Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla’s Original Sin
Some will tell you that Mozilla’s worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.
Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.
Doing what, exactly? Create a fork? Done. Fill their feedback queue with endless screeching about how everything is dooooooom? Done, 10x over. Use another browser instead, say, Chrome? That’s what virtually everyone did, yes.=
Plus shouldn’t this on paper be positive news? Mozilla can, if they run Anonym well enough, be independent of other ad networks. Run their own. Which in turn means they can control the data and where it’s stored, an important issue with third-party ad networks.
Didn’t think I had to say it explicitly. As far as influencing Mozilla’s course, I don’t believe those to be very helpful methods. A fork may be helpful, but it highly depends on the developer(s). I argue against the second one all the time. Third is laughably counterproductive.
Mozilla is capable of responding to (esp. proper) feedback. For example, regardless of what you think about the subject, the community sent a pretty clear message when they started accepting cryptocurrency donations, which I’m sure they’re still keeping in mind to this day.
Point being, engaging with them is one thing that helps and I can do just fine. No need for “endless doom screeching.”
Re: positive news. Yes, on paper it can. We’ll see how it turns out in reality. I’ve explained why I’m not immediately into it, though your comment seems to ignore that part of mine. I do want it to work out though, if for no other reason than because what’s done is done and ultimately, I just want Firefox to thrive.