I don't share their views, but I'm thrilled that their project exists and very happy with Mozilla donating to help improve their email client security, since it's a major player in the pro-privacy ecosystem. If I had to agree with the philosophical beliefs of everyone I gave money to, I'd starve.
This is a great project for users from a privacy-first company. I hope it's good for users, and that Mozilla gets significant support from this project.
Their investment into AI yielded some cool things like on-device language translation that I use a lot in Firefox.
Rust is something that grew out of their investments into programming languages/tooling/etc.
Their investment into documentation and technical writing brought us MDN, which is a great resource for web development.
Mozilla's development of password managers, that they eventually walked back on rolling out as an independent product, yielded a better password manager built into Firefox, as well as Firefox Verify.
It's also important to make a distinction between the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit, and Mozilla the corporation. The non-profit is responsible for many of the non-browser investments.
That would be welcome to hear, as a Mozilla user and someone who wants to trust the org to stand for inclusive, humanist values in Internet technology.
I love contributing to Mozilla. I contributed to a bunch of projects in the past years, including Chromium (a very friendly bunch BTW), but Mozilla makes me feel like I'm a real part of this, not just some guy sending a patch.
- Literally everything they do is in the open, volunteers can participate a lot if they want to, even start new projects. (~50% of their employees remote, I guess that helps a lot here.)
- They're mentoring people new to a project really well - I love this even though I prefer to just dive into the code myself.
- They call you a "Mozillian", send you foundation/company/product updates, invite you to Mozilla Summit (I was there this year, and it was amazing) etc.
- Mozilla is not profit oriented, they just care about their mission: Moving the web forward and keeping it open. Makes me feel like part of a good cause, as opposed to unpaid labour.
All in all, they really got this figured out. I can recommend them to anyone who wants to contribute to something big/important.
Let's Encrypt has had such a positive impact, I think I'll start donating to them instead of Wikipedia. They're a lot more subtle with their calls to donate, but they seem to deliver a lot of good things to a lot of users, with a much smaller budget.
I'm just really grateful for the service, and glad to see the Prossimo work continuing as well.
(On a tangential note, I suspect the way Let's Encrypt makes me feel is the thing that people wish Mozilla still had whenever there is a Firefox thread that turns bitter. Like a breathe of fresh air on a cynical internet.)
To me, this seem like a fine initiative, all things considered.
There's a bit of a false dichotomy in some comments, where Mozilla Rally is preventing or hampering Mozilla from improving Firefox. They can and should do both at the same time, especially if both are positive things.
It doesn't mean all their initiatives are equally good, and that we shouldn't still criticize the bad ones. But this seems benign at worst, and could possibly do some good. it's completely opt in, transparent, and with very strong user control over the data.
Instead of chastising them for all their other shortcomings yet again, I prefer to be happy that this might benefit ethical research.
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