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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

If Mozilla will take steps to be more financially independent from Google, then their criticism of Google's competitors (like Facebook) will be more authoritative.

I understand that this is not something you can do in a short amount of time; at the same time many Mozilla users have been objecting about this issue for years now.

Edit: they pre-install the Facebook Container extension while the Google Container extension is not even in the list of suggested privacy-focused extensions. If money can't possibly come from other sources, maybe they could at least do some work on looking a bit more impartial.

Edit 2: Firefox was found "phoning home" to Google after every new install - at the end of the installation process it would automatically load a page that was using Google Analytics, before the user had the time to enable any content blocker. (This was circulated on Twitter and they later removed the Analytics code).

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Mozilla has been pursuing alternative revenue streams for over a decade. It turns out that monetizing a web browser without selling ads is pretty hard. Their current most promising avenue is Mozilla VPN (a partnership with Mullvad VPN): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/ .

They could take money from Google and be more impartial though, that would go a long way convincing people that they are independent.

For example, they have a built-in, official Facebook Container, while the the Google Container[1] is a third party unofficial extension which is not even among the "Recommended" extensions (even though other similar privacy-focused extensions are in that list).

[1] https://github.com/containers-everywhere/contain-google

Maybe you are not aware about technical details, but it is literally just sandbox, what you can use to any website regardless how it is named. Using Facebook as example is just marketing.

In the recent Firefox versions, they are called only as containers.

I think you are talking about what used to be called "multi account containers"? That's obviously not viable unless you are a "power user", imagine for example a non-tech-savvy person having to enter all of the domains that Google uses, there are dozens of them as you can see here https://github.com/containers-everywhere/contain-google/blob...

Or maybe Firefox containers have changed now? I haven't used FF in a couple of years, how does it work now?

Based on the READMEs, functionality is quite identical on Firefox's build-in containers.

Only difference which comes with these extensions is, that they work automatically for selected domains, instead of you manually opening the site in container. Also, you need to be careful to not open other pages on container tab, which is possible. Maybe I was thinking this to be too obvious for most users, while it is not.

But yeah, there are plenty of domains if someone is really using all of them. However, it is pretty hard to miss Google login window for example.

Of course, one could speculate that one login into your Google account from your browser is enough to fingerprint you everywhere, even with all anti-fingerprint things, but that is another story.

Moreover people on HN love to complain about every independent source of revenue they have. "Focus on the browser", they say.

Damned if they sell ads, like sponsored sites in new tabs, and damned if they don't, instead relying largely on selling defaults.

While I wish donations could sustain a competitive browser, I'll settle for a reasonably independent one. Even if the lion's share of financing is from Google throwing them some bones in exchange for the top search provider slot.

Other browsers have yielded much larger parts of their stacks to Google.

Even if they are still financially dependent on Google, I suspect if they could follow through on being a bit more impartial[1], then I would trust them more

[1] last time I've used Firefox, there was a built-in, official Facebook Container, while the Google Container extension was a non-built-in, unofficial fork, and it wasn't among the list of recommended privacy extensions.

Mozilla does sell ads. Google ads. They just do it by proxy.

I would be incredibly concerned with facebook banning the researchers regardless of whether or not Google donates money to Mozilla.

Yep, apparently the excuse "they're a private company they can ban whomever they want" is only valid if the banned person is someone whose ideas you don't like.

I think Mozilla should be more proactive about soliciting donations (esp. on a recurring basis). Put a "Donate" button into the new tab screen for example, or just prompt me every now and then like wikipedia does. Right now the "Donate" button is a tiny link in the footer of the Mozilla website.

They inserted ads into the default new tab page at some point as "sponsored shortcuts" and "sponsored stories", although I think those options defaulted off for existing Firefox installations.

Honestly though Mozilla should just cut the bloat that makes up the majority of their budget, bank the Google bucks while they're still getting them, and turn that into a sustainable endowment. Unfortunately the C-suites of large, failing organizations can justify larger salaries for themselves than small, successful ones I guess.

Donations go to the nonprofit, not the browser. AFAIK, it's impossible to donate to support Firefox itself.

So to me your post is at best a red herring (what does this have to do with the topic of the blog post?), but more likely an ad hominem to discredit Mozilla.

Nothing of what you write actually refutes the argument in the blog post.

In the blog post, a non-profit organisation bankrolled by ads company A, criticizes ad targeting practices of ads company B, which is a competitor of ads company A.

Imagine if Ford bankrolled a consumer association which then proceeded to publicly criticize aspects of General Motors cars, while at the same time wanting to appear super partes. Wouldn't people be allowed to criticise that?

> Nothing of what you write actually refutes the argument in the blog post.

I'm not refuting the merit I'm refuting the fact that Mozilla is writing that post as opposed to e.g. the EFF

> more likely an ad hominem

what are you talking about? Mozilla is an organisation not an individual LOL

>> more likely an ad hominem

>what are you talking about? Mozilla is an organisation not an individual LOL

That does not change the fact that you are attacking the entity that is making the argument not the argument, which is a classic ad hominem. The nature of the entity making the argument is completely irrelevant.

I don’t think that’s what ad hominem means, you don’t have to trust my words on that, just open a Latin dictionary and look for the entry “homo, hominis”.

And by the way, yes I am attacking the entity not the argument, you are right about that.

Ad hominem is an idiom: you cannot infer the meaning of an idiom from the composition of its words.

A counterargument is ad hominem if it rests on what it says about the arguer, not the content of the argument. It's not always a fallacy, but it is a danger sign for bad argument.

> you are attacking the entity that is making the argument not the argument

it's a case of conflict of interest, only the entity counts not the argument.

Well it goes back even before Google (Chrome) was a direct competitor.

Mozilla was going to walk away from Google's millions back in 2007. Here, the Mozilla CEO said: "We've spent a lot of time and energy making sure that Google understands that it cannot turn us into an arm of Google" [0]

That was their signal to make money without relying on Google's millions. That also provoked Google to create Chrome which, er... means that Mozilla turned Google into a direct competitor all by themselves.

Now 14 years later, Mozilla is still criticising Google, YouTube whilst receiving hundreds of millions from them. Due to that u-turn, I cannot take them seriously on anything about privacy or these sort of investigations at this point.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

They have been taking money from the Google, but I don’t think they have become as ”arm of the Google”, as you make it sound like that. Their promise was to not become like that. They are very little affected by Google after all.

Monetizing browser is super hard outside of ads, and all they have done is to set their default search engine as Google.

Reminds me of how Netflix wanted to initially use blockbuster as their distributor. When it fell through with Blockbuster they had to build their own distribution network and did so at the perfect time to pivot into streaming. You never know if the people you’re arrogant about today will be the ones to drive you out of business.

So which browser is independent from Google? All others use are based on webkit and I would argue the amount of work that Google puts into that is worth much more than the donations given to Mozilla. So essentially all other browsers are even more financially dependent on Google.

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