I think the correlation of people using extensions and people disabling telemetry is pretty high. I do both myself. Even a decent password manager requires one (though not on android because it has an API for that). On android I do use others obviously.
> At best it's like 0.001% circumstantial evidence that has to be reconciled with their history of opposing the Manifest changes. If reading tea leaves matters so much, then certainly their more explicit statements need to matter too.
Their history is less relevant now because it's a fresh CEO that came up with this statement on his first day. New leaders often means a change in direction and this is a worrying sign. Also the number he quoted is far too explicit. Doing something like that would instantly move Firefox to be the absolute worst browser possible considering even advertising- and tracking-loaded crap like Chrome and Edge don't go that far.
Clearly they have been running the numbers and clearly he feels fine talking about it which is a pretty strong departure of previous values.
Of course I'd not continue using Firefox in this case, and I'm sure it would get widely forked. I found it pretty shocking.
The other examples don't reassure me one bit because they're not the same teams and in many cases they were simply external pushes like offers that were rejected. Here it's a different team that already has been changing direction for the worse recently (e.g. PPA, purchasing Anonym), and came up with this without external pressure. There's also plenty of situations where FOSS projects did go full evil.
Anyway I don't really have any better options than firefox and I'm sure that it would get heavily forked if they started siding with the advertisers, but it is worrying to me especially coming from a new leader on his very first day. Not only because it's about ads. Just because it removes user freedom of choice completely if they were to enforce this.
> New CEO says he's not going to remove adblockers, people suspect him for planning to remove adblockers
It's because he has obviously been thinking about it. That $150M number didn't just come out of nowhere. Someone at Mozilla modelled this. The resulting analysis made it into the CEO's mind so far he even mentioned it without being asked.
This is something that's unthinkable to most of the Mozilla users. That's why it's so shocking.
It's like your son making dinner conversation like "hey I was thinking, if I would sell drugs at school I'd make at least 500$ a week! But don't worry I'm not going to do that!".
Yeah, most of the browsers "with AI" are not existing because they're so incredibly useful. They're there because it's a hype, because their parent companies have invested billions and they need to show their shareholders it's actually being used by people. So they ram it in our faces, left right and center. They're not doing this to help us, they're helping themselves.
Mozilla doesn't need to play that game because they're not selling any AI.
We are still in the exploratory phase of what features are useful or not.
I could see describing images useful for blind or vision impaired people. Publishers often have a large back catalogue of documents where it is both impractical and too costly/time consuming to get all the images in those described with alt tags. This is one area where the publishers would be considering using AI.
Text-to-speech and speech recognition also fall under the category of AI and these have proven useful for blind/visually impaired people and for people with injuries that make it difficult to use a mouse and keyboard.
On the search side it would be interesting to see if running the user's query through an encoder and using that to help find the documents would help improve finding search results. This would work like current TF-IDF (Term Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency) techniques work.
I don't agree. I think opinionated design products are much worse in general.
It's really great when your opinions are aligned with those of the designer. If they're not, you're straight out of luck and you're stuck with something that isn't really for you.
This is why I love software that gives as much choice as possible. Like KDE for example. Because I have pretty strong vision myself and I respect my tools to conform to that, not the other way around
That’s what turned me off of Chrome. It will 100% have me migrate if it happens again. I’m not freely giving my attention away for even more people to shove crap in my face.
Even without location they can get a pretty good idea of your location from your IP address or any other signals. Their neighbor also might have allowed access to their phonebook or something like that to make the connection obvious.
Cell tower data is readily available for a modest price. It's not hard to triangulate someone with "good enough" accuracy for marketing purposes.
Also, the world is filled with millions of Bluetooth-logging devices. They're everywhere from department stores (to monitor foot traffic) to the side of the road (to monitor traffic speed).
Reading cell towers also is supposed to be behind the location tracking flag. Including bluetooth by the way, which is why so many apps need this permission these days to even link a BLE device.
And tracking bluetooth emissions shouldn't matter as they are randomised while not in an active connection.
Hmm in our community it's also a way to connect when you meet someone at parties, that doesn't expose too many details like your real name or phone number.
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