This might actually be the end of FF.
Personally speaking I’d be willing to donate if I knew my cash were going towards Firefox and Gecko. I already donate to other FOSS projects where it’s more obvious where the money is going.
Besides Google Chrome (controlled and backed by the surveillance overlords) and Safari (Kept alive by Apple cultists) I see very few free alternatives that can stand on their own. The other options are various niche browsers that leech on one of these three that might have a few changes here and there but lacks the real capability to stand on their own legs.
What I mean with capacity to stand on their own legs is that the group behind it should;
* Be able to be a part in development of web-standards
* Be able to keep up with ever changing web-standards
* Be able to suggest and develop new web-standards if needed
* Be able to maintain a modern web-browser
I am worried about Mozilla but I see no reason to declare that the end is nigh just yet.
Firefox is still very much relevant to me, although I use mainly linux-distros and do not normally use webpages as applications (I browse with javascript disabled, unless there are specific needs). I would love to see some more options out there, but alternatives to Firefox are currently not on the horizon for me.
It’s tangential, but another reason why Safari is popular with some is that it’s refreshingly unbranded by browser standards. It doesn’t try to stand out and realizes it’s just another tool among many on your device. If anybody wants to pry some market share away from Safari, designing a browser that just quietly does its job and blends in without any fuss (no bespoke UI or design language or any of that) would be a good bet.
I see support for firefox drying up as Mozilla just bleeds out.
Ladybird seems cool, but I also think a fully functional browser needs a revenue stream and dedicated full time paid developers.
This is a very silly thing to say given the widespread popularity of Apple products. There’s plenty of valid criticisms of Apple, but it being a “cult” is just not a serious or mature argument.
Even the closed ecosystems are infected.
In publishing, I’d consider something like The Economist or NTY to be a “closed ecosystem”. Many of those places (like CNBC, Fox, WaPo, etc) have auto generated spam articles every day whether it’s a company's earnings or a press release regurgitation. Sometimes that garbage can be accidentally harmful. At least we’re not at the point that CNBC push crypto miners in their blogs. We’re not far off though
"it's better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission (and keep the money either way)" is probably up on the wall instead of "do no evil"
AFAIK, Section 230 protection extends to online advertisement as these companies claim the ads are user generated content. There were many law suits against Google and Meta about being responsible for the content and ads their algorithms push and how it radicalized people or harmed people. I recall Google and Meta won all those cases.
Plus, in the 1960s there was a famous Supreme Court case against NYT for publishing a pro-civil rights ads that contained wrong claims against some like cop or politician in the south. They argues that NYT was libel for the malicious attack. The Supreme Court ruled in NYT favor because even if the ad buyers were malicious, they need to prove that NYT was also intentionally malicious in their intent
Google's revenue is largely from promoting scams and tricking old people into clicking ads that look like normal search results. They're a total scumbag company, it's a sign of how broken consumer protection is that they've gotten away with it for years with no meaningful legal consequences.
[EDIT] Downvotes are warranted, I missed the large part of their revenue that comes from extorting companies into paying for ads for their own brand name so competitors and scams don't top searches for them.
Bing is 10 times worse. They intermix search results with ads, and the only indication is a small light-gray/white “WEB” or “AD” tag that has a css blur and pixilation effect. It’s so subtle it’s insane.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/1/23/21078343/google-ad-d...
A few years back when people were talking about Q-Anon / Pedophile celebrities thousands of YouTube channels were taken down simultaneously of anyone, ANYONE, who was talking about it. "Mouthy Buddha" on YouTube had just 2 videos on the subject and had his channel taken down and was never allowed back on. They all migrated over to BitChute at the time. The YouTube press release claimed about 10,000 videos and their channels removed.
So Google does have ways of scanning content and banning the scam ads, they just don't want to.
The story is about a phishing campaign directed at extension developers, not about the extension "store" (which is not really a store and doesn't sell anything), being "flooded" with malware.
Thanks for pointing this out -- don't hesitate to flag things like this.
The only way I've found to try and detect these as an end user is by using an extension called Under New Management [1], which attempts to alert you if a browser extension has changed ownership, at which point you can pretty much assume they've been compromised.
Other than that, I know of no way to attempt to detect these malicious and problematic extensions. If anyone has any suggestions, please share them.
doubled112•2h ago
Wonder if the activity is related.
pmezard•2h ago