You’re a liar. No one is that influenced.

There are a lot of people in the world. Some feel passionately enough about certain topics to write long lemmy posts. And it doesn’t stop there. Some people actually physically do stuff in the real world too! So if you think typing a few paragraphs of text is too much effort for any real person, then I suggest you try to broaden your social circle.

Firefox does have ads on by default for the startpage, but they can be turned off in the settings in a fairly easy and obvious way. So even as obnoxious and demoralising ads, I don’t think it is fair to say these ones are “persistent and unavoidable”. (It’s not easy to remove the Firefox logo from the new tab page, and that annoys me, but I wouldn’t call it an ad.)

In this particular update, they’ve said that it will not be the last. But yeah, January is highly likely.

It feels so bad how long it has been delayed. As you say, its been years now. But that’s not because it keeps getting delayed over and over. It’s only really been postponed once. The original release date was dropped because they decided to increase the scope, and then their feature-creep seemed to get out of hand. But I think that by far the biggest reason for the delay is the death of one of their team members. In that small tight-knit team it has caused a lasting malaise and loss of focus; understandably so, I think.

In any case, I’m looking forward to that update. Terraria is a great game.

Firefox is a commercial product. Is it not?

Well, it’s partially a matter of semantics. Perhaps different people have different understandings of the word ‘commercial’. For me, I’d say that Firefox is not something a user pays for. It’s existence is not about making a profit, or strengthening a business, or anything to do with money at all - and therefore it is not a commercial product.

I agree that the engineers should be paid, and that browser development is very difficult. But nevertheless, Firefox historically has not been about maximising a profit - or even making any kind of profit at all. (Although it does seem Mozilla leadership are looking to change that.)

The text you quoted sounds like a reasonable and normal definition of a sale to me. i.e. transferring to another business in exchange for something else of value.

So yeah, Firefox previously promised not to do this, “not ever”, and now they say they need to do sell your personal data “in order to make Firefox commercially viable”.

But hang on a second… Firefox is not a commercial product. So making it ‘commercially viable’ is highly questionable in itself.

It’s a shame that Mozilla’s current leadership is more interested in self-enrichment than in the past. But Firefox is still the very best option by far. I hope that the Ladybird project becomes strong the future, if for no other reason than pressure Firefox into staying good.

I reckon there are better free ways to waste your time, and many don’t require moral corruption.