Mozilla, the company behind the highly popular internet browser Firefox, recently started accepting bitcoins through Coinbase toward the Mozilla Foundation . The foundation and initiative look to help protect the open web, collecting donations for their cause.
It’s an interesting time to be witnessing the browser competition. While Google is taking a stance and working to bring internet connections to the entire world through balloons, Mozilla is working toward internet privacy and open technology. Each company maintains increasingly popular browsers but take it a step further for their customer base by fighting on their side.
On Mozilla’s website, they display their goal for the initiative and what their stance is on the use of the internet.
“Our mission is to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web. At Mozilla, we’re a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible, so people worldwide can be informed contributors and creators of the Web. We believe this act of human collaboration across an open platform is essential to individual growth and our collective future.”
Along with their mission, Mozilla also works off a manifesto outlining ten principles they hold close when taking their stance in the fight for an open internet. The manifesto states that they believe the internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible and that the internet much enrich the lives of individual human beings. Along with those two points, Mozilla believes that individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their experiences involving the internet.
The Mozilla Foundation is a California non-profit corporation. All bitcoin donations that Mozilla receives are considered charitable contributions and are to be in a discretion for charitable purposes.
While Mozilla believes the internet should be open, that doesn’t mean its users should be subject to prying eyes. Earlier this week, Mozilla announced that they partnered with the Tor Project and the Center for Democracy & Technology. They three teamed up to work on a new initiative in internet privacy called Polaris, also known as the name of the North Star.
“Polaris is designed to allow us to collaborate more effectively, more explicitly and more directly to bring more privacy features into our products. We want to accelerate pragmatic and user-focused advances in privacy technology for the Web, giving users more control, awareness and protection in their Web experiences. We want to advance the state of the art in privacy features, with a specific focus on bringing them to more mainstream audiences.”
Polaris splits into two different experiments, the first being an evaluation of the Tor Project, a controversial project seeking to make internet anonymity the standard. Mozilla plans to host their own Tor middle relays to enable the Tor Project to expand their reach and build on their infrastructure.
The second experiment seeks to understand how Mozilla can offer a feature to customers that protect those that want it from invasive tracking.
At the same time, Mozilla does not want to penalize advertisers. As it states in their manifesto, Mozilla believes commercial involvement in the develop of the internet brings benefits, but that a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.
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Images from Shutterstock and Mozilla.