Yea, it does seem weird… But money doesn’t lie. Its very easy to search online how Mozilla has enough money to lay for all their weird projects.

They even cost cut their nonprofit products like Firefox and Thunderbird so they have more money to burn on other hobbies.

They’re like a giant corporate MLM where users are encouraged to sell “privacy” to their friends and the profits syphon up to Mozilla where they cash out to google.

I personally think is disingenuous to recommend something to casual users who are used to solving problems with money.

But the issue here is it is usually Firefox advertising themselves to customers so that they can have a subset of those customers actually use google.

They market themselves as a “download and be private” which interests the casual user who hears about how invasive Facebook and google is online and is looking for a nontechnical fix. This small subset of users on Firefox are what funds Mozilla to use googles money to fund their hobbies.

Yes, people should educate themselves, but I personally think it’s unethical for Mozilla to fund for-profit businesses that they control by exploiting this small, uninformed subset of their userbase and it makes it hard for me to trust them based on how they justify their means to an end.

And no, fuck brave, I’m for educating people on how the internet works and to educate themselves if they want privacy or security instead of trusting massive corporations.

Its more so the principle. Many people that download Firefox are doing so to escape google, and if they are not born as cyber security experts they may download Firefox and continue with no real improvement to their privacy.

Secondly, the main thing you should look for is where a company gets its funding. If Mozilla gets almost 100% of its funding through google… How much do you really expect them to push back against the data collection of their userbase?

I rank Mozilla with the likes of ExpressVPN, NordVPN, etc. They preach privacy and security against surveillance… But its just theatre to make money in specific demographics.

Coming from a company the preaches about privacy and rates privacy respecting businesses, while collecting telemetry and accepting 500M/ year to from google to promote their search engine… I’ll take this as the puff up piece that is is.