Save Private Mozilla

Today, I take the keyboard to talk to you about anything other than WordPress. Mozilla, the entity that develops the excellent web browser Firefox has announced to remove another 1/4 of its staff.

Job cuts are not the main problem…

Behind Mozilla’s announcement hides something much more serious in my opinion … since the disappearance of Firefox would lead to an influx to its competitor Google Chrome and would give even more weight to this giant that has made monopoly its hobbyhorse.

Yeah, but I like Google Chrome!

Yes and nobody prevents you from using it but in order to keep a semblance of freedom in this world, it would be nice to use Mozilla Firefox too in order to make it take market share and give faith to its developers.

The goal is not to see Firefox with a 90% market share as Nicolas Hoffman explains very well in his tweet :

The goal is to keep the choice to use Firefox, Chrome, Edge or any other web browser so that none of them have a monopoly and dictate its rules and deprive us of our freedom of choice and incidentally resell our personal data.

Fighting GAFAM… it’s not easy.

State of play

Until recently, I was what you might call a pure Google product… visiting websites with Google Chrome, having several personal Gmail accounts and a GSuite for my pro mail. I also had synchronized drives… and an Android mobile! Anyway… he knew everything and I didn’t care… you know “I have nothing to hide…”

This has got to stop!

The summer of 2019 marked the beginning of a change of ideas! It’s only the fools… all this you see…

  1. I started boycotting Amazon… in favor of European or French e-commerce sites… when the American giant decided to defer the tax on French merchants using the platform…
  2. I wanted to decrease the use of Google products, starting with my personal and professional emails, in order to replace @gmail.com by personalized domains…

Let’s trust French products and startups!

Yeah! France has a startup that makes degoogling its hobbyhorse, I named mailo.com.

On Twitter, @hellomailo is very active on the evil that Google represents … I gave in to the sirens … especially since they have a family offer rather nice (on paper anyway).

What does the mail family offer consist of?

Basically, they offer to secure your children’s email accounts by filtering the correspondents through an approval of the address by the parent(s)…

Concretely, if a correspondent is not in your child’s address book, the email is directed to your Spams (already it’s starting to suck) for validation… if you validate… your child receives the email… ( but the address is not added to the address book => not very logical in my opinion )

If your child adds a contact in his address book, he will only be able to send him an email when you have validated the contact (that’s good… you should say that too!).

In short, not everything is ready but the offer is young and will be (I hope) improved.

So? What’s wrong with you?

Well, what doesn’t suit me is that the offer is young but a correct customer support (because I paid a subscription) should follow… and it doesn’t.

My kids sync their mail on Thunderbird. As the contacts have to be validated by myself, that they are then added to the online address book… they should be synchronizable via Carddav as my adult account… which is not the case… or I didn’t understand…

If you don’t understand… it’s not Mailo’s fault!

That’s true… but if I, a web professional, didn’t understand… what about Mrs. Michu?

And even so… I send emails to several addresses found on their site… no answers. I don’t miss an opportunity to challenge them on Twitter where they are active… and I don’t get any feedback…

How’s your professional e-mail coming?

To manage the @thivinfo.com emails, I was at G Suite (did you notice the time spent?) and I’m not at Mailo… seeing the little reaction on the private part, I thought it was not a good idea to entrust them with one of the most used means of communication in the professional world…

For my Pro mail, I trusted the Swiss host Infomaniak and its mail hosting offer for 1.5€/month. And I have to say that I am quite satisfied.

  • The service works well (Mail /contact / calendar synchronized on Thunderbird and Android smartphone).
  • support in case of questions is very responsive, reachable by mail, phone and instant chat depending on the time and day …

Courage… let’s run away

You’ll understand, I’m not going to make old bones at Mailo.com and certainly migrate everyone to Infomaniak.

Only downside, Infomaniak does not offer a filtering solution as Mailo offers for children …