Mozilla cuts 25% of workforce. Firefox is history?

[Oaktree]

I use gmail accounts, but as we march forward in time the goal is to use it more as a honey trap, and move my more privacy minded things to VPNs and an email service like Proton Mail.

Thanks for the heads-up on Protonmail, I'd never heard of it before, I'll have to check it out. What's the catch? Obviously, it costs them $ (well, I guess it would be € since they're in Switzerland) to run their operation, how do they monetize a free email service? At least with Gmail you know going in what the "price" is.

First I've heard about FireFux. Good riddance. :dance1: What version was it up to? Probably something like 8,935,742.901521. I couldn't get that bloated tank off my PC soon enough. I tried it years ago and every time I opened it the thing wanted to update. I was on dialup back then so I think I kept it for a week. Tried it again a few years later and it was still a tank that crashed on every other webpage. Perhaps it didn't like my security package. :laughing:

Chrome is what I use...I didn't want to like it being it's Google, but it won me over. I've found FF to be somewhat crash-prone too, so I only use it for those pages that don't display correctly in Chrome.

 

[LouNY]

I'll give firefox the contrary vote. I like it just fine, I use it daily on linux with no issues. The only thing it does poorly is printing, for me. I'll use it until I have some reason not to.

Guess I'll join you in voting for FireFox, tie that with Ad Blocker which has blocked 24 ads on the site and it works good.
I don't have any crash issues and I'm running windows 10 on an old laptop with a P6000 processor.

 

[Oaktree]

tie that with Ad Blocker which has blocked 24 ads on the site and it works good.

I've been using Ghostery, in addition to being an adblocker, it also supposedly blocks tracking cookies. There is the occasional website (mostly news sites) that won't let you in with an adblocker, but for the most part it works well.

 

[Diggin It]

Thanks for the heads-up on Protonmail, I'd never heard of it before, I'll have to check it out. What's the catch? Obviously, it costs them $ (well, I guess it would be € since they're in Switzerland) to run their operation, how do they monetize a free email service?

I mentioned it a couple of pages back.

Catch? None really. The free accounts are somewhat limited and there are upgrade nags, but they're not obtrusive. It works pretty well. You can set it to notify another email account that you have mail there so you don't have to stay logged in all the time.

 

[Bullwinkle123]

Thanks for the heads-up on Protonmail, I'd never heard of it before, I'll have to check it out. What's the catch? Obviously, it costs them $ (well, I guess it would be € since they're in Switzerland) to run their operation, how do they monetize a free email service? At least with Gmail you know going in what the "price" is.

Protonmail may have a free tier, but they make money by and large by paid tiers, e.g. business tier, and if you need extras there are other tiers: ProtonMail - Pricing.

Unlike gmail, they can't read or index your mail if it comes from encrypted sources, so you won't be doing any google-like email searches through the web interface.
ProtonMail - Security Features

Of course not all email sources are encrypted, for example, if a gmail user sends you an email.

Caveat, I say all this never having used protonmail, it's just one I'm looking at. The point is pretty much to pay for privacy, so that google isn't tracking my every online purchase from every place because it saw the order receipts sent to my gmail account (as one example). The free tier probably wouldn't cut it for me, but I'd really have to decide if I was going to leave the mail on their servers or store it all in a local email client like Thunderbird.

That google receipt thing is probably the biggest wakeup call. It used to be you could use a google link and it would show you ALL YOUR PURCHASES that it has figured out by reading your email. It was ... surprising, in a bad way. Even Amazon doesn't know that much about me. And of course that's just the tip of the ice berg. Google has since changed how you can view your purchase history so it isn't so blatant that they've read, indexed, and made a complete data store about your purchase history decoupled from your email. If you use it now they put you in a gmail filter which smells completely different.

 

[Bullwinkle123]

On both the subjects of privacy and Mozilla (doing a public service here): These Are the Creepiest Gadgets of 2, According to Mozilla