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Comment by ralfn | Hacker News Reader

Also, doesn't firefox still contain things like pocket.io and other 3rd party data integrations?

I don't know the current situation but I stopped considering Firefox an alternative or mozilla more trust worthy than Google at that moment.

There are still alternatives but that's more things like the default gnome webbrowser.

At heart Firefox's financing model is as broken as Google's. Yet all the real alternatives aren't investing in the actual development.

Give me a competitive browser and render engine with a patreon button or something similar as only business model and I'll switch. At the end of the day that sort of thing needs financing and Mozilla's strategies aren't at heart different. And I don't know current leadership but I haven't heard the all clear yet. Is firefox currently more privacy conscious? People just assume Firefox is a clean browser but last I checked those assumptions were still marketing and not reality.

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It's getpocket.com, actually. The io one is just a domain for sale.

You know, I was furious about the pocket integration and partnership when it first happened almost six years ago. I didn't like the idea of third-party integrations. I was also mad that they didn't bow to pressure from the community and remove the integration...

But now, I kind of respect Mozilla for keeping it despite the community pressure. They were making money with the partnership, and money from sources OTHER than Google is a good thing.

After two years of this, Mozilla realized that Pocket was making so much money on paid memberships that it was smarter to use some of their war-chest to buy Pocket outright.

That's right, Pocket is owned by Mozilla now and has been for 4 years. [1]

Now it's an important part of their financials. In their Auditors report covering all of 2019 [2], they say "Mozilla’s subscription revenues primarily consist of revenue from subscriptions to a service known as Pocket Premium". The subscription revenue for 2019 was over 14 million, triple what it was in 2018.

This makes me more comfortable because I don't mind, in theory, subscribing to services that actually fund Mozilla.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po... [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...

Yeah thanks for mentioning that. The pocket integration would come across better if they put it under the mozilla domain name. I installed Firefox for the first time in a while about a month ago. I plugged it into a proxy to see what it does. When I saw all the Pocket telemetry I was afraid they had gone the Dell "bundling" route, until I looked it up and discovered it was owned by Mozilla.

A competitive browser and render engine with a patreon button as a business model? Sounds like you're staying with Chrome forever then.

Mozilla aren't more holy than the pope, but of course they are more trustworthy and privacy oriented than Chrome. You can see it basically everywhere: containers, cookie management, uBlock support etc. They're not perfect, but they are creating a browser, while Chrome is becoming essentially an ad delivery tool (surprise, surprise, an ad company creating an ad delivery tool).

Agree. Every time I see anyone recommend Firefox as a privacy browser I just assume they are giving this advice to their grandma or sth. Firefox is not whistle clean as a privacy browser. It has location tracking by default and some telemetry that can't be switched off even with flags.

Why anyone who considers themselves privacy conscious would deliberately ignore such red flags in favour of Moz coolaid is beyond me.

Though this doesn't mean I have no love for Firefox. It is a great browser when stripped down of all the bloat. Currently use Librewolf as the FF alternative and this gives me my peace.

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