A long time ago, I liked Mozilla.

Today, I’m not even sure they haven’t fucked up ‘about:mozilla’ along with everything else.

And they’re still the best option.

If my options are:

1. An ad company that at least makes some effort to protect privacy

Or

2. Ad companies that seem almost cartoonishly evil

I’d like to give #1 a shot, plz.

Moz has bought an outfit, founded in 2022 by former Meta executives, that among other things helps advertisers and ad networks measure how well online adverts are performing and that they are being seen by the right audiences, in a way that ideally preserves people’s privacy.

…

Asked to whether the Anonym deal represents a new strategic direction for Mozilla, the representative replied, “Anonym’s approach helps to democratize privacy-centric advertising by offering an approach that levels the playing field and prevents a winner-take all internet. In that way, it provides a compelling competitive vision to those proposed by the dominant ad platforms today, where data is consolidated behind their already high garden walls and advertisers and consumers are asked to trust them that they are protecting privacy.”

fucks sake

The benefit of the doubt logic here Is as follows:

Mozilla thinks that the ad supported model of the web is essential to continuing to function.

Mozilla knows that the vast majority of installs have an adblocker installed.

In order to keep the ecosystem healthy they’re exploring ethical advertising options.

Counterpoint:

The vast majority of their income comes from the largest advertising company in the world - alphabet.

They need to be seen to at least make some efforts to not murder the advertising model through their mere existence while not pissing off the community too much.

Why does Mozilla Firefox need ads, unless they are possibly prepping up their own search engine? Remember, the CEO once said they wanted to start prioritizing on making money. A search engine, built by Mozilla on the Firefox browser would be perfect, with ads for them.

edit. Another thing, If Mozilla puts ads in Firefox, I believe it would be as easy as just switching to another fork that restricts Mozilla’s tracking.

Now if you do, do this. Make sure the fork you go with tries to update as close to the latest Firefox updates as possible, such as security updates for the browser.

We desperately need another browser that isn’t built upon Blink, Gecko, or Webkit, and not written in the CVE generator C++. They are all shamelessly taking advantage of their power.

Anti Commercial-AI license