Psst you’re literally on the fediverse right now.

Oof. I want to cheer this project on as much as anybody, but there’s no two ways around it, those terms have every appearance of being extreme and expansive. Just to copy it here for others to see:

When you post Contributions, you grant us a license (including use of your name, trademarks, and logos): By posting any Contributions, you grant us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to: use, copy, reproduce, distribute, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, store, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), and exploit your Contributions (including, without limitation, your image, name, and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, your Contributions, and to sublicense the licenses granted in this section. Our use and distribution may occur in any media formats and through any media channels.

This license includes our use of your name, company name, and franchise name, as applicable, and any of the trademarks, service marks, trade names, logos, and personal and commercial images you provide.

https://loops.video/legal/terms-of-service

But Firefox good…?

Yes! They are the most important alternative to major corporate backed browsers, helping sustain a diversified browser ecosystem so that no one company can monopolize the web, and push it toward standards that reinforce their monopoly. Google has tried to lock down the phone, app market, browsing experience that sustains their ad networks, and regularly pushes new standards that de-emphasize things like RSS, and that break ad blocking functionality to sustain their monopoly and invade privacy.

Firefox reverses or mitigates most of those and are explicitly driven by a mission of sustaining an open web with standards that don’t bend the web to corporate dominance. Google’s cheeky dont be evil mantra was in reference to exactly the things they are doing now, and it’s a little too on the nose to their actual behavior so it’s no longer a slogan of theirs, cheeky or otherwise.

huh? no one’s asking them to fix firefox, we’re asking that they just ship the latest version.

Huh to your huh? What’s significant about the latest version, other than that it includes requested fixes? This is 12 of one, a dozen of the other.

Or should I be looking somewhere other than F-Droid for Android Firefox?

FFUpdater, on F-Droid, manages updates for Firefox and other browsers. I counted nine variations of Firefox or forks of Firefox. As well as eight variations of Chromium based browsers that aren’t Chrome. So that’s 17 options.

deleted by creator

It’s safe with us

Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don’t work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.

❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don’t even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn’t work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it’s easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.

❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won’t work on stub articles, and just janky because you’re manually zapping things

❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don’t have to be done with JavaScript.

❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you’re trying to do a quick copy you’re going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.

❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it’s possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.

✅ Archive.is - works!

✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they’re probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it’s not depending on the full content being visible on the page.

✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you’re signing yourself up for.

🤷‍♀️ Brave - It works, but, it’s a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.

So unless they are willing to change their model I’ll just refuse to live.

Wait what

Not when they use the conjunction “so”. If they’d used “and”, then sure - there could be any number of reasons. Using “so” as a conjunction like that in the sentence gives it an equivalent definition of “therefore"

You’re technically correct in your narrow focus on the conjunction “so,” but you are missing the bigger picture. Yes, “so” generally functions as a logical connector like “therefore,” meaning that the first statement is directly causing the second. Their sentence could be read as “Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it’s harder for users to investigate,” which isn’t a comprehensive or precise statement on its own.

But that’s a pretty pedantic take. The point that they were making doesn’t rely on an exacting technical breakdown of the closed-source nature of Vivaldi. Rather, they’re making a general observation that closed-source projects tend to be harder to investigate. With that in mind, the use of “so” is informal and reflects a broad conclusion that aligns with general knowledge about open vs. closed-source software. Closed source inherently implies limitations on access, which, while not exhaustive in this single sentence, still holds weight in the general sense.

Why are you making it about that question in particular? There’s a lot of topics that have been raised here, notably Google’s Chromium project, the way it’s killing ad blockers, the way that other browsers also use chromium, people associated with those browsers.

In this range of subjects I’m not sure what the significance is of elevating this libre software question above everything else.

I don’t love Peter Theil by any means, and his association with any project is, to my mind, enough to completely discredit it.

But I get a little worried when it starts turning into references to the bilderberg group, and whatever that link is to NCIO.ca is just completely nuts, low evidence jumping to conclusions.

He certainly has crazy ideas, but I think it crosses the line into conspiratorial to suggest he was instructed by Germany to act as a foreign agent to sabotage the global economy.

Please show me where you explained that Vivaldi’s source code is harder to investigate because “users need to download a 2 GB repo” or a “tarball dump”.

I can see why you think this is not entirely implied. But I also don’t think that it’s incumbent on them to have laid it out with such specificity. You can read this reference to closed source in the most charitable way as alluding to the whole motley of things that render closed source projects less accessible.

It takes a little squinting, sure, but the internet is a better place when we read things charitably, and I don’t think such fine grain differences rise to the level of straight up misinformation.

I mean, there are some real whoppers around here on Lemmy. There’s no shortage of crazy people saying crazy things, I just don’t think this rises to that level.

Brave also uses chromium.

nothing is free

Plenty of things can be and are free at the point of service/point of consumption/utilization.

That’s all they need to be. And there just has to be enough willpower to do that from enough people.

Ok So who is going to give you something for free and why?

People who value the ability to do publish information, or engage in personal expression, for starters.

The best I can think of is that the explainer language used to justify the extension’s removal was just boilerplate language that got copy+pasted here because someone clicked the wrong button. But even that makes a mockery of the review process.

I think “oops clicked wrong button” would be slightly more defensible, but not by much. If they truly rejected the extension for content in it that it does not have, it’s hard to see how a human could make that mistake even accidentally. But maybe there’s something I’m missing.