This is sad 😢

[anthony@indieweb.social]

@dazo @danielquinn This is a year old change and Mozilla already responded: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/.

Could you please update this toot with the date to avoid confusion?

[zbrown@floss.social]

@anthony @dazo @danielquinn they didn't assert any date, the commit itself is dated, the change was not reverted.

[duco@norden.social]

@tomf @dazo which has it's own drama, too. Would also be nice if Servo would get finished.

[adamw@fosstodon.org]

@dazo also a year old?

[ohir@social.vivaldi.net]

@mxk @dazo I'd like to inform you that NetSurf is still alive and kicking. It has kinda working js engine now, and also a basic support for some css and simple svg. Are you ok to support and promote Netsurf?

[mousey@mastodon.seattlematrix.org]

@dazo

RIP

[ohir@social.vivaldi.net]

@dazo I am no fan, euphemistically spoken, of Chromium. But since last US elections I was on the quest where to go if FF I use in GUI for um 25 years now will go fascist. And it happens that only Europe-based browser that seems to have enough power to continue looking into Chromium codebase for me is Vivaldi. Yes I have read many diss posts acusing them of "selling data" and even of "stealing passwords". Often by the same posters who have history of writing about chips in vaccines. Europe with their GDPR laws and User Data Czars in every country counters many of these narratives. Ultimately you must trust in whomever builds browser you use. If you can compile and build for yourself, you can also comment-out all that FF telemetry, don't you? And only then, only if you read and understood every diff that came to your fork, only then you can say "likely this browser is not rigged against me, likely". _Any_ binary you use implies trust.

Yes, we have few choices now. And we, the prols, have no means to support feature bludgeoning that comes from w3c enabling two corpos, one totalitarian government and one non-profit to hold oligopoly/.
Now I am still doing whack-a-mole with Mozilla "inventions" for work activities, but I am learning Vivaldi quirks to be able to switch 2500+ mostly Goog bond community to Vivaldi.

[mgorny@mastodon.com.pl]

@dazo, ah, the FUD again? Not going to fall for it the second time around.

(Yes, there was a heated discussion when they've changed the original copy, and the main conclusion was that nobody bothered to read the whole file, where the same point still exists.)

[yoasif@mastodon.social]

@realcaseyrollins @djsumdog @dazo No Nightly for LibreWolf, but you can use policies in Firefox to escape the badness if really want Nightly.

[dazo@infosec.exchange]

@ohir Yeah, this all makes sense. You need to place the trust somewhere. If it is a corporation, a foundation, a community, a developer or yourself. You can't escape the need for trust.

I tend to trust communities most, as they more seldom have an "agenda". They usually want things to Just Work with as few hurdles as possible. Ideal organisations (like Codeberg) is the next level I can trust, as they state clearly what they want to achieve and is rigged for it.

Mozilla was primarily a foundation earlier, which has moved towards a corporation and now has very different motives than what it had earlier.

I don't trust Google's motives for Chromium, which most of the "Chrome based browsers" builds on. I would generally trust Vivaldi more, even though they are small by comparison. But since they are small, they can "afford" to be brave in their marketing to catch attention. On the other side, they have the European mentality to privacy, which none of the US based alternatives lacks. And if Google really cripples Chromium as they're now doing with Android ... I would expect Vivaldi to be one of the few who really would be able to carry and maintain a Chromium fork.

That is one side of these aspects.

Another one is that it's not healthy for the open Internet itself to be so dominated by a single browser rendering engine. There are fewer chances to keep then straight and honest, to avoid them to end up in a lock-in situation - like was mostly the case 20 years ago with Internet Explorer. Even though, what made that time even harder was that Internet Explorer was primarily only available on a single platform; that aspect is somewhat better now.

So the Firefox branch of browsers really need get some stronger foothold, even if it's just one or two. And then there is Servo, which I also hope can have a real future down the road.

Without alternatives ... we will get a poorer Internet. It might work fine in the beginning, until the dominator takes full control over the market.