Appreciating our friend in the browser non-business

Firefox turned ten years old last November, and celebrated the occasion with a new version (33.1) that featured a much-welcomed developer edition. It also featured a "forget" button that lets you backspace through time, blowing away history, cookies and open tabs: one more privacy tool for the shed.

Those were two among many new moves by Mozilla, Firefox's parent, all siding with individuals leaning against two prevailing winds that have blown across the online world for at least a decade.

The first is centralization.

Ten years ago we were still in what Tantek Çelik calls "the heyday of the independent Web." Back then it was easy to homestead on the Net's frontier with your own domain, site, blog, email and so on. "We all assumed that it was sort of our inevitable destiny that the Web was open, the Internet was open, everyone had their own identity", Tantek says. Now most of us live and work in feudal fiefdoms: the Kingdom of Google, the Duchy of Facebook, the Empire of Apple, the Electorate of Amazon, the Principality of Twitter. That we can travel between these castles does not diminish our dependent stature.

On mobile devices we also live inside the castles of carriers, plus every app's own walled garden inside those castles. This is very different from the personal computing world, where the Net and the Web are the infrastructural contexts. The Net by nature (its base protocols) has no national boundaries, no tariffs, no "roaming" between countries and carrier networks. The Web by nature is all about links. But apps aren't about links. They are silos by design. Worse, we don't acquire them in the open marketplace, but  through company stores inside Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The second is surveillance.

We are watched constantly on the commercial Net: in our browsers, though our mobile devices, and now by our cars as well. Our overlords rationalize surveillance with five assumptions:

1. People can be better known by machines than by themselves
2. People are always looking to buy something
3. The best form of advertising is the most personalized
4. Secretly following people is good for business, law enforcement, government and other institutional graces of civilization
5. Nobody's stopping us, so it must be okay
   

We now have massive data centers devoted to crunching data gathered about us, and gurging billions (trillions?) of ads back at us everywhere, whether we like it or not, with utter disregard for collateral damage in the form of ill will and waste levels of 99% and up.

For all the talk about being "conversational," and "personal", most marketing online today is programmatic. In other words, done by robotic algorithms. Fraud is also rampant and rarely discussed, despite being obvious and huge. Meanwhile, on the lack-of-demand side of our non-relationships with advertising machinery, nearly all of us lie and hide to to protect our privacy online.

The massively clear market message sent by ad blocking(144 million people do it, including 41% of 18-29-year-olds) is also dismissed by the advertising industry, which would have us believe that blocking surveillance (aka tracking) would "break the Web". They forget that both advertising and the Web got along fine without surveillance before the craze started.

No other name-brand entity, with hundreds of millions of users already, is in a better position than Mozilla to help us fight against all this. Mozilla makes the only popular browser that is open source, uncompromised by commercial parentage, and on the side of the individual. Yes, the company does get major funding from Google, but it also has an extreme need to differentiate Firefox from Chrome. Guiding that differentiation are who they work for — you and me — and with.