Well, Mozilla seems to be making some pretty questionable decisions, So I’m considering switching browsers for the third (Is it the third?) time. The thing is, I really like the way Firefox works, so I’ve been trying out the more famous Forks like Waterfox and Librewolf, although I’m going for Floorp. However, I’m wondering: is using a fork enough? I mean, they are Forks maintained by other people, but is there a chance that whatever Mozilla does to Firefox could affect those Forks? Should I jump to a totally different browser like Vivaldi?

  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11612·
    2 months ago

    Mozilla isn’t doing anything to Firefox. The Anonym purchase you linked to was literally to acquire a technology they developed which would, if implemented web-wide, end the dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion that is the current paradigm where a few dozen large companies track everything everyone does on the internet all the time. “Privacy preserving” isn’t just a buzzword in that article - privacy is actually preserved, and the companies involved (including Mozilla) learn nothing at all about you - not your name, not an “anonymous” identifier, not your behavior, nothing. Moreso, Anonym didn’t just create this technology, the entire company was purpose-founded to create this technology.

    There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about Mozilla in particular at the moment. Very little of the animosity they receive is truly deserved once you dig past the narrative and find out what Mozilla’s actually up to, and why.

    • ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
      501·
      2 months ago

      Continuous Mozilla hit pieces coming out….

      I wonder which company motivated only by greed and the fact that their entire business model is “obliterating your privacy” is behind them

        • flashgnash@lemm.ee
          6·
          2 months ago

          Either you make a deal with the devil or use the company that made the deal so you don’t have to

          • warbond@lemmy.world
            4·
            2 months ago

            Limited Liability Corporations exist for that very reason. I think a dude in France made a deal with a cave lion of some sort.

      • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        134·
        2 months ago

        Ads should be tailored to the content of the website they are on. Not to me in any way whatsoever.

        Then you might be interested in this new technology being tested by Mozilla that aims to replace tracking cookies.

          • verdigris@lemmy.ml
            5·
            2 months ago

            Then we continue to use anti-tracking extensions and block all ads. This is not for you.

              • loutr@sh.itjust.works
                21·
                2 months ago

                Like it or not, ads are still the most popular way to pay for online content. I despise ads and I hope some kind of micro-payment solution catches on and offers an alternative, but until then there needs to be a way to reward people for their work, so ads and full-on subscriptions it is.

      • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
        24·
        2 months ago

        But the people employed to create content on all the websites and YouTube channels you use regularly care quite a great deal about advertisement or they’d have to do something else for a living.

        What, you don’t use free services online?

    • grandma@sh.itjust.works
      62·
      2 months ago

      So instead of multiple providers tracking people all the time there will be a single company doing it, but it’s okay because I should trust them for what reason? Why wouldn’t tracking companies just use their own tracking on top of this new technology?

      • lowdude@discuss.tchncs.de
        82·
        2 months ago

        I didn’t read too much into it, but roughly speaking: Because the technology by design aggregates data immediately and drops any personal identifiers/ the unaggregated data in the process. Other companies can build whatever they want on that, but if done properly, it is impossible to reconstruct user-specific data points and profile the users that way.

        This type of privacy-preserving aggregation technique is not new, it is fairly common for things like demographic data, where you want to know things like population density and incomes for some area, without just publishing an exact address with corresponding income for every person (as an example).

        Edit: I think I missed your point a little bit. I am unsure, but it seemed that Anonymous is responsible for designing the framework, not doing any tracking (i.e. it wouldn’t necessarily be “put all trust into them collecting it”). Maybe rolling out that technology could be done in a way of blocking other tracking, or maybe it is intended as a basis for regulations to take up. Maybe someone else can give more informed input on that.