The answer to “what is Firefox?” on Mozilla’s FAQ page about its browser used to read:
The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.
Now it just says:
The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.
In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.
A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, “is Firefox free?” Moz used to say:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.
Now it simply reads:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.
Again, a pledge to not sell people’s data has disappeared. Varma insisted this is the result of the fluid definition of “sell” in the context of data sharing and privacy.
Soon the only private option left will be to curl the website, read the html and picture it in my head.
stallman was right
Are there any specifics about this? It all seems fairly theoretical to me. What do they [want to] do that contradicts “doesn’t sell your personal data” within the context of the fluid definition of “sell”? Do they sell my personal data or don’t they? What definitions of “sell” are relevant here?
It’s all sounding a bit Bill Clinton to me: “it depends on your definition of ‘is’.”
The ambiguity is the smoking gun.
One thing to keep in mind is thar mozilla is now an ad company and can use this data itself for whatever advertising it wants to sell, so they dont even need a third party they can just sell targeted ads directly to companies while not technically “sharing” the info they gather to anyone.
Basically, why sell the data to other people when you can profit from using it directly?
They get access to everything to do in Firefox
Now that Mozilla’s fucked. What’s the next option that’s not Chromium?
- Mozilla is sliding down a slippery slope to enshitification; but they’re still near the top of that slide. The bad stuff hasn’t actually come yet. So Firefox is still top-tier in the short term.
- In the medium term, we can look towards a fork such as Librewolf or Waterfox.
- And in the long term, we’ll probably turn to a new project using Ladybird or Servo.
It do be a slippery slope though
Ladybird in a few years, forks of Firefox for now.
A different fork from firefox like librewolf
Librewolf is just some patches added on top of Firefox.
Which happen to remove all telemetry, ads, reporting, etc. You know, the reason we don’t want to use vanilla Firefox.
Use Librewolf. Please don’t use any damned Chromium-based trash.
I’ll stop using Chromium-based trash once Firefox devs stop acting all holier than thou and implement WebUSB and WebSerial instead of some vague notion they are protecting me from myself by not implementing it.
WebUSB isn’t a web standard and there isn’t a spec for it. If it becomes a standard then they might. However, it is terrible for privacy and security.
https://wicg.github.io/webusb plenty of spec here and a draft to become web standard.
It’s up to me to decide what is sufficient secure and private for me, I don’t have the same threat model as others. It’s the same bullshit line Firefox throws around.
There is a reason why Firefox is constantly losing adoption. People want things to work.
They can easily add it behind a flag until it’s ready, but those that need it can use it in it’s current form. I need it for keyboards and mice to be configurable on Linux. Many hardware manufacturers are starting to use it to make cross platform tools for their prepherial hardware. I’m not gonna wait for Firefox overlords to deem it “safe enough” by their whims. They don’t even have a framework for how to qualify something is safe. It’s just at the personal preferences of Mozilla devs.
They have implemented plenty of things that were drafts, and posed just as many security or privacy issues.
Librewolf, degoogled chromium, private windows. If you don’t want your data to be sold, don’t give out your data.
IceCat
That isn’t ready for common use by most people until there they offer binaries for easy installation.
How’s the security patching? Last time I checked it was way far behind
It also now is against the terms of service to use Firefox for illegal activity or to use it to watch porn.
It also now is against the terms of service to use Firefox for illegal activity or to use it to watch porn.
I’ve seen this mentioned a few times in the past week, but I don’t see anything about pornography in the ToS.
Can you link me a source?
said Ajit Varma, veep of Firefox Product
Pack up your shit, and get the FUCK out. You’re a fucking disgrace.
Given that this is a privacy community, I would think that it would go without saying, But I just like to point out, We should probably disable Firefox sync if were using it. Log out of Firefox accounts in the browser. Even if you’re not giving them telemetry they have all that data.
You can use the x bookmarks sync plugin, Don’t make an account with them just use the un-logged in plugin to backup and restore your bookmarks between browsers. On the upside it’ll even let you copy bookmarks from Firefox derivatives to Chrome derivatives.Go down a comment or two and use Floccus, Just converted it’s wonderful
at their location. However the want it
Alternative to FF Sync?
I Iove this shit. Send to devices, multiple devices, bookmarks, passwords…
Xbrowsersync for bookmark syncing. Works across browsers. A real password Manager, like Bitwarden, for passwords.
I think the killer feature of ff sync is being able to see open tabs on other devices. Is there any other way to achieve that?
Oooh that’s tasty, guess I’ll be adding that to my Configs soon.
Hmm not sure. It’s not something I’ve ever used. Maybe theres something for that.
Though I seem to remember one could host their own sync server?
For sending things to devices I use KDE Connect. I realize it is a fundamentally different application, but it is what I use generally to send / receive links between devices, as well as documents, images etc. It also is good for notification mirroring, and really just integrating Android devices into Windows / Linux computers.
For passwords I used KeePass (and I sync them between devices with SyncThing), but I usually recommend Bitwarden (which is what I used to use). Both are open source, have apps for all platforms, can integrate into your browser if you choose. The main advantage of Bitwarden is that it is open source, all necessary features are free, and you can host the server yourself if you want. It also integrates into some services, notably email aliasing ones, to allow you to generate new emails every time you make a new account.
For bookmarks / history your best bet is the extension everyone else is recommending here!
I wish kde connect was usable for me.
Whatever brand of magic it just finds your device works horribly on my corporate and home network. If I give it a static IP which is only supported in some operating systems, it’s able to find it but then when I change locations it’s totally wrong and refuses to connect.
I’m not surprised by the corporate network, it’s pretty common for those types of networks to severely block inter-device LAN communication. There are two solutions however, for one, KDEconnect has initial Bluetooth support. I think it only support Plasma and Android as of now, and could be documented better, but it does avoid the LAN access problems. The other solution is using a VPN, the easiest off the shelf solution being Tailscale, but I feel this is only worth it if you have multiple use cases for it (I use it for faster Syncthing transfers, Moonlight / Sunshine game streaming. And KDEconnect)
I really wish KDEConnect “just worked”, similar to how Apple’s devices connect to one another, but I guess this is the price you pay sometimes for an open source cross platform solution.
My home and corporate networks are both set up with igmp snooping.
Problem with using tailscale is that if I’m at work, both my desktop and phone would have to be tailscaled home to connect which is not ideal.
When I’m at home I need my phone to connect to my home desktop, when I’m at work I need my phone to connect to my work desktop.
If they supported a list of static IP addresses that would work
If they allowed DNS names as the targets that would work.
If they could add IGMP multicast to their search capabilities that would work. IGMP is the option to be allowed to forward across networks.
Bluetooth could work
They could use MQTT or NTFY
It’s probably about a billion ways to skin this. They basically just need some form of communication without knowing the exact target or being able to specify the target dynamically. I give it a shot every year or so get it to connect a couple of times and then eventually give up.
You can self host firefox sync.
At the moment that would be an option, we’d need somebody to watch the code and make sure they don’t change and send your crap home anyway in an update.
Soo… where do we go now? What open source alternative exists that is on the side of its users?
Just keep using Firefox. Nothing in the code has changed, and if it does you can switch to forks. You all are evangelizing about how important FOSS is to prevent this exact scenario and yet you keep switching browsers for no need at all.
Note: I love Foss, I just think this is an overreaction
Oh sure, but browsers are an entirely different beast.
Eventually, they’ll take it closed source, now I know what you’re thinking “Then one of the forks will just become the dominant one!”
But here’s the thing, the browser engine is very complicated just to keep up with. The W3C spec that all engines must follow is thousands of pages long. So all those forks will wither and die once the engine has been cut off from upstream updates.
None of those forks touch the engine as-is
Do tell how something like Zen or Ladybird has a better chance at doing so. It would be better if instead of this fragmentation the Zen and Ladybird would work in a Firefox fork.
Ladybird has some serious backing and employed developers working on their engine and has been worked on for years (Ladybird started life as the SerenityOS browser)
And even after all that time and money, it’s still not even ready for general use. Their roadmap has them having a public release ready in 2028 iirc
And fragmentation? Really? LMAO there needs to be some competition in browser engines, if there was we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.
There are only 2 modern, open source and fully working engines. Chromium and FF, that’s not fragmentation, that’s a duopoly
That’s like calling Linux on the server a monopoly. It’s open source, with many distros (forks). Anyone can fork the engine.
Distros are not kernel forks. Distros simply take the kernel, and bundle it with many utilities for the end-user. It is the equivalent of taking a puzzle set and assembling the pieces together. Sure, many distros maintain their own programs (such as a package manager), but it is an entirely different thing to maintain pacman than to maintain the freaking kernel.
Anyone can fork the engine.
Even the Linux kernel is not as much of a beast that a browser engine is, I’ve seen estimates that a dedicated small team could build a new modern Linux kernel from scratch and generally usable in about 2-3 years
A browser engine takes years more, again, ladybird’s engine is built from scratch, and it’s currently in year 3 targeting an alpha release in 2026 or Year 4. With it projected to be generally usable in 2028 a full 6 years later.
And there are actually a couple different independent kernels, so no it’s not a monopoly
FUTO could develop a browser engine much quicker by simply forking Firefox.
Even the Linux kernel is not as much of a beast that a browser engine is
A browser engine takes years more [than a kernel]
That’s cool, I didn’t know that. !til@lemmy.world
how something like Zen
Zen is a Firefox fork.
I mean, FOSS doesn’t prevent this on its own. We should probably all switch to LW and try to keep an eye that those telemetry settings don’t become disabled upstream.
Also of concern would be anyone using Firefox accounts and sync.
Librewolf
Ladybird looks promising.
Depends on where you stand on misogyny and transphobia.
I think it is overblown
Also we don’t exactly have a lot of options
I feel out of the loop on this one. Is there a particular individual on the project that this is about, or is this a company policy issue?
Essentially, someone submitted a PR on GitHub changing a “he” in the build instructions to a gender-neutral “they”, to which the main dev of Ladybird (Andreas Kling) replied:
This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.
This next part’s just my opinion; that’s an insane response to someone suggesting neutral language. As a non-binary person, I wouldn’t feel comfortable around this person after such a reply, and I certainly wouldn’t donate to Ladybird or anything of the sort.
That being said, we all likely use tons of software developed by people way worse than Kling. As long as it’s FOSS and is privacy-respecting, I’ll run code that’s been written by bigots. However I definitely won’t support them by recommending their software to others, or by donating time or money to the project.
I don’t think that’s just opinion anymore, it’s a fairly accurate analysis. Countless serious projects use pronouns and “they,” and that’s fine, but for these few specific groups they’re somehow political and a bad thing.
I’ve heard Andreas’ twitter likes were telling, before those went private, but that information’s out of reach now. That said, I’ve seen the people who frequently interact with him there, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable around them either. He seems to really like it, though. Make of that what you will.
Still, good point on the reality of “moral software use.” For all its issues, I do hope Ladybird succeeds as a new browser engine because the internet needs more of those. I’m just not touching it unless they get their shit sorted.
Honestly it seems blown way out of proportion. You are leaving out the part where he said he thinks that they sounds weird. I believe he is still open to rewriting the docs to not use pronouns at all
You are leaving out the part where he said he thinks that they sounds weird.
That doesn’t help. Also, his main reason remains “keep politics out of my project,” completely missing the point that his stance is also political. It’s the old “my politics aren’t political because they’re normal.”
I believe he is still open to rewriting the docs to not use pronouns at all
That’s even more political, and ridiculously so. Linux kernel docs refer to users as “they.” Should they change it? Are they bringing in unnecessary politics into the sanctity of one of the world’s greatest collaborative technical projects? Are they too fucking woke?
Documentation shouldn’t have pronouns since that’s the wrong tone
I think the dev probably just hasn’t been exposed much to transgender people. Reacting with hate immediately doesn’t help at all.
There is a link on another FF post to GitHub where someone changed “he” to “they” in the documentation. All references to a user being able to do anything in the documentation only uses “He”.
The main dev told them to “keep their politics to themselves” and refused the fix.
In which context? If it was referring to a man I get why he’d say that answer
Parent comment says “a user.” Reading the docs, it clearly wasn’t referring to a man, but any user, as in “the average Lemmy user interacts with many instances, and they have the option to block those they’re not interested in.”
I think that’s a pretty cheap PR. Ideally it should be rewritten to not to use pronouns. The PR is low effort and feels like it was deliberately done for attention.
I think that’s a pretty cheap PR.
And?
Ideally it should be rewritten to not to use pronouns.
Why? Linux kernel docs use pronouns and they, and they’re fine. What’s so special about Klingland that they need to keep pronouns out?
The PR is low effort and feels like it was deliberately done for attention.
Have you ever seen the piles of “good first issue” tags on github? Most newcomers start with simple changes, and documentation improvements are high up in being a user’s first contribution. Do you have anything that suggests the person behind the PR had such intentions, beyond you thinking it’s low effort?
Zen Browser
“Flamed”, that’s a new one
Tim’s an old one, actually. Back in the old internet forum days, flaming was the act of going off on someone during an argument. Most forums even had “no flaming” rules, that could result in warns or outright bans if a mod thought an argument had gotten out of hand.
To be clear, flaming is the act of insulting the user, not the act of arguing against them. You can argue against a user without attacking the user directly.
Its pretty accurate
That’s an OLD one. Wow I haven’t heard that term in like 20 years
Appropriate callback too given the pun.
I wanna hear them get SLAMMED
Come on and SLAM and welcome to the JAM
deleted by creator
Another year another browser to avoid. It’s an endless cycle…
Orion is much better. Vote with your computing power.
Orion is a closed-source browser for MacOS and IOS only.
Man! I’ve been out of touch for just a few weeks. I just switched from Mull to IronFox a few weeks ago. I use FF sync. I use Libre
FoxWolf on my PCs.This fight against surveillance capitalism is exhausting…
Edit: I’m more awake now. LibreWolf strips out tracking and dumb features (like PPA), buy I dont know if IF does the same. In short: Anyone using LibreWolf is still fine.
On your edit, how do you know this?
Edit: I’m more awake now. LW strips out tracking and dumb features (like PPA), buy I dont know if IF does the same. In short: Anyone using LW is still fine.
I was looking here: https://librewolf.net/
What is LibreWolf?
This project is a custom and independent version of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom.
LibreWolf is designed to increase protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques, while also including a few security improvements. This is achieved through our privacy and security oriented settings and patches. LibreWolf also aims to remove all the telemetry, data collection and annoyances, as well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM.
I thought you meant lemmy world.
That’s my fault.
Nah, I just misunderstood.
Well, a browser is extremely complex, and hence super expensive to make. So if Mozilla doesn’t find any other way to monetize, I guess they have to do something about user data?
Mozilla payed their last CEO seven million bucks a year. Seems like they were doing just fine without the ad tracking gravy train to afford that salary.
Holy wild speculation pulled right out of your arse, Batman!
https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Mozilla
Scroll down to Excessive Executive Pay.
Mozilla has zero financial issues. Mozilla is a non-profit that is actively investing, and receiving dividends and interest in return. A nonprofit that is generating millions in revenue for essentially nothing and paying their executives fat stacks. They have zero reason to need to do this beyond greed and disregard for their user base.
Stop citing this dude like he knows anything. Many of his videos he says he’s just yapping and doesn’t know why anyone watches. He’s not a citation of any value
Mozilla shares your data under certain circumstances. This helps people realize that Mozilla is able to share your data, regardless of ‘selling’ potential. Some people assumed ‘we dont sell your data’ meant ‘we dont share your data’ when that was impossible for the definition of how some built in features work.
They make money from targeted advertising
It is hard to misunderstand that
They have many gains from the data they shared. This also includes witnessed data by internal employees to even discover what had to be trimmed down or censored before public release. And then some of those employees moved to other companies and copied the strategy into something profitable. Their ethos was not appropriately measurable and auditable to the degree necessary going forward; it needed to be axed. It’s like Google saying do no evil; the sands of time revealed these points unsustainable and limiting to even achieve their objectives in a vacuum. Funding is a security issue. Easy privacy is nice, but the industry needs a lot of work and people have to eat while we test the risky innovations that will make the future shine. Mozilla is still providing great steps to ensure someone somewhere can still make achievable best practices available for all, and when they fail we’ll be there to clean up the mess.
They literally purchased an ad company
I could give you some very long stories related to this. In the end of it, it comes down to how can they ‘sterilize’ the avenues of data collection and allow more opt-out scenarios, and more nuanced potentials that would provide comfort in your browsing habits and privacy desires. It remains to be seen how the situation pans out, but this isn’t a 100% done with them action. They have opportunities here, and we’ll see if their course turns evil or not.
Just because “some people” can’t words, that doesn’t mean that you should change the words to suit the people who can’t them.
The premise of ‘sharing’ and then receiving something from who you shared with IS a form of selling. If Mozilla .never. shared data, are you sure you ‘can words’?
Well, now, I guess all the people who like to lecture me every time the topic of Brave comes up will just chill the f*** out now.
Or we could just not use either? Just a thought.
How Brave of you
Are you saying that Brave does not sell you out?
No, they’re saying that people have been shittong on them for years for using Brave, now that the Firefox people are in the same boat maybe they’ll stop shitting on them.
Looks at thread Nope, people are just going to shit harder.
The thing is: it’s going to happen to Firefox, it has been happening to Brave.
It has always been the case with brave it’s not that it happened or didn’t happen They never alluded that it wouldn’t so we knew not to put anything there. People have been adding stuff to Firefox for ages and now the business model is changing.
Hell if anything that puts Firefox a little worse off at the moment
While Mozilla is in a worse place at the moment, Firefox has been forked many times.
As has Chrome. Right now it’s a simple matter to undo any telemetry changes done, But just like Chrome, what’s the code basis diverge as they try to make it more complicated to keep the telemetry going it’ll be harder for the forks to patch.
Which then begs the question: what is so special about Brave, isn’t it just another Chromium fork?
no, see, while mozilla may be monetizing its user base, we know brave is.
They both are pretty bad.
But we’ve always known that Brave is and if we put any information into it it was because we were okay with that.
Now you’ve got a whole lot of people that have a whole lot of information swimming around and MOZ changes their business plan…
Its a sad day for sure, when the example of privacy and user respect just… Isn’t anymore.
People are just largely naive. Your privacy, at least since 2001, has always been in your own hands. (Not unlike how, if you don’t want to get a virus, you’re stuck moderating your own behavior, as the community around you is largely careless.)
A comparison to malware isn’t quite accurate because in this case, the software itself is already attacking you when it ideally should be neutral.
Nah, fuck brave.
I’ve just learned not to say the B word on Lemmy.
Naw brother (or friend if I’m being too presumptuous), they’re just going to double down on being hypocritical.
Now theyll pull out all the things that Brave did most of a decade ago to stay afloat and laud it over you like it’s not something mozilla’s got on the table right now.
But their crypto… but their search… But that seven-million dollar moz CEO isn’t going to pay for himself either.
Brave is going to sell my shit. That was never in question. But knowing that up front I don’t give them anything that I want to play close to the heart.
Firefox has a fuckton on everone that they’ve had for ages that they can now sell because they changed their business model.
And sure we can turn telemetry off if we haven’t already, But how long do you think that feature is going to work as intended once it’s the only thing paying their top man to stay.
Use their privacy friendly forks.
I mean people would rather have Firefox propped up by Google (an ad company)'s donations then?
I’d rather just use Google if we are throwing privacy out the window
Also why is my business how they make money? I just want privacy and to be Google free
No, that’s a bullshit false dichotomy.
People would rather have Firefox developed ethically by a proper foundation that’s supported by grants and donations even if its total operating budget is vastly lower. (It wouldn’t be able to have a grossly overpaid CEO like Mozilla does now. Oh noooooooo…)
I’m fine with that, people should advocate that more. I don’t disagree with you, but a lot of the coverage and commentary seems to reminicse about a nebulous “the way it was before” which wasn’t ideal either.
Actually? Oh my God yes. We got to have our cake and eat it too. Google, in an effort to skirt monopoly laws actually paid for the open source browser we were using.
I personally love the idea of Google’s ads paying for our untracked browsing
