#Mozilla shuts down #Pocket . I don't quite understand why. Any good #FOSS alternatives - preferably hosted and managed in #Europe - to #archive and categorize #web links?
Mozilla Is Shutting Down Pocket - BrianFagioli writes: In a surprising move that will frustrate longtime fans, Mozil... - tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/… #mozilla
Lately I've been wondering how I could contribute to open source projects despite not being a programmer and not having money for donations, and then I found out about #localisation. For the past couple of days I've been doing some translations for #mozilla projects, mainly #thunderbird, and having my strings aproved has been really satisfying. I love how intuitive Mozilla's localisation interface is.
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#Mozilla isn’t addressing the number one question: why did they remove this section from their #firefox terms of services?
> * Does Firefox sell your personal data?
> Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
Please do criticise #Mozilla – we need an independent, privacy-preserving, feature-rich web browser, not another tracking-infested piece of garbage software.
However, the frequently expressed opinion that “Firefox should be abandoned because Mozilla is the worst bullshit company” is not helpful. Without #Firefox, all your favourite forks (Tor, LibreWolf, Zen…) would struggle to survive and the Google-Apple complex would fully control the browser market.
New Mozilla TOS diff. This is what they just removed:
* Does Firefox sell your personal data?
> Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
The purpose of the new TOS appears to be to enable them to do this - such as for their advertising and AI sidelines.
the clarification is in a blog post, that may not be legally binding. so in my eyes any clarification outside of the ToS is worthless.
If #Mozilla wants to offer AI services or collect and use their users data, this should be a separate opt-in ToS in my opinion, not the terms of the base application.
But TBH #Mozilla is doing too much dumb management decisions these days, so I'm considering to stop recommending it. (colorways, firing #rust and #servo teams, ads for temu and so on)
Gestern habe ich erfahren, dass #Mozilla in "privatsphäre-respektierende" Werbung investiert. Ich bin da etwas skeptisch; #Privatsphäre und #Werbung stehen sich irgendwo diametral gegenüber. Darum habe ich mich mal nach Alternativen umgelesen. Dabei bin ich auf #librewolf gestossen, ein Fork von #Firefox, mit dem Schwerpunkt auf Privatsphäre und Sicherheit. #UBlock und weitere Features sind standardmässig mit an Bord. Werde ich wohl die Tage mal antesten...
I'm baffled about the myriad of @mozillaofficial structures, amount of directors / C-level people & how to rhyme 'investing in privacy-respecting advertising; with 'draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long run.'
As a long time Mozilla supporter, I was already unhappy about the direction of the last years & this does certainly not bode well for the future. 😞 😩
Unfortunately, this year I could not join nor organize any in-person celebration, BUT of course I want to share my gratitude to the many, countless #FreeSoftware services I don’t merely use, but actually depend on.
Last year, I decided to focus only on #YunoHost, because it would have been crazy to list all the projects I use and I love.
This time, even if I will most certainly forget someone, I am challenging myself to mention all the #LibreSoftware my life is powered by.
#Obtainium, for making me directly download apps on my phone, and @fdroidorg for distributing them
#AuroraStore, for proxying the download of apps I am doomed to get from Google Play
@element, for developing #Synapse, even though the new proprietary Synapse Pro is VERY PROBLEMATIC AND DISAPPOINTING
#Fractal, for being the most beautiful and awesome #Matrix client ever
@signalapp, for keeping me connected with the people I love
@Mastodon, for also maintaining a feature-packed experimental fork (#GlitchSoc), that is what Pan runs
#Tuba and #Moshidon, for being the most beautiful and awesome #Mastodon clients ever
#Firefox, for still remaining the best possible #browser choice, despite #Mozilla’s governance messiness
@openstreetmap, for allowing us to find the right path, both literally and metaphorically!
@organicmaps, for being the simplest, cleanest, yet feature-rich #OSM client and navigation app
@protonvpn, for making me browse safely from/to anywhere in the planet and @protonprivacy #ProtonMail, for hosting my email, despite the latest alarming political statements…
@libreoffice, for allowing me to draft documents with ease, the last of which was my #CV
#LanguageTool, for preventing me from making embarassing spelling mistakes
@photoprism, for safely storing and indexing all my photographic memories, on Aby, and for providing stellar and friendly support too!
#Actual, for moderating the very likely risk of ending up completely broke, since it forces me to manage my finances consciously and coherently
@readeck, for storing and sorting ALL my varied and overwhelming inputs
@nextcloud, for storing and synchronizing my data, for its #calendar, its #tasks, and all its awesome apps
#Rustdesk, for preventing my friends and family members from going crazy, by allowing me to remotely connect to their devices and directly address the issues they have
@forgejo, for giving us a chance to truly control and collectively develop the sources of our software, but most importantly @Codeberg, for RESISTING, RESISTING, RESISTING, despite the hatred and attacks nazi assholes throw at them
@musicbrainz for keeping music knowledge open and free, and @ListenBrainz for scrobbling the crazy music I listen to
The @fsfe, for promoting this celebration and fighting the good fight!
Lastly, but most importantly, the biggest thank you goes to all the free software libraries and dependencies the above mentioned #software are made of/built with, including #C, #JavaScript, #Python, #Rust, and all community-maintained programming languages.
Dear @thunderbird : I want exactly zero notifications for me and for the desktop users I support using the upcoming #Thunderbird 134 when it's released.
Will there be an easy option to disable all such notifications ?
I often hear that #Mozilla got into trouble after they let Brendan Eich go, that that was the point where political voices overrode technical merit. In fact, these projects have a lot of momentum, these things take years to work out. It's actually the strategic leadership of Brendan Eich, who was CTO since 2005, that got Mozilla into trouble. Today I came across a nice example of this from 2007.
That #Mozilla has fully embraced the bullshit "open source AI" definition that labels Meta's llama as open source is just so painful. cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog…
In January 2014, I start working for Mozilla I've worked in open source projects for some 20 years and I've maintained curl and libcurl for over 15 years.
Fewer people than ever use the once popular web browser, but Mozilla remains profitable thanks to Google. How long can that trend continue with the Department of Justice coming after Google?
Thunderbird wird 20 Jahre alt, vielen Dank für diese großartige #OpenSource Software die mich fast genau so lange im Netz begleitet hat - das "Schweizer Taschenmesser" der #Email-Clients - Danke an @mozilla und die Open Source Community für @thunderbird und den langen Atem.
Most of Team Thunderbird is heading into a long weekend, but not before we share our latest Community Office Hours video! We sat down for a chat with Mark Surman, president of the @mozilla Foundation, to talk about Thunderbird's history and hopefully long future!
On this day (or near it) in 2015, I joined the Mozilla project by starting work as a full-time employee of Mozilla Corporation. I’m two hardware refreshes in (I was bad for doing them on time, leaving my 2017 refresh until 2018 and my 2020 refresh until 2022! (though, admittedly, the 2020 refresh was actually pushed to the end of 2021 by a policy change in early 2020 moving from 2-year to 3-year refreshes)) and facing a third in February. Organizationally, I’m three CEOs and sixty reorgs in.
I’m still working on Data, same as last year. And I’m still trying to move Firefox Desktop to use solely Glean for its data collection system. Some of my predictions from last year’s moziversary post came true: I continued working on client code in Firefox Desktop, I hardly blogged at all, we continue to support collections in all of Legacy Telemetry’s systems (though we’ve excitingly just removed some big APIs), Glean has continued to gain ground in Firefox Desktop (we’re up to 4134 metrics at time of writing), and “FOG Migration” has continued to not happen (I suppose it was one missed prediction that top-down guidance would change — it hasn’t, but interpretations of it sure have), and I’m publishing this moziversary blog post a little ahead of my moziversary instead of after it.
My biggest missed prediction was “We will quietly stop talking about AI so much, in the same way most firms have stopped talking about Web3 this year”. Mozilla, both Corporation and Foundation, seem unable to stop talking about AI (a phrase here meaning “large generative models built on extractive data mining which use chatbot UI”). Which, I mean, fair: it’s consuming basically all the oxygen and money in the industry at the moment. We have to have a position on it, and it’s appropriating “Open” language that Mozilla has a vested interest in protecting (though you’d be excused for forgetting that given how little we’ve tried to work with the FSF and assorted other orgs trying to shepherd the ideas and values of Open Source in the recent past). But we’ve for some reason been building products around these chatbots without interrogating whether that’s a good thing.
And you’d think with all our worry about what a definition of Open Source might mean, we’d make certain to only release products that are Open Source. Butno.
I understand why we’re diving into products and trying to release innovative things in product shape… but Mozilla is famously terrible at building products. We’re okay at building services (I’m a fan of both Monitor and Relay). But where we seem to truly excel is in building platforms and infrastructure.
We build Firefox, the only independent browser, a train that runs on the rails of the Web. We build Common Voice, a community and platform for getting underserved languages (where which languages are used is determined by the community) the support they need. We built Rust, a memory-safe systems language that is now succeeding without Mozilla’s help. We built Hubs, a platform for bringing people together in virtual space with nothing but a web browser.
We’re just so much better at platforms and infrastructure. Why we don’t lean more into that, I don’t know.
How can Mozilla make money if our search deal becomes illegal? Maintaining a browser is expensive. Hosting services is expensive. Keeping the tech giants on their toes and compelling them to be better is expensive. We need money, and we’ve learned that there is no world where donations will be enough to fund even just the necessary work let alone any innovations we might try.
How do you monetize a platform? How do you monetize infrastructure?
Governments do it through taxation and funding. But Mozilla Corporation isn’t a government agency. It’s a conventional Silicon Valley private capital corporation (its relationship to Mozilla Foundation is unconventional, true, but I argue that’s irrelevant to how MoCo organizes itself these days). And the only process by which Silicon Valley seems to understand how to extract money to pay off their venture capitalists is products and consumers.
Now, Mozilla Corporation doesn’t have venture capital. You can read in the State of Mozilla that we operate at a profit each and every year with net assets valued at over a billion USD. But the environment in which MoCo operates — the place from which we hire our C-Suite, the place where the people writing the checks live — is saturated in venture capital and the ways of thinking it encourages.
This means Mozilla Corporation acts like its Bay Area peers, even though it’s special. Even though it doesn’t have to.
This means it does layoffs even when it doesn’t need to. Even when there’s no shareholders or fund managers to impress.
This means it increasingly speaks in terms of products and customers instead of projects and users.
This means it quickly loses sight of anything specifically Mozilla-ish about Mozilla (like the community that underpins specific systems crucial to us continuing to exist (support and l10n for two examples) as well as the general systems of word-of-mouth and keeping Mozilla and Firefox relevant enough that tech press keep writing about us and grandpas keep installing us) because it doesn’t fit the patterns of thought that developed while directing leveraged capital.
(( Which I don’t like, if my tone isn’t coming across clearly enough for you to have guessed. ))
Okay, that’s more than enough editorial for a Moziversary post. Let’s get to the predictions for the next year:
I still won’t blog as much as I’d like,
“FOG Migration” might actually happen! We’ve finally managed to convince Firefox folks just how great Glean is and they might actually commit official resources! I predict that we’re still sending Legacy Telemetry by the end of next year, but only bits and pieces. A weak shadow of what we send today.
There’ll be an All Hands, but depending on the result of the US federal election in November I might not attend because its location has been announced as Washington DC and I don’t know if the United States will be in a state next year to be trusted to keep me safe,
We will stop putting AI in everything and hoping to accidentally make a product that’ll somehow make money and instead focus on finding problems Mozilla can solve and only then interrogating whether AI will help
The search for the new CEO will not have completed by next October so I’ll still be three CEOs in, instead of four
I will execute on my hardware refresh on time this February, and maybe also get a new monitor so I’m not using my personal one for work.
At the end of my post for my seven-year moziversary, I made some predictions about what was to be and now has been the next year of work. And I got them pretty spot-on: Predictions for the next yea…
OUTDATED⚠️ Mozilla bought the Android email app K-9 (which didn’t include any trackers) and integrated trackers as part of #Mozilla‘s rebranding under the #Thunderbird name.
They even made it opt-out instead of opt-in. Their defense for breaking the law: ”we wouldn’t have enough data if we obeyed the law.“
It doesn’t matter whether you ”anonymized“ the data or not: If you want to extract data from someone’s device to yours, you may do so only if they knowingly consented. sigmoid.social/@davidculley/11…
The Thunderbird developers listened to their users and removed tracking entirely. Only the beta version of version 8 contained the telemetry. The final release no longer does, at least for now.
mich würde hier ja mal ein ausführlicher Test/Vergleich vom @kuketzblog zu Fair Email interessieren. Früher war K-9 die Empfehlung. Davon bin ich weggegangen, wurde doch aber von #mozilla übernommen bzw. eine Kooperation gegründet, oder?
Wait a damn minute, look at that pull request discussion and the diff as committed… the CTO of #Firefox has amended #Mozilla's "Neutral" position regarding #JPEGXL to indicate that their "cost" concerns are mainly about the security risks of a decoder being 100k lines of C++, and that they would be "open to shipping" a memory-safe decoder that meets their requirements?
And some folks at Google are going to write that implementation in Rust?!
"Google snažil uzavřít dohody s mobilními operátory, aby získal silné výchozí pozice ve smartphonech a ovládl v nich vyhledávání. Tvrdí také, že #Google platil deset miliard dolarů ročně bezdrátovým společnostem, jako je AT&T, výrobcům zařízení, jako je Apple, a výrobcům prohlížečů, jako je #mozilla aby se zbavil konkurentů a udržel si podíl na trhu s vyhledávači."
Jestli to projedou tak to možná bude poslední hřebíček do rakve pro #firefox :D
