I would not take that as a given for Mozilla's upper management. Many of their decisions seem to ignore what users want in deference to Google or other motivations.
You're just making shit up. I was with the Mozilla project for 25 years, with Netscape and then the Mozilla companies for 23 years. I was involved in reviews of the very first Google and Mozilla contract in the fall of 2004. Google has no say in the Mozilla product experience. None. There are some things Mozilla is disallowed from doing to Google Search results that Firefox displays, but that's basically it. That you want to imagine nefarious backroom deals that never existed and use those imaginings to shit on Mozilla is deeply insulting, and you should know that you and people like you have done more to dispirit and demoralize Mozilla than any competition ever did.
Wether there is a formalized contract or not Mozilla makes choicses in the interest of Google over (especially power) users all the time. And in general its absurd to think that taking money (not to mention almost your entire funding) from someone isn't going to make you biased towards that person. As has been pointed out many times in discussions about this, you don't need any explicit deals for conflicts of interest to emerge. Having the wealth of Mozilla's leadership depend on Google's good graces is going to encourage them to make decisions that will keep Google happy.
Attacking users users that bring up grievances is not going to help your case here.
> There are some things Mozilla is disallowed from doing to Google Search results that Firefox displays, but that's basically it.
What exactly are those things? Is that why Firefox does not come with ad blocking by default?
Personally speaking, I would love to switch to Firefox just to use uBlock Origin, but this picture[1] shows Opera's killer feature.
It's a screenshot of today's old.reddit.com/r/all. You can see how you're able to read all of the text vertically, without having to scroll sideways, because it wraps perfectly to the current pinched zoom level. No other browser works this good on Android, and reading stuff is my main internet use case. Try seeing how that website looks on any other browser, it's ridiculous how unusable they are.
Not being indexed by search engines is a fatal flaw in my opinion. There might be some interesting discussions taking place on Mastodon, but I would have no way of knowing.
As an analogy, there might be some interesting discussions happening at my local Community Center, or my neighbor's house, but I would have no way of knowing. But to discover these discussions, I would need to meet someone with a shared interest who would, in turn, share with me a place that they go to for continued discussions and to hang out with interesting people who share an interest.
So maybe, if done correctly, this is a feature? The good content is one extra network connection away, but easy enough to find if an advocate chooses to highlight content, share a connection, or otherwise create an inbound reference to the community.
If you had a way to search like "hey there's an interesting conversation going on at my local community center, maybe I will go and join their next session."
At the same time, does your local community center want the unfiltered public to have input to their conversations? Or are they only interested in spreading it to friends/neighbors of people already at the center?
I like the idea of it, but I also have no idea how one would find any of these cited discussions. It seems having an existing social network gives you a strong advantage. As a lurker, introvert, and ruralite, I think I'm going to be naturally disadvantaged on these types of platforms.
Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the whole design.
Have you tried deleting your profile and starting fresh? Something is clearly messed up. Launching takes a fraction of a second for me on NixOS with a years-old profile.
Have you ever visited Vietnam? The people I've met there are highly motivated to build successful businesses, even more so than in many western countries.
Because perceived race is a big factor in how most people treat strangers, so having that information would likely be useful in identifying unfair bias in enforcement.
I think it'd be impossible to anonymize data in such a way that it's still useful but not easily identifiable with public or partial private information.
> I got a Nitrokey3 to use as a hardware token, and ended up not being able to access my country's e-gov facilities, because L1 certification required.
What will likely happen is that many services will only accept passkey managers that have been blessed by big tech and locked down to the user. You're not going to be able to authenticate with your bank using an open source implementation.
Level 1 (I think they're talking FIDO?) is the bare minimum level. If Nitrokey aren't certified, there's plenty of open and proprietary keys not owned by "big tech" that are.
