Mozilla has clearly positioned itself as (1) the independent browser-vendor who cares about (2) open source, (3) the open web and (4) your online privacy.
If they start bundling "free" proprietary third-party services, where the price is a piece of the user's privacy, to provide a more seamless experience at the cost of bypassing "normal" rules for web-application integration, they have effectively compromised themselves on all 4 of those criterias.
This one incident is not the end of the world to me, but I've had this feeling for quite a while that Mozilla is losing both direction and momentum, and stuff like this helps cement it.
Had it not been proposed as a joke, I would already be looking forward to those Emacs-patches incorporating Webkit as the new embedded browser.[1]
[1] Embedding Webkit was proposed as a "solution" to the famous Emacs-quote "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"[2] no longer being valid or relevant.
> Mozilla has clearly positioned itself as (1) the independent browser-vendor who cares about (2) open source, (3) the open web and (4) your online privacy.
They were positioned that way, but ever since they gutted the security of Sync[1], it's really hard to take them seriously.
[1] First, your data is now 'secured' on their servers solely by your password, which for most people is memorable and thus breakable; previously it was secured with a high-entropy key, which was secured on your system with a memorable password, if desired. Second, login to their services (which uses that same God password) is performed by downloading JavaScript (and perhaps HTML and/or chrome; I forget now) from their servers, which means that they can at any time choose to intercept as few or as many user passwords as they wish—or as someone with legal authority wishes them to.
> Had it not been proposed as a joke, I would already be looking forward to those Emacs-patches incorporating Webkit as the new embedded browser.
I thought that there was a serious effort to do that. It'd be great IMHO.
If they start bundling "free" proprietary third-party services, where the price is a piece of the user's privacy
Like search engines? Terrible reasoning. Browsers need these or they won't be competitive. There was a judgment call that a read later mode is needed to be competitive, too. We can argue whether it's the right call, but not about the above.
Mozilla has clearly positioned itself as (1) the independent browser-vendor who cares about (2) open source, (3) the open web and (4) your online privacy.
If they start bundling "free" proprietary third-party services, where the price is a piece of the user's privacy, to provide a more seamless experience at the cost of bypassing "normal" rules for web-application integration, they have effectively compromised themselves on all 4 of those criterias.
This one incident is not the end of the world to me, but I've had this feeling for quite a while that Mozilla is losing both direction and momentum, and stuff like this helps cement it.
Had it not been proposed as a joke, I would already be looking forward to those Emacs-patches incorporating Webkit as the new embedded browser.[1]
[1] Embedding Webkit was proposed as a "solution" to the famous Emacs-quote "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"[2] no longer being valid or relevant.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war#Humor