That is true, but all that wouldn’t be able to survive if Mozilla were to significantly scale back development.

I’m not sure which button you’re talking about, but if it’s the one in the sidebar, click “Customise sidebar”, and then uncheck “AI chatbot”.

By now you would’ve expected someone to have pointed out what code is actually collecting that data that’s supposedly sold.

I don’t see how being a non-profit suddenly makes it cheaper to build a secure, modern and compatible browser. (Although I know lots of people underestimate how much effort that takes. But just consider that already Mozilla’s doing it for far less money than Google invests in Chrome, for example.)

I fail to understand how they haven’t figured out a way out of this seems to me they’re using all the money they from Google as if there is no tomorrow… Why on earth also if Firefox is so clearly their main product does it seem to not always be at the centre of their attention?

The answer to the second question is the answer to the first - there have been a ton of attempts at alternative sources of funding, but it’s hard to come close to the ~half a billion USD the default search deal provides. So far the branded services you’re calling for don’t seem to have been able to pull it off, and I haven’t seen any signs that donations would be able to either.

(Although as for email with Thunderbird…)

I think you’re grossly overestimating the share of volunteer contributions if you think it might even be over half. It’s amazing what contributors do, but the vast majority, and especially thankless-but-important work like web compatibility or security, is done by paid staff.

They’re saying they want something like Synaptic (mostly for its “multi-select”, apparently, though I’m not sure what that means?), but have it support AppImages, Flatpaks, Snaps, etc., instead of just Debs like Synaptic does.

Can I just say: hats off to the bug archaeology you’ve done there :)

Heh yes, but for the purposes of this post I wanted to focus on why it wasn’t just another distro recommendation, but one tailored specific to their use case :) (I don’t even use Kinoite myself, so it’s extra genuine.)

If you do a reinstall, I’d recommend going with a Kinoite install. It’s like regular Fedora KDE, except that it avoids this risk of traces of past experiments everywhere.

Ah OK, so it just feels like Windows Recall if we assume it’s going to become Windows Recall in the future…

thelibre.news is woefully underappreciated.

Huh? The article says:

it is generated locally, on your device

Did I misread something?

(Agreed that this should be the norm and not luck.)

Except without the shitty parts where it keeps a log of everything you do and sends it off your device, luckily.

I didn’t say it was exactly the same as FF

Yeah I know you didn’t, but we’re in a comment thread that started with

It’s otherwise exactly the same as the stock firefox experience

That’s why I responded to check whether it doesn’t change a bunch of stuff as well that might catch people off-guard if they expected the same experience.

I mean, that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s easy to turn off if you know that and what you need to turn off. Literally on this same page there’s someone mentioning they keep getting logged out, which is because Librewolf clears cookies on exit - which of course was completely reasonable for them not to know. So it feels like “it’s exactly the same as Firefox” is setting the wrong expectations.

Not really, and the reason is that everyone disagrees on what “Mozilla’s BS” is - e.g. some say not enabling full protection is BS. Some say it’s fine for Mozilla to know what hardware Firefox crashes most on, some say it’s none of its business.

But honestly, it’s possible to disable almost everything you don’t like in Firefox, and it’s usually just a toggle. So I think the easiest option is to just do that whenever you run into something you don’t like. The alternative is doing it the other way around, i.e. starting with e.g. Librewolf and then undoing their tweaks if you don’t like them, but it’s harder to know what tweak is responsible for breaking a website you use, for example.

Doesn’t it also turn on stuff like aggressive fingerprint protection (which provides more protection against fingerprinting, but also breaks more and more important stuff).

Good for you, but those forks too owe their existence (among other things) to the donations (and down the road subscriptions) to Thunderbird.

You’re right, but I think “hugely profitable” is probably optimistic - I’d expect something to the level of Proton or Fastmail. Fine, but not a big money maker like Firefox is.