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I mean, I understand this argument, but Mozilla is still vastly superior to the alternatives. And as others have pointed out, even if Mozilla kicks the bucket, Firefox is open source and forks exist.
Mozilla has been making a lot of questionable decisions, but they are nowhere near the point-of-no-return yet. Mozilla is still a company, and companies make corporate decisions.
AI -> ADS
AIADS
AIDS
If firefox becomes worse or starts lagging behind more, I’ll stop using it. It doesn’t seem all that useful to attempt to predict 5 years into the future Firefox’s state and therefore decide to switch away now.
Clown graphics reminds me of the alt-right trolls who hate Mozilla for their stance on diversity and freedom. They are even late to the AI party, there isn’t a single “free as in freedom” AI around, are you aware of it?
This is such a braindead fucking take. Companies should explore new technology not just take a look at the current popular opinion and run with it as absolute fact. The majority of this post is literally just using AI as a boogieman, oh no they’re creating jobs that relate to AI! The company is over!!!
They saw three roles that mentioned AI and took that as absolute proof that Mozilla has “fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads”. Grow the fuck up. The internet takes money to run, ads are an inevitability so no shit a major browser company has someone managing that aspect of their browser…
I see they have fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads
oh, but they had 9 open listings for AI!!! THat’s a THIRD of the cOmPaNy’s listings!!!
Are you not aware of how big Mozilla is? https://leadiq.com/c/mozilla/5a1d88fe2400002400628c85/employee-directory
N. America: 1.5k Asia: 468 Europe: 378 Africa: 86 South Africa:44 Oceania: 25
That alone shows how insane this take is. Mozilla dipping their toes into the water with a handful of roles doesn’t mean mozilla is focused on it alone (or even at all!). Secondly, there is a lot of value that can be taken from AI (both server and client-side), without even touching the subject of generating images/video/text/etc. Things like auto-transcriptions, summaries for the seeing impaired, etc.
But then we get these posts essentially fear mongering any perceived interest as slight as it may be into AI. Absurd.
I’m ok with them chasing ethical applications of AI. I’m more tired of their half-assed efforts to chase every shiny new object over the last few years. It feels like as a non-profit, they should be comparatively immune to chasing the same transitory trends that other shareholder-owned companies are obsessed over. But it seems like for Mozilla, they have an even shorter attention span than their corporate competitors. We’ve seen them chase after crypto, metaverse, augmented reality, Firefox OS, and now AI. All of those efforts fizzled out with a whimper.
That crypto one isn’t even a project, just that they used some service to handle crypto donations for them. It is weird though that they think they can just walk into a successful space without offering anything new and still expect to get users.
It’s a shame FirefoxOS didn’t gain enough traction.
Sure, but the only way to counter AI spam in the dead internet might be to have your own local AI model to filter junk out. And that has to be with the browser.
There is also cookie consent spam, ads and newspaper “notify me” shit that probably can only be fixed with AI.
Your take is that Mozilla doesn’t think before they adopt, except people here don’t think about what not to adopt either.
That is the first time I’ve seen South Africa listed separately from Africa
The brain-dead take is that companies should explore new technology. Without any qualifiers on it (i assume there aren’t because you didn’t add any and you applied it to ai). That’s how we’ve ended up with such a huge amount of waste, pollution and theft from small independents.
Even if we just narrow it to the field of AI, the waste and environmental damage from just this kind of tech is just absurd.
Let’s add to the downsizing ai causes, the pathetic service disruptions and inevitable decline of a company’s reputation from using such a thing and its nothing but a waste.
Only a good AI can stop a bad AI with a pun
The only thing I don’t like about Firefox (other than no PWA capability) is the ‘dark pattern’ of how when the home page loads, the first three of the six items shifts to the right after the page has started loading, and are replaced with sponsored links. So, if I go to click on YouTube when I launch Firefox, there’s a fair chance that by the time I get to click there it’ll suddenly jump over to the right and I’ll end up clicking some other link.
To me, that’s sketchy behaviour.
No PWA capability?
At least on mobile, I have multiple PWAs installed via Firefox.
Not on desktop though.
You can disable those ads though…
I don’t mind the ads. I just don’t like the ‘trickery’ of them shifting the existing shortcuts after the page has already loaded.
The only good ad is a dead ad
Check this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/ It doesn’t have super advanced capabilities of PWAs however the “pwa creators” already assume one is using Chrome etc.
Yes I’m using that. It’s fine if you only have one pc, but a pain having to set it up every time you set up another Linux install etc.
people been saying the ships been sinking since netscape. version 130 now
It has been sinking. Adtech is cyber warfare. They sold out. https://make-firefox-private-again.com/ everybody be sure to change your settings in about:config to disable that Anonym bullshit. No, we’re not the ‘product’ we’re human beings.
deleted by creator
No, worries. We will always have forks. Mozilla wins simply by having their only competitor be Google.
The problem is they have to come up with a new source of income now that it looks like Google’s payments to be the default search engine to them are illegal.
That’s like 90% of their revenue, so they’re panicking.
They could make a web server and sell support for it.
AI + Ads = AIDS.
Just say no, kids.
So they probably scrolled through a page of job ads and cherry picked a few so they could talk smack…
You can do this with any company
I looked at their jobs list and counted 35 jobs. Of that I count 9 that are AI-related and 4 that are ads-related. The list also includes a few generic jobs like “Chief of Staff”, “Client Analytics Manager”, “Staff Test Engineer” or “Fixed-Term Social Media Trainee”.
Basically at least 1/3 of the jobs they’re advertising that have a specific team mentioned are AI or ads jobs.
You can’t do this with any company. The correct number of ads people working at Firefox is 0.
First off, keep in mind the post we’re all responding to is trying to use these listings to paint the entire focus/future of this company with a single brushstroke, as that is relevant context.
I see they have fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads
that statement right there.
Basically at least 1/3 of the jobs they’re advertising that have a specific team mentioned are AI or ads jobs.
oh, but they had 9 open listings for AI!!! THat’s a THIRD of the cOmPaNy’s listings!!!
Are you not aware of how big Mozilla is? https://leadiq.com/c/mozilla/5a1d88fe2400002400628c85/employee-directory
N. America: 1.5k Asia: 468 Europe: 378 Africa: 86 South Africa:44 Oceania: 25
That alone shows how insane this take is. Mozilla dipping their toes into the water with a handful of roles doesn’t mean mozilla is focused on it alone (or even at all!). Secondly, there is a lot of value that can be taken from AI (both server and client-side), without even touching the subject of generating images/video/text/etc. Things like auto-transcriptions, summaries for the seeing impaired, etc.
But then we get these posts essentially fear mongering any perceived interest as slight as it may be into AI. Absurd.
The correct number of ads people working at Firefox is 0.
Here you are telling on yourself. Ads, whether you like it or not, are a huge piece of how the internet funds itself. As Mozilla is essentially the second largest browser after chromium-based ones, you absolutely need someone managing how ads integrate with your browser.
For example, there is a HUGE amount of people that don’t want to mess with ad blockers and such and want a browser to protect them outright, Mozilla can do this with things like privacy-preserving attribution to protect user data while still serving ads in good faith.
Yes, it is so very easy to say FUCK ads, they don’t belong on the internet… until you want to host something and suddenly the costs can get real big real fast.
And another thing, you say “correct number of ads people working at firefox is 0”
You can’t do this with any company.
by this, do you mean cherry pick open listings by a company and pretend that those open listings are indicative of not only the companies focus but also their general distribution of efforts? Because that’s all you’re doing with this comment.
0 would mean they already have all those positions filled
Why doesn’t Mozilla move to a Wikipedia model and ask for donations? I would certainly rather donate than be served ads by Firefox.
Because the CEO of Wikipedia doesn’t get paid $2.5 million a year. She only makes $450k.
hahaha, “only”
in the nonprofit world, that’s damn good for what wikipedia does
Real loser, amirite? Barely makes more than a Supreme Court Justice.
I’m OOTL, the CEO of Mozilla makes $2.5 million a year? Or am I misunderstanding it?
Damnit. I love Firefox. What is the best alternative?
Reports of its death are GREATLY exaggerated. I would suggest continuing to simply use firefox and disable any future crap you don’t prefer.
That said librewolf which is intended to be firefox with stronger privacy settings by default that said
- Default settings break more websites
- You have to get extensions manually from for instance github because it doesn’t use mozillas addon (it can probably be enabled)
- It doesn’t use the built in password manager which is in fact privacy preserving so you have to enable it or use something else
- you don’t get syncing via firefox sync which is in fact already privacy preserving so you have to enable it if you want it
- It doesn’t remember cookies without manually adding an exception to each site this is extremely obnoxious. I’m sure its configurable though
At this time it is far easier to disable the few things that may be undesired from firefox vs turning librewolf into an acceptable option.
I experience little breakage with Librewolf, and when I do, maybe 75-85% of the time it is because the site only works with Chromium. I get extensions directly through the browser, I have not enabled anything as far as I am aware. And of course you can configure the cookie clearing. I quite like it, there are (in my case at least) not many exceptions you need to add before it works quite smoothly, but of course that depends on your usage.
I use plain old firefox there are few sites that require chromium. I have noticed that enhanced tracking protection and adblock can both break some sites. Whether it makes sense to turn them off or use a different site depends on the site.
There really isn’t one. The closet would be Konqueror with KHTML and one of Mozilla’s discarded projects called Servo (which is a beta project now run by the Linux Foundation). The rest are Chrome in a wig and Safari.
FYI: KHTML became Safari that became WebKit that became Chrome.
There is also this which might be viable in the future, https://ladybird.org/
The lady bird dev is a musk fellating tech bro
EDIT: I can’t remember where I learned this, but I swear someone on lemmy had shown some tweets that were showing support for the musk era changes and were in some way endorsing web3 garbage. Take everything anyone says on the internet with a grain of salt.
There was a comment thread a month ago about the attempted refusal to use gender neutral language because that’s political: “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
It’s not the same thing, but it does match the pattern. Still take everything with some salt though.
That much I certainly remember and is easily verifiable, I wish I had a source for the musk support though.
That sucks but if it’s open source it doesn’t matter imo
Well fuck. There goes that one.
Andreas Kling? How so?
We’ll see how it goes in a few years. I did forget about it so thanks for reminding me about it.
Im using LibreWolf. Its a fork of firefox. For me its the perfect balance between compatibility and privacy friendliness.
Is it a true fork, or is it a project that follows the Firefox tree and builds a customized browser from it?
The difference being, if it’s a true fork, they have to do all their own browser engineering starting at the time it was forked off. That sounds like a monumental effort.
Project fork
Strange, because they say it’s a “custom version” of Firefox. That normally means it’s a custom build, not a true fork.
I started using librewolf about a month ago but I’ve (unfortunately) switched back to Firefox because of multiple compatibility issues.
Edit: I should add that I switched from Firefox to Fennec (a fork of Firefox) on my phone and that has been working fine.
Someone should ship librewolf with less stupid defaults
They do, its called Firefox.
Which is what I suggested they continue to use but for those who are concerned about privacy by default I would still suggest something in between.
Forks of it.
Fireforks
I love it too. No chance I’m changing any time soon
Google Chrome! It’s nice that it syncs with my existing Google account instead of needing a new one, plus it has updates built in!
And it blocks adblockers! I can’t know what to spend my money on without ads!
My copy hasn’t started doing that
Are you paid by Google? That’s what we’re trying to escape by using Firefox.
I’m gonna go with failed attempt at satire.
Shit, i ruined the joke
Not like anyone else is reading it as satire. If everyone misses the point, that’s on the writer.
As I notice this comment is satirical, unlike the (currently) 49 plebeian downvoters, I feel my massive genius brain undulating and pressing upon my skull.
🤮
All browsers are either based on Chrome or Firefox. There’s no alternative.
All browsers are either based on KHTML or Netscape. There’s no alternative.
You see that’s a sort of weird way of looking at it?
Well, there’s Chromium and then there’s Chrome.
Doesn’t Safari use a different codebase? It’s not available on non-Apple platforms, but it’s good to know that there are still engineers working on a different codebase.
Chrome is definitely a fork of Safari in a way. Or more accurately, Blink is a fork of Webkit.
So really, all modern browsers are either forks of KHTML / KJS or are based on the Mozilla codebase. But, at least right now, there are 3 separate engineering teams working on 3 independent codebases. Which hopefully will mitigate some of the issues you get when one company completely controls a software “ecosystem”.
A few days ago there was a thread that was talking about fingerprinting.
I started playing with cover your tracks by the EFF.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
It turns out that Firefox was routing all my browser DNS traffic around my pi-hole. (It is called DNS over HTTP or DOH)
I had no clue.
That’s supposed to keep you from being monitored by bad actors over public Wi-Fi, iirc.
Makes sense. It really needs to be a network dependent setting.
My user.js has over 400 lines now and is almost the same as Arkenfox’ user.js.
Mozilla has been a sinking ship for decades now.
There’s a reason Chrome was able to steal the alt browser market from Mozilla at a time when even laymen understood that IE was awful - Mozilla stopped innovating the second they were winning. They had tabs! What more could you want?
Chrome came along at a time when browser performance wasn’t a focus, when JavaScript meant websites were slow, and said “fuck that, let’s make it fast”. Say what you will about Chrome or JS, Google was on to something and the modern web today is 95% thanks to Chrome pushing things forward.
Everyone jumped to Chrome and Mozilla fucked around for literally years before they got the memo that actually browser performance matters. They were once the best browser tools on the market until once again Chrome pushed the envelope, and once again developers switched while Mozilla sat back and did nothing.
Mozilla meandered back and forth, releasing shitty products nobody wanted (like pocket and send) instead of focusing on the most important thing: the browser.
Yet they’re somehow still here, hobbling along, doing fuck knows what instead of making a better browser and innovating to beat Chrome.
Stopped innovating? Just because the user interface didn’t change much? They’ve contributed a ton to web api’s and the open web in general. They also contributed massively to rust, and private / secure browsing standards. It has absolutely not been left to languish. Now I prefer some other UI’s but you won’t catch me claiming Mozilla ceased innovation.
They’ve also contributed in general to JavaScript. So yeah, Google definitely pushed the envelope there, but Mozilla didn’t just watch it all happen. Also, factor in that they were key contributors to web assembly.
Yes they contributed a lot to web standards, bit they didn’t contribute to actual user experience which is why people install a web browser in the first place.
Mozilla consistently gets complacent.
That seems paradoxical to me. Maybe you mean user interface, but those standards are a massive part of experience. How media loads, caches, and renders. How cross site resources work. How DNS works. Etc. And just think of all their massive contributions to CSS and animations. I mean they play a pretty big part in user experience.
Not to mention MDN, for which many of us can be thankful alone.
I think what the commenter is saying is that’s great but where was that in their own browser at the time? Google was kicking ass moving browsers forward it’s great Mozilla contributed the scenes but why not take that and at least have made it work in their own browser.
I think the point is that the average web user doesn’t even know about things like caching, rendering, CSS, DNS, etc., let alone care. It’s awesome that Mozilla contributes to those things, but for 95% of the user base, unless it makes itself readily apparent in the browser itself, it might as well not exist to them.
Ok. Now pretend you’re me, a normal person who doesn’t even know what Rust is.
How has Firefox improved for me? The browser is clearly an inferior product.
Chrome came along at a time when browser performance wasn’t a focus, when JavaScript meant websites were slow, and said “fuck that, let’s make it fast”. Say what you will about Chrome or JS, Google was on to something and the modern web today is 95% thanks to Chrome pushing things forward.
That’s where the web started getting worse.
Yeah.
Everything gets made for IE and people scream like its the end of life on the planet, and still ridicule it to this day.
Everything gets made for Chrome and people cant slobbing knob over how glorious and great it is, and how good its been for everything, and blah blah blah.
Chrome is worse than IE ever was.
Mozilla was doomed from the start.
Netscape Inc. wanted to sell browsers eventually, which makes sense. It’s product which requires a massive amount of engineering effort. But, when Microsoft started tying IE to Windows and giving it away free, there was no way that Netscape could actually make any sales. The bigger reason their business was crushed was that Microsoft was also giving away their web server (IIS) away for free, while Netscape was charging for theirs.
Some kids today are too young to know that Microsoft was sued by the US government over this and lost the case (along with what was very likely Microsoft falsifying evidence). But, then Bush Jr. took office and the government basically took a case they had won and effectively threw out the win.
When it was clear that Netscape was going to fail as a business they open-sourced the browser either as an act of charity or spite. The problem is that it’s still a massive and expensive project to build a web browser. That’s especially true in a world where standards keep evolving and the browser has to keep having new features added.
Since making a browser was so expensive, they needed financial support, and eventually that came from Google. At first Google just wanted Firefox to exist as a hedge so that Microsoft wouldn’t dominate the browser market. But, once Google came out with Chrome it was both a way to keep directing traffic to Google search, and a way to pretend they don’t have a monopoly on browsers.
But, if 90% of the funding of your project comes from Google, there are some obvious lines you can’t cross. So, Mozilla has to keep doing this dance where they make a browser that competes with Chrome, but one that doesn’t cross certain lines that would make Google mad and result in them shutting off the funding.
Google would shut off the funding to Firefox in a heartbeat if they took ad blocking and privacy too seriously. But, Google doesn’t care too much if Mozilla messes around with AI or ads.
I never switched to Chrome and never really noticed any performance issues. If a page took half a second or a second to render, it was an absolute non issue to me.
The problem is that browsers aren’t profitable. Mozilla need a revenue source other than donations, and that’s why they’re trying to make another product that’ll stick. They need to make money somehow. If Google stops paying them because of the antitrust lawsuit, Mozilla will probably disappear in a few months.
Browsers are profitable, Mozilla only exists because of the money the browser brings in.
Yes, it’s true that the money is currently coming from Google but only because Google is willing to pay more than other search providers. If Google stopped paying, someone else would pay instead.
To put it another way, Google isn’t forking out millions to Mozilla out of the goodness of its heart
EDIT: to everyone down voting this, please explain to me why Google also pays Apple an obscene amount of money to be the default search engine on iOS if there’s no competition in this space?
No.
Google pays to keep its monopoly on search.
Chrome, Android, etc. all are just tools to funnel views on their ads.
If Mozilla would fold, Google would have a monopoly on browsers, which could cause problems for them. So they finance fake competition.
No other company could pay even close to that amount of money.
Google pays to keep it’s monopoly on search
Agreed.
Google pays literally tens of billions to make sure they’re the default search engine across everything - including the likes of iOS.
Why is it that when Google pays Apple hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s because they’re enforcing their search monopoly, but when they pay Mozilla a fraction of that, it’s because Mozilla would have no way of staying afloat otherwise?
Why is Google paying apple so much if nobody else could afford it?
Make it make sense.
Because that way they avoid any competition.
Thing is, businesses like Google’s ads are not linear. If you can track 90% of people 90% of the time, your ads are much much more valuable to advertisers than a company that only tracks 70% of the people 90% of the time. So it makes sense to create a moat by literally shitting money on everyone around you.
Think about the opposite: if Apple would switch to DDG by default, most people would leave it at that. And that would mean, a significant chunk of the US search traffic is gone. Europe and the rest of the world are not that apple-heavy, but Apple users are rich power users (on average), these are extremely valuable.
I think you’re missing the point here. You’re claiming Google only pays Mozilla to have a competitor, yet they also pay apple even more money for the same thing in an area they’re just competing.
The point is that there is competition in the default browser search space, it’s just that Google pays more than anyone else.
If Google stopped paying Mozilla tomorrow, someone else would pay them for the same default search engine spot. It might not be as much, but it would still be a significant amount.
A few years ago it was Yahoo that footed the bill.
if Google stopped paying, someone else would pay instead.
Have we all forgotten that time period when Yahoo! was the default search provider in Firefox?
Judging by the replies and down votes, yes we have.
Didn’t expect to see Lemmy defending privacy raping mega corp Google today…
You can disapprove of their privacy practices while acknowledging its innovations. There’s a reason Chrome got a stranglehold on the market.
Although Google making Chrome almost certainly had a part in it. For a while, you couldn’t use Google without a “try our new Chrome browser!” pop up in the corner, and there aren’t many who don’t use Google.
Firefox doesn’t have the same advertising reach, and neither do they have the reputation of Google, as a big company to help them in the eyes of laymen. Basically everyone’s heard of Google, but less so Mozilla. You’d may as well ask them to install Konqueror, or Netscape for all the good that it would do.
Exactly. Google had the existing userbase of – and free advertising to – every single person who visited google.com. All it took was a little banner saying “Get Chrome! It’s free and better!”
That, combined with having billions of dollars to throw at making Chrome successful, of course they became the #1 browser.
The Firefox team has never had the funding they really need to compete with Chrome. I see the AI and ad push to be a desperate attempt at securing enough funding to stay relevant. It’s really sad to see.
As long as Firefox lets me turn off any unwanted ad or AI integration, I will keep using them, but damn I hope they secure some funding and get their shit together before they lose the majority of their userbase.
Hey can we save the word rape for actually important shit instead of privacy concerns, thanks.
Wooooords have meeeeeanings, pleeeeeease don’t misuse them for emphasis.
Using metaphors is perfectly legitimate.
A broad statement in response to a specific complaint. Not every metaphor is “perfectly legitimate”
Why is this metaphor different from others? From my point of view, it does just what you stated - adds emphasis. Nothing less, nothing more. To do that with a negative statement, you need a word with a negative meaning, so “rape” works well.
Thinking about it more, it’s a word that can be triggering for someone, because of the ugly meaning. But the ugliness of the meaning is also what makes it suitable for the metaphor. We can say the word, just like we can use words like “dying”, “torture” or religious stuff like “hell”, “heaven”, “godly” - it makes for effective metaphors, but I can see how someone could be offended.
I think performance was part of Chrome’s success, but there was also all the memes in 2010 about installing chrome to replace IE, and the ads that Google ran on their search page. I don’t think Pocket came out until Firefox was already deep into the decline. I do think Chrome held onto those users because of their ram efficiency at the time, and nice features like built-in translate. Now, users can’t switch because the web depends on Chrome, just like back in the IE days.
I think performance was part of Chrome’s success
I don’t think I fully believe that, normies don’t care about how fast a page loads and the proof of that is that they were using IE for so long.
Now, users can’t switch because the web depends on Chrome, just like back in the IE days.
What? I’ve been using FF since 2006, or something like that, how is the web dependent on chrome?
It’s one factor among several. Another large factor is that Chrome was easier to deploy and manage in a corporate environment for many years. Really until Edge came out a whole lot of people had it foisted on them via their IT department at work, I’m sure many still do but Edge has definitely changed things and made that less common since it gets included with the OS. Combined with Google constantly pushing it everywhere these workers were guaranteed to encounter the option to download it at home even if they didn’t explicitly seek it out, and since they already used it at work it wasn’t a scary download it was familiar and made by that great company Google that everyone is so impressed by. They click the download and that’s that, they don’t even know Firefox is an option.
That’s for sure, my company doesn’t even allow FF
Despite my above rant, I still use Firefox as my primary browser. The web works absolutely fine on it. I think I’ve encountered one site that required chrome to work correctly in the last year and that’s a huge improvement over where we were back in the early 2000’s with IE.
No, there’s other reasons why people don’t switch, compatibility is not the issue.
I have to switch to chromium often, unfortunately. Various websites are untested with Firefox, and many apps such as Teams are not compatible with FF. Probably better than the early 2000’s but still really bad.
I use teams on Firefox and haven’t encountered any issues. Admittedly I only use it occasionally, as I do mainly use the desktop app.
I think they added some compatibility in the past year or so but I had issues detecting my microphone on Linux just 2 weeks ago. I’ve had some smaller ecommerce sites fail to load properly on Firefox/Librewolf, Red Hat’s Training website doesn’t work on Firefox, and also some features on apps like Google Meet and Miro are unavailable. It’s nothing that makes firefox unusable, and I can always open up ungoogled chromium when needed, but it is a serious issue for browser diversity and competition that the web has defaulted to chrome now.
At least it’s notable when a website doesn’t work correctly in Firefox rather than being a frequent annoyance
In the past i switched to Firefox for a few days, and the memory usage of google (gmail, calendar) was enough to make me switch back.
This time i did thunderbird too. The memory usage is still bad, but i was able to stay… for now.
Decades? Slowest sinking ship in history.
The two slowest trends in tech: the fall of Mozilla and the rise of Linux
There’s a reason Chrome was able to steal the alt browser market from Mozilla at a time when even laymen understood that IE was awful - Mozilla stopped innovating the second they were winning. They had tabs! What more could you want?
That’s part of the story, but even more important is that they shoved it down everyone’s throat.
