How about Reddit or DeviantArt? I’ve noticed issues with each of those

Ever seen this movie scene about a guy who got his name in the phone book?

That’s a fair thing to bring up. I think your point went over my head, because I was mostly reminiscing about how the less capital-oriented parts of the internet were relatively pleasant before companies like Facebook came along and encouraged them all (with their newly acquired capital) to jump into the big centralized areas.

So you wish to change in order to avoid admitting things change?

Well yes, but it’s the patches that make them special. Every Firefox fork that disables Mozilla PPA by default is another browser that cuts into Mozilla’s attempt to resell private data to advertisers while marketing it as private (which is, I kid you not, a reason they say they needed it enabled by default).

And considering Firefox itself is still open source, it’s a completely valid browser to base a fork off of. Especially when the only serviceable alternative is Chrome right now.

The dot com bubble made the Internet explode, sure, but corporate sites weren’t the entire internet back then. There were far more niche sites, web rings, forums, etc…

…For now. Looks like they’re going to get rid of it too (which makes sense, because they copy Chromium’s codebase).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-chromium/developer-guide/manifest-v3

You’re 100% right about Brave being scummy.

And I hope my point didn’t come across as a defensd of Brave, but rather, “how is it that Mozilla is doing this thing in a worse way than a company that is infamously disreputable?”

I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.

Mozilla’s PPA was developed in collaboration with Facebook. While we don’t usually think of that company as advertisement centric, they are, just moreso within their own walled garden of a social network.

parading around as pro-privacy frauds.

Here’s a frighteningly accurate prediction from The Register, written back in January:

…Baker notes: “We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating … This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way.”

Surely not slurping telemetry?

According to the report, the “Mozilla way” is all about privacy, encryption, and keeping customer data safe. Hopefully, it will also be about innovation rather than scattering AI fairy dust over its product line.