I’m just following the warning signs, in the last year:
There’s the news of the opt-out only on tracking as you brought up. Then they fired one of their open source executives because he had the audacity to get cancer. Then they acquired an ad company because “we’re built different and we can fix her and totally not get corrupted by ads in the process”. Then the AI shit oh and ofc the news where they almost sucked Putin’s dick and pulled FF from being accessible in Russia for a day or 2
And a bunch of other stuff that I’m probably forgetting about. And that’s just within the last year.
Google and Chrome were great to! Until they weren’t. FF probably won’t ever actually die, not for a while at least. But the User and Privacy first aspects certainly will. They’ll probably succumb to enshittification and become like any other corporate browser like Chrome or Edge for years to come.
Ah I just searched for Firefox news and the PPA thing was the only one that came up.
As for firing the executive, I can’t find anything about him being specifically relayed to being open-source anything. Steve Teixeira was their Chief Product Office briefly- he only was hired in 2022 and left the company a few months ago, and prior to that he worked for Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. So I don’t think this can really be framed as some attack on open-source or privacy. If the allegations are true that they discriminated against him for having cancer that’s shitty of course, but Mozilla has of course claimed that they did not and it’s going to court. They didn’t fire him either- they asked him to take a demotion to Senior VP of Technology Strategy and he chose to leave instead.
Yes Mozilla bought an ad company. They’re called Anonym and their stated goal is to provide an advertising service that can exist profitably without violating privacy. I hate ads- I block as many as I can and I use a pi-hole. I avoid ad-supported services as much as possible. I’m also privileged enough that I can afford to pay for a subscription to a lot of stuff or just buy physical media to rip and store on my own server. But there was a time when I was a broke college student stuck using campus Internet and playing by their rules, so the safest option I could afford was just to watch ads. Ads can be an ethical business model that helps improve the lives of low-income households. For people with legal or ethical concerns about piracy, or additional restrictions on their Internet, or who just lack the technical skill.
It’s certainly fair to keep an eye on Anonym and Mozilla in this regard, but I haven’t seen anything objectionable there yet.
Similar for the Mozilla AI. It seems it’s still in it’s infancy and I’m not a fan of companies jumping on the air bandwagon in general, but at the very least Mozilla has identified the problems with other AI’s and is looking to create a better alternative. If they get caught stealing training data, releasing tools to allow high schoolers to make deep fake revenge porn, tell people to start putting glue in their pizza cheese, or some other crap like that then they should absolutely be criticized for it. But none of that has happened yet that I’m aware of.
I also can’t find exactly what you’re referring to with Russia. The closest thing is that it looks like there were some extensions that were made to work around Russian state censorship. The Russian government passed a law in March banning such workarounds. In response, Mozilla took down 5 extensions, reviewed them, and then decided to reinstate them in June. Not quite ideal, but still seems like reasonable action to me.
It’s fair and a good thing to criticize Mozilla and Firefox. But it seems like you’re trying to spin every single move they make as a sign the sky is falling.
And I also know that there are both states and corporations paying people to go on the Internet and push propaganda. Firrfox has a lot of enemies. You cant just blindly believe every article saying they are succumbing to enshittification.
