Vincent @ Vincent @feddit.nl

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122

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Joined

2 yr. ago

OK cool, let's conservatively say every C-suite member gets 10 million. I don't know how many of those there are, but let's conservatively say 10. That only leaves us with a funding gap of 400 million. Any idea how to close that?

I'd absolutely be in favour of that, preferably funding from several states. But I'd prefer getting that in place before losing the main source of income.

You're saying Firefox could exist, and keep up with security updates and website compatibility, without being backed by money? (Or based on a couple of donations?) Any convincing evidence that could make us trust that that's possible too?

I mean, go ahead, rethink our digital economics. While we wait for that, what do we do in the meantime?

(And of note: Mozilla itself has launched several initiatives there as well (example), but none have panned out so far.)

Their argument was not that it's good because people can use Chrome - the remark about Chrome was a sarcastic side note that is not needed to support the argument that it's not clear what the issue is with an anonymous counter.

From what I've seen PPA doesn't depend on OHTTP to do the obscuring. This page mentioned Distributed Aggregation Protocol and differential privacy, that are meant to ensure that it is literally impossible for any one party to see your data. Not just "obscured", but impossible to access.

But be sure to let us know what data about us a partner could theoretically view, and how, if you disagree.

As the other comment mentioned, it's about caring about principles in theory vs. real-world effect. He still says that you should use Firefox (with some tweaks - installing uBlock Origin is the most important one, of course) if you want the most privacy-friendly browser, but I'm sure his ruckus will have caused people to just give up and stay with Chrome too.

Many of the non-pragmatists also see this as somehow leaking information about you to advertisers though, rather than only working together with advertisers in the first place. But nobody has been able to mention what an advertiser would be able to know about me.

(Yes, yes, there are also people for whom it is only about working together with advertisers - I'm not talking about you, so no need to let us know.)

Paid for by what money?

Sorry, I wasn't talking about your answers specifically, but about aggregate results. (Also note that I think you might not get presented with all possible features when taking a single survey.)

The point is not to find the features that people would like, but the features that people would like most.

Additionally, this allows you to find a few features that have particularly high value for a subset of users, even though on average they're not that interesting. (I think Multi-Account Containers are a good example of that: too much of a hassle for many, but for some people, like me, a reason to never switch away from Firefox.)

I'm loving the immutable revolution in Linux land.

Because you'll end up with ten features that all have overwhelmingly "really want" and "want" answers, and then you still don't know which of those ten to work on first.

You mean you've taken it multiple times and kept seeing the exact same ten sets?

They're the experts in survey-taking, not in knowing what the users want - the users are experts in that. Hence the survey.

That remark was basically a reformulation of and agreeing with your "But, who am I..."

The survey design accounts for this. See https://lemm.ee/comment/13835466.

Presumably if people don't care, they don't fill in the survey. But as an extra failsafe, they've also included the feature "twice as slow as your current browser". If you rank that high, then your result can probably be discarded.

But yeah, this design has worked well for many other surveys, so presumably it'll work well for this one. They're the experts :)

This is fairly standard survey design, I believe. They're not looking to know which features are wanted in general; they want to know their relative popularity. The sets you're presented are randomised (i.e. we don't all get to see the same sets), which allows them to get a ranked list of lots of potential features, while only having to run ten survey questions per participant.

If you get a set with three features that everyone likes or dislikes at about the same level, then it doesn't really matter want you answer: they'll all end up at the top or bottom of the list, respectively. Because each of those options also get presented as part of different sets to different users, where different answers can win out.

spreading the word and contributing to code if necessary.

That's exactly what I'm calling for - keep up the good work!

I care about viability. There is no way to keep up a project like Firefox and maintain web compatibility and proper security hygiene by relying on volunteers in today's world. All those competing open source browsers only have the luxury of not caring about the financial side because they're relying on the efforts of organisations that do.

Ja daar ben ik het mee eens.