Edit: How did I miss their #1 promise to shift even more into being an Ad Company

While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising…

Kind of ironic that Raffi Krikorian is both

• The new chair of Mozilla.ai, a $30 million project geared towards advancing environmentally unfriendly slop
• The CTO of Emerson Collective, a “philanthropic” corporation that allegedly cares about the environment

Raffi, if you’re reading this, the best thing you could do for both Firefox and the environment is to pocket your entire salary, wind down your division, and return the remainder of the $30m to Mozilla for development of Firefox.

If you missed it, Mozilla outsourced the production of this logo to a professional design firm. The previous logo redesign was crowdsourced, with fans voting on their favorite design. It feels rather metaphorical, doesn’t it…

Edit: How did I miss their #1 promise to shift even more into being an Ad Company

While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising…

Kind of ironic that Raffi Krikorian is both

• The new chair of Mozilla.ai, a $30 million project geared towards advancing environmentally unfriendly slop
• The CTO of Emerson Collective, a “philanthropic” corporation that allegedly cares about the environment

Raffi, if you’re reading this, the best thing you could do for both Firefox and the environment is to pocket your entire salary, wind down your division (and if you must lay off employees, let them pocket theirs!), and return the remainder of the $30m to Mozilla for development of Firefox.

If you think this is worthy of sharing, please, feel free to share it! Just mention me so I can take a look :)

Frustratingly, doing a search on that Changelog page for sources is mostly full of stuff not relevant to my search.

I did find a different post on Lemmy that talks about it, though. This post is incredibly thorough, and does an excellent job of undoing Kagi’s attempt to memory-hole the information about which sources they use.

This makes it all the more frustrating that Vlad refuses to re-add them, instead asking to know why we would care. Here’s a link to that conversation, which is on a platform controlled by Vlad, which appears to be resistant to archiving services that attempt to fetch those particular comments. Also for posterity:

slamor
Oct 27, 2024
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

There is really no proper information about search sources. We need to know what resources are used and at what rate.

Please make a more detailed and clear edit.

Vlad
Oct 29, 2024
[@]slamor Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need.

slamor
Nov 2, 2024
[@]Vlad why not?

Searching through kagi.com for “Yandex” yields a lot of dead links. The one living link is the Changelog, which says they added Yandex to their image search, back in December 2024… But that’s hardly a revelation. The changelog doesn’t go back very far either, AFAIK

As for the other links: Google says these links used to contain it the word, but I don’t know why. Maybe this one was for raised sites, maybe it was for lowered sites, which would at least give a little insight into whether users loved or hated the domain…

url: https://europe-west2.kagi.com/stats?sd=asc&st=percentage
text: yandex.com. zlibrary.to. androidcentral.com. answer-all.com. baijiahao.baidu.com. cbc.ca. developer.apple.com. eightify.app. github.getafreenode.com. gitmemory …

Another result seems to suggest Yandex Images served up a photo of Steve Jobs in a demo search, but that is no longer the case. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

url: https://kagi.com/images?q=steve+jobs
text: 564 x 318 yandex.ru. 20 Steve Jobs Quotes: Wisdom from the Apple Co-Founder 20 Steve Jobs Quotes: Wisdom from the Apple Co-Founder. 696 x 418 cioviews.com. 75 …

Kagi has been criticized for removing their list of partners - originally, they admitted to partnering with Yandex, but they recently hid that partnership after receiving backlash. I’m not sure if the changelog will reflect that information, but I am curious to check now.

One potential workaround, if you’re okay with using extra software, is making a script with AutoHotKey to intercept Ctrl+Alt+X and fire a different key combo in its stead.

This doesn’t fix the issue with the Firefox but, you know, it’s something.

Firefox will upgrade page loads to HTTPS and gracefully fall back to HTTP if that does not succeed. This behavior is known as HTTPS-First.

Wasn’t this already the case? For a while?! I don’t know whether this means HTTPS sites will load more reliably, or HTTP sites will.

AI Chatbot access is now being gradually rolled out to all users.

Hooray

To use this optional feature, choose AI Chatbot from the sidebar

Oh it’s migrated to be even more prominent now

or from Firefox Labs

… Despite still being labeled experimental

Pro tip: Long-clicking the Back button gives you a mini history to choose from. It works on the desktop and on mobile Firefox too, in the overflow menu’s Back button.

Not quite the same as this fix, but this knowledge has saved me from hunting through browsing history a few times.

Mozilla FakeSpot sells your private data (profile, location, browsing and search history) to advertising companies.

https://lemm.ee/comment/11216210

And when Mozilla released the Orbit AI assistant, they linked to FakeSpot for some reason…

Edit 2

The official Deepfake Detector privacy policy is missing from the FakeSpot website. This is the one Mozilla links from their extension policy.

Edit

Firefox may be bad in many ways, but the biggest alternatives are generally worse. There are some reasonably good forks like Zen and LibreWolf, but if you have the wherewithal to patch Firefox’s user.js on a desktop, you’ll probably be better off with a patched Firefox.

https://lemmy.world/post/4064988

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-09-24-harden-firefox-with-arkenfox.html

Your writing is better than serviceable, I just had a brain fart while reading it

I thought you said “What’s next, a few ads in the URL bar?” …because Mozilla has put a few ads in the URL bar.

Kind of funny they list their built-in, paid VPN as a positive feature and not a negative. Maybe they were running out of good things to say about… Themselves.

Granted, Mozilla also shot themselves in the foot by saying Firefox was better for not blocking ads by default, but that’s a different story for a different day

Brave still does include ads enabled by default. You need to disable sponsored images in the New Tab page.

News feeds seem to be a symptom of enshittifiaction. At least you can still get a functional and minimalist homepage on Firefox by disabling it.

Remember Google Now, that “homepage for you” on Android that showed you the weather, reminders, calendar events, etc… But eventually Google removed all the functionality and replaced it with an infinite feed of news slop.

Slop. Feed. Rather synonymous.

YouTube memory leak issues allegedly fixed.

It’s strange to me that one of the most popular requests on Mozilla Connect is Startpage as a default search engine, but Mozilla opted for Ecosia.

I have nothing against Ecosia in theory, but it’s notable that the company will only plant trees based on clicked advertisements, and the privacy policy isn’t quite as great as Mozilla has suggested in its promotional material.

So we agree Mozilla only chose to promote Big Tech options.