Mozilla and the Death of Virtue
Sun 08 September 2024
A fedifriend mentioned me yesterday on a post about a recent kerfuffle regarding some decisions that Mozilla has been making, particularly in regards to buying an advertising company (and integrating advertising into the browser) and adding "A.I." features into recent builds of Firefox.
I had intended to reply with a blog post, but then I felt that I didn't have enough subject matter expertise on browsers, so I made it into a thread. As I started pasting together the pieces of the thread, I realized that it really did deserve to be a blog post, so I am going to post it here in its original microblog-like form (this includes not doing anything to soften the tone, which I absolutly would do with a normal blog post). I have however removed hashtags and reformatted them as ordinary text, as they do not function in this format.
Sorry I'm getting to this [reply] late.
With Mozilla, it's just one more in a very long line of absolutely clueless leadership decisions.
Mozilla still doesn't understand why it exists (other than as a plausible deniability against monopoly by Google).
We choose Mozilla because of virtue. The virtue of openness, the virtue of ethics, the virtue of honoring people's privacy and digital agency.
And when Mozilla's leadership demonstrates an absolutely blithe ignorance of that fact, and they draw on the same absolutely braindead corporate machinations to garner income that their Wall Street hired idiots tell them to use, they continually bleed support and userbase.
Zen Browser looks neat, but Firefox forks are nothing without Mozilla. Nobody has the strength to maintain a modern browser. It is a fool's errand by light of just how horrible the modern web's "standards" are.
For people who care about Digital Virtue, and who care about Mozilla, watching them court the latest brainrot corporate crap like AI is like watching your younger sibling that you've helped raise get hoodwinked by some slimy huckster and basically turn into a crackhead.
That is the anger you are seeing. It is the anger of people who care deeply about what is good, noble, virtuous and right seeing the last bastion of any kind of virtue in technology show a little leg to AI hucksters.
And of course, some of it is also anger at being subjected to the same. So it's not all virtuous anger, some of it is self-interested, but not blame-worthy.
Category: Ethics Tagged: Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Non-religious post Non-technical post