… And damm it feels good! Before starting this step, I had to migrate to a better browser that respects privacy (Brave, because🖕Firefox, I mean Mozilla at this point doesn’t even want you to be safe on the web anymore!) And a better “Google-style” ecosystem (Proton is the best they have an email service, a calendar, a password manager and the holy drive).
The last step was YouTube. How to do without a Google account? Well, thanks to Piped + Yattee, the best combo I had a hard time finding. For those who do not know, Yattee is a great app that is an interface for Piped on Apple devices, besides, do you consider Apple to be respectful of privacy? Me yes 👍
In short, today I am the happiest of men 🤩. If you wonder which search engine I use instead of Google, it’s Qwant, because, even if they use Bing’s API like DuckDuckGo, they work on their own index and they even start putting a little AI in their search engine, which doesn’t tell the user to eat non-toxic glue of course 😉. They also made an excellent redesign.
It’s a bit of a dog whistle, I just don’t entirely understand for what yet. Basically you’re better off not asking and going on with your life.
A charitable answer is, however, that a central source of income for Mozilla is Google paying them to remain their default search engine. Mozilla is hesitant to truly attack Google, as it would be biting the hand that feeds it.
More importantly though, Mozilla has a female chairwoman. A lot of tech savvy people would rather stick with Brave, whose CEO they can relate to.
Woaw… If that’s a thing, I really feel sorry for them :/
Yikes, that last paragraph.
I find it hard to believe anyone can have such an incredibly clairvoyant understanding of the tech industry that they manage to see Mozilla as an evil megacorporation, yet at the same time failing to see any fundamental problem with Brave.
It could be a lot of things going on other than just sexism, but I cannot help but feel like any time a woman takes the lead in an open source organization a bunch of often vague but always hateful discourse follows in open source forums. Most people are of course fine, but a toxic minority will usually manage to get some weird discourse going that spreads to anyone taking whatever they spew on face value.
Often it can be hard to distinguish valid criticism from less than valid criticism, and in the case of big organizations there is always valid critiques to be made, so I don’t blame people all that much for falling for it. Still, being a happy user of both GNOME and Mozilla products for more than a decade, it tickles me just how much hatred these projects receive online.
That’s my five cents anyway.