https://reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1dofyj1/how_did_mozilla_firefox_go_from_being_the_best/
Post Text
Seriously, every post I read that’s upvoted is smack talking Mozilla in every way possible and it just so happens to take place exactly when Google quietly announces Manifest V3. Mozilla is not our enemy, Google is. Don’t let all these bot upvoted comments and posts let you forget that. Has Mozilla made some questionable moves lately? Yeah… the biggest being the purchase of Anonym. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-the-bar-for-privacy-preserving-digital-advertising/
We’ll just have to wait and see how that turns out. But I found it amusing when I saw this post and it got so many upvotes immediately after Mozilla announced the purchase. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1dkujuh/mozilla_anonym_is_a_datahoovering_monster/
Then Mozilla allegedly fired someone because he has cancer. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/mozilla-is-trying-to-push-me-out-because-i-have-cancer-cpo-says-in-bombshell-lawsuit/ar-BB1oOjOZ
Then I was reading Mozilla android browser is suddenly the worst and least secure android browser.
It’s never ending… Honestly I think I am just going to take some time away from Reddit because it’s becoming such a corporate shill and bot upvoted cesspool. I’m sure this will get heavily down-voted but I just wanted to give my two cents. Mozilla will always be my preferred choice for privacy and security and unless I see some actual changes within the browsers no one will ever convince me otherwise.
Only people saying that are bots and people who dont know what the fuck is going on, which is most people. Out of my office of 60 people, I am the only one who even knows this is happening. Even my manager, who is technically supposed to hold all IT knowledge for the company, still uses chrome as his only and doesn’t even know what manifest anything is. Mans is driving vanilla chrome just taking ads and trackers to the face.
Mans is driving vanilla chrome just taking ads and trackers to the face.
I know that the context here is that you’re staying that he’s presumably supposed to have familiarity with the browser, but…honestly, I’m not sure that encouraging people who don’t have some level of technical familiarity with their browser to use ad-blockers is a fantastic idea.
As obnoxious as ads can be, it’s also true that I’ve seen various ad-blocker and tracker-blocker (and now auto-EU-cookie-agreement-accept) periodically break websites over the years. If people are able and willing to troubleshoot the browser when things break, then sure, but I know a bunch of people who I don’t think would likely be able to do that, and the irritation of ads may be less-serious than the inability to access a website, even if the ads are a lot more frequent than the website breaking.
There are also websites that will intentionally detect ad-blockers and block access to the website. Those do generally provide instructions to turn off ad-blockers – like, they want to have people viewing the ads, not just avoiding the website – but I dunno if it’s a great idea to get people in the pattern of happily following instructions to extend sites that tell them to do so additional browser permissions.
There’s an additional problem – that some widely-installed extensions have been purchased by other companies. I don’t do a great job of following who-acquired-what-addon on the system that I use. I suspect that most people don’t. If you’re giving a browser addon access to see and twiddle all sorts of data across all sorts of websites – banks, whatever – you’re extending a lot of trust to whoever can push updates to that addon.
I think that what Firefox might benefit from is a “troubleshoot webpage” feature that – among other things – tries doing a binary search, disabling addons, to see if some active addon is causing breakage. That won’t solve the “some company bought a browser extension and is now maybe doing less-than-salubrious-things” problem, but it’d make me more comfortable recommending that not-super-technically-savvy users use ad-blockers in terms of website breakage.
Might also do some things like check Internet connectivity (like, is some Javascript-heavy page breaking because the Javascript is trying to fetch things and silently failing), check for VPNs being active or inactive, etc. I have a Bluetooth adapter that occasionally wedges after being woken up from sleep, and it’s not always obvious to me that that’s the cause. I know a lot of people who would spend a lot of time frustrated with that.
I would note that ads are a source of poor performance, and vectors for infection and compromise of a system through realistic misleading dialogs and outright exploitation of vulnerabilities.
I have had my parents fall victim to viruses and get scammed out of money due to advertisements on purportedly legitimate websites.
If a website doesn’t work due to an ad blocker, my parents don’t need to visit it.
Ah, how the turn tables.
At home, I use PiHole and AdGuard to block ads. I also use Firefox on my desktop with ublock origin plugin. Sites do break sometimes. But here’s my thinking. If a site is using or forcing an ad in such a way that the site is broken for me, I go to another site. That one didn’t deserve my time or business. My bank website works just fine. So does the power company, gas, etc. The important stuff is fine. The rest has competition.
I will note that my auto insurance website broke between an email link, the trackers in said link and the website. I messaged their IT dept in a complaint form and they said they would change how the email system tracker works to prevent that in the future.
Redditors gladly fall for drama and clickbait. Mozilla being a non-profit at its core means they’re supposed to be the good guys, so if they do anything that could be interpreted badly, or even if they don’t, journalists will publish stories about it and Redditors will gladly lap that shit up.
If Google tries to rape them, that’s yet another Tuesday, boring.The “opinion” of redditors is as thoughtful and researched as a billy club to the backside of the head. I should know, I was a redditor for 10 years
Spot on. I guess Lemmy is like Reddit in some ways.
It’s social media. Social media is all about bubbles, groupthink, driving engagement. It happens on Facebook, it happens on Reddit.
It happens here, too. There are certain views that are accepted as what every right-thinking person holds, and certain other views that are dumped on with great glee about how wrong they are. But which specific views they are varies from bubble to bubble.
Well, I say you’re wrong!
Reactionary bullshit conceivably being promoted by the advertisement industry instead of rising organically (though it really only matters when asking whether its a few loud people, or a bunch of AI-generated noise).
My first thought was some corpos are saying this, campaigning against Firefox.
All you gotta do is think about who still uses Reddit and you’ll have your answer. It’s the SM for the average joe, and the average joe knows jack about technology.
I think they could be right. For gods sake Firefox bought an ad company. And their latest and greatest features are “me too” AI garbage and “vertical tabs”. Whoop de do — browsers did vertical tabs in the 90s and it flopped.
Google and Edge are worse, but that doesn’t make what’s happening to Firefox any better.
What ever happened to mean and lean browser code that concentrated on rendering a website as quickly and accurately as possible?
browsers did vertical tabs in the 90s and it flopped
There are extensions for that. Which are worse than they used to be because they didn’t provide APIs enabling to do that properly, about 10 fucking years after they dropped the old APIs. There are a lot of other feature requests from back then open, often even filed years before they went through with dropping the old APIs. The best way of doing custom keyboard shortcuts in Firefox is still injecting Javascript into each page, with all the shortcomings this has. Usability of Firefox is way worse nowadays than what it was 10 years ago - and I do understand (and agree) with the decision to dump the legacy APIs, but you can’t just break functionality lots of people use, and not provide APIs in over a decade to fix that.
I’m trying other browsers now and then, but every single one is a dumpster fire. At least the Firefox dumpster fire is a bit less out of control - but that’s the most positive thing I can say about it nowadays.
“All content I dislike must’ve been upvoted by bots.”
No, real life is often just like that. It helps to remember that people tend to focus on the bad, and reddit culture isn’t known for its tendency towards sensible takes.
Try to keep the good stuff in mind, I quite enjoyed reading through the recent AMA in r/firefox, for example.
Mozilla is a big entity. Regardless of your views, there’ll always be both good and bad brewing in there. I think a disproportionately loud group of people need to learn to accept that, and reflect a bit more before commenting.
And yes, getting some distance from internet bubbles can help. Reddit is not the only culprit.
It was gradual rather than sudden, and partly a matter of perception catching up with reality.
