I’ll probably stick with FF-derivatives like LibreWolf & Mullvad unless & until Mozilla changes something that ruins things downstream. If they do, I’d consider my WebKit-based options.

Yeah. It’s his avatar:

A curated list of jwz’s comments on Mozilla, the organization he started 27 years ago.

There’s no question that Mozilla is an advertising company now.

I think the downvoters can’t hold these two thoughts in their mind at the same time:

1. Firefox is the best browser.
2. Firefox has serious problems because Mozilla is a terrible steward of it.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-company-now/#comment-249969

Preemptive subtwit.

Let’s say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren’t covering it.

So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.

Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, 'Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren’t selling kitten deli slices?"

Some might say – maybe you aren’t an animal shelter any more. Some might say.

Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money. It doesn’t need any more to maintain a browser and an email client.

From jwz, who founded Mozilla & Firefox:

• 2020: This is a pretty dire assessment of Mozilla
• 2023: Remember when Mozilla made a web browser?
• 2024: Mozilla is an advertising company now
• 2024: Mozilla’s Original Sin

.

Mozilla had a duty to preserve the open web.

Instead they cosplayed as a startup, chasing product dreams of “growth hacking”, with Google’s ad money as their stand-in for a VC-funding firehose, with absolutely predictable and tragic results.

And those dreams of growth and market penetration failed catastrophically anyway.

(Except for the C-suite, who made out quite well. And Google, who got exactly what they paid for: a decade of antitrust-prosecution insurance. It was never about ad revenue. The on-paper existence of Firefox as a hypothetical competitor kept the Federal wolves at bay, and that’s all Google cared about.)

---

Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?

As I have said many times:

In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
3. There is no 3.

It took me the last five minutes to figure out that the chrome URI is probably not in reference to Google Chrome at all, but rather chrome as in the user interface skin.

I rue the day that, in the panic of Trump’s 2016 election win, I donated a not insignificant amount to this organization. They clearly didn’t need it and only squandered it. What is this Chief Marketing Officer’s salary?

Prior to Mozilla, Lindsey headed up corporate-level marketing for Facebook Inc. […]

I’m pretty sure I know what the instance I admin does & doesn’t endorse, thanks.

I happen to know jwz personally, and he knows Mozilla intimately: he founded it. His dislike of Mozilla is pretty much the same as mine, and he is neither “anti west” nor anti liberal. We dislike Mozilla because it has lost its way from being a FOSS browser maintainer and a booster for & steward of an open web.

And I’m not “anti-West,” I’m anti-capitalist, anti-settler-colonialist, and anti-imperialist; and those happen to be things that “the West” presently embodies.

This is apparently either not widely known or some people just like to shoot the messenger.

• jwz, Jun.: Mozilla is an advertising company now
• jwz, Oct.: Mozilla’s CEO doubles down on them being an advertising company now
• Mozilla support: Share data with Mozilla to help improve Firefox
• Firefox documentation: Telemetry

Stick a in Firefox. #mozexit

What? They’re not going to kill their own browser that they virtually exclusively control. Why would they kill one of their biggest cash cows? Google is an ad company, and they want control of the client software that we use which they pump ads to and exfiltrate our identities from.

Yeah we’ve known this was coming ever since Manifest V3 was a done deal. We’ve had years of foreshadowing and months of warning to get off Chromium.

JWZ was one of the main instigators of Mozilla/Firefox, and Mozilla’s launch party was held at his nightclub.

Some relevant posts from his blog:

• Mozilla’s CEO doubles down on them being an advertising company now
• Mozilla’s Original Sin.
• Mozilla is an advertising company now.
• “Open source, at least in a spiritual sense.”
• CEO pay skyrockets, while Firefox Marketshare nosedives.
• “Today I learned about Mozilla’s new AI startup from my gas pump.”
• “The only way to get a corporation to behave ethically is to create a PR disaster for their comms team.”
• “This is where the Innovation goes in.”

Technically correct: literally no one does fit the criteria for not everyone.

jwz three months ago: Mozilla is an advertising company now

From the comments:

Preemptive subtwit.

Let’s say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren’t covering it.

So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.

Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, 'Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren’t selling kitten deli slices?"

Some might say – maybe you aren’t an animal shelter any more. Some might say.

Mozilla has been financed by ads since 20 years. This pays the people working on the browser. 99% of the work is actually done by employees, not by volunteers. Acquiring that advertising company is the next logical step to get rid of Google (also financed by ads…) Instead of blaming shaming, we need to think about how to finance working on free software, as relying on unpaid work is not viable and brings issues with diversity.

You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, “The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?”

Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text. That’s news. Literal news.

“Instead of blaming and shaming” – fuck that. I will absolutely and unapologetically blame them for the utter shame they bring on themselves.

Mozilla has become a mockery of its former self, so fair enough. “Activist spirit” my ass.