It was released (read: forcibly shoved down our throats) by Google and came out of nowhere when there were zero problems with the decades old and extremely well researched incumbent image/video formats that the web was already using (i.e. jpg, png, gif, mp4, etc)

I don’t agree with this. There are many things wrong with those file formats. GIF, for example, is over 35 years old and has a 256 color pallete. Now, if it’s good enough for your purposes and it “ain’t broke” for that, fine, but compare these formats to JPEG-XL and it’s clear that they deserve to be surpassed. WebM/WebP, despite my many issues with it (WebP and AVIF are bullshit formats), they did serve a legitimate purpose, and quite frankly you can even say it was good for the environment due to lowering filesizes at an actually meaningful scale.

In fact, if I’m reading Mitre correctly, there are libjpeg vulns still being found since WebP was launched. I’m not saying this to equivocate the two from a security standpoint, hell no, but to critisize the common view I see online claiming the older formats are unbackable.

Sure, I agree, but at the end of the day it’s useful to be able to search and watch YouTube videos so long as it’s a popular platform because it still has by far the bulk of topics covered.

How is that Stalinist? Censorship isn’t some unique rare policy, even 5EYES countries regularly challenge the legality of E2EE.

It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.

This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.

Thanks for the detailed reply :)

I agree with all your points, it is misleading and potentially harmful to use a strong term like spyware to refer to all of those things, without further context. I guess I’m still used to a couple of tech circles where people would jokingly throw ‘spyware’ around to describe anything and everything, so I didn’t realize how misleading it really is. Especially when it’s applied to things like automatic updates, which only the most extreme security models consider more of a risk than a security feature.

That website has a very strict, unusual interpretation of ‘spyware’. Even if all the telemetry and unprompted connections made by Mozilla Firefox are in good faith and legitimate features, that website still labels it ‘spyware’, as it is revealing unnecessary information without your consent.

The same website gives Tor Browser a ‘Not Spyware’ rating, as it (necessarily!) removed the default features of Firefox that concerned them.

Side note - I think you may have accidentally marked your account as a ‘bot account’ in the settings.

It’s Chromium-based, so I don’t understand how it could be “configured in the same way”.

That website is […] full of verifiably false information

Could you please provide and example or two? I wish to verify it, since I didn’t notice any last time I checked the site.

they act as if any and all [unprompted] connections a browser makes are automatically bad and “spying”.

They’re very clear that this is their approach (bold text on the home page). Even if you disagree with their definition, that doesn’t make the site bad. And there are many valid situations where a threat model should be this strict, consider anti-government activists in any country.

They even claim that Tor Browser is a “spyware”.

It says “Not Spyware”. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/tor

Firefox gets a high rating on default configuration.

The next line explains that with custom configuration, it becomes Not Spyware.