Glyn Moody:
As Techdirt stories attest, Wikipedia has been attacked in the past for publishing true information that somebody doesn’t like. As well as wanting articles to be censored, those behind such attacks often also demand the names of those who worked on the article. Something similar is now happening in India, where the Indian news agency Asian News International (ANI) has filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court, claiming to have been defamed in an article on Wikipedia, and seeking 20 million Indian Rupees (about US$240,000) in damages.
[…]
The latter’s signees say that they are “profoundly concerned at the suggestion that the Foundation is considering disclosing identifying private information about volunteer editors to the Delhi High Court”, and they call upon the Foundation to “prioritize the safety and well being of volunteers, even if it comes with a risk of legal action against the Foundation, or other costs.”
India Lawsuit Legal Privacy Web Wikipedia
Kevin Purdy (Hacker News):
Back in June 2002, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was experiencing space for the first time, the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Microsoft was reaching its final arguments, and Adam Price, using what was then called Mozilla on a Mac, had an issue with persistent tooltips.
That relic is no more, as a fix to Bug 148624 was pushed in early September, with the fix appearing in build 119. I tried to replicate the tooltip on my not-yet-updated 118.0.1 Firefox browser on Mac but could not experience this rite of passage for myself. The patch itself is quite small, adding a check for whether a document has focus to the tooltip-showing code.
[…]
Zhu [born in 1999, just three years before this bug was submitted] was motivated and knew how to program but had “zero experience in projects as complicated as the Firefox browser” and had “never contributed to open source projects before.” But it was the summer before their PhD program started. “So, why not?”
My favorite old Firefox bug is that it needs AppleScript support.
dannyobrien:
If you’re curious about how you’d even go about finding and fixing a bug in the Firefox codebase, Mike Conley has been livestreaming his dev work at Mozilla weekly for years. A lot of the stuff he records involves picking a bug from the backlog, and then meticulously hunting it down and murdering it.
Bas Schouten (via Hacker News):
We’ve been motivated by the improvements we’re seeing in our telemetry data, and we’re convinced that our efforts this year are having a positive effect on Firefox users. We have many more optimizations in the pipeline and will share more details about those and our overall progress in future posts.
Bryce Wray (via Hacker News):
Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome. The latter shot from 1.37% use in January, 2009, to its own peak of 66.34% in September, 2020, since falling back to a “measly” 62.85% in the very latest data.
[…]
With such a continuing free-fall, Firefox is inevitably nearing the point where USWDS will remove it, like Internet Explorer before it, from the list of supported browsers.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols (via Hacker News):
And the top web browser is, according to the DAP’s 5.27-billion visits over the past 90 days, just as you’d expect: Google Chrome with 47.9%. Firefox, with only 2.2% of the market, is sliding into irrelevance.
PG&E (via Hacker News):
The following browsers are below our threshold for support.
Šime (via Hacker News):
To be honest, until recently I wasn’t even sure myself why I use Firefox. Of course it’s a pretty good browser, but that doesn’t explain why I’ve stubbornly stayed loyal to Firefox for more than a decade. After giving it a bit more thought, I came up with the following reasons.
Frederic Lardinois (Hacker News):
Exactly 20 years ago, Mozilla started shipping version 1.0 of its Firefox browser. At the time, you could download it or buy a CD-ROM with a guidebook from Mozilla (or maybe get it on one of those free CDs that would come with many magazines at the time). Born out of the ashes of Netscape, Firefox would go on to gain well over 30% of global market share. But that was followed by a period of stagnation, and after the arrival of the faster and lighter Google Chrome, Firefox slowly but surely lost market share. It didn’t help that Mozilla, at the time, seemingly prioritized everything but its browser, all while its mobile browser initiatives never quite took off.
Despite everything, Firefox is still going strong, and it is a better browser today than it ever was. Now, Mozilla, which recently said that it wants to refocus on the browser, needs to figure out how to get it back on a growth path.
Thomas Claburn:
“There was a time where the browser space was absolutely the front line of an open, safe, equitable internet,” our source said. “Mostly that was about, frankly, preventing Microsoft from taking over the internet.”
[…]
In other words, for the past decade, upstart browser makers like Mozilla, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Arc, and others have essentially been fighting for that 10 percent – the table scraps left by the tech giants.
[…]
“The problems are about the information that travels on the internet,” our source said. “It’s not about the protocols that run the internet anymore. … It’s not about the plumbing. It’s about what’s flowing through the plumbing.”
Previously:
Anniversary AppleScript Bug Firefox Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Mozilla Open-source Software
Bryan Lunduke (via Hacker News):
The Mozilla Foundation has released their latest annual report -- covering the time up through December of 2022 (Mozilla’s reporting always lags by one year) -- and something peculiar leaps out of the data:
- The compensation of the Mozilla CEO has skyrocketed (by millions)
- While the Mozilla revenue drops
- And the Firefox Marketshare takes a nosedive
Mozilla (via Hacker News):
Mozilla was built to make the internet better
[…]
Building Mozilla stems from a harmonious blend of philanthropic vision and commercial acumen, embodying the balance between social impact and sustainable growth. Driven by the mission to serve the public good. Two examples are how we build through our Venture Fund and the amazing projects funded through In Real Life.
Richard Speed (via Hacker News):
Unsurprisingly for a technology company, the report is heavy on AI going mainstream where Mozilla reckons it can make an impact in the technology, particularly with regard to open source developers and privacy.
Mozilla’s adventures in AI? The organization says it has 15 engineers working on open source large language models and is working on use cases in the healthcare space. Moez Draief, managing director of Mozilla.ai, said: “There’s a lot of structured data work in that industry that will feed the language models; we don’t have to invent it.”
Seattle3503:
Mozilla’s corporate structure has the same problem OpenAI had. Because Mozilla is not a for-profit entity, management isn’t accountable to shareholders with a financial stake. Because Mozilla isn’t a charity, management isn’t accountable to donors. Who is Mozilla management accountable to? A board; mostly made up Baker’s associates. It is an incestuous arrangement. If Mozilla were serious, they would change the way management is held accountable. Baker needs someone who will actually hold her feet to the flames.
Mozilla is entirely unimaginative, but is self sustaining as long as it keeps its advertisers. Mozilla is a shambling corpse that will continue to shuffle forward until it is no longer favorable for Google to buy search placement.
Diane Brady (via Hacker News):
Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found.
[…]
Chambers says she plans to focus on building out new products that address growing privacy concerns while actively looking for a full-time CEO.
Thomas Claburn:
Mozilla Corporation was sued this month in the US, along with three of its executives, for alleged disability discrimination and retaliation against Chief Product Officer Steve Teixeira.
Teixeira, according to a complaint filed in King County Superior Court in the State of Washington, had been tapped to become CEO when he was diagnosed with ocular melanoma on October 3, 2023.
Laura Chambers:
Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.
[…]
By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with Anonym’s cutting-edge technology, we can enhance user privacy and advertising effectiveness, leveling the playing field for all stakeholders.
Jamie Zawinski:
This seems completely normal and cool and not troublesome in any way.
Jamie Zawinski (Hacker News):
Some will tell you that Mozilla’s worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.
[…]
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
• • •
Floris Hulshoff (via Hacker News):
Mozilla will soon remove its telemetry service Adjust from the Android and iOS versions of browsers Firefox and Firefox Focus. It appeared that the developer was collecting data on the effectiveness of Firefox ad campaigns without disclosing that.
AdGuard (via Hacker News):
If you haven’t been following Firefox super closely, you might wonder: Why was there an ad-tracking SDK in the first place? After all, Mozilla has always positioned itself as a champion of privacy. So, what’s the deal with third-party trackers in their browser?
[…]
It might shock some, but Mozilla has quietly used the Adjust SDK for years. Back in 2020, a curious Redditor on the Firefox subreddit demanded answers about this telemetry partnership — questioning what data was sent, how it was used, and how it squared with Mozilla’s privacy-first image.
[…]
Mozilla says that Firefox for Android uses the Adjust SDK to track and analyze the origin of app installs, specifically to determine if a user installed the browser in response to a specific marketing campaign.
Sergiu Gatlan:
European digital rights group NOYB (None Of Your Business) has filed a privacy complaint with the Austrian data protection watchdog (DSB) against Mozilla, alleging the company uses a Firefox privacy feature (enabled without consent) to track users’ online behavior.
The feature, called “Privacy-Preserving Attribution” (PPA) and jointly developed with Meta (formerly Facebook), was announced in February 2022 and was automatically enabled in Firefox version 128, released in July.
NOYB’s complaint claims that, despite its name, Mozilla uses the feature to track Firefox user behavior across websites.
• • •
Martin Brinkmann:
Raymond “gorhill” Hill, maker of the world’s most popular content blocker uBlock Origin received two emails from Mozilla recently about his Firefox add-on uBlock Origin Lite.
[…]
Mozilla says that it has reviewed the extension and found violations. […] As a consequence, Mozilla disabled the extension on the Firefox Add-ons Store.
[…]
Hill refuted all three claims that Mozilla made on the GitHub repository stating that the extension is not collecting any data, that there is no minified code in uBlock Origin Lite, and that there is a privacy policy.
Taras Buria (via Hacker News):
Raymond Hill decided to drop the extension from the store and move it to a self-hosted version. This means that those who want to continue using uBlock Origin Lite on Firefox should download the latest version from GitHub (it can auto-update itself).
• • •
Mozilla:
We’ve made the hard decision to end our experiment with Mozilla.social and will shut down the Mastodon instance on December 17, 2024.
Niléane:
Mozilla deciding to put an end to its Fediverse investments while simultaneously going all in on AI tells you everything you need to know about what it has become.
Christina Warren:
I understand that this is going to upset people but bffr, if you have 270 active users, that isn’t sustainable. I understand why Mozilla experimented with this. I equally understand why this isn’t something they could do in perpetuity with this low of a number of users.
• • •
Laura Chambers:
As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we need to simultaneously work on public policy, standards, products and infrastructure. Today, I want to take a moment to dive into the details of the “product” and “infrastructure” elements. I will share our emerging thoughts on how this will come to life across our existing products (like Firefox), and across the industry (through the work of our recent acquisition, Anonym, which is building an alternative infrastructure for the advertising industry).
Jamie Zawinski (Mastodon):
They’ve decided who their customers are, and it’s not you, it’s people who build and invest in surveillance advertising networks. But in a “respectful” way.
• • •
Ellis Tree:
Open-source, not-for-profit software company Mozilla has revamped its digital identity to better encapsulate its mission to advocate for an “open, accessible, and supportive internet”. Best known for its Firefox web browser, the company now has a new branding system that aims to visually unify its expanded set of services, channels and resources, which Mozilla has developed over the years, as well as highlight its current “vital research advocacy work in the digital world”. So, central to the brand’s shift has been to move forward with Mozilla as a brand name in order to ensure that the software company “is recognised for its broader impact, not just Firefox”.
Thomas Claburn (Hacker News, Slashdot):
The Mozilla Foundation is laying off about a third of its staff. The non-profit org, which oversees the corporation that develops the Firefox web browser, insists it will continue its advocacy mission, though its approach may change.
[…]
Mozilla Corporation in February laid off about 60 staff, representing about five percent of that software maker’s headcount.
Gaby Del Valle (Hacker News):
In an email sent to all employees on October 30th, Nabhia Syed, the foundation’s executive director, said that the advocacy and global programs divisions “are no longer part of our structure.”
Frederic Lardinois (Hacker News):
To kick-start some of this growth, Mozilla is looking at reaching new, and younger, users. Chambers noted that Mozilla is running a number of marketing campaigns to make people aware of Firefox, especially those who are only now starting to make their first browser choices.
[…]
Of course, she said, the browser also has to work very well — and that’s something Mozilla has focused on quite extensively in recent years. And at the same time, the team also has to keep innovating and giving users the features they are looking for. She noted that as part of refocusing on Firefox, Mozilla is running far more user experience experiments in the browser now, for example.
[…]
From a financial perspective, Mozilla is almost completely dependent on its search deal with Google. Since the Department of Justice is now looking at these deals, though mostly because of Google’s deal with Apple, there is a risk that this may also end up hurting Mozilla. Chambers didn’t seem too concerned about this, however. She noted that the scope of this ruling, which is expected soon, is the U.S., while Mozilla is a global organization.
Previously:
Acquisition Advertising Artificial Intelligence Business Firefox Lawsuit Layoffs Legal Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Mastodon Mozilla Privacy Sunset
