Mozilla Corrupta

It appears that a lot of the problems start with Mozilla being intent on refusing to call the ads what they are, while insisting the changes are somehow a great innovation in browsing. No, Mozilla, they are ads, and your refusal to call a shovel a shovel taints you with the morals of the businessman and the executive. What, did I hear that you are tired of being a window into the web? Then why don't you pass off Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey and your other projects to another open-source organization. Then you can go your own way, selling condos or pasties or plastic doodads. Talking like you do, Mozilla, makes you sound like a mob of bored executives … the kind that make good television shows or cable channels worse … the kind that need to be fired in order to save the browser from further corruption.

The kind of rhetoric Mozilla's using is the sort you'd expect from a cable company, which love to insist that the new $5 monthly fee on your bill isn't to make money, it's to improve the customer experience. Mozilla is a nonprofit organization, and for more than seven years around 85% of their funding has come from Google for being the browser's default search engine. While most people wouldn't fault them for wanting to have a broader revenue stream, refusing to call a spade a spade clearly isn't helping the sales pitch.