We need a serious effort to fork Firefox that can be maintained as a sustainable open source project. I know there are a few forks floating around, but they’re small projects with only a handful of contributors. These kinds of efforts will never be a serious alternative.
A web browser is one of the most important pieces of software nowadays, and currently neither Chromium nor Firefox are true community efforts. We need something on the level of the Linux Kernel Foundation in my opinion.
Just to add and remind, the amount of LOC and work in a web browser and its engine is more than Linux kernel itself at this point. This goes for both Gecko and Blink/WebKit browsers.
People underestimate the amount of work put in modern web browsers. They are ecosystems at this point.
Thats because todays browsers are way too bloated. A fork that trims unnecessary features could be very effective.
There exist things like NetSurf. Or, remove JS execution from web browsers, and now you have un-bloated web browser that cannot access… 80% of clearnet, and cannot comment on Lemmy.
There have been ideas explored in this direction, like Gemini and Gopher protocols. Some people use them.
Many people are upset about this, but it is in my opinion an excellent thing. Mozilla and Facebook are working together to improve one aspect of Facebook’s privacy
It’s not like Mozilla is shilling and getting paid off, as some people seem to think.
This is how privacy is really improved, by working with the companies and governments that have power in the space, not by sitting in your cave using only librewolf and tor, and refusing to use anything you don’t build from source and self host.
That only helps you at best, and the privacy abusers (google, facebook) will just ignore you.
I see it as on the same level of a vegan advocacy organisation working with one of the biggest meat companies in the world. Sure, the vegan org might reduce the suffering of the animals under their control, but that shouldn’t be their goal, complete abolishment of animal agriculture should be.
It’s an apt comparison, but do you want complete abolishment of all forms of telemetry, tracking or advertising? Or perhaps more relevant, is that Mozilla’s goal? I don’t think so. See this post by them.
Yes, yes and yes. And Mozilla have been selling out their user’s data since the day they took money from Google.
This is honestly what annoys me more than anything about Mozilla: they pretend to be champions for privacy, but they aren’t. And people fall for it. They are controlled opposition. They are the social democrats of the privacy world: channeling privacy supporters into their compromise (and compromised) position and painting the radicals as unreasonable dreamers.
If they were to finally die, that would probably be good for online privacy. A real non-corrupt free software fork of chromium could take off with built-in ad blocking and actually good privacy defaults. Firefox is sucking the oxygen out of the room right now.
Ultimately all tracking and data collecting besides what’s absolutely necessary needs to be declared 100% illegal. I have no hope Mozilla will help in this fight at all.
Starting from paragraph 2, I could replace “Mozilla” and “chromium” vice versa and your comment would actually hold true.
I just think that when Firefox dies, maintaining a chromium fork with Google tracking crap ripped out is going to be way easier than continuing development on Firefox, and can be done by way fewer people.
Firefox will take down Tor Project with it. Chromium/Blink is that bad. Also, Firefox allows user.js and userchrome.css modifications, something unparalleled in Blink/WebKit world.
Firefox is not going anywhere. Google is scared of antitrust and antimonopoly lawsuits.
How is that supposed to work? Firefox’s own products in itself are not that reassuring for user privacy. It was better when Moxie collaborated with them to improve whatsapp code. At least that guy’s products were respected for privacy at that time.
Even if they don’t live up to your standards, you can agree they are way ahead of the competition.
Are you talking about Chrome?
Does Chrome allow editable user.js and userchrome.css? Does Chrome not leak IPs via WebRTC? Is Chrome used as base for Tor Browser?
My eyes also popped out of my sockets, so I read the Mozilla blog source article. It is just a proposal to W3C, as it stands. And since this is NOT something proprietary like FLoC and particularly NOT meant as an alternative tracking method, there seems to be more to it than what the anti Mozilla and pro Chromium squads want to believe.
Why is this reactionary attitude going on? It happened with the “deplatforming” article, and now this.
How many people are not okay with USA Big Tech corpos submitting patches to Linux kernel? Did you stop using Linux and choose… Windows or MacOS due to it?
I don’t think there’s any anti-mozilla, pro-chromium squads roaming the wilds, but yeah, Mozilla has not fallen, they’re just working on a spec, with engineers from facebook, to enhance privacy.
The reason why I said it’s a good thing: do you honestly trust the likes of facebook/google to design something privacy oriented, even if their intentions are entirely honest? No, of course not. Regardless of their intention, they have been built, as companies on principles opposing such design. They had to be. They don’t have the people, the experience, the methodology, the principles etc.
So it’s great to see them joined by someone who does (Mozilla) who I’m sure they’ll respect if they want to have the proposal accepted not just by W3C, but the greater community.
GrapheneOS squad, for example, is anti Mozilla and pro Chromium, and is a massive internet troll group. There are some anti Mozilla stans with Chromium based recommendations on Lemmy doing the rounds too.
