I still don’t see Mozilla as a bad actor, especially in comparison with the villany that is google and microsoft. It’s still a great alternative for privacy newbies and average users, although I personally made the switch to librewolf (desktop) and iceraven (mobile) a while ago. Both being forks of firefox, development for actual firefox is essential for either of these to survive, so Mozilla still has my support albeit indirectly
Librewolf / IronFox for me, Mozilla can fuck right off with their cloud services, added value and hunger for telemetry. Their 2% userbase is about to shrink even further.
Oh wow, I did that exact switch yesterday upon seeing the changes.
Mozilla’s only reason of existence right now is so that Google can skirt an antitrust case.
Edit: to be clear, that in itself makes it a bad actor.
I don’t subscribe to this theory.
They don’t need to keep firefox on life support to avoid an antitrust case. A chromium fork could serve the same purpose.
That might be true, but the fact that the competitor is using their engine as base could be used against them. It also doesn’t change the fact that they have Mozilla wrapped around their finger.
the fact that the competitor is using their engine as base could be used against them
Not really.
they have Mozilla wrapped around their finger
There’s not really any evidence of that. Sure Mozilla has done some stupid things, and they’re not the champions of internet privacy we would like them to be, but it’s really just hyperbole to say they’re wrapped around google’s finger.
I guess we just disagree what kind of influence having your company derive 90% of its income from a competitor can have.
i have ironfox on android, and you can use alternative to google play, apparently google has secretely downloaded an app" which scans your phones and sends it to google.
I’ve been using Firefox since it was Netscape, and I’m ‘concerned’ but not going anywhere yet.
Exactly the same situation here. I’ll wait for a while and see what happens.
Yeah, same here… I’m cautiously worried, but more for other things that have happened than these last changes.
I’m mainly trying to work out how to get off windows.
Nice. I’ve been there, and changing just a bit at a time has added up to my computing now being in a state I’m much happier with.
Linux Mint. You’ll get a thousand other recommendations which you can perhaps explore once you’re more comfortable with Linux but for the easiest most Windows-like experience just get Mint.
You don’t even need to ditch Windows completely, if you’re uncomfortable with that, because you can dual boot meaning when you turn your PC on it asks would you like to open Windows or Linux
If you don’t like it, well, at least you tried. I think you’ll have a great time though exploring free software to do tasks you would have had to pay or subscribe to previously.
Take your time, ask questions on forums if you need to, and most importantly, enjoy it. Enjoy the experience of learning how computers actually work, enjoy personalising your machine to truly be your machine.
Good luck, and have fun!
Librewolf. Mozilla will just keep enshittifying their browser. My biggest hope is that chrome is split off from Google and Mozilla loses their funding from google (500M/year). It’s way more than they need and they refuse to actually compete with Chrome/Chromium. Instead, they are content being the excuse for Google not to be sued for being a monopoly.
Hopefully the charade will end before Trump leaves office. Either because the US courts force google to split or because the EU finally grows a pair and declares Google and their tech to be a liability. My bet is that a new browser like LadyBird will give Firefox a reason to actually improve, but it’ll be too late.
After a quick look at librewolf I may absolutely join you
deleted by creator
This is probably a good opportunity to promote the Lemmy communitiy for LibreWolf: !librewolf@lemmy.ml
Not yet, they’re still the best option that doesn’t use Chromium (I don’t count Safari), but Servo is looking pretty promising
Yes.
Short term – I’ll probably be moving to LibreWolf, most likely. I’m planning to spend a good chunk of time this weekend reviewing what exactly their fork does. I’ve read their self-description already – and like it – but I want to look through the code and try to build it myself before I start depending on it.
Long term – I’ll be keeping my eye on Servo and Ladybird.
deleted by creator
this actually makes me more likely to use it.
deleted by creator
Thanks for the pointer. As I said, I need to spend a good chunk of time reviewing exactly what they’ve done before I feel confident enough to depend on it. A simple reconfiguration of stock Firefox that I am confident does not phone home is likely good enough for me in the short term.
If you have a better solution though, please let us know what it is.
deleted by creator
I’m staying on this side, but probably switching to a fork like Librewolf
I’ve previously used Floorp which is feature rich but not polished, and same goes for Zen
I’ve heard that librewolf struggles to keep up to date with important security updates iirc? That is pretty much the only thing holding me from using it permanently.
Seeing a lot of people recommend the same three forks, though. I’ll have to try them out and see what i like best :D
deleted by creator
It is an autoconfig file
But there is a fork of firefox with that implemented by default called “Librewolf”, I don’t know if thats made by the same people or not
deleted by creator
I honestly have no clue, personally.
I know i have to jump ship, but my choices are either chromium, or a fork of firefox, that may be slow to catch up with security / may not last.
I’ve got my eyes on librewolf, floorp and zen.
I’m especially watching https://ladybird.org/. A completely independent browser. But the dev has gotten himself in hot water iirc, but anything to get away from google and mozilla, i guess. Also, it’s not complete.
We’ll see what the future has in stock for us.
What is forcing you? Why do you have to jump ship.
This is not an endorsement to use Firefox further but I am curious about your phrasing.
I think @fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com hasn’t yet been enlightened by the fact that one can block Mozilla’s URLs and IPs to escape it. TOS for software is dumb and made to be broken, don’t let anyone argue with you otherwise.
I’ve decided to stick to firefox for some time, but i don’t trust mozilla anymore.
They’ve been enshittifying for the past few years, and this is a huge tipping point for me.
I’ll take your advice, thanks
Mainly that i don’t want my data being sent to mozilla. But I’ve decided to stick to firefox for a little more, but this action from mozilla has dropped my trust in them.
No, because I haven’t used mainline Firefox in years.
I’m pretty happy with LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox (available on Accrescent btw!) on Android (GrapheneOS)Unfortunately it’s still much less secure than Chromium, but I want and need a proper adblocker to maintain my freedom online. And I’m definitely not using Brave…
The only kinda usable Chromium browsers are Ungoogled Chromium and Trivalent. I think I might try building Trivalent on macOS at some point. Maybe also gonna apply some patches from Thorium, as long as they don’t compromise security.
Any thoughts on Vivaldi?
No thoughts on privacy, but I have been using Vivaldi for many years now and it’s good. Pretty customizable if that’s your thing.
Well it’s proprietary and in my opinion extremely bloated.
I use Waterfox as my primary and Vivaldi as my secondary browser for when a site just really wants a Chromium based browser…it’s great, Chrome minus Google, plus a few nice extras. For those old enough to remember when Opera was a popular alternative browser (before getting bought up and turned to garbage) – Vivaldi is from the guy who made Opera.
Unfortunately it’s still much less secure than Chromium
What does that mean?
Is there anything in the new ToS that’s even bad? Like, there are lots of people breathlessly ranting about how privacy is dead because Mozilla mentioned the existence of third parties and gibberish like that, but when I read it myself it mostly seemed like they were just saying that if you use third party services through Firefox then the third parties will have your data. That seems kinda like a nothingburger of a controversy to me. I dunno, I’m not a lawyer, maybe I missed something, but if so I certainly haven’t seen anybody else explain it properly.
They also recently removed the promise to never sell data: https://programming.dev/post/26136291
There’s this comment (https://lemmy.zip/post/32886349/16923402) in this post (https://lemmy.zip/post/32886349?sort=Top) that should be interesting
You can’t see it from Beehaw as beehaw defederated Lemmy.world
They removed a broadly worded promise that might theoretically be used to get them in trouble for selling anonymized data. I’m not happy about that, but it doesn’t surprise me.
The rest is just people being angry at Mozilla for describing how a modern web browser works, because other companies have pointed at similar language to argue that they have the right to do whatever they want with any information they collect and no one has stopped them. That sucks, but the problem is that there are no consequences for large corporations, not that Mozilla is using the information you put into your browser to access the internet for you. Maybe Mozilla will also decide to intentionally misinterpret their own legalese to train some garbage AI, but the absolute worst case scenario is that they’re the same as every other significant browser, and a more reasonable interpretation would be that the non-profit organization is probably not profit motivated and actually means the things they say.
Who knows. I can’t see the future, but without Firefox forks of it are a dead-end, and any other browser is still going to collect a bunch of information and use it to navigate the web for you, because that’s just how today’s garbage javascript laden websites work. Yelling at Mozilla for explaining that in their ToS isn’t going to fix it, and Ladybird isn’t going to magically change how those websites work. If you really want to do something about it, don’t use those websites. Good luck with that.
a
deleted by creator
You’re right that it’s nothing big, but the kind of people super into purity tests tend to congregate on the fediverse (which I find a little ironic but am also happy to have some people around who accept no compromises).
Well, I have been using Zen, a Firefox fork for the past 6 months, and they have yet to clarify their stance on the ToS update.
Anyway, I don’t think I’ll change anyway, we need Gecko in the browser engine landscape and I have been so used to Firefox’S UI and flexibility that I have a hard time imagining myself not using a Firefox-based browser.
Coincidentally, I just found out about Floorp yesterday, in no relation to this ToS change, and will take a look at it soon. Keep in mind I haven’t looked at all yet, so I have no clue if they have a worse ToS or something.
If they’re willing to lose their market share just to chase the AI dragon, I’m willing to be complicit. I know that Brave is pretty good on PC (aware of their crypto bollockery), and I’m taking Librewolf for a spin. As for mobile, I’m happy with Vanadium.
The real shame is Thunderbird getting caught in it. I’ll have to look for a replacement both on PC and Android.
I use fair mail on Android and I really like it. Evolution comes pre installed on Debian, it got the job done for me too. The mobile client is more important to me personally.
Maybe, but I’ll stay on the non-Chromium end of things. I’ll definitely try out some competitors, such as:
- Mullvad Browser
- Zen
- LadyBird
I still support engine diversity, but that doesn’t have to be mainline Firefox.
That said, I don’t think the TOS is as bad as people claim, so I’m in no rush.
I was trying out Mullvad Browser and clicked on a Discord link and it launched the Discord app on my computer.
I was shocked that a security-oriented browser would launch an external application without warning by default. Even Chrome prompts the user first.
Hmm, that is odd.
