Well - I don’t know about them being the same.

The new terms specifically disclaims Mozilla’s ownership of your data:

This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

which limits their license to your data to processing it for usage within Firefox or Mozilla services. That is a huge difference. I don’t see how they would be able to claim - in a clickwrap agreement - that Mozilla saying that they don’t own your data somehow grants Mozilla ownership of your data.

That would be mind boggling.

I’m not pushing the video, it is there for people who don’t want to read. 🤷

Sorry for wasting your two minutes.

Here’s some more analysis (also linked on the original post).

My feeling on this is basically with Mozilla potentially running advertising campaigns on their own in Firefox (especially with Google funding possibly drying up), Mozilla felt that they needed to clarify their permission for access to user data.

Still, that doesn’t really explain why their initial terms were so over-broad in the first place – that is why everyone’s thinking went straight to AI as soon as they made their initial announcement. They haven’t deigned to provide us with an explanation for that - besides telling us that it was due to the CCPA.

Clearly we can’t lay all the blame on CCPA, since the rights grant is more limited today than at first introduction - a fact that they readily admit.

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Yep, it is also not enabled for Linux, and your distribution might not be using a Mozilla binary anyway.

Right now, it is for new users only. Existing users are going to have to opt in at some later date.

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Not really, when you push immature alternatives when ignoring a real choice. Seems more like you are supporting monopoly by ensuring that actual competitors get ignored - along with even smaller vendors.

“Look, don’t use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Word, what you really want is VIM!”

You are saying there is all of this wasted money, but as soon as you are asked for evidence, it is all “I’m not a tax auditor”. Defend your claims!

I wrote up what happened (more stuff on my blog).

TL;DR they use aggregated data for ads and they felt like they needed to have an explicit opt-in.

They are both worse than Gecko, a platform you wish to die.

Sorry, you aren’t a tax auditor, but you are out here making claims. Try defending them?

Thanks for letting us know to discount what you say – if you prefer monopoly over choice, we’re really not having the same conversation.

This you?

Personally I hope firefox dies as fast as possible so we see some focus on good alternatives.

Gecko is not a good platform, there is a reason why people who use geckoview eventually all migrate away from it, the most recent example I can think of is wolvic, which hasn’t replaced geckoview yet, but does have the version 1.0 of a chromium release now.

The sooner we get real alternatives to chromium and stop pretending that gecko is one the better. Currently servo is progressing really fast, has good APIs and usability for both a full desktop browser and embedded usecases (but still very immature).

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The numbers you have quoted so far don’t make a dent in the 400M though - we haven’t even reached 1% yet. How much do you think Mozilla is spending on Firefox? How much of that is “extra” per your back of the envelope math?

Nothing is stopping public funding of Firefox, so I don’t see it as an either, or situation.

Would you deny Ladybird search revenues? It is an interesting question.

Do you have numbers behind these assertions? How much money is spent on “crap”?

That doesn’t really discount the argument. Not a lot of investment for a decent return. Why is that bad?

Pocket and VPN make money, that would be like firing IRS auditors in the name of efficiency.

I agree that general purpose AI isn’t really all that interesting, since I don’t think it is going to drive involvement or investment. I also imagine that it doesn’t really cost that much - they don’t have any real products behind it, and they all seem clearly experimental.

I guess I understand your aversion to contributing to “junk projects”, but if they are junk projects, there isn’t likely to be a ton of investment. Harder to shift the bottom line.