Firefox

It isn't anonymous, it's slightly obscured.

They use ohttp ( a proxy ) run buy a "partner" they control to do the obscuring.

That should be part of people's informed threat modeling. Having a tattle tale in the browser reporting web activity to a third party is a big deal.

"The other option," like there's only one. Like you can't imagine anything else.

Until Mozilla got directly involved, other option was, fuck off.

"Why don't you just move to another country if you don't like it here?"

"I say this as a true patriot."

There's your issue.

If privacy preserving ad features become good enough, we won't have as much privacy inversive ad tracking and a better internet overall. For the long game, this might not be such a bad thing as ads won't go away anytime soon.

Typical. You post a reasonable response and get a bunch of ad-pilled shit takes:

"But will you eat shit if I put a little chocolate on it?"

"If you don't eat shit, you don't deserve to ~~interact with the internet~~ eat."

"Maybe if you pay them a little money, they'll stop trying to serve you shit?"

Advertisers contribute nothing of value to our society and contribute little of value to even the companies they serve. Let them burn. Every action they take to "serve" me ads will be met with an equal counteraction.

We deserve to live a life without being constantly bombarded with messages telling us to buy, buy, buy! This significantly decreases our quality of life and is endemic within our entire society. What the hell are all of you who defend advertisers thinking?

Give them an inch and they will take a mile. It definitely won't be the first time.

If people aren't ready to see an ad or pay to support something. Then maybe they don't deserve that thing.

Please argue how removing all (non-voluntary) advertising from society right now would do anything other than vastly improve society, and keep calling people like me idealists.

Wrong.

Not an idealist, I'm not even mad, just calling out the hypocrisy because Mozilla did this quietly, not telling us at all.

"I'm doing this for your benefit, but I'm not telling you about it", where have we heard that before?

Save me from people "doing things for my benefit".

Just so funny how you blatantly mis-charaterize this, even using pejoratives to label people who dislike Mozilla's arguably adversarial approach.

And frankly, they had a chance to develop a fair balance over 20 years ago, and chose to say "fuck all the users" instead. And the website owners keep repeating this. Ok, fine, I will never stop blocking ads - they chose this battleground, not me.

To take your approach to making arguments: how's the taste of boot today?

As a privacy enthusiast and pragmatist, I see Firefox as providing no additional benefit to users or advertisers. Considering the laughably small market share of Firefox, I'm not sure how it is expected to woo advertisers over either.

Which of these options look more robust: Google Topics, Mozilla PPA, or advertisers doing AB testing on their own by simply using different links for different audiences?

If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don't trust the advertiser, then the additional third party does nothing.

Many of the non-pragmatists also see this as somehow leaking information about you to advertisers though, rather than only working together with advertisers in the first place. But nobody has been able to mention what an advertiser would be able to know about me.

(Yes, yes, there are also people for whom it is only about working together with advertisers - I'm not talking about you, so no need to let us know.)

They don't necessarily need to run everything by me (or us, the community) but this context would've lessened my rage greatly.

Wouldn't be a very useful metric if no one had it on lol

Other big issue is they didn't consult the Open source community. They could've been just straight with us and told us that donations aren't cutting it and then community as a whole could've come up with something to monetize. And even if it ends up being advertising they could've worked with community to implement in such a way that it would respect the try reason why most people switch to Firefox to escape Google's surveillance. And maybe I can stop daydreaming about an utopia

The problem is that they auto-opted all users into it, without giving notice or warning about what it is. They've done this before too with other "experiments". The problem is that Mozilla becoming an ad oriented business is bad for user privacy. No different to Apple's shift from hardware to services. The fox is infiltrating the hen house. Line must go up, and the users always pay the price for that with their data.

Turns out a user base who hates ad tech and surveillance capitalism doesn't want ad-tech or surveillance embedded in their browser. Who would've thought?

What in his statement was incorrect?

As the other comment mentioned, it's about caring about principles in theory vs. real-world effect. He still says that you should use Firefox (with some tweaks - installing uBlock Origin is the most important one, of course) if you want the most privacy-friendly browser, but I'm sure his ruckus will have caused people to just give up and stay with Chrome too.

I don't think that PG's and EFF's standpoints are incompatible.

PG says this is not private.
EFF says this is better than google's solution.
Being better than google's solution does not mean that it's now private.

Lol, sorry, didn't realize that. Thanks for telling me.