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âInternet Villainâ Mozilla. Can Enough Really Be Said?
So how is that working out for them?
After realizing that these petitions were a smear campaign organized by large tech firms and they had been used and now had publicly gone on record as Enemies of Free Software, some people un-signed the petition and then contacted Roy Schestowitz on trying to weasel their way out of copies of former revisions that had been shown on Techrights, citing their âprivacyâ.
Most of the signatories of the petition are companies working against Software Freedom, like âInternet Villainâ Mozilla, which hires people straight out of Facebook[1] and the Central Intelligence Agency[2], and gives Internet Privacy Awards to Comcast[3], one of the most notorious ISPs for many years, which even did such actions as NXDOMAIN (No Such Domain) hijackings of invalid Web sites to a Comcast page of ads, and Man-In-The-Middle) (MITM) attacks against unencrypted Web page loads to display messages and inject JavaScripts.
[1]
http://techrights.org/2023/08/18/mozilla-hires-facebook-b2b-people/
[2]
http://techrights.org/2022/09/10/mozilla-three-letter-agencies/
[3]
http://techrights.org/2020/06/25/mozilla-comcast/
Mozilla also fills Firefox with trash and spyware and ads that drive their users away in droves.
I was noticing that Braveâs Active Monthly Users was about 20 million before the âCOVID lockdownsâ and has worked its way up to almost 60 million. An increase of nearly 40 million. In the mean time, Mozilla has chased out 77 million monthly active users.
It seems that roughly half of the users that Mozilla has chased out have gone to Brave alone.
Brendan Eich is vindicated.
They forced him out of the CEO role at Mozilla so that the current CEO, Mitchell Baker, who is something of a âcorporate arsonistâ in my opinion, could ascend to CEO and fill Firefox with trash, DRM[4], and âChrome-ismsâ. (Bad, oftentimes impossible-to-secure âfeaturesâ of the Web Platform, dictated by Google.)
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine
Now the people at Mozilla, (at least the ones that didnât get sacked in the huge rounds of layoffs!) get to reap the rotten fruit of their coup against Eich.
Mozilla sacked 70 in the first round and 250 in the next, and that was just in 2020 alone.
Then what these places generally do next is go on hiring freezes and quit replacing people who leave. So there can be substantial further losses but the bad ânewsâ stops getting published.
What we get is a Firefox that barely changes, except patches to deal with Windows spyware that crashes it and some Chromeisms, and more âparasite-wareâ like âFirefox Suggestâ, which is aggravating adware and a keylogger.
Mozilla, an enemy of Free Software, is clearly perishing, and Brendan Eich is well into the process of bringing the whole rotten temple down on top of them.
He is pushing back harder on the junk that Mozilla always ends up welcoming with open arms after some tepid disapproval that ultimately accomplishes nothing except feel good PR before they attack the Open Internet again.
Recently, Brave Software had this to say about Googleâs WEI âproposalâ.
Brave strongly opposes Googleâs âWeb Environment Integrityâ (WEI) proposal. As with many of Googleâs recent changes and proposals regarding the Web, âWeb Environment Integrityâ would move power away from users, and toward large websites, including the websites Google itself runs. Though Brave uses Chromium, Brave browsers do not (and will not) include WEI.1 Further, some browsers have introduced other features similar to, though more limited than, WEI (e.g., certain parts of WebAuthn and Privacy Keys); Brave is considering how to best restrict these features without breaking benign uses.
Googleâs WEI proposal is frustrating, but itâs not surprising. WEI is simply the latest in Googleâs ongoing efforts to prevent browser users from being in control of how they read, interact with, and use the Web. Googleâs WebBundles proposal makes it more difficult for users to block or filter out unwanted page content, Googleâs First Party Sets feature makes it more difficult for users to make decisions around which sites can track users, and Googleâs weakening of browser extensions straightforwardly makes it harder for users to be in control of their Web experience by crippling top ad-and-tracker-blocking extensions such as uBlock Origin.2 This is unfortunately far from a complete list of recent, similar user-harming Web proposals from Google. Again, Brave disables or modifies all of these features in Braveâs browsers.
The Web is the worldâs most popular, and therefore most important, open system for sharing information and distributing applications. It is critical that users stay in control of how they interact with the Web, and for the Web not to be reduced to a series of take-it-or-leave-it black-boxes that users canât inspect, canât understand, and canât modify. Googleâs WEI proposal (like many other Google proposals) intentionally shifts power away from users, and towards large websites and advertisers.
WEI is the latest step in a terrible direction Google is pushing for the Web. Web users deserve a browser that doesnât treat them as enemies that need to be restricted and controlled.
When Brendan Eich commented directly,
We are a fork, have been all along, the âreskinnedâ claim is complete nonsense. We wonât be shipping WEI support, just as we disable or otherwise nullify lots of other junk that Google puts into Chromium.â
Brave has done a lot of things for your privacy, including, recently, blocking sites from port-scanning you.
Malicious websites use all manner of tricks to worm their way into our systems, but in order for them to be most effective at their nastiness, they need to know what theyâre facing. That often means scanning our phones and computers, looking for open network ports and identifying the programs running on them. The data that generates can effectively âfingerprintâ your device, letting the malicious site identify and track you â even if you use a browser with safeguards like an ad-blocker. So far, your best protection has been to install a third-party browser extension that blocks local port scanning, but now the Brave browser is tackling this problem head-on, by preventing websites from scanning open ports on your device in the first place.
In what can only be described as a deliciously delusional case of irony, Mozilla recently announced that, while everyone is running for the âfire exitsâ to get away from Firefox, which is burning down due to the âcorporate arsonistâ and her minions, you may now âimport your Chrome WebExtensions if you are switching from Google Chromeâ.
Thatâs like the Titanic welcoming new passengers after it hit the iceberg.
As we used to say, ROFLCOPTER.
With 77 million lost Firefox users since January 2019, Eich got 75% and the other 25% went off to one of the half-dozen Firefox forks (including LibreWolf) that have been sanitized, purged of malicious software, or even to SeaMonkey, Vivaldi, or the âeven-worse-than-firefoxâ Google Chrome.