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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 11:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 7eb4b3a6838dfa20f824d31556da50be
http://techrights.org/videos/librewolf-and-tlgs.webm
Summary: The state of the Internet isn’t great, but it’s a lot worse when it comes to the Web; it became a hub of spying and malicious activity, so in this video I explain why we’re moving away from Firefox and, where possible, embrace gemini:// as well
THE World Wide Web is not in a healthy state. The committee which controls the World Wide Web is stacked by monopolies. It has gone on for about a decade already and years ago they added DRM (EME) on top of it. Mozilla too went along with that agenda…
In the video above I mostly discuss why I’m giving up on Mozilla; the ‘last straw’ or the breaking point was some time this month and it isn’t limited to Mozilla’s latest controversial ambition. It’s trying to relay (or grab) people’s mail (links [1-3] at the bottom). So at the start of the week both Ryan and I started documenting some essential facts and more of us in IRC started moving from Firefox to something else. We don’t typically use Firefox as a primary Web browser regardless, but why ever use it if Firefox is controlled by surveillance ogres?
For that matter, I am truly concerned about Thunderbird, as the video above explains. It’s being gutted. There are no forks of it, so Mozilla still controls (or harms) millions of existing Thunderbird users (along with extension developers). Mozilla’s CEO, the Chef and Baker, didn’t think too highly of Thunderbird. She actually dismissed if not blasted Thunderbird about a decade back. She insinuated that people moving to Gmail is OK (spoiler: Google’s money pays her over 3 million dollars a year). She attacked the very concept of decentralised E-mail. Gmail is antithetical to it. She does not (or does not wish to) understand Thunderbird users.
The way I see it, today’s Mozilla milks the “goodwill ambassador” status of Firefox (which the community advocated, free of charge, for the benefit of Mozilla Corporation) in the same way frauds and charlatans who run the Linux Foundation milk "Linux" (which they do not even use!!!) to death…
Why would you trust Mozilla with your E-mail? Of with your passwords? Of your browsing history? It handles bugs (by taking data from users), sure, but that’s for the technical staff, not the sales executives at Mozilla. They hired from companies like Facebook and the Board includes Microsoft (no wonder Mozilla increasingly acts like Microsoft’s slave [1, 2, 3]). The company is circling down the drain and now it (mis)uses Firefox as a brand to entice you to give them DNS queries (through partners), Internet traffic (VPN), and even your emails (Mozilla is spying on people; don’t be misled by the PR). I’ve had enough!
> “One noteworthy downside is that by default LibreWolf is very strict — even too strict by “Libre” standards — to the point of being unusable for most people.”
Both my wife and I have migrated our data from Firefox to LibreWolf. Earlier today I nearly completed the migration and Ryan posted some tips last night [4]; applicable only for newer versions of Firefox, i.e. not the ESR in Debian (it lacks export option for passwords, for instance). One noteworthy downside is that by default LibreWolf is very strict — even too strict by “Libre” standards — to the point of being unusable for most people. And it defaults to a Microsoft 'proxy' for search. Maybe we’ll do a HowTo related to this one day. Moreover, LibreWolf pretends to be “FirefoxDesktop on Windows” (or something to that effect) even when you use it on GNU/Linux, which means that Web statistics will inevitably give a false impression of Microsoft Windows being bigger than it actually is (not a new problem).
I get to the main point of the video only in the last 5 minutes or so (the sound quality will improve as we adapt to a new workflow). One hour before recording the video we found another new encouraging development in Gemini Space (or Geminispace).
“After some testing by my friends and talking to René,” said the announcement around 1PM, “I’m excited to share my new search provider for the Gemini protocol, TLGS” (already quite good and accessible at gemini://tlgs.one).
So far, based on some tests (e.g. searches about Techrights and Mozilla in the video above), the TLGS capsule/search engine works better than the other (existing) ones…
Based on this page, TLGS Search has indexed (for search) 80,000 pages so far…
it’s a great start!
> “‘Fixing’ the World Wide Web is too ambitious an aspiration because once something enters the formal specifications/standards it’s very difficult to undo.”
That’s quite a lot and it doesn’t include much cruft.
We hope that a bunch of notable scandals, both large and small, will encourage people to reassess their choice of Web browsers and maybe explore a move to Gemini. There’s already a lot of good material there. No spying, no advertising, no affiliate marketing in links. Totally Legit Gemini Search (TLGS), as per its site, “is an experimental search engine for contents served over the Gemini Protocol. It crawls and indexes textual contents that it encounters in the Geminispace. And provides a [sic] interface for people to look for what they need. The interface is heavly [sic] inspired by GUS and geminispace.info.”
The World Wide Web was great in the 1990s. Then it was abused by Microsoft, it sort of recovered for a while (owing largely to Firefox), but now it seems beyond redemption. ‘Fixing’ the World Wide Web is too ambitious an aspiration because once something enters the formal specifications/standards it’s very difficult to undo. Tim Berners-Lee had a chance to say “No!” to DRM and other nasty stuff. But he missed that chance, wilfully… █
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