Darren Hobbs 
marialBring popcorn, this is a developing story… 🍿
(From Threads)
(From Threads)
David Zaslavsky@marialeal oooh snap 😂
I suppose it's not inconceivable that the Firefox marketing team came up with that phrase independently, but it sure looks suspicious.
Bernie the Wordsmith@diazona @marialeal Having zero ounces of trust in Firefox lately so I'm inclined to think the plagiarism is real
Cassandrich
Pink@diazona @marialeal I’m sure they asked ChatGPT to come up with a catch phrase and it picked Vivaldis (as pointed out in their response)
Make Subaru Gay Again
refraction 
@makesubarugayagain @marialeal that's not Matt Damon...
Martouf@elexia @marialeal sorry ben affleck, the last movie i saw in theaters was sorry to bother you.
Das@makesubarugayagain @elexia @marialeal caption with Damon was more fitting with the OP and thread... 😂
Proto Himbo European@makesubarugayagain @marialeal Wait, is that Matt Damon? I've seen this at least a hundred times...
Michael Gale@miclgael @makesubarugayagain @marialeal That makes more sense.
Now I'm remembering (I think) some 00s SNL sketch or something, where someone says like "...Matt Damon, an absolutely incredible actor, and Ben Affleck, an amazing... friend of Matt Damon's".
Da_Gut@marialeal go go Vivaldi!
zakius@marialeal to be fair Quantum still adapts more than Vivaldi, even if not all knobs are there you can add them if needed
it's not the level of real Firefox, sure, but Vivaldi isn't as hackable and Chromium extensions, even Mv2, are wore than WebExtensions
and yeah, I'm not a fan of Mozilla since their poor communication,broken promises and such in 2016-2017, but the software itself just does what I need it to, which I can't say about any other browser
@zakius @marialeal Glad to hear this. Mozilla has been shitty in some ways, but pretty OK in others, even recently. I struggle with questions like "At what point do I avoid this software in protest of what the company is doing?" and right now Firefox is being sorta shitty, but I'm mentally grading them on a curve compared to Chrome and Edge. On that curve they get a C+ compared to Vivaldi's A or A-, but that's a C+ that can do some things I frequently want done.
@guyjantic @marialeal there was a time when I wanted to avoid using official builds as a statement, but Waterfox took "Mozilla did nothing wrong" approach and nothing else at that time was worth my effort (ESR and heavily privacy hardened forks are too annoying for me) so I'm back on the official Dev builds, there's not much else I could do
create my own fork that sends "I dislike your approach" in telemetry instead of valuable data? that's expensive and petty
create my own fork that sends "I dislike your approach" in telemetry instead of valuable data? that's expensive and petty
@zakius @marialeal I am not against expensive, petty messaging :)
But I just have to be pragmatic, I think. Browsers are one of the software tools I use constantly. I'm not a dev, a programmer, or even much of a script kiddie, so my ability to manage my privacy, my statements about instititional behavior, etc. is a little more limited: I can switch platforms, but I can't code my own or fork my own projects, etc. It's also true that my skill level here means adopting some of the more aggressive pro-FOSS or pro-privacy alternatives would require a lot more investment of time and frustration for me than for some other people.
I find myself trying to find a shifting balance: support my values to the extent it is feasible while still doing other important things in my life like my job.
lea@marialeal moooooom the annoying browser social media managers are fighting again
Freya the web scale dog 
@lea @marialeal gotta love drama between the okay browser and insufferable closed source chromium slopware
hearts@lea @marialeal @asm vivaldi is especially bad because they brand themselves like an open source, privacy focused option, and then deliver nothing but a ui reskin and a disappointing builtin feed reader / mail client
Joshix
solo@solonovamax @lea @asm @marialeal @joshix what do you mean "no"? it's the same underlying technology
@hearts @lea @solonovamax @asm @marialeal yes, both are based on chromium. But that doesn't make them the same.
Vivaldi has open source changes and a proprietary ui on top of chromium.
Google Chrome has proprierary changes on top of chromium.
@joshix @hearts @lea @solonovamax @marialeal they're equally unverifiable, we have no way of knowing whether the proprietary parts include something intrusive or rancid
@asm @hearts @lea @solonovamax @marialeal iirc the proprierary stuff in vivaldi is just some js/html/css which kinda is verifiable
Tony
Hubert Figuière
Iris Young (he/they/she) (PhD)@hearts can you expand on this? I've not heard this before.
Gustavo@hearts @lea @asm @marialeal I miss the time browser vendors tried creating new things and innovating. The web is SOOO full of half-assed APIs, like a crypto standard that doesn't support streaming and a speech recognition API that can't be used for hands-free control. You have an API to download files and one to create files in a streaming manner, and those don't work together!!! Now all they think is AI, which NO ONE WANTS.
Aria <3 
@ariarhythmic @lea @marialeal Firefox gets an okay cause you can make it good with a bunch of config tweaks. LibreWolf gets a good cause it does 90% of those config tweaks and more for you
𒀭Wiiお姉さん 💜 🏳️⚧️@asm no amount of configuration is going to fix missing and/or broken engine features
woe2you@asm @lea @marialeal The Chromium monopoly is easily as big a problem as forcing AI into everything.
hyperrealChromium isn't a monopoly. Firefox and other browsers exist. Chromium does have the majority market share, tho, and I agree this is on par with the forcing AI into everything problem.
IMO Vivaldi gets points for avoiding AI. Only 5% of the code base is proprietary and it's only the UI. 90% is open source Chromium base. Vivaldi is privacy-friendly to the extent that they don't use and sell your data for profit. They've also built ProtonVPN into the browser and users can use the free tier without a ProtonVPN account. I think Firefox is inherently more privacy-friendly because it's not Chromium-based, and has the container tabs feature which Chromium-based browsers sorely lack.
Zen, LibreWolf, and Waterfox are better Firefox skins if you want no-AI and more privacy-by-default settings, but they don't have mobile apps.
@hyperreal @marialeal @asm @woe2you
They've also built ProtonVPN into the browser and users can use the free tier without a ProtonVPN accounti don't think cooperating with fascists is a selling point but you do you 
@lea @marialeal @asm @woe2you Proton is audited. They're not fascists. If you are basing this opinion on the Twitter post from the CEO, then you don't understand cryptography lol. They can't access your data.
@lea @marialeal @asm @woe2you I'm not sure I understand your reasoning then. How are they cooperating with fascists?
@hyperreal @lea @marialeal @woe2you they've literally been openly praising fascists, can't get any clearer than that
@asm @lea @marialeal @woe2you Do you have a link to where they do this? You can get clearer, if you show me the evidence.
@hyperreal @lea @marialeal @woe2you since it's originally a Twitter post, here:
xcancel.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660
xcancel.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660
Andy Yen (@andyyen)
Great pick by @realDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.
@asm @lea @marialeal @woe2you I can't argue with that, and I was already aware of that Twitter post, but you made it sound like it was a general pattern of behavior among Proton employees. I don't know what else Andy Yen has posted in praise of fascists, but I don't think it's fair to act like he's tantamount to the likes of DHH.
But, I accept your original point. Fair enough.
Kate@hyperreal @lea @marialeal @asm @woe2you you do realize that, as long as you use proton's webclient from proton dot me, they can just simply ship whatever code they want to you, with no good tooling on your end to audit that they are not sending a "tailored" version specifically to you, which will hand over your keys / mails / whatever you're seeing?
@lea @marialeal @asm @woe2you @hyperreal i'd imagine the greater point of concern would be monetarily supporting individuals who would contribute to the rise of the modern far-right movement. this really isnt about the encryption
@hearts As I mentioned above, I don't think Andy Yen fits in the category of "individuals who would contribute to the rise of modern far-right movement."
If you show me a pattern of active overt support for fascism from Andy Yen, then I'd reconsider my opinion. The one Twitter post is hardly anything but praising the appointment of Slater, who has a clean track record on anti-trust despite being affiliated with the Republican party, and Yen saying it started under the first Trump admin. Maybe he's even reconsidered his own opinion about that since then.
As far as contributing the the rise of modern far-right movement in a consistent and meaningful way, I don't see that from Andy Yen.
@hyperreal it wasnt one tweet, it was a series of communications including one from the proton brand account
theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
@hearts Addendum (this paragraph): It's still about the same Twitter post and Proton's / Andy Yen's response to backlash against it. Far from a "series" of comments. The way I see it is that Yen / Proton are not claiming allegiance to Republican party for any other reason than the Republican party's record on antitrust. I think this it is a mistake for them to praise Republicans, and I don't agree that any kind of tech can be "politically neutral", but I still think this is far from overt, direct, and consistent defense of fascist ideology.
For what it's worth, and in partial defense of Proton, they would really have no other choice but to comply with the laws in any country they go to. They have fought back against requests for data that they considered unlawful.
The company says it complies with lawful requests for user data but it also says it contests orders where it does not believe them to be lawful. And its reporting shows an increase in contested orders — with ProtonMail contesting three orders back in 2017 but in 2020 it pushed back against 750 of the data requests it received.
They are also still unable to provide the contents of the email, even if they can provide the subject and other metadata of email messages:
Per ProtonMail’s privacy policy, the information it can provide on a user account in response to a valid request under Swiss law may include account information provided by the user (such as an email address); account activity/metadata (such as sender, recipient email addresses; IP addresses incoming messages originated from; the times messages were sent and received; message subjects, etc.); total number of messages, storage used and last login time; and unencrypted messages sent from external providers to ProtonMail. As an end-to-end encrypted email provider, it cannot decrypt email data so is unable to provide information on the contents of email, even when served with a warrant.
I will agree that the logging of IP addresses and the email metadata means that they are not as privacy-centric as they advertise themselves to be, and that's really bad.
But, none of this particularly smacks of "contributing to the rise of the modern far-right movement." They have to comply with Swiss law. Maybe they can do more to encrypt email metadata, or maybe the email protocols just aren't conducive to that, in which case Proton is limited in what they can feasibly or possibly do.
My overall judgment in light of all this is that deciding to use Proton should be based on your privacy threat model. If you're a journalist or fairly high-profile activist then I would caution against it, but I wouldn't know what to recommend instead. Maybe Signal? All email and internet providers have to comply with the laws of the land. If you're, say, a therapist who wants to protect client confidentiality, or a regular citizen (like me) who wants solid encryption, integrity, authentication, and authorization in their digital communications and freedom from Big Tech companies, then Proton is fine.
@lea @marialeal @hyperreal @asm @woe2you Proton is NOT a fascist company. The tweet in question was written by the CEO, and it was about Gail Slater. She is focused on antitrust, which is unrelated to fascism, it's a good thing. The CEO never praised Trump's politic in general. There is an absolute lack of nuance.
@BafS It can be argued that, as Slater is a Trump-appointed advisor, and affiliated with the Republican party and Fox Corporation, that she has effectively cooperated with fascists. Her track record on anti-trust speaks for itself. I don't know the extent to which she has influenced the Trump admin for the greater good or if she was just another lackey. Apparently she resigned from her position recently.
@hyperreal "Slater aligns with conservative antitrust views, advocating market competition against Big Tech monopolies without expanding regulation, as discussed in her interviews." that's why it was very interesting for Proton. Breaking big tech monopolies is great.
Recently she was pushed out after blocking deals favored by Trump allies and lobbyists.
I'm still trying to understand what is fascist about that, people love to throw words without actually reading or trying to understand what is going on.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/us-antitrust-gail-slater-ousted-trump-administration
@hyperreal @asm @lea @marialeal It's as close to a monopoly as makes no difference. Firefox is a rounding error these days, even Edge has more users. The only thing in the market share stats that's hiding the true extent of the Chromium problem is Safari, which is a different problem all of its own.
Yes, Chromium is de jure open source but it's de facto a Google product, and that's a threat to the open web. They contribute the lion's share of dev time and funding and they dictate the direction of the project. Take the Manifest spec for example: the changes from v2 to v3 were specifically to neuter ad blockers. Effective ad blocking is a threat to Google's bottom line, so Google said frog and Chromium hopped, and all Chromium-based browsers are now more privacy hostile by design.
Firefox's soft forks are vulnerable to every piece of dipshittery that comes out of Mozilla. They have to spend time and resources unfucking things that Mozilla have fucked. Speaking of Mozilla, they also get a huge chunk of funding from Google, because that enables Google to point at them and say "look, Firefox is still around, we're not a monopoly".
The browser landscape is utterly fucked.
@woe2you All good points.
"The browser landscape is utterly fucked." Yup. Not to be defeatist, but I don't really know what else we can do about it.
I have some faith/optimism that because these browsers are open source, and because there are enough people who care about it, there is some hope for the open web.
On a related note, I seem to recall reading about a brand new browser that is in development and isn't based on Chromium or Firefox. I don't recall the name or where I read about it. But I hope that is has enough resources and momentum to gain traction in the browser landscape.
Barktic Fox 
@hyperreal @woe2you @asm @lea @marialeal Other browser engines existing doesn't mean Chromium doesn't have a monopoly. Other desktop OSes existed when Microsoft was convicted of having a monopoly. Other search engines exist but Google was convicted of having a monopoly.
@alahmnat @woe2you @asm @lea @marialeal The circumstances for those are vastly different. In the case of Google Search and Microsoft, they were effectively a monopoly for the average user -- they obscured the possibility and availability of alternatives.
In the case of web browsers, the possibility and availability of alternatives is not as obscured. Anecdotal: My mom knows about Firefox but still chooses to use Chrome / Edge. She's only heard of Linux because I'm her son lol, she otherwise would not know what it is and think Microsoft Windows is the only thing you can get. Marketing has a lot to do with this. You don't see commercials and ads for Linux in everyday normie life.
@alahmnat But anyway, my estimations could be wrong. Maybe the legal definition of monopoly is such that Chromium would qualify. Regardless, it does have way too much of the market share compared to alternatives when you include all Chromium-based browsers.
The official Google Chrome browser would only qualify IMO if it creates barriers to using alternatives, obscures the existence of alternatives, and/or invests money in doing those things to stifle competition. They've done that with Google Search, but I don't know if Chrome browser qualifies.