Link: https://goblin.band/notes/ak9wrlzwgqsvbj9y

Facebook's Senior VP of Marketing
is now
Mozilla's Chief Financial Officer

Facebook's VP of Ads
is now
Mozilla's Senior VP of Product
(The apparent most senior position)

Time to dump firefox

I'm looking forward to the long articles shedding light on how Mozilla was slowly corrupted by it's own success and ultimately failed.

Why is it even structured like a corporation?

because as soon as people figure out they can make money off of something it gets ruined.

it's two separate entities, a corporation and a nonprofit.

i don't know why it's like that.

So where would be best to move on? Librewolf or tor?

It's just so obviously been happening a while now. Good thing Waterfox and Librefox exist.

In the USA there are restrictions on what types of activities a not-for-profit company can do. For example, you can't pay a not-for-profit to do work for you. So a common approach is to make a for-profit company owned by the not-for-profit. It will pay staff and any bills associated with work for hire or from selling stuff, and donate any money left over to the not-for-profit. Since companies are taxed based on profits, and donations are tax deductible, it lets companies get around the restrictions.

It sounds dodgy as fuck, but I worked for an open source company structured like this and it is apparently common. The COO even had a letter from the state in a file stating that it was okay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Gross, guess I should finally switch over to Ironfox or Waterfox or Librewolf or whatever...

• If you're looking for a drop-in Firefox replacement, WaterFox is good.
• LibreWolf is great for privacy by default.
• Tor Browser is something you only want to use if it's alongside using Tor.

My concern is that if Firefox disappears entirely, all of its forks will also disappear. None of the current forks' dev teams are set up to be full maintainers of the whole product. They only take what Mozilla release and modify from there.

They only exist as long as Firefox and Mozilla exist. They all depend on Mozilla for updates, patching and core functionality.

FUCK!

Yep, and browsers are apparently notoriously hard to build and maintain. We're cooked.

I'm waiting to see if Ladybird takes off. They have some questionable sponsors, but you need money to get started. Hopefully they stick to their guns of being independent if they become successful.

And Mozilla will exist as long as Google needs to have a functional opponent they can point to. Firefox is maintained on Google's dollar.

You mean all the forks that rely entirely on the Firefox engineering team to exist?

Because the specs are a pile of shit.
I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure that google helped with that.

The good thing is you are certainly not alone. Just look at all the rather new options that have emerged ever since it became clear that Mozilla is failing itself and "us". Don't be sad, things change every know and then, and freedom is waiting for you. This is a libregang post.

What regulatory body could have the authority to audit Mozilla, recognize that there's suits cashing in millions at the expense of the common good, and do some spring cleaning ?

Already switched to WaterFox when they announced AI in FireFox and already have LibreWolf set up just in case and tor is still in my test phase, need some more time with it.

Used FireFox since 2006-2007 and was happy to learn it has other variants, but hate that these corporate bastards have to ruin everything.

Plugging Servo. They're testing nightly builds now.

https://servo.org/

Dude what do I go to now? I avoid Google as much as possible. I use Safari on Mac but my main PC is Linux. I’ve been using FF for a looooong time. I will not participate in anything Meta related.

I can be of assistance. From the World Wide Web consortium, the group who creates the Web standards:

This specifies a browser API for the measurement of advertising performance.

Editors:

• Andrew Paseltiner (Google)
• Andy Leiserson (Mozilla)
• Benjamin Case (Meta)
• Benjamin Savage (Meta)
• Charlie Harrison (Google)
• Martin Thomson (Mozilla)

Yes Mozilla itself was working with Facebook back as far as 2022, and was basing this work on their telemetry which was pretty controversial back in 2018.

Damn, the web really is just a big pile of advertising shit now.

Thanks - I guess we really need to come up with alternatives.

Wooo! Finally! Glad too see this day come

Edit: and saw they support OpenHarmony too, which is extra nice

Ladybird has both questionable sponsors and questionable leadership and past drama.

Servo is the one I'm excited for.

I'm watching both servo and ladybug with great interest.

Surely nobody can predict what happens next...

Yeah but Firefox only exists because of the large community willing to work on it. That community can go to Waterfox or Librefox and continue development under better leadership.

*relied

The forks already exist now, so the cat's kinda out of the bag. Sure, they may benefit from updates from Mozilla, but it's not like they're just going to up and disappear or stop working all of the sudden.

No, they still rely on the Firefox engineering team to keep updating Firefox and to keep adding necessary additions for web standards, security updates, performance fixes, and so on and so forth.

All of these forks will fall behind web standards changes and effectively just become the Firefox flavor of Internet Explorer over time. It won't happen overnight. You're right about that, but it will most definitely happen over the course of a few years. Effectively handing full control over to Google and Chrome

All of these forks rely on Firefox to provide the hard bits in order to keep up with Chrome, or at least attempt to keep up with Chrome.

Building a browser is pretty damn hard, and honestly, it's a miracle that even the Firefox engineering team has managed to do what they do, given they only have, at best, a quarter of the resources that Google puts towards their browser.

It could happen, but devs could also just keep forks up to date on their own too. As Firefox gets shittier, better alternatives will become more popular and there'll be more people willing to fund them.