the project died without gaining any traction and WebAuthn (which has its issues, but where users are the source of their identities) took over. That's what BrowserID should've been, but Mozilla just went with the flow and refused or failed to fight for identity ownership.
It's things like those what made me regret using Firefox (but again, everything else is worse), not some home page sponsored links. That's where they stopped to differ from the rest for me. Mozilla used to be a beacon of doing things right even if it was challenging, fighting for a better web. And they became just another software company, that put their glorious past on all the ads (how they're so pro-everything good) while failing to live up to those high standards.
They had an user agent, but they butchered it and made it just a browser.
It's the lack of foresight and the lack of good judgment that I don't see getting fixed.
Both of those incidents should have been completely avoidable with even the most minimal of forethought.
I don't think that there's "a strong anti-Mozilla bias" here, as you put it earlier. The people affected by that incident, and by others, were probably among the most ardent Firefox supporters. After all, they were still using it long after so many others had already moved to Chrome.
Loss of trust is something that isn't easily forgotten, and it's a relevant factor worthy of bringing up in discussion.
It's a non-story because you had to opt-in to Firefox's "experiments" feature to get the extension pushed to you. Opting in to the experiments feature is *literally* granting permission for Mozilla to change the behavior of your Firefox browser remotely in between official releases. So, Mozilla had your permission to change your browser. I simply will not shed a tear for anyone who felt betrayed by something they signed up for.
And, by the way, I was also "affected" by the Mr. Robot thing because I also opted in to the experiments feature.
Furthermore, the extension did nothing harmful. It didn't even collect any data as far as I know. You know why Mozilla pushed an extension that didn't even collect any data instead of one that does? Because they were acting in a trustworthy way!
Sure, it was a faux pax. Mozilla thought they could be cute the same way a lot of old school FLOSSy, hackery, software would include amusing Easter eggs and jokes. It was inappropriate and didn't land well for a variety of reasons, but there was no reason to lose trust in Mozilla at the time, and there's *certainly* no reason to even bring it up today, years later, when just about every other tech company and computer product is trying their damnedest to spy on you, sell your data, prevent you from having root control of your devices, and squeeze subscription money out of you.
Again, Chrome starts tracking you the instant you launch it for the first time. Microsoft tracks you when you log in to Windows and occasionally re-enables tracking features that you've disabled. Mozilla pushed a silly "fun" extension to users who opted in that didn't collect any data nor make Mozilla any money.
This discussion is nonsense. If you truly don't trust Mozilla after the harmless Mr. Robot extension was pushed to you after you chose to allow them to modify your browser remotely, then go ahead and stop using Firefox- I don't care. But please stop spreading FUD.