We want you to make a browser that is so good, that it can function independenty of Google and Chrome financially and technologically. This is not an end in itself. Google is just not a very trustworthy steward of the marketshare that they have on the browser market.
You are in a unique position to make this possible. Please double down on it instead of throwing away your hundreds of millions of monies that you have on unfocused, irrelevant bullshit that noone will remember in two years.
You made a whole browser engine that actually improved on current engines in Rust and then you basically threw it away. What on earth was that about ?
Mozilla we want you to make Firefox without any tracking, and without and advertizing shit in it , and we want it fast and secure, and we love your extensions. Some of us here are even willing to pay you subscription fees to support the browser! But keep in mind that you have millions of dollars already.
We loved you all the way from when your product was still called phoenix, Mozilla suite even, and everyone was so excited to have this excellent browser. We pooled money to take out full page ads in a paper newspaper for Firefox. Because we believed in your product so much. I still have the page here. Do you remember ?
Please. Stop with this stupid bullshit.
Focus, Mozilla, Focus!
From the depth of our hearts,
PS: and if you find some time, go fix that bug that makes the active tab so difficult to differentiate if lighting conditions or eyesight aren't perfect.
> PS: and if you find some time, go fix that bug that makes the active tab so difficult to differentiate if lighting conditions or eyesight aren't perfect.
fwiw you can change the firefox chrome(what they call the browser widgets itself and predates googlechrome) css to highlight the active tab fairly easily if it's important to you.
> PS: and if you find some time, go fix that bug that makes the active tab so difficult to differentiate if lighting conditions or eyesight aren't perfect.
Also, Mozilla should stop removing features, buttons and preference items based on bullshit metrics that majority of the power users don't even keep enabled, thus skewing the studies completely.
All that makes me feel about Mozilla, Exactly how I felt about Nokia between 2010-2015; Having everything to make a turnaround yet making deliberate decisions to bury yourself deeper. Just like Nokia, I'm not ruling out internal sabotage entirely either.
At this point it just seems like Google is keeping Mozilla alive for avoiding anti-trust issues, But all horizontal monopolies are switching to being vertical monopolies anyways as they've learnt there are no laws to stop them and so I don't think Google would have reasons to put up this facade for much longer either.
Yet I still use Firefox as main browser, But have started to switch mission critical websites to Brave. Mainly because I don't want to use 3rd party extensions(Found a recommended Firefox add-on involved in malicious activity[1]) and that websites have started to treat Chrome as the only browser(We're back to IE 6 times again).
Completely agree of course but honestly they fired Brendan Eich that was all about this and installed a CEO that is all about identity politics. What do you expect to come out of that?
> PS: and if you find some time, go fix that bug that makes the active tab so difficult to differentiate if lighting conditions or eyesight aren't perfect.
Mozilla already make a browser that is a great alternative to Chrome, and it's not enough. Would better CPU/RAM usage, fixing security bugs, or removing "advertizing shit" really change consumers opinions and gain a significant share of the market from Chrome?
Every time Mozilla attempts to innovate on the web they're publicly berated for not refocusing the company on the cries of enthusiast developer crowd, as if continued criticism will eventually compel Mozilla to be a better company. Where's the support?
And for us power-users, please implement the hiding of all the bars (tab bar, location bar etc), so we can save some screen real estate on our tiny laptop screens, when using the browser with other windows side-by-side.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding something very important: a browser is nothing without content to view in it.
In order to achieve Google independence, Mozilla can't just focus on Firefox. They need an ecosystem of web apps that are Firefox-first, or at least not Firefox-second the way Google's YouTube and Search are. They can build it themselves, or they can get other people to do it, just as long as it gets done.
Nobody seems interested in doing it for them. Most web pages either work better in Chrome, or they work about equally well in both browsers. The obvious allies that I can think of who might want to help elevate Firefox are Google's competitors, like NetFlix, Vimeo, various third-party ad companies, and, back when Google+ was still a thing, Facebook, but there are ideological reasons why being too overtly friendly with most of these companies can't happen.
Ideologically, Firefox would want to ally with hobbyist groups, but they're small and fragmented: if there was a widespread movement to push Firefox at the exclusion of Chrome, many hobbyists would be happy to participate, because fuck Google, but nobody wants to go on this stag hunt[1] alone, and nobody has enough influence to organize such a thing except maybe Mozilla themselves (if enough websites start blocking Chrome at Mozilla's request, YouTube will retaliate by blocking Firefox, and I'm pretty sure Google's war chest is big enough that they'd be the ones who live through this metaphorical nuclear war). So most hobbyist websites work about equally well in both browsers, which overall means that the set of websites that work well in Chrome is a superset of the ones that work well in Firefox.
Thus, Mozilla is stuck in a position where Google is vertically monopolizing them into irrelevance. Their repeated failure to launch their own products has proven that they don't have the power to go their own way, and working on their browser engine just means you have an excellent web browser engine, but that Chrome has them beat in the category of "stuff to actually do with it," which is much more important.
This is, of course, the reason why Google desperately needs to be broken up.
There was a time when Mozilla really did fight big tech. I loved working there. Internally the phrase "we fight for the user" was used, and it felt true.
Now they're just using that same war-cry as marketing to get you to sign up and fill out surveys for their market research. They're doing exactly what they're mad big tech is doing (collecting data), but with a dose of moral superiority.
It's sad that they've taken a message that resonates and just haphazardly use it for messaging anything they're building.
I installed firefox focus which is a privacy first mobile browser that advertises that it cuts out phoning home. I was irate when I dug into the settings and found out that "Studies" is on by default. Research data collection should always be opt-in rather than opt-out, especially for privacy focused software.
I see the current things they're running through this, and it's university studies on various topics that could use browsing data. So I see value in having a simpler route for researchers to get that, and one that respects users' choice in what to participate in and so on... but the "fight Big Tech" gloss is a turn-off.
I suppose when you know your audience is dwindling down closer and closer to just "people who are ideologically opposed to Chrome" this is the messaging you go with.
What I couldn't find was: does Mozilla get paid by the researchers for this data? There's language around users "donating" their data, and a sort of caveat-ed pledge not to "sell your data" but what the actualy structure of this program is was unclear to me. Their site isn't really clear about whether this falls under the auspices of the "corporation" or "foundation" side of Mozilla's operations.
I also wonder for research purposes, the extreme opt-in nature of this program, you need to be using Firefox, you need to opt-in to Rally, and opt-in to the specific study. You have so much selection bias there that the data feels like it won't be terribly useful for extrapolating valid patterns about, say, COVID-19 information/misinformation (as one of the studies is examining).
It has nothing to do specifically with Firefox, but is all about the incentives. If someone puts a non-trivial amount of effort into developing a product, they could be motivated by:
1. Trying to make money off selling it to end users.
2. Trying to make money by selling the end users' attention to advertisers.
3. Vanity, if it's a side/hobby project.
4. Influence the audience (pushing things aligned with their values into the audience's attention span).
5. Being a loss leader of a sort. E.g., trying to grab a market share in expectations to make money later, or sell growth figures to investors.
So, specifically to web browsers:
* Chrome, the de-facto standard, is clearly sustained by option #2.
* Because Chrome is free-to-use, option #1 is not viable for any competition.
* Because web browsers are complex and require a lot of upkeep, #3 is also mostly out of the picture.
So, if Mozilla wants to stay alive, they have no other choice than to treat their end users as the merchandise. And, to differentiate themselves from Google, they will keep making bullshit claims that will have nothing to do with reality. Even worse, as long as the current approach to antitrust doesn't change, there won't be any long-term alternatives to this model.
All of this could be swiftly solved by deeming indirectly subsidized "free" products anti-competitive (e.g. cash flow coming from outside the direct users), and not allowing mergers above something like a 20% market share, but I can't see this happen anytime soon.
What's wrong with filling out surveys? Data collection is an important way for product developers to improve their products. This can either be done without user consent through shady data collection practices or explicitly with the user's consent as is the case with surveys.
You are free not to fill out the surveys but saying that any form of data collection is akin to "doing what big tech is doing" is an extremist position and undermines companies which are respecting users' privacy and requesting rather than forcibly extracting data about user behaviour.
> Each study has a clear focus, unique data needs, and specific goals. Before you enroll, we’ll tell you exactly who we’re working with, which data is being collected, where it’s going, and how it’s being used.
Ironically, the page loads JS from https://cdn-3.convertexperiments.com (seems to belong to convert.com) and Twitter, without disclosing the fact that Mozilla is sharing your browser data with those two entities.
I'm a daily Firefox user myself, but I can't help to feel that each political effort they try to execute either backfires, or draws resources from what really has to be done: developing and maintaining a excellent user agent for the open web.
>"Ironically, the page loads JS from https://cdn-3.convertexperiments.com (seems to belong to convert.com) and Twitter, without disclosing the fact that Mozilla is sharing your browser data with those two entities."
This is why (for the narrow demographic that bothers to care) uMatrix is such an awesome tool. This page is completely functional without loading either of those domains' shovelware -- and it saves laptop battery life too. This is true for most pages.
Ironic indeed that it's mozilla.org illustrating this point.
Block everything by default! Block all the things!
After reading Mitchell Baker's "deplatforming isn't enough" rant pushed at me by Firefox, I expect nothing good out of Mozilla under the current leasership, sorry.
This really is the kind of thing that could uncover some very shady practices by Facebook and others, but I expect it to produce the same kind of bullshit as the recent "Facebook whistleblower" who worried that facebook is not abusing its power sufficiently to censor and unperson people.
Brave is the new Mozilla. Mozilla is a husk. Brave launched a new search engine (which works great. try it!), have built-in Tor support, Wayback Machine support, experiment with new revenue models and unlike Mitchell "we need more than deplatforming" Baker, Eich actually seems to have the visceral inclination for the things that Mozilla claims to stand for.
I don't particularly care for the remnant of Mozilla either, but it's not at all clear to me that Brave is a better option. It seems very much like they're trying to position themselves as a kinder, gentler flavor of adtech. I don't want that; I hate that the modern web has turned into an adtech ouroboros, and I want a browser whose mission is to gut the whole thing, not a browser with a new recipe for a more delicious tail.
Curious, why would someone use brave over Chromium?
Brave as I understand it is just the Chromium browser at its core. (Similar to how all browsers on iOS are just safari wrapped in a different application layer)
>"Big tech has built its success by exploiting your data. When you join Mozilla Rally studies, your data helps us uncover Facebook's tracking network, understand search engine choice, and help local news find sustainability."
Understand search engine choice? That's an absurd thing to say; 90% of their revenue comes from default-search-engine contracts...
I've lost faith in Mozilla over the last decade and this initiative is a great example. The web is in a rough state but doing research on user data isn't going to solve anything. The way it gets fixed is new technologies that allow new apps and social networks that replace the old ones. This is what Mozilla should working on.
It's sad but not unsurprising to see HN nitpicking this page. Normal website tracking and what companies like facebook, google, or amazon can do aren't comparable. The three partner organizations listed are extremely trustworthy and I know the Markup in particular has done very similar studies in the past, been excellent about informed consent and user data, and uncovered unique data on how social networks display content by doing so.
From "How we use your data":
>> ...put the power to create a positive change in the right hands.
No way would I touch something like this with your pole. This is langauge that paves a clear path for abuse. This isn't even modern day virtue signaling, it's been around for ages.
I can't manage to see Mozilla as standing on integrous ground, with their constant spewing of 'woke' bs and muddy objectives/chasing of butterflies.
Create something new to love, rather than fighting against what you hate.
I understand there seems to be a lot of pent-up frustration in these comments, some of it related to this specific initiative and some not.
I'd like to highlight a few reasons why this could be exciting and, indeed "pro-user".
* The core value proposition in my view, though not spelled out on the linked page (I think because it's targeting a broader-than-HN audience), is that data collection can produce answers to empirical questions about "Big Tech" that would otherwise likely never be answered by anyone except in-house Big Tech data analysts. E.g., empirical questions about the impacts of search engine design choices, how newsfeeds influence behavior, etc. Of course, these studies will face issues with selection bias, but that's not insurmountable, and probably better than nothing. For instance, publicly shared data about Pixel tracking, even from a biased sample, is better than having no data on that topic, IMO!
* The collaboration with academics and journalists is important because it means the results of each study will be shared. It's in the incentive systems of both groups to publish results. Best case, individual users, people who build browser extensions, etc. can use findings about search engines and newsfeeds to change their behavior or build new tools. Policy discussions would also benefit from some quantitative grounding.
* The alternative ways to answer these questions: academics and journalists run scrapers, data-collection browser extensions, etc. on their own. Harder to do, especially post-Cambridge Analytica and more recently, NYU's ad observatory getting shut down (https://cyber.nyu.edu/2021/08/21/facebook-disables-ad-observ...). Or, the state forces tech co.'s to publish answers. Or, we just never know!
* A weaker point: This project is trying to set new standards about data management, e.g. providing a true "one click to opt out" option. I see this as an experiment, that other projects can follow if it works. This is a bit more of a stretch than the previous two points.
My bias: I'm an academic who wants to see the results of the various studies being conducted, so I'm very hopeful!
To me, this seem like a fine initiative, all things considered.
There's a bit of a false dichotomy in some comments, where Mozilla Rally is preventing or hampering Mozilla from improving Firefox. They can and should do both at the same time, especially if both are positive things.
It doesn't mean all their initiatives are equally good, and that we shouldn't still criticize the bad ones. But this seems benign at worst, and could possibly do some good. it's completely opt in, transparent, and with very strong user control over the data.
Instead of chastising them for all their other shortcomings yet again, I prefer to be happy that this might benefit ethical research.
Rust seems to be the only positive thing out of Mozilla these days. I don't know how much of that was a coincidence.
They've become some sort of an ethics firm that they front with their dying browser. A little like AOL being reduced to a web portal long after their Netscape days.
It's unfortunate because they really can't afford to compete with Google and continue with Servo or anything innovative.
They lost the race in browser performance and usershare. The only way I could imagine Firefox regaining the latter would be a political event of the popularity and significance of Net Neutrality "scaring straight" non-technical users into FOSS.
I'm kind of surprised they got two people to let them stick their faces with quotes that are so irrelevant to the pages content, other than being some kind of endorsement.
> “Mozilla Rally has the potential to be the Hubble Space Telescope of the Internet.”
> David Lazer, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University
and
> “Mozilla Rally is a revelatory tool that seeks to fix the information imbalance created by tech platforms at the public’s expense.”
> Julia Angwin, Editor-in-Chief and Founder of The Markup
This is nonsense. The Firefox user base is narrow, self-selecting, and small. They won't be able to "uncover Facebook's tracking network, understand search engine choice, and help local news find sustainability" with that limited instrument. How many Firefox users actually use Facebook? Maybe 100 total?
I think this is one of the main reasons why Firefox keeps decreasing in popularity. They focus so much on activism instead of building a great browser. The best activism they could do is to improve Firefox so the Chrome market share decreases. After using Firefox for many years, I recently switched to Brave which has everything I wish in a browser(minus the Crypto stuff which you can disable).
[+] [-] yosamino|4 years ago|reply
We want you to make a browser that is so good, that it can function independenty of Google and Chrome financially and technologically. This is not an end in itself. Google is just not a very trustworthy steward of the marketshare that they have on the browser market.
You are in a unique position to make this possible. Please double down on it instead of throwing away your hundreds of millions of monies that you have on unfocused, irrelevant bullshit that noone will remember in two years.
You made a whole browser engine that actually improved on current engines in Rust and then you basically threw it away. What on earth was that about ?
Mozilla we want you to make Firefox without any tracking, and without and advertizing shit in it , and we want it fast and secure, and we love your extensions. Some of us here are even willing to pay you subscription fees to support the browser! But keep in mind that you have millions of dollars already.
We loved you all the way from when your product was still called phoenix, Mozilla suite even, and everyone was so excited to have this excellent browser. We pooled money to take out full page ads in a paper newspaper for Firefox. Because we believed in your product so much. I still have the page here. Do you remember ?
Please. Stop with this stupid bullshit.
Focus, Mozilla, Focus!
From the depth of our hearts,
PS: and if you find some time, go fix that bug that makes the active tab so difficult to differentiate if lighting conditions or eyesight aren't perfect.
[+] [-] weaksauce|4 years ago|reply
fwiw you can change the firefox chrome(what they call the browser widgets itself and predates googlechrome) css to highlight the active tab fairly easily if it's important to you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/
[+] [-] bee_rider|4 years ago|reply
Is it possible that this is just a theme issue?
[+] [-] tomrod|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxtbl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|4 years ago|reply
At this point it just seems like Google is keeping Mozilla alive for avoiding anti-trust issues, But all horizontal monopolies are switching to being vertical monopolies anyways as they've learnt there are no laws to stop them and so I don't think Google would have reasons to put up this facade for much longer either.
Yet I still use Firefox as main browser, But have started to switch mission critical websites to Brave. Mainly because I don't want to use 3rd party extensions(Found a recommended Firefox add-on involved in malicious activity[1]) and that websites have started to treat Chrome as the only browser(We're back to IE 6 times again).
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210924045611/https://github.co...
[+] [-] staticelf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twblalock|4 years ago|reply
At this point the average consumer is used to free stuff, and a subscription model would ensure that Firefox is only used by a niche audience.
[+] [-] torstenvl|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/torstenvl/userChrome.css
[+] [-] drstrangelok|4 years ago|reply
Every time Mozilla attempts to innovate on the web they're publicly berated for not refocusing the company on the cries of enthusiast developer crowd, as if continued criticism will eventually compel Mozilla to be a better company. Where's the support?
[+] [-] sharps1|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
[+] [-] dopkew|4 years ago|reply
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447
[+] [-] notriddle|4 years ago|reply
In order to achieve Google independence, Mozilla can't just focus on Firefox. They need an ecosystem of web apps that are Firefox-first, or at least not Firefox-second the way Google's YouTube and Search are. They can build it themselves, or they can get other people to do it, just as long as it gets done.
Nobody seems interested in doing it for them. Most web pages either work better in Chrome, or they work about equally well in both browsers. The obvious allies that I can think of who might want to help elevate Firefox are Google's competitors, like NetFlix, Vimeo, various third-party ad companies, and, back when Google+ was still a thing, Facebook, but there are ideological reasons why being too overtly friendly with most of these companies can't happen.
Ideologically, Firefox would want to ally with hobbyist groups, but they're small and fragmented: if there was a widespread movement to push Firefox at the exclusion of Chrome, many hobbyists would be happy to participate, because fuck Google, but nobody wants to go on this stag hunt[1] alone, and nobody has enough influence to organize such a thing except maybe Mozilla themselves (if enough websites start blocking Chrome at Mozilla's request, YouTube will retaliate by blocking Firefox, and I'm pretty sure Google's war chest is big enough that they'd be the ones who live through this metaphorical nuclear war). So most hobbyist websites work about equally well in both browsers, which overall means that the set of websites that work well in Chrome is a superset of the ones that work well in Firefox.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt
Thus, Mozilla is stuck in a position where Google is vertically monopolizing them into irrelevance. Their repeated failure to launch their own products has proven that they don't have the power to go their own way, and working on their browser engine just means you have an excellent web browser engine, but that Chrome has them beat in the category of "stuff to actually do with it," which is much more important.
This is, of course, the reason why Google desperately needs to be broken up.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] maxwelljoslyn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkoberger|4 years ago|reply
Now they're just using that same war-cry as marketing to get you to sign up and fill out surveys for their market research. They're doing exactly what they're mad big tech is doing (collecting data), but with a dose of moral superiority.
It's sad that they've taken a message that resonates and just haphazardly use it for messaging anything they're building.
[+] [-] colordrops|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerocrates|4 years ago|reply
I suppose when you know your audience is dwindling down closer and closer to just "people who are ideologically opposed to Chrome" this is the messaging you go with.
What I couldn't find was: does Mozilla get paid by the researchers for this data? There's language around users "donating" their data, and a sort of caveat-ed pledge not to "sell your data" but what the actualy structure of this program is was unclear to me. Their site isn't really clear about whether this falls under the auspices of the "corporation" or "foundation" side of Mozilla's operations.
I also wonder for research purposes, the extreme opt-in nature of this program, you need to be using Firefox, you need to opt-in to Rally, and opt-in to the specific study. You have so much selection bias there that the data feels like it won't be terribly useful for extrapolating valid patterns about, say, COVID-19 information/misinformation (as one of the studies is examining).
[+] [-] john_moscow|4 years ago|reply
1. Trying to make money off selling it to end users.
2. Trying to make money by selling the end users' attention to advertisers.
3. Vanity, if it's a side/hobby project.
4. Influence the audience (pushing things aligned with their values into the audience's attention span).
5. Being a loss leader of a sort. E.g., trying to grab a market share in expectations to make money later, or sell growth figures to investors.
So, specifically to web browsers:
* Chrome, the de-facto standard, is clearly sustained by option #2.
* Because Chrome is free-to-use, option #1 is not viable for any competition.
* Because web browsers are complex and require a lot of upkeep, #3 is also mostly out of the picture.
So, if Mozilla wants to stay alive, they have no other choice than to treat their end users as the merchandise. And, to differentiate themselves from Google, they will keep making bullshit claims that will have nothing to do with reality. Even worse, as long as the current approach to antitrust doesn't change, there won't be any long-term alternatives to this model.
All of this could be swiftly solved by deeming indirectly subsidized "free" products anti-competitive (e.g. cash flow coming from outside the direct users), and not allowing mergers above something like a 20% market share, but I can't see this happen anytime soon.
[+] [-] jdoliner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slowmovintarget|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eberkund|4 years ago|reply
You are free not to fill out the surveys but saying that any form of data collection is akin to "doing what big tech is doing" is an extremist position and undermines companies which are respecting users' privacy and requesting rather than forcibly extracting data about user behaviour.
[+] [-] capableweb|4 years ago|reply
Ironically, the page loads JS from https://cdn-3.convertexperiments.com (seems to belong to convert.com) and Twitter, without disclosing the fact that Mozilla is sharing your browser data with those two entities.
I'm a daily Firefox user myself, but I can't help to feel that each political effort they try to execute either backfires, or draws resources from what really has to be done: developing and maintaining a excellent user agent for the open web.
[+] [-] perihelions|4 years ago|reply
This is why (for the narrow demographic that bothers to care) uMatrix is such an awesome tool. This page is completely functional without loading either of those domains' shovelware -- and it saves laptop battery life too. This is true for most pages.
Ironic indeed that it's mozilla.org illustrating this point.
Block everything by default! Block all the things!
[+] [-] andrewguenther|4 years ago|reply
Mozilla's positioning as a privacy advocate while consistently pushing projects that are antithetical to privacy is just nauseating.
[+] [-] macilacilove|4 years ago|reply
This really is the kind of thing that could uncover some very shady practices by Facebook and others, but I expect it to produce the same kind of bullshit as the recent "Facebook whistleblower" who worried that facebook is not abusing its power sufficiently to censor and unperson people.
[+] [-] guidovranken|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|4 years ago|reply
Brave as I understand it is just the Chromium browser at its core. (Similar to how all browsers on iOS are just safari wrapped in a different application layer)
https://www.chromium.org/Home
[+] [-] nextaccountic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perihelions|4 years ago|reply
Understand search engine choice? That's an absurd thing to say; 90% of their revenue comes from default-search-engine contracts...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...
>"The majority of Mozilla's income (over 90 percent) is generated from relationships with search engines and Google has always been top of the list."
[+] [-] chrisseaton|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thesausageking|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beefee|4 years ago|reply
If they want to actually break with big tech, they can retract and apologize for this pro-censorship advocacy piece: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
[+] [-] agentdrtran|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artificialLimbs|4 years ago|reply
No way would I touch something like this with your pole. This is langauge that paves a clear path for abuse. This isn't even modern day virtue signaling, it's been around for ages.
I can't manage to see Mozilla as standing on integrous ground, with their constant spewing of 'woke' bs and muddy objectives/chasing of butterflies.
Create something new to love, rather than fighting against what you hate.
[+] [-] nickvincent|4 years ago|reply
I'd like to highlight a few reasons why this could be exciting and, indeed "pro-user".
* The core value proposition in my view, though not spelled out on the linked page (I think because it's targeting a broader-than-HN audience), is that data collection can produce answers to empirical questions about "Big Tech" that would otherwise likely never be answered by anyone except in-house Big Tech data analysts. E.g., empirical questions about the impacts of search engine design choices, how newsfeeds influence behavior, etc. Of course, these studies will face issues with selection bias, but that's not insurmountable, and probably better than nothing. For instance, publicly shared data about Pixel tracking, even from a biased sample, is better than having no data on that topic, IMO!
* The collaboration with academics and journalists is important because it means the results of each study will be shared. It's in the incentive systems of both groups to publish results. Best case, individual users, people who build browser extensions, etc. can use findings about search engines and newsfeeds to change their behavior or build new tools. Policy discussions would also benefit from some quantitative grounding.
* The alternative ways to answer these questions: academics and journalists run scrapers, data-collection browser extensions, etc. on their own. Harder to do, especially post-Cambridge Analytica and more recently, NYU's ad observatory getting shut down (https://cyber.nyu.edu/2021/08/21/facebook-disables-ad-observ...). Or, the state forces tech co.'s to publish answers. Or, we just never know!
* A weaker point: This project is trying to set new standards about data management, e.g. providing a true "one click to opt out" option. I see this as an experiment, that other projects can follow if it works. This is a bit more of a stretch than the previous two points.
My bias: I'm an academic who wants to see the results of the various studies being conducted, so I'm very hopeful!
[+] [-] cryptoboy2283|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodusername|4 years ago|reply
There's a bit of a false dichotomy in some comments, where Mozilla Rally is preventing or hampering Mozilla from improving Firefox. They can and should do both at the same time, especially if both are positive things.
It doesn't mean all their initiatives are equally good, and that we shouldn't still criticize the bad ones. But this seems benign at worst, and could possibly do some good. it's completely opt in, transparent, and with very strong user control over the data.
Instead of chastising them for all their other shortcomings yet again, I prefer to be happy that this might benefit ethical research.
[+] [-] pipeline_peak|4 years ago|reply
They've become some sort of an ethics firm that they front with their dying browser. A little like AOL being reduced to a web portal long after their Netscape days.
It's unfortunate because they really can't afford to compete with Google and continue with Servo or anything innovative.
They lost the race in browser performance and usershare. The only way I could imagine Firefox regaining the latter would be a political event of the popularity and significance of Net Neutrality "scaring straight" non-technical users into FOSS.
[+] [-] kodah|4 years ago|reply
> “Mozilla Rally has the potential to be the Hubble Space Telescope of the Internet.”
> David Lazer, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University
and
> “Mozilla Rally is a revelatory tool that seeks to fix the information imbalance created by tech platforms at the public’s expense.”
> Julia Angwin, Editor-in-Chief and Founder of The Markup
[+] [-] phendrenad2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catears|4 years ago|reply
For example tracking facebooks tracking pixels (https://rally.mozilla.org/current-studies/facebook-pixel-hun...).
I can't determine if this is "fighting big tech with their own weapon" or "adding more tracking to the problem of too much tracking".
[+] [-] luhego|4 years ago|reply