I’ve seen predictions of Firefox’s downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.
It’s really easy to see the headlines saying things like “Firefox is tracking it’s users and violating their privacy!!!” And panic. But digging into the latest “scandal” (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.
One of the main criticisms is that it’s opt-out instead of opt-in. Which… I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren’t going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.
I don’t fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It’s good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.
But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.
For whatever reason Lemmy seems to have an anti-firefox agenda. They make some good points but most of the posts on Lemmy are just pure emotion, speculations, and FUD.
It’s in the last line of their comment:
But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.
As a former moderator of r/Firefox… We inherited this from reddit.
It was pretty bad on Reddit but seems worse here haha.
At least on r/Firefox, that was partly due to an enormous uplift by the moderators to keep it not toxic. I become a moderator there specifically because of the pervasive anti-Mozilla toxicity.
I’ve seen the exact opposite of that until very recently honestly.
If they were violating people’s privacy, it would be completely unacceptable to make it opt-out.
But they aren’t. They are doing things that some people believe they’ll want to violate people’s privacy in the future to do in a different way.
I didn’t know what it was, so I looked it up. Their description is here:
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
It sounds interesting… It also sounds like it will fail, because Mozilla seems to think that trackers are primarily interested in collecting ad stats, and that targeted advertising is less critical, but I think in reality it’s the other way around, and advertisers won’t accept such a limited solution.
I see no benefit to this because it will never be used instead of traditional tracking. It will just be a way for advertisers to get data from people who are blocking normal trackers and get even more data from people who aren’t.
Oh, I wish them the best and hope they succeed.
But I also think they’ll fail. And not even for that one reason, I think there are enough advertisers not interested on tracking to make it succeed. I just think they’ll flounder it. What is too bad, because they are the ones best positioned to make it.
The sanest take yet. If this were reddit and gold meant anything, you’d deserve it
I was an early adopter of Firefox 20+ years ago. It started going downhill more than 15 years ago and I bailed to Chrome when that launched. It really was better than Firefox at the time. Then Chrome got worse and I wound up back on Firefox, not because Firefox had gotten better in that time but because everything else had gotten worse than Firefox in the intervening time. Also, if going from 48% market share in 2009 to a barely relevant <5% in 2024 doesn’t count as a downfall I’m not sure what does.
Firefox not getting better in the last 15 years is quite disingenuous though.
Also the plugins eventually caught up and made it more usable.
The most fragile thing to me is their funding stream, which may even serve as a source of enshittification demands, implemented as subtly as possible.
Oh so tracking cookies should be the same, find the settings menu to opt out since the majority of the population just clicks to accept everything.
