Why Firefox Fights for the Future of the Web

'"Mozilla is no longer fighting for market share of its browser: it is
fighting for the future of the web," writes the Guardian, citing
Mozilla Project co-founder Mitchell Baker:

Baker's pitch is that only Mozilla is motivated, first and foremost,
to make using the web a pleasurable experience. Google's main priority
is to funnel user data into the enormous advertising engine that
accounts for most of its revenue. Apple's motivation is to ensure that
customers continue to buy a new iPhone every couple of years and don't
switch to Android...."

Firefox now runs sites such as Facebook in "containers", effectively
hiving the social network off into its own little sandboxed world,
where it can't see what's happening on other sites. Baker says: "It
reduces Facebook's ability to follow you around the web and track you
when you're not on Facebook and just living your life...." Mozilla has
launched Monitor, a data-breach reporting service; Lockwise, a
password manager; and Send, a privacy-focused alternative to services
such as WeSendit. It's also beta-testing a VPN (virtual private
network) service, which it hopes to market to privacy-conscious
users...

Apple's iOS (mobile operating system) is an acknowledged disaster for
Mozilla. Safari is the default and, while users can install other
browsers, they come doubly hindered: they can never be set as the
default, meaning any link clicked in other applications will open in
Safari; and they must use Safari's "rendering engine", a technical
limitation that means that even the browsers that Firefox does have on
the platform are technically just fancy wrappers for Apple's own
browser, rather than full versions of the service that Mozilla has
built over the decades... "Even if you do download a replacement, iOS
drops you back into the default. I don't know why that's acceptable.
Every link you open on a phone is the choice of the phone maker, even
if you, as a user, want something else."

Summarizing Baker's concerns, the Guardian writes that "It is
perfectly possible to build a browser that prevents advertising
companies from aggregating user data. But it is unlikely that any
browser made by an advertising company would offer such a feature..."

And an activist for the Small Technology Foundation tells them that
Google "wants the web to go through Google. It already mostly does:
with eyes on 70% to 80% of the web."'

-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/11/17/1614222

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
_______________________________________________
wlug mailing list -- [email protected] | To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/postorius/lists/wlug.list.waikato.ac.nz