What do you think they should have done differently ?
I understand fixing something like that takes a lot of effort, but they lost a lot of time and money in projects that had no chance of working out, such as FirefoxOS (really? making an entire OS using the slowest browser engine that there is on the cheapest ARM hardware they could find?), Hello, Persona, etc. They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive, the same way I will never forgive Google for abandoning Reader. Servo is a nice project but the chances it will be abandoned after years in development are over the roof.
So now they are focused on their privacy improvements, but they can't stop shooting themselves in the foot (sending your browsing history to the advertisement company Cliqz, remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show, installing Pocket by default...)
Then, if it is slower, and they don't seem to be able to take my privacy seriously despite their claims to the contrary, why in hell should I use Firefox?
Every tech company has failed projects, you can't blame them for trying.
Look at Google: google wave, google plus, google buzz, their clusterfuck of IM / phone calls.
I mean knock yourself out, there's a whole list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...
My point being, Mozilla has to try to innovate, and they have to try these projects. They're being reproached that some failed, but no one is questioning Rust now that it's taking off...
Furthermore, one time long ago, Mozilla might have thought they didn't need to build a mobile browser, and focus on their main product: Firefox for Desktop.
Next thing you know, Firefox is completely irrelevant on what's becoming the dominant computing platform.
I don't know whether VR/AR or IoT will be a thing, and I'm sure that they will be criticised for their projects there when they don't, but I'm certainly glad they're at least trying to make those open platforms - just in case they do become mainstream.
1. Cliqz is not an advertising company, it's a search company and we push hard for privacy protection in everything we do (private search, antitracking, adblocking, etc.) 2. Privacy policies are legally binding, and in ours we state that no personal data is collected. We designed our features and products to not require collection of any private data (that includes our search engine). 3. I'd like to point out that in Firefox, by default, your queries are sent to advertising company Google. So I don't understand all the heat when Mozilla tries to find more privacy-friendly alternatives to Google. In this case, they replaced Google by Cliqz (again, an independent German search company focusing on privacy, building its own index: no Bing results involved) in Germany, for 1% of the users. That seems to perfectly fit in Mozilla's mission of protecting users' privacy.
2nd, sending the user's complete browsing history to a 3rd party which is owned by an advertising and media company without telling the user was a terrible idea. It's simply mismanagement by the Mozilla Corporation.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
>This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.
I enjoyed the read BTW, somebody put some real time into that sort of system
FWIW it sounds [#] exactly like a scummy advertising company - I'd address that if the company is not getting revenue through placements or advertising at all.
I notice you said your products are designed to not require private data collection; presumably that means they do it, but could in theory work without doing it. That comes across as weasel words.
# Edit: I mean the name, I don't know the company.
We're currently proposing a mix of client-side private offers (not unlike Brave) and paid products (e.g.: Ghostery premium, and more are being worked on as we speak). Users should have a choice.
> I notice you said your products are designed to not require private data collection; presumably that means they do it, but could in theory work without doing it. That comes across as weasel words.
No. That means that we do not collect personal data. And being able to do so took (and still takes) a lot of research and careful design.
What's that mean, it sounds like you mean "advertising with discounts in?", not sure what "offers" means if that's not it?
Brave browser has advertising, so it sounds like you're saying your income _will_ come from ads?
That's not an awful thing, so it's weird you're not up front about it??
1. All clients download a database of offers locally (they are basically vouchers, we call them offers because they have the potential to make users save money).
2. While browsing with this feature enabled, URLs of pages as well as some other information accessible locally are processed by the extension which tries to detect the intent of buying something online.
3. When an intent corresponding to one of the items in the local database is found, an offer is shown with a coupon that can be used to save money.
What sets it apart from ads in my opinion is that everything happens client-side and that the offer is only shown when there is a clear intent to buy something (instead of all pages with traditional ads). This means that users will actually see very few of them, but that they should be very relevant and useful (you save money).
Are you audited by any independent, respected privacy watchdog organizations to make sure that you're adhering to your published policies?
If not, how can I be sure that you're doing what you say you are?
Also, even ostensibly non-personally-identifying data can be de-anonymized.[1]
The only way to be sure that your data can't be used against you is for it not to be collected in the first place.
I really don't want to use chrome but FF ended up annoying me so much I went back to it.
(Safari almost worked... but the outlook webmail we use didn't play well, and with safari I had to refresh and re-login every hour or so, rather than daily on other browsers)
If this sort of experience is true for most users, then it's bad.
(Sure, "not Google" but I can also just use Safari.)
Safari works pretty OK with G properties, except offline editing of docs
That was an experimental, lightweight Skype alternative, that didn't take too much effort to build beyond introducing WebRTC into Gecko (which they had to do anyway) and which probably helped them iron out bugs in Gecko's WebRTC implementation. Also, for the record, when I used it, it worked mostly fine.
> Persona
It worked, but almost nobody used it (you could argue that that is "not working out" from a social, if not technical point of view).
> They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive
They didn't abandon it. They transferred it into other people's caring hands. They still provide some support for it under the Mozilla umbrella and they still coordinate (to some extent) with Thunderbird's current developers when modifying the common base Firefox and Thunderbird depend on.
> Cliqz
Partially true, if rather overblown. It affected a tiny number of people (~ 1 % of new users, in only one country), the data was anonymised and the code running on the server to which the data was sent was FOSS, though obviously there's no definitive proof that Cliqz didn't substitute it with malicious code. It was an order of magnitude less bad than what Google always does and considering that the point was to build an alternative to Google search, if it had worked out, it would have been a massive privacy gain. The most disappointing part was it being opt-out, not opt-in, for the randomly selected users.
> remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show
That was a very silly (and stupid) gimmick, but it didn't invade your privacy.
> installing Pocket by default
Having Pocket installed by default is not a privacy violation, even if it is slight bloat-ware.
I'd imagine Apple will team up with Mozilla, so we would have two major browser engines.