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0 pointstakluyver5y ago0 comments

To take one example, Mozilla's 'privacy not included' guides. They rate hardware and software products for privacy protections. This is a topic that people care about in the abstract but couldn't easily make concrete decisions on. You may disagree with how they do it, but it's definitely relevant.

I get the feeling from this thread that some people think the only conceivable purpose of Mozilla is to maintain an independent browser, and if they can't do that they may as well shut down. Mozilla sees itself in a larger role of supporting a healthy internet, and kind of has to think about what else that might mean besides an independent browser.

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stingraycharles5y ago· 2 in thread

> I get the feeling from this thread that some people think the only conceivable purpose of Mozilla is to maintain an independent browser, and if they can't do that they may as well shut down

This is exactly how I feel about Mozilla indeed. Their only relevance to me is their browser, I don’t care much about the rest. If a “privacy not included guide” is the best example of other value they add, this strongly confirms it from my point of view.

takluyverOP5y ago

Perhaps the disconnect is that Mozilla's goals are not just the bits you care about. If all you're saying is that they should double down on Firefox and ignore everything else because that's what you want, that's not a very interesting argument.

Even if you believe Firefox is the only goal, though... Mozilla needs money to develop it. Despite all the technical effort that's gone into it in recent years, Firefox is still losing marketshare. Maybe there's some killer feature that will turn it around. But so far tracking protection doesn't seem to have done it, and there's not that many other features that Google can't copy. So if you still want Firefox to be useful in 10 years, there's a real chance it will be need to be subsidised by something like Mozilla VPN.

stingraycharles5y ago

> If all you're saying is that they should double down on Firefox and ignore everything else because that's what you want, that's not a very interesting argument.

I started this discussion with the point that I’m not donating to Mozilla, because I don’t want my donations to go to their other projects. Mozilla is of course free to do with their resources what they want, it’s just that they should not be expecting my support in that case.

I personally prefer to fund established projects and developers with donations, I just don’t consider Mozilla very good at starting new projects. I want to fund and support Firefox and that’s it, and there’s currently no way to do so. And with that, comes my criticism of how they are using their resources that I can fund.

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