"Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising."
"we do this fully acknowledging our expanded focus on online advertising won’t be embraced by everyone in our community" - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-advertising/
I appreciate Mozilla laying their intent out explicitly with no room for interpretation or guesswork.
Personally, I think this is not just a huge misstep, but a deathknell.
I like Mozilla, or rather I liked what Mozilla once was. Over the years I've volunteered time on various Mozilla projects - both online and in-person. I've advocated for Firefox for two decades.....
Time after time, especially in recent years, I've given Mozilla the benefit of the doubt - because I both believed they were honestly doing things for the right reasons.
I no longer believe that.
Short term....we have two cross-platform browser engines.
Both maintained by advertising companies - both with a multitude of forks claiming to disable and/or patch out the bad stuff.
But ultimately, both base browsers - and this the underlying web standards - are being primarily driven by the needs of advertisers.
@c0dec0dec0de @odr_k4tana @mikolasan @sarahjamielewis Eh...after all I've been through, I'd still rather write a lot of stuff in C. I've been working on a toy kernel in Rust and if the goal wasn't "do more Rust" I'd throw it out and do it in C. It's just easier to express myself in it.
That said, the only thing I could find about this Tony Swain's work was a non-functional site called Multiversesocial? I couldn't really get his point because the site didn't work.
@sarahjamielewis I don't know whether it always used to be this bad, or if I didn't know any better in the mid 90s, but yikes, we're in an awful place now.
I'm so damned sick of the advertising industry.
Tim Berners-Lee has been such a big help in regard to the latter, eh?
" distilled ontological evil"!!!🔥 🔥 🔥
@sarahjamielewis The other important thing to understand when reading this is that modern advertising is a facade. It's not about selling stuff, it's about surveillance.
If tla's wanted to build this infrastructure to spy on their own citizens, it would cost a fortune and be subject to government oversight. If the private sector builds it, they can buy the data on the free market and don't need any sort of permission.
@sarahjamielewis And it was ever thus, atleast since the "HTML5" mess kicked off and WHATWG hijacked W3C. There's a fond of amusing e-mails in the archive.
Some days I simply fire up Lynx.
@Profpatsch Ok, I'll try. You want an institution,
- that against the explicit advisory of all relevant experts has for years now consistently expressed their desire to backdoor everyone and everything and eliminate encrypted private digital conversations entirely and
- whose member states have for years now slowly drifted towards fascism, with the for that leaning typical increase in crackdowns on speech and protests and the free press
to take over development of security critical software like a web browser. @sarahjamielewis
@dalias
@sarahjamielewis
As far as I know the tor project is maintaining a so called base browser that is shared by both tor browser and mullvad browser. There had been discussions about creating a non-Tor browser with that which ended up being mullvad browser.
I am not a fan of the mullvad browser branding but it will probably have less unexpected things that people don't want.
(This is based on some issue tracker comments and some guessing)
@dalias @sarahjamielewis Mozilla Corp has *hundreds of millions* of dollars in the bank and several long-term advertising deals with Google and smaller players.
They won't, can't go bankrupt. Even with a dwindling market share they'll be happily around in a decade to come.
On the other hand, anyone able to take over the development of such a complex beast as Firefox would have to be a billion dollar corporation, if you think they will do it for Good Intentions, you are in grave error (MS considered Firefox/SpiderMonkey when they wound down their own browser & JS engine dev, not even they seen it worthy to do, just for the competitive advantage and to stick it to Google/Blink)
@lispi314 @flaki @sarahjamielewis Conversely, any gratuitous bundling can serve as a "counterexample" to the rule. You could say I'm wrong "because Debian". What's key is coupling and coherent functional identity boundaries.
Drivers are not "the Linux kernel" just because Linux insists on running them in kernelspace, maintaining them in the same git tree, and not having a stable public API they use.
@flaki @dalias @sarahjamielewis do we actually need a modern web browser to be such a big, complex beast?
It's got to be able to do https GET, HEAD, and POST; other methods are niche. It's got to be able to render HTML (with CSS) and probably SVG, and a raster image format, probably PNG, but could hand off all other MIME types to helper applications.
It's advantageous for it to be able to do some scripting. I think we don't need it to accept cookies.
@dalias @flaki @sarahjamielewis No.
I said explicitly that it is advantageous to be able to handle scripting. I was building complex data driven websites in the 1990s and I know that doing all the processing server side doesn't scale.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
Kit Rhett Aultman
0xC0DEC0DE07EA
Nikolay Robotoev 🥞🎙️
Oliver D. Reithmaier
lachlan slowly taming rust
Woodrow Douglass
Snosrapkungfu (They/them)
Calamity Joan 😷
2¢
Lou Cyx
Ross Burton
VulcanTourist
Lorraine Lee
BrambleBearGrrrauling
Andrew Haining 
Tina H
Beady Belle Fanchannel
Ellie 🏴🏳️⚧️
evacide
Cassandrich
Jairaj Devadiga
Sertonix
Flaki
LisPi
stilescrisis
Simon Brooke
Ryan Castellucci (they/them) 
noodlejetski 