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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I too am skeptical.

    Mozilla cares a lot about performance. It is monitored obsessively and there are entire teams dedicated to squeezing out every last drop of performance. Heaven and earth would be moved for a 30% perf boost. I’m guessing either there’s some very severe tradeoffs to these prefs, or setting them somehow breaks the methodology used to obtain this number.

    Edit: also benchmarks can be notoriously misleading. I don’t have any opinions or knowledge on basemark (the benchmark used to get this 30% number), but speedometer v3 is the most state of the art and generally agreed upon benchmark for performance these days.

    That doesn’t mean the 30% number is bogus… Just that it should be followed by “…on basemark” rather than implying it’s conclusive to overall performance.











  • Because Firefox is funded by ads, whether it’s the PPA ads outlined in this post, or search referrals from Google. Default adblocking would kill the revenue stream. Maybe Firefox could continue on with volunteers and donations, but not anywhere near its current staffing level. Eventually the engine would fall further and further behind and fewer and fewer people would use it.

    To clarify… Making a browser is relatively easy and there’s lots of successful projects that do so without significant revenue. But making a rendering engine is really fucking hard and requires a ton of money to maintain.


  • Let’s be real, there’s no way PPA is going to be as valuable as the data that can be gathered by state of the art ad tech. So the ad companies that adopt this will be making a compromise to do so. How is this tech making their lives easier?

    Also they have no incentive to develop this tech, so why would they? It’s not like Mozilla is doing work for them that they would have done anyway. If anything they’re probably worried that the tech will take off and then legislation will follow to force them to use it.


  • Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already. But Mozilla is very much all about trying to make things better for everyone on the internet, regardless about their opinions (or lack thereof) on privacy and ads.

    Mozilla has recognised that advertising isn’t going anywhere, so there’s two options:

    1. Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.
    2. Push for a better alternative that can improve privacy while still keeping the engine that drives the internet intact.

    What other major player would ever push for privacy preserving attribution? Hint: no one. While I get that many people here want 0 ads (myself included), PPA is a great step in the right direction, and could have a huge positive impact if it’s shown to work and other companies start adopting it.

    And guess what? You can still turn it off, or use adblockers. Unlike Chrome, Firefox won’t restrict you in that regard.




  • ahal@lemmy.catoPrivacy@lemmy.mlTruly independent web browser
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    5 months ago

    Oh that’s not at all what they implied. They implied you shouldn’t use the project based on the author’s opinions. That’s very different from implying the author isn’t entitled to their opinions.

    Boycotting the software doesn’t infringe on the author’s rights to have a shitty opinion. It’s called consequences for being an asshole.