15 ms·

Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

487 points by mattweinberg 3y ago

nbar1 3y ago
I think this is a great acquisition, but I'm curious where this may give Mozilla an advantage. Do they plan on baking this into Firefox, and if so, to what degree are we willing to let the browser govern the content?
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  It feels like this business has no real "moat." But I think for once that's not really a problem: I would hope Google decides they need to add comparable functionality to a browser! And then maybe it can begin expanding for more general use... detecting likelihood of any content being artificial... hmm I'm scared again.
  - nailer 3y ago
    I imagine the moat is an ML model of inauthentic reviews. Getting training data for known inauthentic and known authentic reviews is difficult.
- cxr 3y ago
  How can this strike you as a great acquisition if you aren't sure what the advantage is?
  - nbar1 3y ago
    FakeSpot will benefit from a parent company like Mozilla.
    - cxr 3y ago
      By that standard, I could call you buying a $100 Amazon gift card and mailing it to me a great acquisition.
jmann99999 3y ago
I used Fakespot a few years ago. It seemed to work well at that time. I switched computers and didn't go back to it (probably out of laziness). Does the HN community still view it as a trusted source to make better buying decisions?
- jkestner 3y ago
  I use it just about any time I'm buying something on Amazon that isn't from a trusted brand's store.
  - jmann99999 3y ago
    Thanks for that! A few days ago I looked at returning to it but wondered if it had become gamed. I appreciate it.
PaulHoule 3y ago
Normally I'd say... "They'd better write it in the bylaws that Mozilla isn't allowed to buy any more companies" but a system for identifying fake content on the web might (unlike all the other Mozilla acquisitions such as the thoroughly pizzled Pocket) improve the web browsing experience.
- blowski 3y ago
  I agree with your comment, but I’m curious what “pizzled” means.
  - Logans_Run 3y ago
    NSFW definition (depending on I.T. policies) [1] Pizzle is a Middle English word for penis, derived from Low German pesel or Flemish Dutch pezel, diminutive of pees, meaning 'sinew'. The word is used today to signify the penis of an animal, chiefly in Australia and New Zealand. [2] Interestingly, it is used in medical slang (Dictionary of medical slang -Jacob Edward) and it is defined as exhausted, or to its point: ~ Pizzle chewer ... A female who relieves a male of his phallic tension by fondling the instrument in her mouth. ~ Pizzle-grinder ... 1. A butcher. 2. A prostitute. ~ Pizzle honker ... A prostitute who satisfies her patrons by manual friction. ~ Pizzle warmer . . . The pudendum muliebre, esp. the vagina. ~ Pizzled . . . Exhausted physically or mentally. So I guess you could say that Pocket is a Fizzled[3] Pizzle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzle [2] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166295/etymology-and-meaning-of-the-word-pizzled https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166295/etymology... [3] Fizzle: To finish slowly in a way that is disappointing or has become less interesting & There is often an initial indication of interest, but then it fizzles out and no cash materialises. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fizzle https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fizzle
    - ehPReth 3y ago
      I suppose in this case it means "fucked Pocket"
    - JohnFen 3y ago
tivert 3y ago
Wow, Mozilla is acquiring a side-project that's actually useful? Color me pleased. Beats wasting time on an a commodity VPN service.
- jdiff 3y ago
  Their VPN is just reselling someone else's service, minimal effort invested while opening a mainstream service that actually provides an income stream. Seems like a solid strategy to me.
  - dm_me_dogs 3y ago
    It also helps that the service they're re-selling is actually good. (Mullvad, if you weren't aware)
    - unethical_ban 3y ago
      Firefox VPN is great for beginners, but it assumes too much and isn't flexible enough for power users. I had to cancel it because "Allow LAN connections" didn't base itself off my local subnet, but on RFC1918. My network is in a private IPv4 net other than that, and I couldn't configure split-tunnel manually. Proton VPN works wonders and I like their mail product too.
- dblohm7 3y ago
  > Beats wasting time on an a commodity VPN service. That service is what earns them non-Google revenue.
guestbest 3y ago
[flagged]
- msla 3y ago
  > Sorry about being pedantic, but is no such thing as fake content, there is only more content. This isn't pedantic, it's ignoring context: In context, "Fake" clearly means that the so-called review wasn't written by a human who had used the product. Given what a review is, and what purpose we expect reviews to serve, so-called "reviews" written by a language model are clearly fake, just like a non-driveable toy car is a fake car.
  - guestbest 3y ago
    Online reviews are a product, not a nebulous concept and sites like Amazon depend on them to drive sales of products or are a company’s entire unique value proposition like in the case of Yelp. The idea that reviews are not in some way manipulated at ‘fake’ since they drive capital towards or away from businesses. In other words there are no altruistic reviews. The only neutral content comes from a Random Number Generator, which is thus far impossible to create
    - msla 3y ago
      A review written by a human who didn't use the product is fake, a fortiori a review written by a non-human that doesn't use any products is fake.
- ranting-moth 3y ago
  People can argue over word definition. If I pay someone to write me a false positive review, I'd say that's much more closer to a definition of a "fake content" than "more content". We can call it fake, false, malicious, misleading, bogus, sham, deceptive or any other similar names.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Is Pocket going to start recommending "fakespot certified" products via affiliate links?
- qzx_pierri 3y ago
  Please don’t give Mozilla any more ideas
ve55 3y ago
How do they expect to lead in identifying fake content when the problem is intractable if adversaries are even somewhat competent? You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.
- wslh 3y ago
  You can even follow the Amazon Mechanical Turk [1] + ChatGPT + editors type of workflow which will be indistinguishable from a real content? I am eager to see what arises from this acquisition. I remember using Disqus in Wordpress to expect more competitive spam detection. The result? It didn't even detect obvious network bots. Fakespot raised $ 5.3m [2]. Is there a disclosure of the number for this acquisition? [3]. [1] https://www.mturk.com/worker https://www.mturk.com/worker [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fakespot https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fakespot [3] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:C2WWi44ZHqQJ:https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/fakespot-joins-mozilla-firefox-shopping-announcement/&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ar https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:C2WWi4...
- tornato7 3y ago
  The problem is not intractable if the analysis of reviews is statistical and reputation-based instead of content-based. They can look at how many reviews were added over time, how the product page has changed over time, if the reviewers are genuine users or if they only leave 5-star reviews on a handful of sketchy products, etc. Of course, it would be much easier for Amazon to do this, because they could look at IP addresses, purchase history, mailing address, etc. - but it's in their best interest to let the spam continue, apparently.
  - asdadsdad 3y ago
    This is the oldest conundrum in Trust & Safety. The target party (Amazon) has pretty much all of the rich data (IPs, cards, addresses) while the interested party (usually a small company) is trying to scrape their way to solve a problem that the first party is half-assed interested in solving because they (1) have an internal "abuse" team to deal with it already and/or (2) are probably making money by keeping the problem alive either directly or indirectly. As if the above is not already, there's one more complication: the interested small company needs to pitch their solution as a service to the platform because in general that's the only interested party of real business value. i.e. end users would not pay for such protection or won't pay enough. Apply it to social media impersonation and scams, Adtech scams, etc etc. Fun stuff.
purpleidea 3y ago
I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.
- 878654Tom 3y ago
  Why do you expect this from Mozilla but not Microsoft, Google, Apple,...?
  - function_seven 3y ago
    Because I expect Microsoft and Google to build more features for advertisers to target me, and Apple to build more features that lock me into their ecosystem. I expect better from Mozilla.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      If history is any indicator, why are you still expecting anything different from Mozilla in 2023? Same shit, different year.
      - function_seven 3y ago
        Because I let my nostalgia of 2004 get the best of me. And as much as I may gripe about their loss of focus, or their lagging behind in certain areas, I still appreciate them for the good things they do (e.g. fingerprint resisting, containers) and for the potential that they still have—even today—to implement user-focused improvements in their browser. They may not lean into it as much as I'd like, but they still do better than Google or Microsoft in this regard.
        hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Microsoft has the potential to make Windows 11 UX great. They made it worse than 10 by removing functionality that's existed for years. Will Microsoft do it just because the potential exists? No. Mozilla CEO takes a $3m salary and their biggest earner by many magnitudes is a search partnership with Google. Nothing is going to change with how they treat Firefox at a consumer-level until they need to man the battle stations with a rugpull on losing that partnership. "Why would they lose it?" AI happened and the current economic climate means Google is reducing spending by killing things that don't bring tangible value.
bcx 3y ago
This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over, and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mozilla 3.9% - Safari
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  Surely that is desktop browser stats. Safari must be doing better when accounting for iPads and iPhones.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  Stats vary a lot by source, for example[1] puts FF and Safari neck and neck (which seems optimistic to me, as much as I like FF). 1: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/ https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/
  - derefr 3y ago
    I think a lot of University computer labs still use Firefox. At least at some point, that was because it was easier to lock down — no directory "an administrator" (i.e. malware) could just dump an extension into to treat it as force-installed.
  - capitainenemo 3y ago
    https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... 5.59% for Firefox in the desktop category. (mobile is tough for any alternative browser - chrome has a hard time on iOS although I'm sure only being a skin over webkit doesn't help) Desktop is a better market to compare anyway, if including Edge. Is Microsoft even trying anymore on mobile?
notacoward 3y ago
Funnily enough, I happened to visit fakespot for the first time in ages today, after I discovered that reviewmeta is dead. It looks like the functionality has already been bundled into Firefox/Chrome extensions instead of being a standalone website, and they're already pushing an AI angle. That was quick.
didip 3y ago
I thought you have no money, Mozilla? What are you doing?
kivlad 3y ago
I'm saddened by the sudden and intermittent disappearance of ReviewMeta, which prided itself as not inserting affiliate links into their site/extension. Reading this news leads me to believe that this is a perfect fit in accordance with Mozilla's overall mission, making this a good outcome for something that could've easily been exploited by a bad actor making the acquisition.
- tornato7 3y ago
  I'm upset to hear that ReviewMeta is gone. They had much better detection than FakeSpot, in my opinion.
berkle4455 3y ago
Will this acquisition enable Fakespot to focus on their core offering instead of continuing to sell user search and purchase data?
Zamicol 3y ago
Did they mean to say "Firefox [has] a lineage that dates back to the origins of the i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ web"? Tim Berners Lee invented the Web, not the Internet.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I am distressed by the number of people (many of who should know better) that think the web is the internet.
qzw 3y ago
I’m hoping that Mozilla has a secret plan to extend Fakespot beyond just shopping and to become the killer app for distinguishing all AI generated content. May not even be possible to achieve, but that would be a worthy goal for Mozilla.
rank0 3y ago
Please Mozilla just give me built in tab groups. FF is like the only remaining browser without this feature.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Sideberry does that and also puts the tab bar sideways
applecrazy 3y ago
Cool product, but I'm actually concerned about privacy using a tool like FakeSpot. Their privacy policy is extremely broad and includes handing over purchase history and search history on shopping websites to the extension authors: > Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use Fakespot’s Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal identity in order to effectively market our products and services to you and others: Contact Info Identifiers Usage Data Application Search History (e.g. not your Google/Bing/other search engine history) Purchases Diagnostics https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
- RoyGBivCap 3y ago
  Yeah you don't want to install their extension as it stands. Which is why they try so hard to push it, instead of just putting the analyzer on the front page. See if you can even find it: https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ Meanhwhile there are 3 links to the chrome extension, and two to the app.
frabcus 3y ago
Presume they'll bring the add-on into their standard monitoring / security checking! "This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing." https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake-reviews-amazon/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake...
- krono 3y ago
  Many Firefox extensions including the "recommended" ones which are claimed to be actively monitored are breaking Mozilla's extension policies by secretly sending telemetry, injecting advertisements, load and execute external resources, etc. None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish new versions where the same violations are still present and even a few published updates that introduced additional violations. To Mozilla: If you want to change the world, start with yourself. To the rest: Whenever you install or update an extension, always go through its published source first. You can get to it by right-clicking the install/download button to "save as" and then simply unpacking the xpi file.
  - sundarurfriend 3y ago
    > None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish new versions where the same violations are still present Could you publish these publicly anywhere, so that we can do for ourselves the job that Mozilla apparently is failing to do (while claiming to)?
    - krono 3y ago
      Here are a few that contained violations at the time when I checked them out last February: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/giphy-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/giphy-for-fir... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabliss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabliss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subscription-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subsc... The official policies can be found here: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/add-on-policies/ https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/add-on-p... Some highlights of commonly "forgotten" rules: > No Surprises > Add-ons must be self-contained and not load remote code for execution. > Add-ons must limit data collection to what is necessary for functionality [...] Data includes all information the add-on collects, regardless of the manner. > Collecting, or facilitating the collection of ancillary information (e.g. any data not required for the add-on’s functionality as stated in the description) is prohibited. > Modifying web content or facilitating redirects to include affiliate promotion tags is not permitted
WhyNotHugo 3y ago
You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content. I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla's browser.
- asldkfjaslkdj 3y ago
  Not to mention, improving the browser in the space of adblockers installed by default ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... ftw! ) would remove most incentives for AI generated content in the first place. /inserts shrugging emoji
  - majormajor 3y ago
    Adblockers increase the incentives for AI generated "organic" content since in the absence of the ability to push explicitly-marked ads, you're gonna get astroturfing and such instead.
    - asldkfjaslkdj 3y ago
      You assume an efficient market. Advertising is not about the Seller of the product and the Publisher of the content. Oh no. The money in advertisement is the hundreds of companies that prey on each other all the way connecting seller and publisher. Because nobody trust anybody in advertisement. There's traffic validate. Click validation. Sales attribution. Sales attribution validation. MRC Accreditation for the sales attribution validation. etc. etc. etc.
  - mynonameaccount 3y ago
princevegeta89 3y ago
This is interesting. FakeSpot is already getting aggressive with injected ads and recommendations on product listing pages (Amazon as an example) and this tells me they're going money-heavy, while Mozilla on the other hand might have much left at all actually. How exactly the financial aspect shapes out remains to be seen.
tannhaeuser 3y ago
Maybe Moz is on to something here; while they're at it, how about telling apart original content from copycat sites? But what's really interesting is, can we not put ML to good use for generating a new browser for us, given a corpus of expected renderings? Or have we managed to make web standards so fscking complicated and out of hand so as to make that infeasible?
senko 3y ago
Mozilla is a company in search of relevance. Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) .. ... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it? I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do whatever they want. Except Firefox is the golden goose. (Ffx user here, I'm using it for dev, browsing and mobile (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn't require chrome).
- vxNsr 3y ago
  100% agree. Mozilla uses Firefox to raise funds and then spends it on pet projects and executive bonuses instead of putting it into Firefox.
- INeedMoreRam 3y ago
  [dead]
InCityDreams 3y ago
...and people still think mozilla is on their side.
nothingneko 3y ago
How does Mozilla even have the money to do this? I thought they were broke.
progmetaldev 3y ago
I see a lot of people here complaining that Mozilla isn't spending enough of its money on the development of Firefox, but a lot of that money comes from their Google deal. If Firefox started to gain market share over Chrome, do you think that Google would continue to fund them, and if not then who would?
- negative_zero 3y ago
  I believe that the sentiment is that Google funds Firefox despite it's now poor market share as "antitrust insurance".
  - progmetaldev 3y ago
    That makes a lot of sense!
- vindarel 3y ago
  Other search engines would. It already happened that Yahoo paid to be the default search engine in Firefox, for certain regions of the world (Yahoo was for the US, they also had deals with Yandex and Baidu). And Google would probably still want to have its search engine available out of the box to millions of users, even through an other browser.
krono 3y ago
Fully automated profiling, deciding, and then advertising to as many people as possible whether you are a scammer or if a review you left is genuine. And the only method through which you can discover that you are the victim of of a false accusation is to use this product to actively and manually monitor your own content. Both freedom of expression and automated decision-making are already quite heavily regulated in the EU today with even more and tighter rules currently the way[1]. These new regulations also happen to extensively cover the combating of fake and illegal content by online platforms. Additionally this seems contrary to Mozilla's claim[2] of commitment to human dignity, individual expression, accountability, and most of all: trust. Strange thing to be investing in for any other reason than to make it disappear, which I don't think is the plan. Money would have been better spent elsewhere... or anywhere else, really. [1]: A Europe fit for the digital age https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... [2]: Mozilla Manifesto https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
natch 3y ago
Ironically it’s humans that generate spam and choose to, and are incentivized to continue to choose to, monetize content. I’ve asked ChatGPT for product recommendations and it’s a breath of fresh air to get suggestions that are not filtered for affiliate commission potential. Let’s hope this lasts but in the meantime I doubt I’m the only one noticing that this AI content is not steering you based on the potential for profit. So, fakespot kind of had it backwards, in a way. What we need is Humanspot to warn us away from content, AI generated or not, that has been corrupted by a human profit motive.
kgbcia 3y ago
I tried to use Pocket and just couldn't get into it. Software like Adblock and this fakespot thing have to be part of the browser for it to work seamless.
nfriedly 3y ago
It looks like the Fakespot add-on is NOT one of the ~20 approved add-ons in Firefox for Android. It'd be funny if it wasn't so frustrating.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  That matches my expectations given this was just announced. However, if it's still true this time next week, that'll be some :facepalm:
asdfman123 3y ago
Fakespot is one of those utilities that is better if fewer people know about it. If everyone starts using Fakespot, vendors will just optimize to fool Fakespot.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
As much as I love Firefox, let's not lie about the state of affairs: "We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet." no you are not, Firefox is nowhere near one of the most popular browsers. It's essentially a non-player in the browser space, and while the people working for Mozilla are still meaningfully contributing to standards bodies, the browser itself is basically irrelevant in the global market. I wish it wasn't, but the good old days of "we beat IE" are long gone, and FF did not step up to Chrome, nor to the Chromification of the rest of the browser landscape. It just threw ideas at the wall in the hopes that something would end up being a revenue stream while Firefox languished. Quantum was the right move, except they should have kept making moves. You don't win by being "pretty decent", you win by doing things people didn't realize they needed their browser to do, and doing all the things they do know they need to do better than the competition. It's been drastically down hill since Chris Beard left.
dahwolf 3y ago
I'm surprised people are still reasoning about Mozilla in their former "glory". Firefox market share has been tanking for 13 years(!) straight. Already 6 years ago the CTO of Mozilla concluded that Chrome had won: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ There's nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox's course. It's not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine. The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into actual meaning or impact? All of this made possible by "easy money". They literally do not have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep things as-is. As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the first time in their history they're learning what hard money is. Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual service/product people will pay you for...is fucking hard. As such, it's odd that in their borrowed time they continue to give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add revenue. I guess they'll never learn.
zx8080 3y ago
This will probably allow building a detailed model of every FF user (as Fakespot will be probably enabled by default). Not only browsing history (like in a failed Google Chrome FLoC attempt). Shopping interests, behavior on every page and so on. Even mouse movements and key press frequences.
zx8080 3y ago
It would too suspicious if Google directly buys Fakespot (a control on which allows to manipulate any review autencity). So Mozilla, which is totally funded from Google money, buys them. A cookie consent on fakespot page states mainly Fakespot and Google cookies in a surprising manner. They give two options, but none to refuse any cookies: - ok - do not sell or share my personal information How are they different? From reading details, I assume no difference. There's no way to turn off any non-necessary cookies group (shared with Meta/Facebook (!) and Google). It will be sad to stop using FF because of this integration.
moneywoes 3y ago
Is the acquisition price listed anywhere?
noisy_boy 3y ago
I would prefer Mozilla spend effort in improving the performance of Firefox; I always switch to it and then, to my repeated dismay, always fall back to Chrome because it just feels snappier. Instead of identifying fake content, I'm more interested in features that generate fake stats for analytics, effectively making them useless. However, not sure if the Google money would keep flowing for such efforts.
navi0 3y ago
So, how long before Cloudflare buys Mozilla or Brave (or builds it own)? Feels like they would be a better long term home than Mozilla surviving off an annual stipend from Google.
dudeinhawaii 3y ago
I guess I'm in the minority in that I love Fakespot as a tool to determine the "real" review scores of products on Amazon and other online shops. I get tired of the "1000 reviews, 5 stars" that turns out to be pure garbage. Instead, I find that half of the very amazing 5 star, 10k reviews products are rated a C, D, or F. I think it'd be great to have this integrated into the browser and be able to get a sense for what's real or "likely fake" when browsing the web of tomorrow.
- aembleton 3y ago
  Sounds like the job for an extension
dipakgr 3y ago
I think safari and Chrome will enjoy a duopoly with Brave in the running...
amai 3y ago
Mozilla only exists so Google and Microsoft can claim that they have no monopoly on the browser market. That is why many of Mozillas moves basically make no sense.

487 points by mattweinberg 3y ago

I think this is a great acquisition, but I'm curious where this may give Mozilla an advantage. Do they plan on baking this into Firefox, and if so, to what degree are we willing to let the browser govern the content?

Waterluvian 3y ago
It feels like this business has no real "moat." But I think for once that's not really a problem: I would hope Google decides they need to add comparable functionality to a browser! And then maybe it can begin expanding for more general use... detecting likelihood of any content being artificial... hmm I'm scared again.
- nailer 3y ago
  I imagine the moat is an ML model of inauthentic reviews. Getting training data for known inauthentic and known authentic reviews is difficult.
cxr 3y ago
How can this strike you as a great acquisition if you aren't sure what the advantage is?
- nbar1 3y ago
  FakeSpot will benefit from a parent company like Mozilla.
  - cxr 3y ago
    By that standard, I could call you buying a $100 Amazon gift card and mailing it to me a great acquisition.

jmann99999 3y ago

I used Fakespot a few years ago. It seemed to work well at that time. I switched computers and didn't go back to it (probably out of laziness). Does the HN community still view it as a trusted source to make better buying decisions?

jkestner 3y ago
I use it just about any time I'm buying something on Amazon that isn't from a trusted brand's store.
- jmann99999 3y ago
  Thanks for that! A few days ago I looked at returning to it but wondered if it had become gamed. I appreciate it.

PaulHoule 3y ago

Normally I'd say... "They'd better write it in the bylaws that Mozilla isn't allowed to buy any more companies" but a system for identifying fake content on the web might (unlike all the other Mozilla acquisitions such as the thoroughly pizzled Pocket) improve the web browsing experience.

blowski 3y ago
I agree with your comment, but I’m curious what “pizzled” means.
- Logans_Run 3y ago
  NSFW definition (depending on I.T. policies) [1] Pizzle is a Middle English word for penis, derived from Low German pesel or Flemish Dutch pezel, diminutive of pees, meaning 'sinew'. The word is used today to signify the penis of an animal, chiefly in Australia and New Zealand. [2] Interestingly, it is used in medical slang (Dictionary of medical slang -Jacob Edward) and it is defined as exhausted, or to its point: ~ Pizzle chewer ... A female who relieves a male of his phallic tension by fondling the instrument in her mouth. ~ Pizzle-grinder ... 1. A butcher. 2. A prostitute. ~ Pizzle honker ... A prostitute who satisfies her patrons by manual friction. ~ Pizzle warmer . . . The pudendum muliebre, esp. the vagina. ~ Pizzled . . . Exhausted physically or mentally. So I guess you could say that Pocket is a Fizzled[3] Pizzle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzle [2] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166295/etymology-and-meaning-of-the-word-pizzled https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166295/etymology... [3] Fizzle: To finish slowly in a way that is disappointing or has become less interesting & There is often an initial indication of interest, but then it fizzles out and no cash materialises. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fizzle https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fizzle
  - ehPReth 3y ago
    I suppose in this case it means "fucked Pocket"
  - JohnFen 3y ago

tivert 3y ago

Wow, Mozilla is acquiring a side-project that's actually useful? Color me pleased. Beats wasting time on an a commodity VPN service.

jdiff 3y ago
Their VPN is just reselling someone else's service, minimal effort invested while opening a mainstream service that actually provides an income stream. Seems like a solid strategy to me.
- dm_me_dogs 3y ago
  It also helps that the service they're re-selling is actually good. (Mullvad, if you weren't aware)
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    Firefox VPN is great for beginners, but it assumes too much and isn't flexible enough for power users. I had to cancel it because "Allow LAN connections" didn't base itself off my local subnet, but on RFC1918. My network is in a private IPv4 net other than that, and I couldn't configure split-tunnel manually. Proton VPN works wonders and I like their mail product too.
dblohm7 3y ago
> Beats wasting time on an a commodity VPN service. That service is what earns them non-Google revenue.

guestbest 3y ago

[flagged]

msla 3y ago
> Sorry about being pedantic, but is no such thing as fake content, there is only more content. This isn't pedantic, it's ignoring context: In context, "Fake" clearly means that the so-called review wasn't written by a human who had used the product. Given what a review is, and what purpose we expect reviews to serve, so-called "reviews" written by a language model are clearly fake, just like a non-driveable toy car is a fake car.
- guestbest 3y ago
  Online reviews are a product, not a nebulous concept and sites like Amazon depend on them to drive sales of products or are a company’s entire unique value proposition like in the case of Yelp. The idea that reviews are not in some way manipulated at ‘fake’ since they drive capital towards or away from businesses. In other words there are no altruistic reviews. The only neutral content comes from a Random Number Generator, which is thus far impossible to create
  - msla 3y ago
    A review written by a human who didn't use the product is fake, a fortiori a review written by a non-human that doesn't use any products is fake.
ranting-moth 3y ago
People can argue over word definition. If I pay someone to write me a false positive review, I'd say that's much more closer to a definition of a "fake content" than "more content". We can call it fake, false, malicious, misleading, bogus, sham, deceptive or any other similar names.

candiddevmike 3y ago

Is Pocket going to start recommending "fakespot certified" products via affiliate links?

qzx_pierri 3y ago
Please don’t give Mozilla any more ideas

ve55 3y ago

How do they expect to lead in identifying fake content when the problem is intractable if adversaries are even somewhat competent? You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.

wslh 3y ago
You can even follow the Amazon Mechanical Turk [1] + ChatGPT + editors type of workflow which will be indistinguishable from a real content? I am eager to see what arises from this acquisition. I remember using Disqus in Wordpress to expect more competitive spam detection. The result? It didn't even detect obvious network bots. Fakespot raised $ 5.3m [2]. Is there a disclosure of the number for this acquisition? [3]. [1] https://www.mturk.com/worker https://www.mturk.com/worker [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fakespot https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fakespot [3] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:C2WWi44ZHqQJ:https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/fakespot-joins-mozilla-firefox-shopping-announcement/&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ar https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:C2WWi4...
tornato7 3y ago
The problem is not intractable if the analysis of reviews is statistical and reputation-based instead of content-based. They can look at how many reviews were added over time, how the product page has changed over time, if the reviewers are genuine users or if they only leave 5-star reviews on a handful of sketchy products, etc. Of course, it would be much easier for Amazon to do this, because they could look at IP addresses, purchase history, mailing address, etc. - but it's in their best interest to let the spam continue, apparently.
- asdadsdad 3y ago
  This is the oldest conundrum in Trust & Safety. The target party (Amazon) has pretty much all of the rich data (IPs, cards, addresses) while the interested party (usually a small company) is trying to scrape their way to solve a problem that the first party is half-assed interested in solving because they (1) have an internal "abuse" team to deal with it already and/or (2) are probably making money by keeping the problem alive either directly or indirectly. As if the above is not already, there's one more complication: the interested small company needs to pitch their solution as a service to the platform because in general that's the only interested party of real business value. i.e. end users would not pay for such protection or won't pay enough. Apply it to social media impersonation and scams, Adtech scams, etc etc. Fun stuff.

purpleidea 3y ago

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

878654Tom 3y ago
Why do you expect this from Mozilla but not Microsoft, Google, Apple,...?
- function_seven 3y ago
  Because I expect Microsoft and Google to build more features for advertisers to target me, and Apple to build more features that lock me into their ecosystem. I expect better from Mozilla.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    If history is any indicator, why are you still expecting anything different from Mozilla in 2023? Same shit, different year.
    - function_seven 3y ago
      Because I let my nostalgia of 2004 get the best of me. And as much as I may gripe about their loss of focus, or their lagging behind in certain areas, I still appreciate them for the good things they do (e.g. fingerprint resisting, containers) and for the potential that they still have—even today—to implement user-focused improvements in their browser. They may not lean into it as much as I'd like, but they still do better than Google or Microsoft in this regard.
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Microsoft has the potential to make Windows 11 UX great. They made it worse than 10 by removing functionality that's existed for years. Will Microsoft do it just because the potential exists? No. Mozilla CEO takes a $3m salary and their biggest earner by many magnitudes is a search partnership with Google. Nothing is going to change with how they treat Firefox at a consumer-level until they need to man the battle stations with a rugpull on losing that partnership. "Why would they lose it?" AI happened and the current economic climate means Google is reducing spending by killing things that don't bring tangible value.

bcx 3y ago

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over, and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mozilla 3.9% - Safari

wodenokoto 3y ago
Surely that is desktop browser stats. Safari must be doing better when accounting for iPads and iPhones.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
blacksmith_tb 3y ago
Stats vary a lot by source, for example[1] puts FF and Safari neck and neck (which seems optimistic to me, as much as I like FF). 1: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/ https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/
- derefr 3y ago
  I think a lot of University computer labs still use Firefox. At least at some point, that was because it was easier to lock down — no directory "an administrator" (i.e. malware) could just dump an extension into to treat it as force-installed.
- capitainenemo 3y ago
  https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... 5.59% for Firefox in the desktop category. (mobile is tough for any alternative browser - chrome has a hard time on iOS although I'm sure only being a skin over webkit doesn't help) Desktop is a better market to compare anyway, if including Edge. Is Microsoft even trying anymore on mobile?

notacoward 3y ago

Funnily enough, I happened to visit fakespot for the first time in ages today, after I discovered that reviewmeta is dead. It looks like the functionality has already been bundled into Firefox/Chrome extensions instead of being a standalone website, and they're already pushing an AI angle. That was quick.

didip 3y ago

I thought you have no money, Mozilla? What are you doing?

kivlad 3y ago

I'm saddened by the sudden and intermittent disappearance of ReviewMeta, which prided itself as not inserting affiliate links into their site/extension. Reading this news leads me to believe that this is a perfect fit in accordance with Mozilla's overall mission, making this a good outcome for something that could've easily been exploited by a bad actor making the acquisition.

tornato7 3y ago
I'm upset to hear that ReviewMeta is gone. They had much better detection than FakeSpot, in my opinion.

berkle4455 3y ago

Will this acquisition enable Fakespot to focus on their core offering instead of continuing to sell user search and purchase data?

Zamicol 3y ago

Did they mean to say "Firefox [has] a lineage that dates back to the origins of the i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ web"? Tim Berners Lee invented the Web, not the Internet.

JohnFen 3y ago
I am distressed by the number of people (many of who should know better) that think the web is the internet.

qzw 3y ago

I’m hoping that Mozilla has a secret plan to extend Fakespot beyond just shopping and to become the killer app for distinguishing all AI generated content. May not even be possible to achieve, but that would be a worthy goal for Mozilla.

rank0 3y ago

Please Mozilla just give me built in tab groups. FF is like the only remaining browser without this feature.

wkat4242 3y ago
Sideberry does that and also puts the tab bar sideways

applecrazy 3y ago

Cool product, but I'm actually concerned about privacy using a tool like FakeSpot. Their privacy policy is extremely broad and includes handing over purchase history and search history on shopping websites to the extension authors: > Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use Fakespot’s Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal identity in order to effectively market our products and services to you and others: Contact Info Identifiers Usage Data Application Search History (e.g. not your Google/Bing/other search engine history) Purchases Diagnostics https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy

RoyGBivCap 3y ago
Yeah you don't want to install their extension as it stands. Which is why they try so hard to push it, instead of just putting the analyzer on the front page. See if you can even find it: https://www.fakespot.com/ https://www.fakespot.com/ Meanhwhile there are 3 links to the chrome extension, and two to the app.

frabcus 3y ago

Presume they'll bring the add-on into their standard monitoring / security checking! "This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing." https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake-reviews-amazon/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake...

krono 3y ago
Many Firefox extensions including the "recommended" ones which are claimed to be actively monitored are breaking Mozilla's extension policies by secretly sending telemetry, injecting advertisements, load and execute external resources, etc. None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish new versions where the same violations are still present and even a few published updates that introduced additional violations. To Mozilla: If you want to change the world, start with yourself. To the rest: Whenever you install or update an extension, always go through its published source first. You can get to it by right-clicking the install/download button to "save as" and then simply unpacking the xpi file.
- sundarurfriend 3y ago
  > None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish new versions where the same violations are still present Could you publish these publicly anywhere, so that we can do for ourselves the job that Mozilla apparently is failing to do (while claiming to)?
  - krono 3y ago
    Here are a few that contained violations at the time when I checked them out last February: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/giphy-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/giphy-for-fir... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabliss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabliss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subscription-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subsc... The official policies can be found here: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/add-on-policies/ https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/add-on-p... Some highlights of commonly "forgotten" rules: > No Surprises > Add-ons must be self-contained and not load remote code for execution. > Add-ons must limit data collection to what is necessary for functionality [...] Data includes all information the add-on collects, regardless of the manner. > Collecting, or facilitating the collection of ancillary information (e.g. any data not required for the add-on’s functionality as stated in the description) is prohibited. > Modifying web content or facilitating redirects to include affiliate promotion tags is not permitted

WhyNotHugo 3y ago

You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content. I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla's browser.

asldkfjaslkdj 3y ago
Not to mention, improving the browser in the space of adblockers installed by default ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... ftw! ) would remove most incentives for AI generated content in the first place. /inserts shrugging emoji
- majormajor 3y ago
  Adblockers increase the incentives for AI generated "organic" content since in the absence of the ability to push explicitly-marked ads, you're gonna get astroturfing and such instead.
  - asldkfjaslkdj 3y ago
    You assume an efficient market. Advertising is not about the Seller of the product and the Publisher of the content. Oh no. The money in advertisement is the hundreds of companies that prey on each other all the way connecting seller and publisher. Because nobody trust anybody in advertisement. There's traffic validate. Click validation. Sales attribution. Sales attribution validation. MRC Accreditation for the sales attribution validation. etc. etc. etc.
- mynonameaccount 3y ago

princevegeta89 3y ago

This is interesting. FakeSpot is already getting aggressive with injected ads and recommendations on product listing pages (Amazon as an example) and this tells me they're going money-heavy, while Mozilla on the other hand might have much left at all actually. How exactly the financial aspect shapes out remains to be seen.

tannhaeuser 3y ago

Maybe Moz is on to something here; while they're at it, how about telling apart original content from copycat sites? But what's really interesting is, can we not put ML to good use for generating a new browser for us, given a corpus of expected renderings? Or have we managed to make web standards so fscking complicated and out of hand so as to make that infeasible?

senko 3y ago

Mozilla is a company in search of relevance. Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) .. ... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it? I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do whatever they want. Except Firefox is the golden goose. (Ffx user here, I'm using it for dev, browsing and mobile (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn't require chrome).

vxNsr 3y ago
100% agree. Mozilla uses Firefox to raise funds and then spends it on pet projects and executive bonuses instead of putting it into Firefox.
INeedMoreRam 3y ago
[dead]

InCityDreams 3y ago

...and people still think mozilla is on their side.

nothingneko 3y ago

How does Mozilla even have the money to do this? I thought they were broke.

progmetaldev 3y ago

I see a lot of people here complaining that Mozilla isn't spending enough of its money on the development of Firefox, but a lot of that money comes from their Google deal. If Firefox started to gain market share over Chrome, do you think that Google would continue to fund them, and if not then who would?

negative_zero 3y ago
I believe that the sentiment is that Google funds Firefox despite it's now poor market share as "antitrust insurance".
- progmetaldev 3y ago
  That makes a lot of sense!
vindarel 3y ago
Other search engines would. It already happened that Yahoo paid to be the default search engine in Firefox, for certain regions of the world (Yahoo was for the US, they also had deals with Yandex and Baidu). And Google would probably still want to have its search engine available out of the box to millions of users, even through an other browser.

krono 3y ago

Fully automated profiling, deciding, and then advertising to as many people as possible whether you are a scammer or if a review you left is genuine. And the only method through which you can discover that you are the victim of of a false accusation is to use this product to actively and manually monitor your own content. Both freedom of expression and automated decision-making are already quite heavily regulated in the EU today with even more and tighter rules currently the way[1]. These new regulations also happen to extensively cover the combating of fake and illegal content by online platforms. Additionally this seems contrary to Mozilla's claim[2] of commitment to human dignity, individual expression, accountability, and most of all: trust. Strange thing to be investing in for any other reason than to make it disappear, which I don't think is the plan. Money would have been better spent elsewhere... or anywhere else, really. [1]: A Europe fit for the digital age https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... [2]: Mozilla Manifesto https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

natch 3y ago

Ironically it’s humans that generate spam and choose to, and are incentivized to continue to choose to, monetize content. I’ve asked ChatGPT for product recommendations and it’s a breath of fresh air to get suggestions that are not filtered for affiliate commission potential. Let’s hope this lasts but in the meantime I doubt I’m the only one noticing that this AI content is not steering you based on the potential for profit. So, fakespot kind of had it backwards, in a way. What we need is Humanspot to warn us away from content, AI generated or not, that has been corrupted by a human profit motive.

kgbcia 3y ago

I tried to use Pocket and just couldn't get into it. Software like Adblock and this fakespot thing have to be part of the browser for it to work seamless.

nfriedly 3y ago

It looks like the Fakespot add-on is NOT one of the ~20 approved add-ons in Firefox for Android. It'd be funny if it wasn't so frustrating.

mdaniel 3y ago
That matches my expectations given this was just announced. However, if it's still true this time next week, that'll be some :facepalm:

asdfman123 3y ago

Fakespot is one of those utilities that is better if fewer people know about it. If everyone starts using Fakespot, vendors will just optimize to fool Fakespot.

TheRealPomax 3y ago

As much as I love Firefox, let's not lie about the state of affairs: "We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet." no you are not, Firefox is nowhere near one of the most popular browsers. It's essentially a non-player in the browser space, and while the people working for Mozilla are still meaningfully contributing to standards bodies, the browser itself is basically irrelevant in the global market. I wish it wasn't, but the good old days of "we beat IE" are long gone, and FF did not step up to Chrome, nor to the Chromification of the rest of the browser landscape. It just threw ideas at the wall in the hopes that something would end up being a revenue stream while Firefox languished. Quantum was the right move, except they should have kept making moves. You don't win by being "pretty decent", you win by doing things people didn't realize they needed their browser to do, and doing all the things they do know they need to do better than the competition. It's been drastically down hill since Chris Beard left.

dahwolf 3y ago

I'm surprised people are still reasoning about Mozilla in their former "glory". Firefox market share has been tanking for 13 years(!) straight. Already 6 years ago the CTO of Mozilla concluded that Chrome had won: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ There's nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox's course. It's not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine. The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into actual meaning or impact? All of this made possible by "easy money". They literally do not have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep things as-is. As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the first time in their history they're learning what hard money is. Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual service/product people will pay you for...is fucking hard. As such, it's odd that in their borrowed time they continue to give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add revenue. I guess they'll never learn.

zx8080 3y ago

This will probably allow building a detailed model of every FF user (as Fakespot will be probably enabled by default). Not only browsing history (like in a failed Google Chrome FLoC attempt). Shopping interests, behavior on every page and so on. Even mouse movements and key press frequences.

zx8080 3y ago

It would too suspicious if Google directly buys Fakespot (a control on which allows to manipulate any review autencity). So Mozilla, which is totally funded from Google money, buys them. A cookie consent on fakespot page states mainly Fakespot and Google cookies in a surprising manner. They give two options, but none to refuse any cookies: - ok - do not sell or share my personal information How are they different? From reading details, I assume no difference. There's no way to turn off any non-necessary cookies group (shared with Meta/Facebook (!) and Google). It will be sad to stop using FF because of this integration.

moneywoes 3y ago

Is the acquisition price listed anywhere?

noisy_boy 3y ago

I would prefer Mozilla spend effort in improving the performance of Firefox; I always switch to it and then, to my repeated dismay, always fall back to Chrome because it just feels snappier. Instead of identifying fake content, I'm more interested in features that generate fake stats for analytics, effectively making them useless. However, not sure if the Google money would keep flowing for such efforts.

navi0 3y ago

So, how long before Cloudflare buys Mozilla or Brave (or builds it own)? Feels like they would be a better long term home than Mozilla surviving off an annual stipend from Google.

dudeinhawaii 3y ago

I guess I'm in the minority in that I love Fakespot as a tool to determine the "real" review scores of products on Amazon and other online shops. I get tired of the "1000 reviews, 5 stars" that turns out to be pure garbage. Instead, I find that half of the very amazing 5 star, 10k reviews products are rated a C, D, or F. I think it'd be great to have this integrated into the browser and be able to get a sense for what's real or "likely fake" when browsing the web of tomorrow.

aembleton 3y ago
Sounds like the job for an extension

dipakgr 3y ago

I think safari and Chrome will enjoy a duopoly with Brave in the running...

amai 3y ago

Mozilla only exists so Google and Microsoft can claim that they have no monopoly on the browser market. That is why many of Mozillas moves basically make no sense.