…For now. Looks like they’re going to get rid of it too (which makes sense, because they copy Chromium’s codebase).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-chromium/developer-guide/manifest-v3

You’re 100% right about Brave being scummy.

And I hope my point didn’t come across as a defensd of Brave, but rather, “how is it that Mozilla is doing this thing in a worse way than a company that is infamously disreputable?”

I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.

You haven’t heard about the Brave ads that let you slowly accumulate tokens that you can then use to tip creators or websites? I’m not saying it was a good plan, or an ethical plan, but it was… You know, something.

Unlike what Mozilla did, Brave didn’t enable this by default, but they heavily marketed it as a feature.

If Mozilla implemented some kind of tipping system, that could be interesting. Apparently, such a system already could exist under GNU Taler too.

Would you look at that, privacy preserving advertisement!

Let’s take it one step further and go really crazy with a/b testing

<a href="company_url/campaign1"><img src="funny_picture.gif"></a>

<a href="company_url/campaign2"><img src="different_picture.gif"></a>

disingeneous to call it adding ads

Who called it adding

With all due respect, Mozilla is now (and, for a while, has been) an ad company. When an ad company tells you ads are necessary, you should not trust them. Plenty of lousy things have been entrenched as social norms, but it is the job of the entrenchers to justify their existence… Which Mozilla is definitely not doing here.

User-unique gets collected, and then the user-unique data sent to a remote server.

Only on the remote server will this data be aggregated, or so Mozilla says.

I think a big part of the problem is that they didn’t show anyone a notification or an onboarding dialog or whatever about this feature, when it got introduced.

Right. Not only didn’t they notify anybody, but they took to Reddit to defend the decision not to notify anybody:

we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.

Which is strange, because Mozilla has no problem with popups in general.

• Is Firefox trying to be my default browser in a sneaky way?
• Mozilla sends pop-up ad overlay in Firefox
• How do I completely disable this “reminder” from popping up again?
• Firefox reminds users to backup data and verify it periodically
• Keep pesky trackers off your tail

A for-profit that wrapped itself in a non-profit shell that is empty and just run by the for-profit?

deleted by creator

Privacy.com is technically a bank, so you’re going to need to identify yourself in some way regardless.

DuckDuckGo’s AI is basically a proxy to OpenAI or Anthropic.

We do not save or store your Prompts or Outputs.

Additionally, all metadata that contains personal information (for example, your IP address) is obfuscated from underlying model providers (for example, OpenAI, Anthropic).

If you submit personal information in your Prompts, it may be reproduced in the Outputs, but no one can tell whether it was you personally submitting the Prompts or someone else.

If you don’t like the sound of that anyway, and it’s totally understandable if so, there are settings to disable it.

I have carefully considered the arguments. Perhaps I have even contributed to them indirectly. I find them to be incredibly legitimate and in dire need of Mozilla’s action.

I’m kind of surprised your comment on this post got so much attention because it says so little; it should be dismissed out of hand as purely rhetorical IMO.

She switched places with another CEO that promptly fired even more workers, yes.

Can you link to your critiques? I looked for them on your behalf and found three other posts of this video, but no comments from you on them.

Criticizing this video for emotional arguments doesn’t make sense. It lays down statistics, quotes privacy policies, and chips at the way Mozilla uses emotional arguments in its marketing. And I’ve seen many Firefox people simply argue “the CEO deserves to be paid well” and “Firefox is the last bastion of the open web” - arguments that I myself have at least semi agreed with, which means I might have proclivity to emotion myself.

So if there’s a problem… Can you cite specific examples in the video?

Brave can keep the old APIs but they’ll still be affected, because developers for Chromium-compatible browsers still have to decide whether they want to create or support apps that will only work in a subset of browsers, and figure out how to distribute them outside the Chromium store.

There’s also privacy issues with Matrix:

• Account deletion on Discord: username becomes [deleted]
• Account deletion on Matrix: will not delete username
• GDPR-compliant account deletion on Matrix: will not delete username

Discord is also one (admittedly very lousy) company, while Matrix starts with the privacy issues and just gets worse

Edit x2: I can’t place a parenthesis to save my life

Corrupt politicians can simply ignore the law. If they didn’t ignore it, they wouldn’t be very corrupt.

Telegram hasn’t been secure since basically day 1. IIRC it went something like

Security experts: Never roll your own cryptography.
Telegram: We rolled our own cryptography!
Security experts: Don’t. And it’s broken.
Telegram: uhhhh… We fixed it.
Security experts: It still looks really bad. Stop it.
Telegram: says nothing