Live by the sword, die by the sword. I stopped using Firefox when this insanity raised its ugly head. Then to Chromium, then to Chrome. Much happier, now.
THE OPEN WEB is in constant peril. Almost a generation ago, everyone worried Microsoft, which had the dominant web browser of the time, could dictate the content people saw and the tools developers use. Its dominance faded, but the rise of mobile prompted new concerns about the role Apple and Google play as gatekeepers to the web. And Facebook’s control over what people see and share online continues growing.
Since its founding in 2003, the Mozilla Foundation has served as a check on the power of tech giants like those. It’s among the few organizations in Silicon Valley that isn’t out to make anyone rich. Although its for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corp., has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars through its partnership with Google, that money finances the development of the Firefox web browser and other open source projects. Unlike other tech companies, Mozilla needn’t collect massive amounts of personal data to mine for marketing gold.
Given the intrusive nature of government surveillance, Mozilla—with its dedication to privacy and independence from corporate and government interests—should be more vital than ever. But in the age of social media and mobile devices, it has struggled to maintain relevance and failed to transition to a world where the desktop browser is fading in importance. Mozilla hasn’t even dented the mobile market with mobile versions of its browser or its Firefox OS smartphone operating system. And the organization has done little to counteract Facebook’s expanding influence. What’s more, its foothold on the desktop continues to slip as Google Chrome grows in popularity.
Its prospects for the future are fuzzy at a time when the web needs an open alternative more than ever. |