Unfck the Internet
firefox.comIt makes me sad to see people targeting Mozilla for everything.
Like yeah its default browser is Google because that's the way they can pay developers to work on it. For now they are only viable alternative in browser space.
Yeah it collects data(only after asking for appropriate permission) which too is anonymous(i might be wrong here). But they are not collecting it to make profit out of it like google. Its only to make firefox better.
And people suggesting to use forks of firefox keep in mind if there is no firefox there are no forks. I am not qualified to comment on Mozilla's way of handling their funds. But it is what it is for now.
But atleast if you use firefox daily show some love!
It's nigh-impossible to please privacy absolutists, while also hoping to create a consumer friendly (UX-wise) product. It also takes very little for them to toss the baby out with the bathwater.
Which is all a bit baffling since we already have a privacy absolutist's dream version of Firefox called the Tor Browser.
The problem is, so called "anonymized" data is able to identify you (sometimes with very few data points required. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/24/researchers-spotlight-the-...). Mozilla advertises Firefox as the browser that doesn't track you, but that's just wrong (since FF has quite a bit of telemetry). And it's on by default, and since people who are new to the privacy mindset may not know about how this telemetry is on, it's sad how Firefox is still recommended.
I used to work at Mozilla until recently and what you're talking about is nonsense. The telemetry data is handled extremely carefully. Any downstream use of that data is also carefully managed so that creating re-identifiable data is not possible.
Could Mozilla reidentify people with raw telemetry - sure. Is it easy or done in practice - no. Shut the hell up unless you know better than someone who has handled that data.
Seriously folks - Mozilla has problems - but proper handling of your private data is not one of them.
> Like yeah its default browser is Google because that's the way they can pay developers to work on it.
Not many people complain about this btw. It's a foolish argument. If Yahoo or DDG is the default, most people will just switch back to Google.
>only after asking for appropriate permission
No. it's opt out.
> which too is anonymous
No
>There is no firefox there are no forks
That's one of the most important points. Without Firefox, TOR browser will not exist either.
>But atleast if you use firefox daily show some love!
Yep! It's my default browser. Has killer features no other browser has.
> Not many people complain about this btw. It's a foolish argument. If Yahoo or DDG is the default, most people will just switch back to Google.
That was in reply to a comment which was deleted by the commenter.
>only after asking for appropriate permission
>No. it's opt out.
Oh never noticed that. But I think that's because its just annoyance for the people who don't care about privacy. And those who does can just opt out.
> which too is anonymous
> No
Whatever it maybe I trust Mozilla more than Google. I am not being a fanboy too. Mozilla is not some giant tech company selling your data to advertisers.
> Oh never noticed that. But I think that's because its just annoyance for the people who don't care about privacy. And those who does can just opt out.
Opt-out is still a dark pattern. For those who don't care about privacy, it should default to no data collection, with simple language detailing what will be collected, and what it's used for.
I'm still in your camp though in that I'd trust Mozilla to not sell my data and instead use it to only improve their products.
>It makes me sad to see people targeting Mozilla for everything
Not for everything but the disgusting management, and the trow out of real Devs. Mozilla management, shut up and make a good browser and leave the rest to the EFF.
BTW: Don't link youtube videos if you want to unfuck (yes if you mean it write it..you know WITH the U). And please make the Firefox Logo in Rainbow-color, not because you stand behind it, but because it gives you that cozy feeling that your are the good ones.
Clicking on the link shown on the website assigns a unique ID to your version of Firefox downloaded from the playstore. Every user gets a unique ID. This ID is sent back to 'Adjust' when you install the app.
So much for unfcking the internet. Hypocrisy everywhere.
Anonymous tracking is fine with them, I'd presume, and totally seems to be in line with Mozilla's stance, too, one would think. It isn't like their flagship product, Firefox, is free of all telemetry.
Unique Id is hardly anonymous.
Anonymous tracking is already part of the URL. The ?utm_source=unfck part of the URL helps Mozilla know how many people installed Firefox from that link.
What data is being leaked that can be used to break anonymity?
You click the link. You get an ID assigned to you. You install the app. It calls back home with the ID and a list of specific apps on your Android.
This tracking is happens continuously. You have to go to the settings and toggle the data collection off.
In case it wasn't clear, I am not complaining. Analytics has its place, but the Unique ID's are a bit much, especially when they want to unfk the internet.
> It calls back home with the ID and a list of specific apps on your Android.
Is this just speculation, or is this visible in the code?
It's visible by just checking DNS logs.
https://brave.com/ios-browser-first-run/
Scroll down to Firefox.
> "Anonymous tracking is fine with [Mozilla]..."
that seems to be a reasonable and consistent stance, but it's also reasonable for users to be skeptical of their anonymity claims as well as the implicit claim of being undeanonymizeable (what a mouthful) or having strict safeguards on potentially fingerprintable info.
i think branding around privacy (and secondarily security) is a good strategy for them (apple is effective with it), but mozilla really has to nail the messaging, not only for the public but for more-discerning technologists as well. so far, the compromising stance they've taken doesn't seem to be hitting the right chords all around.
my take is that they're messaging is too broad and diluted right now. for example, diversity and inclusion are great, but not for the mozila/firefox brand at its current (smaller) size. it just distracts from a core brand that should be laser-focused on privacy and security to set it in stark contrast with google & chrome (and to a lesser extent, apple & safari). that creates real market segmentation and shifts user choice-making to dimensions that favor mozilla/firefox. other (potential) brand values just don't do that for them.
and, they don't have the resources and reach (and reserve brand equity) of companies like google & apple to effectively deploy broad brand ideals. instead, they really need to focus narrowly on just privacy and security if they want to survive their mindshare/marketshare drought.
Can you expand on this? On desktop I don't see anything being stored anywhere on this site, but I'm likely missing something.
Did you click on the play store link?
It is not linked directly to the play store. it is run through a tracking company first, which then assigns a unique ID to your installation for knowing what caused users to install firefox. The ID is present in the URL.
Click the link once more to get another ID assigned to you.
Then when you open the app, The ID is sent back to the company along with a list of specific apps installed on your Android.
Oh sorry, I misread your original comment. Now I understand what's happening. Thanks for elaborating :)
So it’s like the intel CPU serial number all over again, except maybe more granular (specific), but at least mutable.
I clicked the "download on the app store" button, but ended up on a domain "app.adjust.com" showing a full screen "safari cannot open this page. The error was: the URL was blocked by a content blocker". Deceptive link, doesn't go to the regular ios app store for sure.
If you want to "unf*ck the internet", perhaps start doing exactly that with your own links. I cannot understand why "adjust dot com" needs to insert itself between this page and the app store. If it's for installation tracking, why not host whatever tracking service on your own domain? AFAIK "adjust dot com" couldn't possibly offer any magic installation tracking that the first party domain couldn't offer.
Mozilla appears to be not long for this world, and it's incredibly sad.
What we should be doing is pointing fingers at Google, who have no business running the world's top browser, search engine, and ad network. That's a monopoly.
Mozilla just signed another huge deal with Google for the default search engine in Firefox to be Google. Judgement of that deal aside for a moment, Mozilla isn't going anywhere soon.
What's the goal of this campaign? To raise awareness about Firefox's products and increase users?
If so, who is the target demographic? The art and style look like they belong on Nickelodian.
It's giving me a "Hello, fellow kids" vibe.
It reminds me of GOG's fckdrm.com site, that it looks like has been down for about a month but used to look like this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200817145700/https://fckdrm.co...
I guess it wouldn't be down if it was wildly successful. Also, to their credit GOG was promoting DRM-free in general and it wasn't just an ad for GOG but linked to other DRM-free stores, including direct competitors. I see there are a few other links on Mozilla's page if you follow a link but mostly it looks like an ad for Firefox.
I'm a big fan of GoG and Bandcamp.
Weirdly, Steam doesn't get enough credit for being DRM-free for many of its games; games that don't ship their own DRM or use Steam CEG are effectively as DRM-free as GoG games are. You can't transfer them out of your account, but you could zip up the folder they reside in and copy it to another machine without problems.
The Steam executable itself is a DRM system, as far as I am aware there is no way to download via the website as there is with GOG (or Humble's DRM free options or other DRM-free sites), so personally I don't consider Steam ever DRM-free.
GoG doesn't let you download without a username and password tied to a license. Neither does Humble.
The App is just a cdn api wrapper.
Nit pick: Nickelodeon, not "Nickelodian".
>choose independent tech
Yeah, and Firefox is a corporation that gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Google, whose CEO gets paid about $2 million a year.
I won't get into their politics, because frankly they shouldn't matter, but please actually start working on your browser, Mozilla. Ungoogled Chromium is eating your lunch.
Is it too much to ask for a tech company to just focus on their product and not delve into social advocacy?
Edit: The Unfck the Internet project proclaims to be all about user privacy, but it promotes an extension to report political ads and an extension to report recommended YouTube videos (with the goal of not exposing people certain content). That is why I see this as social advocacy because it's clearly got political motives.
The Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization with the mission of making the internet a better place. Here's the manifesto: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/
I don't understand this stance to be honest. Do you also think that Apple's focus on privacy is wrong? Why would a company building a web browser not be concerned about the state of the web, the privacy of it's users, etc? These things seem to be directly related to their product.
Apple is only focused on privacy in the barest sense. They'll refuse to unlock physical devices while happily answering thousands of requests from the US and other govermnents for users' iCloud data[0]. They also don't allow users to encrypt data stored in iCloud, expressly so they can continue to do this[1].
Apple's front as a privacy company is little more than PR. I understand this isn't really the point of your comment, but I think the privacy policies of Apple and Mozilla make for a misleading comparison.
Mozilla cannot have anything other than a huge positional advantage over Apple where privacy is concerned, mainly because the amount and type of personal data the two companies ingest are so vastly different. Were Mozilla to adopt Apple's stance on privacy, results would be disastrous.
[0] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
> They'll refuse to unlock physical devices while happily answering thousands of requests from the US and other govermnents for users' iCloud data[0].
They are required by law to do the latter. They are not required to to do the former (or at least are willing to go to court to defend that belief).
> They also don't allow users to encrypt data stored in iCloud
The article you linked does not back up this assertion. It says they chose not to automatically encrypt user backups to the cloud, at the FBI's request. I'm sure if you encrypt data and upload it to iCloud, they will not delete your encrypted data.
I don't fully agree with your second point. The way iCloud on an iPhone works, users have no chance to encrypt data before uploading it. Most people are only tangentially aware of what data is siphoned automatically by the service.
It would be the responsibility of the iCloud service to encrypt data (if Apple had chosen to do so, and a user opts in). Simply choosing not to delete encrypted blobs is not the same thing. The salient point is that Apple was _going_ to offer encryption as a part of the iCloud service, but dropped the feature at the FBI's request.
Apple altering their pro-privacy plans after strong pressure from a federal agency tells a very different story than the one you presented with your initial statement.
Because Mozilla doesn't care about the privacy of their users. If they did, Pocket would be easily disabled, and they would have zero telemetry (like Ungoogled Chromium).
I don't think the things you cite necessarily mean "Mozilla doesn't care about the privacy of it's users". There's always room for improvement, but "they're not perfect" != "they don't care".
Tangentially related: ungoogled Chromium has some impact on Google's monetisation, but zero impact on their browser monopoly, because in the end you're still using their browser engine. So if you're talking about counteracting browser monopoly, ungoogled Chromium is not a good choice.
I will name drop Librewolf as the "Ungoogled Chromium" of Firefox-based browsers. However, the web itself is tightly controlled by Google, and for me using UG Chromium is the best bet. I've stopped caring about the browser monopoly and instead looked for ways to minimize my usage of browsers and the web in general.
No, I don't think Apple's focus on privacy is wrong. Adding features which enhance user privacy doesn't seem like social advocacy because it's on an individual-level.
Here's why I consider this Unfck the Internet project to be social advocacy - the extension to track political ads via a public database. The extension to report problematic YouTube recommendations also serves the same purpose.
Yes. The things that companies and other organisations do have large impacts on society and individuals. This is particularly the case for organisation like Mozilla which are explicitly about promoting these concepts through technology.
Yes, unless the technology has no societal implications.
It really doesn't, though - any more than the printing press itself did or the television did. What was produced by them may have had societal implications, but the manufacturers of printing presses and televisions just went about their business of producing high quality printing presses and televisions as best they could.
>Put a lid on Facebook
><a id="js-fb" class="mzp-c-cta-link" href="http://facebook.com/sharer.php...
Yup...
That's just a link to Facebook, which is much better than the more common method for sharing which involves letting Facebook run JavaScript on your website.
Firefox installs a scheduled task that daily reports your default browser to Mozilla and you can't disable it because it comes back after an update. Also while Mozilla provides and constantly advertises (by showing a full page ad for it) an addon that blocks Facebook tracking it doesn't make or advertise an addon to block Google tracking (coincidentally Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions every year)
> Complains about facebook by saying it tracks users.
> Links to a facebook owned company (giphy) in the next image.
"u".
Here, you dropped this. Omitting the 'u' doesn't suddenly change the weight of the word.
demographic target lean and whatever aside, deep in the giphy of promotional gifs ...Unfck this and that........there's one that says Un Zuck It
hm, on the nose
Is it too much to ask to use the full and uncensored word 'fuck'. I personally have no problem with casual profanity when its use is warranted, and am more "offended" by people who think they need to self censor themselves.
> I personally have no problem with casual profanity when its use is warranted, and am more "offended" by people who think they need to self censor themselves.
You could frame this the other way. I don't necessarily understand why people are so bothered by the word, but I also don't understand why avoiding it would bother you.
Personally, I think it just makes the page accessible in more contexts. I'd feel ever-so-slightly embarrassed bringing up a page filled with course words while in the office. Removing the vowels makes me less embarrassed. We can have a discussion about if that makes any sense, but culture and traditions frequently don't make sense, and I don't think this is harming anyone.
I always found people who use that word online never actually achieve the word's intended purpose, which is to emotionally charge your sentiment. The word is so common place that it has lost all meaning. Using it in the early days you were a rebel and the word actually shocked people. Today, not so much. Using it just makes you sound like another boring keyboard warrior.
And pedantically the verb would be 'defuck'. Unfucked is an adjective.
Things Mozilla could do right now that would greatly improve our security and privacy:
Add anti-fingerprinting tech to the core browser or at least verify one of the existing add-ons that do it.
Add PGP/GPG to the core browser.
Look into sandboxing. Maybe pick up maintenance of Sanboxie.
I am not a big fan of Mozilla (though I still use it because it is the least bad browser for me) but you can already set:
privacy.resistFingerprinting to 'true' in about:config
It is not perfect, of course, but helps a lot. Expect some sites to break.
privacy.resistfingerprinting is strictly for advanced users. Always attach a huge warning when asking people to enable it.
Examples of breakage - while enabling 2FA on any site, or using sites that offer the ability to edit photos, canvas picker, etc.
> Add PGP/GPG to the core browser.
Please, no. 1990s ball-of-mud insecure crypto with unusable UX?
Pass. We don’t need the browser to be the client for everything. We just got FTP and Gopher removed!
Has anyone used Jumbo here? If yes, what's your review?
It was really difficult to tell what the app actually does from their website. I was interested, but didn't want to have to download it just to find out.
Pocket $2000
Firefox OS $15000
Persona $8000
CEO $3600
Firefox $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my browser is dying
Firefox/Mozilla.
Please stick to making a better browser, like you did back when the add-on ecosystem didn't suck and was vibrant and alive.
All these semi-political initiatives just look childish virtue signalling, bankrolled by Google search money and don't do your history any justice.
When you try to go up against FB and Google with feelgood nonsense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6atSU2iUrdI (yes, yes...)
I’m struggling to stay loyal to Firefox. Mozilla feels like a bloated pig snuffling on Google’s handouts so that its many employees can enjoy a SV lifestyle. We just need devs and a designer or two to focus on Firefox.
This feels very uncharitable, given that they laid off 30% of their workforce and the remainder are pretty much all paid under SV market prices and work there because they believe in the mission. (At least, that was what I saw when I interned there in 2014 and everything I've heard since points to that still being the case)
I love Firefox but my personal "fight-for-diversity" is carried on through the use of Safari, which I consider the best browser, at least on the Mac.
On Linux I use Firefox. On Windows I would use Firefox.
Safari doesn't have the privacy extensions of Firefox (e.g. uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Multi-Account Containers), or custom search keywords. I use Firefox on iOS actually, because I get to sync my custom search keywords.
Also in my experience, while Safari is very efficient in terms of battery, Firefox has made great improvements in that department and also ... Safari chokes on more than 10 open tabs, whereas Firefox runs just fine with at least 10 times more tabs.
I wanted to try to move to Safari, but I use too much Firefox's containers feature. Is there a way I could have the same experience on Safari?
The solution is to police your own ads and not use some services?
It looks like we're out of ideas if the solution is to just use the internet less..
The solution is regulation.
But that could take another decade to materialize, or more, so what do we do until then?
On an individual level, yes, the solution right now is to avoid some services.
Unfuck your own browsers first Mozilla
It's honestly the best browser out there...
It is but it still could benefit from some unfckng of lately fckng introduced.
This is so tone-deaf it hurts to look at. The way it's presented feels like they're trying to pander to people.
I use Firefox every single day. Focus on your browser, and let your product do the talking.