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Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox web browser and other open source projects, has announced its Mozilla Information Trust Initiative. This initiative involves Mozilla "developing products, research, and communities to battle information pollution and so-called 'fake news' online."
Although the announcement from Mozilla claims that the "spread of misinformation violates nearly every tenet of the Mozilla Manifesto", this initiative does raise some concerning questions. Should a web browser vendor be actively patrolling content on the web? Is such patrolling of content harmful to a truly open web? Is this merely the first step toward web browsers censoring or controlling the dissemination of information available on the web? Would the resources expended on this initiative be better spent improving the performance and efficiency of Firefox?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @01:39AM
How much longer will Mozilla survive? I recall them signing a 5 year search deal with Yahoo at the end of 2014. So they've only got a couple more years left on that. Is Yahoo in a position to continue that deal? I'm not sure, but I'd be skeptical, especially with Firefox's share of the market down into the low single digits now. Will Google sign another deal with them? I doubt that that would happen. So I'm skeptical that they'll have a source of funding by early 2020. None of their other projects have made much of a splash. Firefox OS and Persona went nowhere. Rust and Servo seem to have stalled. Thunderbird and SeaMonkey are slowly dying off. Bugzilla is pretty much dead. Things aren't looking good for Firefox, especially with the WebExtensions stuff that's coming up. At this point I'm feeling very uneasy about Mozilla's future. I don't think that this initiative will help out at all, too!