Olives @olives@qoto.org

I'm reading a post on Mozilla's site on "making it more secure" and I'm just saying you shouldn't do that.

If you are giving a LLM capabilities that could lead to a security incident, then that is on you, and you shouldn't do that.

https://ladybird.org Someone pointed out to me that some people are working on a new browser which does not involve Chrome / Firefox. Interesting and sounds like a lot of work.

Spectre basically forced multiple processes and Firefox was hideously inefficient with multiple processes to the point of it being a joke.

Google has been known to trip Mozilla up at interesting times.

For instance, Mozilla spent years on making their browser faster, only for Google to drop the Spectre class of vulnerabilities one day which forced browsers to implement mitigations which hurt performance.

I think that one is a coincidence but Mozilla seems to have no flexibility / adaptability.

There is even a speculation that Mozilla deliberately made their browser worse because they have received money from Google. That is how poorly run they were.

Starting new projects is fun, I guess. Milling away at what is actually relevant to them (and what users are actually interested in) isn't as much. Then, at the end of the cycle, they just close those projects anyway.

Mozilla is basically known to focus on everything other than what they're supposed to be working on. Their browser. Whether that's building an OS, some random social cause done crudely (i.e. questioning YouTube), or some other thing.

That's what led to the decline of Mozilla Firefox, their only actually successful product.

And maybe it is a legacy of that, but I also found that Mozilla spent too much in the way of resources on getting involved in random social causes, and they weren't even good at getting involved in those.

Like questioning YouTube.

To be fair, some of it might be that Google has a lot more money, but it is also on them for not utilizing their resources effectively (or until it was too late).

So, I guess that while he might not be that pleasant as a person (there have been quite a few jerk CEOs in the sector), he is competent.

Brendan Eich was an odd case. He had views which weren't pleasant, for instance, he was against same sex marriage (dunno what he thinks of it now).

After Mozilla ousted him though, they largely became irrelevant (through mismanagement) and never recovered.

https://brave.com/blog/intro-to-brave-ads/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
Remember that Mozilla co-founder, and former CEO, Brendan Eich created a browser called Brave which purports to be "private" but does a lot of surveillance in the name of serving you ads. #privacy

https://brave.com/blog/intro-to-brave-ads/
Another one is the Brave Browser which purports to be "private" while doing all this surveillance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
Brave was created by Brendan Eich, who also co-founded Mozilla.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-does-adblock-plus-make-money/ Remember that Adblock Plus made money from their "acceptable ads" program. #privacy

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-does-adblock-plus-make-money/
We also have to remember that it is not unusual for a service which purports to be about blocking ads to have an "acceptable ads" program of ads they choose to whitelist (which they then make money from).

So, if someone sees Mozilla, a company known for having troubles with making money, behaving like this, what are they going to think?

I think they have a point. Mozilla could easily ask for consent from users but they chose not to. Hiding behind sophistry about whether this is technically "tracking" doesn't really change that.

If it is just an alternate more private attribution method, why is there such a "need" to ship this over the concerns of users? Why does it matter if more users use it (from the outset)?

So, as far as points go, it kind of makes sense. Maybe, someone could argue whether this is the right vehicle for this but arguments for it also come off as hollow.

https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-feature noyb takes legal action against Mozilla tracking feature. #privacy

Meanwhile, there is India, where the Supreme Court fairly recently said that censoring porn was unconstitutional.

Which country will be mentioned next? Malaysia? Also a Muslim country known to censor porn.