> This thread in general feels like it leaves Mozilla no room to experiment or find any form of growth.
Mozilla is welcome to experiment. The issue here is:
- The default opts the client in instead of the client making that choice to be a Guinea pig in the experiment
- I get emails almost weekly that amount to Mozilla playing the role of internet privacy police. They *are* well aware of the rights and wrongs. Are they going to call out themselves?
- As for growth? How about paid pro-privacy email hosting? And a suite of applications (a la Google docs)? Advertising might not be going away but there are still opportunities that align with Mozilla's ideals and brand... And they're too busy being hypocritical internet police???
I think the worst part of the funding equation is that had Mozilla stayed on mission and invested it's Google fees wisely, Firefox development could have been indefinitely funded.
Instead, we have had Mozilla sprawling in numerous directions secondary to the browser and failing in nearly all of them.
That is the problem, people want to run a modern corporation with its tentacles always reaching and growing instead of focusing on a core business proposition that they can win at.
If you dont grow at double digit percentages year of year, are you even trying?
> The default opts the client in instead of the client making that choice to be a Guinea pig in the experiment
I think this is a reasonable critique, even if I personally don't find it a big deal. If it's privacy preserving, I don't necessarily give a shit if it's defaulted on - especially if there's a way to disable it.
(IMO, defaulting it on and then widely announcing how to disable it is what they should have done, and their bungled communications on this is biting them)
> I get emails almost weekly that amount to Mozilla playing the role of internet privacy police. They are* well aware of the rights and wrongs. Are they going to call out themselves?*
Why would they call themselves out here...? They have stated, very bluntly, that they are trying to do something in a privacy preserving way. They are acting in line with their stated intentions/role/etc.
> As for growth? How about paid pro-privacy email hosting? And a suite of applications (a la Google docs)? Advertising might not be going away but there are still opportunities that align with Mozilla's ideals and brand... And they're too busy being hypocritical internet police???
Those are wholly separate business ventures, whereas dealing with the advertising behemoth is an unfortunate part of the browser ecosystem today. Someone, somewhere, is going to have to contend with this - and Mozilla is somewhat uniquely positioned to explore here.
If you think Apple or Google are going to do it without perverse incentives, then I don't know what to tell you.
We all lost our minds when Google tried to pull their privacy-preserving Federated Learning of Cohorts thing. I expect an even bigger outcry when Firefox, whose entire brand and reason for existence is privacy, quietly tries to do the same thing.
Mozilla is welcome to experiment. The issue here is:
- The default opts the client in instead of the client making that choice to be a Guinea pig in the experiment
- I get emails almost weekly that amount to Mozilla playing the role of internet privacy police. They *are* well aware of the rights and wrongs. Are they going to call out themselves?
- As for growth? How about paid pro-privacy email hosting? And a suite of applications (a la Google docs)? Advertising might not be going away but there are still opportunities that align with Mozilla's ideals and brand... And they're too busy being hypocritical internet police???