I don’t think you have to worry too much about Mozilla running out of money. Right now, they’re spending it like there’s no tomorrow.

CEO salary: Mitchell Baker’s salary jumped by millions of dollars while Firefox browser market share slumped.

Shopping spree: Mozilla purchased two brand new AdTech corporations in the last year or so:

• One of them serves up ads through Firefox on shopping websites and sells your browsing/location history.
• The other works with corporations like TikTok (and at least two more of the top 10 most popular social networks) to analyze their traffic.

Throwing cash around: If wasn’t enough, Mozilla has earmarked $30 million for AI research grants, and another $30 million for random venture capital.

So in general, even if you could to donate directly to the development of Firefox, I think Mozilla should get its financial house in order before you do. (But you cannot donate to the development of Firefox, which is another reason you might want to consider withholding any donations.)

Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:

• It’s made by an ad company
• The same ad company runs multiple popular ad blockers (including AdBlock Plus)
• There are no standards on privacy invasion

uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.

The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla’s own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.

I’m still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.

…For now. Looks like they’re going to get rid of it too (which makes sense, because they copy Chromium’s codebase).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-chromium/developer-guide/manifest-v3

I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.

disingeneous to call it adding ads

Who called it adding

With all due respect, Mozilla is now (and, for a while, has been) an ad company. When an ad company tells you ads are necessary, you should not trust them. Plenty of lousy things have been entrenched as social norms, but it is the job of the entrenchers to justify their existence… Which Mozilla is definitely not doing here.

A for-profit that wrapped itself in a non-profit shell that is empty and just run by the for-profit?

Brave can keep the old APIs but they’ll still be affected, because developers for Chromium-compatible browsers still have to decide whether they want to create or support apps that will only work in a subset of browsers, and figure out how to distribute them outside the Chromium store.

TIL the things to build a browser take up less space than a package manager… But I don’t do Linux any more hardcore than Ubuntu either

Private, for-profit, and let’s not forget antagonistic to the GDPR.

Corrupt politicians can simply ignore the law. If they didn’t ignore it, they wouldn’t be very corrupt.

If I need to fudge info, I tend to put it into a password database’s “notes” field for easier note-keeping, FWIW.

Not a full-on identity, but bits of info like stated name, address, etc.

Interesting

Sounds like you have too stable of a temperament to be a Lemmy server admin to me. Just wait until I tell you what I know about the guy who built a server just to downvote someone else on here, the one platform where downvotes don’t matter.

Extremely intended! They built a model to lie and a surrogate model to say the first model was being truthful.

They called it LaundryML.

Considering the news about OneRep… Definitely steer clear of Mozilla’s scrubbing service.

OneRep is what Mozilla uses to remove your data from the internet, if you pay them for Monitor Plus.

Didn’t somebody make a biased AI and a laundering AI to say it wasn’t biased, just to demonstrate how easy it was to do?

I’ve seen the back end, you’re correct

Just like on Facebook, when you delete a comment on Lemmy it gets stuck with a “deleted” flag that’s possible to undo on some clients, including the official one last time I did it.

To be fair, your incredulity is totally understandable. I think we should fix Lemmy too.