You’re 100% right about Brave being scummy.

And I hope my point didn’t come across as a defensd of Brave, but rather, “how is it that Mozilla is doing this thing in a worse way than a company that is infamously disreputable?”

You haven’t heard about the Brave ads that let you slowly accumulate tokens that you can then use to tip creators or websites? I’m not saying it was a good plan, or an ethical plan, but it was… You know, something.

Unlike what Mozilla did, Brave didn’t enable this by default, but they heavily marketed it as a feature.

If Mozilla implemented some kind of tipping system, that could be interesting. Apparently, such a system already could exist under GNU Taler too.

Would you look at that, privacy preserving advertisement!

Let’s take it one step further and go really crazy with a/b testing

<a href="company_url/campaign1"><img src="funny_picture.gif"></a>

<a href="company_url/campaign2"><img src="different_picture.gif"></a>

User-unique gets collected, and then the user-unique data sent to a remote server.

Only on the remote server will this data be aggregated, or so Mozilla says.

I think a big part of the problem is that they didn’t show anyone a notification or an onboarding dialog or whatever about this feature, when it got introduced.

Right. Not only didn’t they notify anybody, but they took to Reddit to defend the decision not to notify anybody:

we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.

Which is strange, because Mozilla has no problem with popups in general.

• Is Firefox trying to be my default browser in a sneaky way?
• Mozilla sends pop-up ad overlay in Firefox
• How do I completely disable this “reminder” from popping up again?
• Firefox reminds users to backup data and verify it periodically
• Keep pesky trackers off your tail