My problem with this is that ideally, software I deign to run on my computer acts with only my interests in mind. The overarching goal of these changes is not to preserve my privacy, but rather to help advertising companies to learn something about how I interact with their ads. I don't care that Mozilla's particular implementation is not as bad for my privacy as it could be, I only care that their motivation has switched from acting in my interests to acting in the interests of advertising agencies.
Point me to the Firefox donation box or subscription (not the Mozilla donations, which don't fund Firefox, or a subscription to an unrelated service that has overhead of its own) and I'll start a monthly payment today.
(Before you spend too long looking: there isn't one. Mozilla doesn't want me to pay for Firefox, they want to get their funding other ways.)
True but Firefox is mainly written by people who want to earn a living.
Much FOSS is actually written by people who are being paid to do it,
How do you fund the producers of Firefox and the infrastructure needed to get it built and released. Currently the only way is that the sellers of the adverts you read give money to fund Firefox.
Now if you paid for Firefox then they don't need to get money from advertisers.
Similarly to get ad free webpages you need to pay the authors.
> Currently the only way is that the sellers of the adverts you read give money to fund Firefox.
According to Wikipedia[1], most of Mozilla is funded by Google, for setting them as the default search engine, rather than by more conventional advertisers.
On a more personal note, I'd prefer if that money went towards improving their FOSS offering instead of giving the now-former CEO a $7M bonus[2], acquiring advertising businesses [3][4], and littering Firefox with these anti-features.
Yeah I think the biggest problem is that Mozilla was made a corporation, and as such has corporative aspirations and mindset. It would have been much better if it had remained just a foundation.
As I understand it, it is impossible for me to fund specifically Firefox development. I can donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which means a portion will go to, for example, "$30M to build Mozilla.ai", which I emphatically do not want to fund.
Given the firehose of money from Google, how much contributor money from people like me would be needed before Mozilla changes their mind? From my viewpoint, they've built their foundation to expect that firehose, and they don't think user funding is enough - they really want that juicy advertising money instead.
Of the $220M spent in software development in 2023, how much specifically went to Firefox development, vs. the other projects they have?
How much did they pay for Anonym, and how much to integrate Anonym into their systems?
If 5% of my funding goes to 'the producers of Firefox and the infrastructure needed to get it built and released' and 95% goes to crap that make things worse for me, then I'm better off funding something like the Tor browser or variants like the Mullvad browser, where my funding is more directed toward improving my personal privacy.
I'll let them figure out what things to disable so I don't have to watch the release notes with a keen eye every time I update.
It's not just impossible for you to specifically fund Firefox. From what I understand, Mozilla Foundation money does not go to Mozilla Corporation/Firefox at all. You cannot donate to it at all, and your donations only go to those things you don't want to fund.
Your understanding is accurate. Donations to Mozilla cannot legally be used for Firefox development because your donations are tax-deductible due to Mozilla being a charity and Firefox development is done by a for-profit corporation.
Of course Mozilla employees deserve to be paid. Are you really saying the only way to ensure this happens is for them to sell the software or sell ads? (I write GPL-licensed software for a living and manage somehow to get paid. I also write some for free because I find it fun.) Further, Mozilla positions itself as a member of the free software community and as acting in the interests of its users.
They're a charitable nonprofit, and the Mozilla license is one of the more permissive ones; they're fine with you freely sharing their work.
They currently already get 7M/year in donations for no purpose. I imagine they'd get a lot more if that money would fund Firefox, and how many core/paid developers do they really need if they have people that know that they're doing?
Mozilla also doesn't have to operate out of one of the most expensive cities in the world. And no, they don't have to be there to attract competent developers either.
> True but Firefox is mainly written by people who want to earn a living.
Not, originally. Wasn’t Brandon Eich like 17 or something when he rewrote Firefox?
And lots of people put out ad-free web content for free. It’s not that it doesn’t exist, just check out all the blogs and whatnot from HN profiles. Very few people with ads or even making money off their pages.
At least to Beta. Not sure about the release version because it doesn't have about:flags. Probably it's infested with it too, and it's unclear how to disable it.
Aside: figure 1 epitomizes everything that I hate about high-impact results-first journals: everything has to be packed into this one figure because nobody's expected to read anything else. No disrespect to the authors, these journals force you to express your work in this reader-hostile fashion where the most important parts of the paper wind up buried in the supplement.
Formatting wise this is a very poorly made figure. I sincerely hope this is not the current standards for what’s considered to be a good journal nowadays.
Although I love IF, I'd never heard of Scott Adams and his games until now - so thank you! I noticed while reading this that at some point he began targeting a portable game engine, and went hunting for details. Eventually I found some documentation for the game file format (https://github.com/MikeTaylor/scottkit/blob/master/docs/note...), and oh my it's short and sweet. Not as capable as the Z-machine but at 1 page vs (checking) 64 for a practical but still-compact specification (https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/sp...), it's an impressively simple game engine.
I'm a "normal person" who's never created a mastodon account, and just tried this. The original article (a "toot") has a "sign up now" button in the side pane, which I clicked, entered a username and email address and pressed submit. I immediately received an email with a confirmation link, which I clicked. Now I can toot.
Somehow I doubt your level of technology literacy is the same as the average twitter/threads user. (You'd have more tech literacy) Just being on hacker news is a bit of a filter.
Web app and IMAP/POP mail access affected. I've been with them for years and this is the first outage I've experienced. Feeling for the people tripping over themselves on a Friday afternoon to fix this!
Same. I've been with them for a few years now and this is the first serious outage I've experienced. They have been rock solid so far, so I'll forgive them a bit of problems.
