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The Mozilla Megathread - All News & Discussion Relating to the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Corporation, Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, and Related Projects Go Here
I don't know about that, I only use RSS for info about software updates. You can always take few minutes to install it for a sec, load up an RSS feed and see how it behaves. Or maybe there's a plugin somewhere that does that, iunno.
I completely forgot I even started this thread in the first place, and I feel ashamed for not making a better effort into maintaining it. Enough waffling, updates in the interim I haven't posted.
21DEC2023 | Source: dist://ed
TITLE: CAPTCHA successor Privacy Pass has no easy answers for online abuse
Author: Martin Thompson Original | Archive
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21DEC23 | Source: dist://ed
TITLE: Your Rich BFF, Vivian Tu, On Creating Her Own Personal Finance Community
Author: Kristina Bravo Original | Archive
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21DEC23 | Source: dist://ed
TITLE: AI: 2023’s Most Celebrated Influencer
Author: Damiano Original | Archive
OP's note: this article has an attached PDF... which begs the question of why the blog post doesn't just have everything on the fucking PDF. God fucking damn it, Mozilla... I feel myself losing brain cells because of you. PDF included in post for your reference.
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18DEC23 | Source: Thunderbird Blog (finally, some good fucking news)
TITLE: When Will Thunderbird For Android Be Released?
Author: cketti Original | Archive
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18DEC23 | Source: Thunderbird Blog
TITLE: Thunderbird for Android / K-9 Mail: November/December 2023 Progress Report
Author: cketti Original | Archive
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14DEC23 | Source: dist://ed
TITLE: These tech gifts will make you feel safer (and better) about gifting this holiday season
Author: Uncredited Original | Archive
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14DEC23 | Source: dist://ed
TITLE: New extensions you’ll love now available on Firefox for Android
Author: Jenifer Boscacci Original | Archive
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12DEC23 | Source: dist://ed
TITLE: Introducing Solo, an AI website builder for solopreneurs (OP's note: this neologism made me instinctively shudder when I first read it... and it makes me shudder every time I have to look at it while drafting this post)
Author: Raj Singh (OP's note: the duality of pajeets - you're either a shill for IT shovelware or you're uploading HTML, CSS, and JavaScript tutorials on YouTube for shits and giggles, signed a fellow Desi man). Original | Archive
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07DEC23 | Source: dist://ed
TITLE: Explore The Future of AI With Mozilla’s Innovation Week
Author: Rebecca Smith Original | Archive
OP's note: the article itself says that this was published on 15DEC, but my RSS feed says 07DEC. It was also not archived previously.
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06DEC23 | Source: dist://ed
TITLE: Mozilla VPN Update: New privacy features, plus independent security audit results
Author: Mozilla Original | Archive
OP's note: Mozilla VPN is quite literally a re-skin of Mullvad, a far superior VPN. Don't buy the re-brand, when the original product is 100% identical in function but is also stewarded by a far less exceptional company with a much better track record. This is coming from a diehard Mozilla Firefox user, FYI.
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Anything older than this, I can't post due to character limits.
I use Betterbird+LibreWolf now. I'm sure stock Mozilla Firefox + UserJS is fine enough for some, but not having those steps just to use a web browser is a priceless benefit to me.
I completely forgot I even started this thread in the first place, and I feel ashamed for not making a better effort into maintaining it. Enough waffling, updates in the interim I haven't posted.
The Mozilla blog (ie Firefox, Pocket, etc) is fucking abject rubbish and makes my brain rot. Very few posts are even related to Firefox. It’s basically marketing drivel, content drip feeding, and a scant remainder of worthwhile information about Firefox.
Paradoxically, the Thunderbird blog is absolutely wonderful and full of meaningful updates about the project. Gives me Clem from Linux Mint vibes, so that’s nice.
I remember being content with Firefox until with each update, it kept removing all my extensions just because. I assume cause I don't have a mozilla account to preserve them.
I switched between multiple browsers (brave, chromium, etc.) and only settled with Librewolf. Not as much as a /g/ meme as I had feared. I referred to this website to settle on which program. I would have stayed with chromium if it weren't for its obnoxiously demanding ram usage, but I won't lie and say I don't have a soft spot for firefox-like interfaces.
That being said, I look forward to reading this thread.
Haven't even gone past the first page and I'm already seeing the same 2 privacysperg sites I've seen a shitload of times before. What a great start! Linuxtards and privacyspergs literally can't live without citing these 2 gay sites everyday holy cow .
My post is about Eich resigning from Mozilla, way before the Brave days, after people found out he was supporting groups against gay-marriage View attachment 5469708
FYI Vivaldi had an e-mail, calendar and RSS suite akin to Thunderbird integrated in the browser since June of last year. I still use Thunderbird, well, Betterbird for mail though. And recently also for RSS feeds since the way it's implemented in Vivaldi is a bit fucky where it doesn't have a clear distinction between mail and RSS feeds. But I might go back to the one in Vivaldi.
Heard of Vivaldi a plenty lot, but never tried it because what's the point it's literally Chromium like 95% of browsers nowadays. Is it any good? The 3 features you mentioned I'm not sure I'd ever use them, the Calendar is esp redundant since no matter if it's windows, mac or linux there's always a prebuilt calendar baked into the system.
Thunderbird has been treated by Mozilla as a unloved bastard child for years, however there isn't really any better option when it comes to e-mail clients nowadays. Claws Mail? Sylpheed? Seamonkey? Vivaldi? Outlook? About every other option is more shit, while Thunderbird remains to be the least shit of them all.
SeaMonkey user here, its "Mail & Newsgroups client" is literally just older Thunderbird with a different coat of paint on it (and with necessary security updates).
All in all, I'd say SeaMonkey is even more of a bastard child - at least Thunderbird has more than 3 people developing it.
Still waiting for that WebExtensions support, it may just come out in a decade or so. Because maintaining old XUL add-ons all by myself doesn't quite fit my definition of having a good time. Oh well, at least I don't have to do it very often.
Haven't even gone past the first page and I'm already seeing the same 2 privacysperg sites I've seen a shitload of times before. What a great start! Linuxtards and privacyspergs literally can't live without citing these 2 gay sites everyday holy cow .
I've used a lot of browsers over the years. I started using the big-I Internet in late 2001. My first foray into the (to me) brand new world of both computers and the world wide web started on a 1999-vintage Dell running Win98, with Netscape 4.x and IE 5.5. This was back when you had to have both browsers bexause some sites used Netscape's proprietary HTML implementation and others used Microsoft's own proprietary HTML implementation. For a rather young Gargamel the Internet was a quite an amazing experience with near limitless potential. Limitless potential and infinite ActiveX security warning dialogs to which the answer was, of course, always "Yes".
Since then and largely through the efforts of Mozilla, things got a lot better before slowly degrading into the shitfest we have today. There are no truly good browsers. Every single one is flawed. Every single one that isn't Chrome or Firefox is a clone of Chrome or Firefox. Most even look and behave the same as Chrome and Firefox. Chrome looks and acts like an adware crippled and round rectangle-infused Firefox. Firefox looks and acts like a slightly less shitty version of Chrome without the faggot-inspired round rectangles and also without Google's artificially crippled extension facilities.
I really hate Chrome. Google makes it really easy for me to hate Chrome. I really want to like Firefox. Mozilla makes it really hard for me to like Firefox. I really hate how Google has been trying to take over the internet with their proprietary shit and things like the Web Integrity API that they're definitely going to weasel into Chrome at some point (and it's already made it into Android's built-in web renderer). It is really unfortunate that Mozilla the only real competition in this space because honestly, I don't think they're even fit to properly care for alpacas, much less topple the market dominator like they did all those years ago. Maybe, just maybe Google's war on adblockers will be their undoing, Maybe this will be the thing that finally pushes the niggercattle masses to abandon Chrome for Firefox and it's fully intact Manifest v2.
I started using Firefox right after version 2 landed. It was fast, it had a good feature set out of the box, it could be extended with add-ons, and it had a great UI. It was especailly good compared to what I used before, which was IE6, some newer shittier version Netscape, and I think I had also tried the Mozilla suite by that point as well. The only real problem I ever had with Firefox 2 was the memory leaks that showed up when I had dozens of tabs open for days on end. During this time I also played around with Opera, one of the versions that used Presto. It was pretty cool actually, but I ended up sticking with Firefox. I guess the customization capability just didn't appeal to me at the time.
I remember Firefox 3.x was still pretty good. Version 4 onward I didn't pay much attention because Chrome seemed to work better for me at the time. I know Mozilla did some bonehead things like completely redesign the UI, and then some time later completely redesign the UI again. Largely I used Chrome and didn't pay attention to the other browsers until the summer of 2018 when Google made the boneheaded move of completely redesigning the UI of Chrome. It was and still to this day is an absolute dogshit design, arguably worse than Mozilla's stupid UIs. It bugged me so much I decided to look into the other browsers, which by this time were pretty much all clones of Chrome or Firefox.
The one I liked the best was Vivaldi. It had a really clean, square corner, boxy kind of look and it looked really nice with a dark theme. By this time I had really grown to appreciate customizability, which is something Vivialdi excelled at. Unfortunately it was also a pretty slow browser, especially on my hardware. Web pages loaded pretty fast, but the UI was dogshit slow and laggy. The browsing history page looked really slick but took a couple minutes to load. My understanding is that the UI is written in Javascript and the interpreter is single threaded, but I could be wrong on that. I did notice that having many Javascript heavy pages open at the same time made the whole browser slow to a crawl regardless of whatever else you were doing. Kinda made it hard to do eBay reasarch.
I also tried Pale Moon during this time. Pale Moon is basically Firefox 2/3 with a much more modern Gecko rendering engine. Actually a fork of Gecko called Goanna. My problem with Pale Moon is that it really struggled with things like YouTube, and it's single process design which worked great in 2004 in Firefox 2, wasn't really cutting it in 2018. Vivaldi despite its own performance issues worked better for me and my usage habits.
Some time during 2020 or 2021 I started using Firefox just for YouTube, as Vivaldi struggled really badly with streaming video on Linux. At some point during, I think early 2023, I just moved everything over to Firefox because having two browsers open all the time was eating too much of my limited RAM. I hate the Firefox UI and I really hate that you basically can't change anything about how the browser behaves. It really feels like an Apple Samsung product.
I went and tried out almost every browser in current development. Chrome, the latest Vivaldi, various Firefox clones, "Opera", the latest Pale Moon, the latest SeaMonkey, etc.
SeaMonkey was easily the fastest, both in terms of UI responsiveness and page load times. Even looked pretty decent with a theme. It being a fork of the original Mozilla browser, itself a fork of Netscape, it's iconic UI was instantly recognisable to me, and still a very solid design even today. It's a real shame that SeaMonkey's rendering engine is so broken though. Literally >50% of all the sites I tried either didn't load or were unusably broken.
That said, deep down what I want in a browser is modern Gecko and multi process architecture wrapped in a classic Firefox 2 UI with customizable keyboard commands, or at least the non-retard ones that Firefox 2 had. Though failing that I'd probably be happy with a non-broken SeaMonkey.
The Mozilla blog (ie Firefox, Pocket, etc) is fucking abject rubbish and makes my brain rot. Very few posts are even related to Firefox. It’s basically marketing drivel, content drip feeding, and a scant remainder of worthwhile information about Firefox.
Anybody tried Betterbird? Its supposed to be a better Thunderbird fork.
I managed to recompile it for my Linux system, I have to say it is shit loads more responsive, it works as a drop in replacement for thunderbird, no migration necessary,
...it should be questioned why so much money — possibly millions of dollars donated by individuals who thought they were supporting a web browser — is being funneled into highly political organizations that seem to have no involvement with the World Wide Web, Web Browsers, or any related standards.
How does a mostly-non-existent company, with no online presence at all (no website, social media, reviews, etc.), get paid $30,000 in “discretionary” money from Mozilla?
During 2021, Mozilla paid $387 Thousand dollars to someone called “MCKENSIE MACK GROUP.” From their LinkedIn page, Mckensie Mack Group describes itself thusly: “Black-led and nonbinary-led, MMG is a global social justice organization”.
This is a way for the jews to track you across different website and fix a big problem (from their perspective) where they don't know if watching their ads has any effect on you. This API makes it so that they will be able to tell, directly, that you saw an ad for product X, then bought that product.
Mozilla is working with Meta and other actors on defining an in-browser attribution API. The purpose of this API is to provide a privacy-first design for advertising companies to be able to measure how advertising drives conversions. That is, answering the question of whether advertising effectively achieves its goals, such as increased sales.
A "privacy-first" API that invades your privacy to let them track you more effectively
Users largely benefit indirectly from the use of this API. That’s a hard fact, but an important one.
Any benefit people derive from this feature is indirect. The sites they visit are often supported by advertising. Making advertising better makes it possible for more sites to function using the support that advertising provides.
So there are no benefits to you, and they know it, but they're still going to do it. Note that they're building it directly into the browser, wasting resources that could have went into making Firefox better.
The first point here is hard to measure objectively, but we have at least one example to draw on. Meta famously reported USD10 billion of losses as a result of Apple’s Ad Tracking Transparency feature, which resulted in them being unable to perform attribution for a sizable portion of iPhone users.
Oh no, when you're forced to ask the dumb goyim cattle for permission, turns out they don't want to be tracked. That is why this feature is opt-out, and enabled by default, so that most people won't even know it's there and will be tracked:
This feature will be enabled by default with an option to disable it.
Having this enabled for more people ensures that there are more people contributing to aggregates, which in turn improves utility. Having this on by default both demands stronger privacy protections — primarily smaller epsilon values and more noise — but it also enables those stronger protections, because there are more people participating. In effect, people are hiding in a larger crowd.
An opt-in approach might enable weaker privacy protections, but would not necessarily provide better data in exchange. Having more data means both better measurement accuracy and an ability to add more noise on a per-person basis, meaning better privacy.
This looks like a good start, but like the explainer acknowledges it is critical that navigator.privateAttribution.measureConversion be protected against Sybil attacks because right now it isn't. There needs to be some way for the conversions to be signed by the target site and then the DAP service verifies the signature. Otherwise people will just spam fake conversions making the data useless since due to anonymity there is no way for the target site to get any signal out of the histogram.
Now to address the points made in the previous post since @Coca Cola Official does not actually understand what it does.
This is a way for the jews to track you across different website and fix a big problem (from their perspective) where they don't know if watching their ads has any effect on you. This API makes it so that they will be able to tell, directly, that you saw an ad for product X, then bought that product.
This goal is to track ad performance. The entity running ads only gets to see a histogram of about how many conversions each ad achieved along with about how many conversions where the user had not seen an ad. This histogram comes from the DAP service and does not come "directly" from the user. Batching conversions together paired with differential privacy prevents sites from being able to tell what user made a conversion from what ad. There is no goal for tracking individual user behavior.
A "privacy-first" API that invades your privacy to let them track you more effectively
Seen ads are stored locally on device and conversions are not sent directly to the target site, but rather to the DAP service. The DAP service uses cryptography to protect the contents of the report that is uploaded. In order to know the contents of the report all of the DAP server hosters have to collude with each other. This is orders of magnitude more private that the existing ways that attribution is done.
If this can evolve into a comptetive solution for attribution it can improve the privacy of users from it being used over more privacy intrusive alternatives. Not every feature has to benefit every user. Like other platforms the web also has the user -> developer -> content flywheel. Implementing features for developers that allow them to create better websites which can give users more value.
That is why this feature is opt-out, and enabled by default, so that most people won't even know it's there and will be tracked:
Just like many other APIs there is a balance between utility of a feature and the privacy implications. ATT for example was done to protect the device specific advertising uuid. This advertising uuid is bad for privacy since data brokers can tie a bunch of information to this uuid. Now as an app by collecting the advertising uuid a lot of information can be looked about what data is associated with it. Apple also has their own private ad attribution API in Safari called Private Click Measurement which is opt out. This stance by Apple isn't inconsistent, there is much more utility with PCM with a minimal privacy cost.
The explainer explicitly provides justification for making it opt in as it both increases accuracy of the data in the histogram and allows for more noise to be added increasing user privacy.
The way this feature is constructed, to track individual user behavior Mozilla would have to collude with another company that's involved in running this scheme. Otherwise it's mathematically provable, and the source code is available, so you don't have to take their word for it. It boils down to whether you trust them not to collude.
At any rate, not giving them any sort of information is more private then giving them this information in aggregate. Google has tried a similar scheme (FloC) in the recent past. It shows that they're feeling pressure from privacy autists to build it this way.
there isn't (yet) because they would get fleeced by the EU.
>inb4 EU
they don't do it out of their goodness of their heart, but because it's easy money.
The way this feature is constructed, to track individual user behavior Mozilla would have to collude with another company that's involved in running this scheme. Otherwise it's mathematically provable, and the source code is available, so you don't have to take their word for it. It boils down to whether you trust them not to collude.
Ad attribution for the web is not in the late state. Each browser vendor has their own ideas on how this should work and it does not look like we are close to have an agreed upon solution for the web. It would be similarly insane to think that everyone is out to get you. For example when an API like WebGPU was created the goal was to enable more efficient graphics programming on the web. While yes there is a privacy trade off, the goal was not to track people. If somehow there would be a proposal which had 0 privacy loss, with no performance implication people wouldn't consider that as a failure, but in fact a good thing.
Right now the DAP servers are run by Mozilla and ISRG. ISRG is not an advertising company. Even when colluding they only get to learn the index of the ad (the number of the bucket of the histogram to increase). While right now there are 2 entities in the future there could be more, and it requires every one of the entities to conclude. As long as 1 does not collude the individual measurements are private.
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