Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.
This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.
I’ve been willingly enabling data collection features for Mozilla but I guess that time is revolute, they don’t feel trustworthy anymore.
Same here. Just turned off all data collection checkboxes. Fuck Mozilla!
and then, “uh, we are removing the URL bar in the next version because our statistics say nobody uses it!!”
Guys Mullvad browser and Librewolf exist.
Do they support ubo?
they’re firefox forks and ubo comes automatically installed with them.
I have librewolf, don’t use it much. Is it functionally the same as FF? In terms of plug-in and website compatibility.
Most consumer sites are optimized for chrome and even safari, firefox & Edge (Obviously) face issues with scripts and plug-ins.
Most consumer sites are optimized for chrome and even safari, firefox & Edge (Obviously) face issues with scripts and plug-ins.
This is why it’s dangerous that Chrome has such a large amount of market share. Instead of using standard features, sites are using Chrome-specific features and even relying on Chrome bugs that don’t exist in other browsers. It’s exactly the same reason Internet Explorer was bad.
It’s basically the same, but the devil is in the detail. DRM disabled from the get go, which is a show stopper for some sites (say, netflix). Some sites will bork themselve on the strange user-agent. Some advanced privacy features are quite hard to disable willingly, which may or may not be a good thing if you actually have to get things done on sites that breaks.
One would argue that sites that breaks when privacy features are enforced are not worth it, but you don’t always have a choice in that regard.
Zen Browser too
Yeesh. So what’s an alternative?
Chromium I guess? Let’s wait and see first.
How in the absolute fuck is chromium an alternative?
I’m very happy with librewolf on desktop and ironfox on mobile
Same.
waterfox
This one says that waterfox also has Google and Mozilla telemetry, but I guess you can turn it off? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox
telemetry is off by default idk if that’s up to date
LibreWolf, or if you can tolerate some breakage, PaleMoon or Basilisk (I say ‘if you can tolerate some breakage’ because Goanna is hard-forked from old ESR code, and PaleMoon and Basilisk are both Goanna-based).
As I understand it, these changes don’t affect browsers that use FF as a base, so Zen Browser might not be affected.
I’ve been trying it out this week, and it’s good. And can still use all the FF extensions.
To add to the list:
Mullvad browser (pc only) (removes blobs,proprietary crap, telemetry, and is otherwise hardened and was developed in partnership with the tor org. Some prefs are fine to change but you’re best off by leaving as is.
Tor browser - nuff said. If you want anonymity use this. Don’t change any prefs.
Arkenfox has a nodded user.is file you can simply drop into your current ff profile dir. It includes many hidden prefs and settings and allows you to customize for your needs/threat model.
Arkenfox’s mods are used by other privacy friendly browsers. As are some tor mods.
If you can find your way around about:config and don’t mind some learning, you can achieve most of the results of hardened broswers.
There are guides to further harden your ff. Search for Hardened Firefox.
Privacy policies should legally be called surveillance policies.
Or “Invasion of Privacy” Policy
Get ready for ads as well
They removed this:
{ "@type": "Question", "name": "Does Firefox sell your personal data?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. " } },Turns out when you gotta choose between going defunct and selling ad space, selling ad space wins.
Also turns out that drying up donations for privacy protecting browsers means there is less demand for it, and less money to fund it.
The majority cost of Firefox is engineering salaries.
Eventually something has to give, and this is it.
Also turns out that drying up donations for privacy protecting browsers means there is less demand for it
Or, hear me out, that former donors don’t trust them anymore!
But also that a lot of people don’t want to donate, basically when they could only donate an immeasurably small amount, to a company whose CEO gets an unimaginably huge pay, that could be used for significantly boosting development.
Personally that’s a big reason I rather want to support smaller projects, or even that of size like Bitwarden.Yeah but the line between them and google is not there anymore in that case
Cough cough, that’s true the biggest cost is salary 17,097,933. But 10 millions are paid to C-Suite and 4mil to contractors who do the job. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla-foundation-form-990-public-disclosure-ty23.pdf Just look into the books.
Looking forward to seeing the cope from the Mozilla fanboys for that one.
sometimes bound to give, if firefox isnt taking in money from having no ads, to having ads. they are going to need tons of ads, and the ability to sell your browser info for money, much like chrome is doing. surprised its taken this long to finally say “private donations isnt enough”
can a chromium fork reasonably be maintained with adblock support?
Thorium certainly does https://thorium.rocks/
I stopped following Thorium when some questionable pics were discovered in its repo
Thoughts on Vivaldi?
I mostly use Librewolf on Linux, and Fennec on Android. When I specifically need a Chromium-based browser, I usually open a Chromium guest from nix-shell on Linux, or Kiwi on Android.
Can you elaborate on this?
I want to say thanks but also I hated reading that lol
This new policy doesn’t apply to Firefox forks so you’re better off with one of those
so in a similar vein: can the community reasonably maintain an up-to-date and secure gecko-based browser we can universally move to instead of firefox? can we make google back the fuck off while we do so? because thats what seems to be the way, with how things are going down.
You mean like Pale Moon
I forgot that Pale Moon existed. How’s development going on that these days? I see that it got an update a week ago.
Still going strong. If the community reports issues or incompatibility then it gets fixed quickly.
That would be getting right back in bed with Google, gross.
Brave supports extensions still but it has its own issues.
It’s getting hard to boycott companies and products when it starting to look like most are dipping their toes into stuff their users don’t like.
I moved on to Waterfox, is this a good move?
Where’s the gofundme for the firefox fork project?
Was this from google turning off the funding tap?
Is this because some middle manager at Mozilla has to pretend to be productive?
No it’s because Firefox isn’t profitable and to try to survive in its current form they have to do something.
It might be more productive to die and live on as an open source effort. I personally doubt there’s enough open source engagement to keep Firefox current and competitive but it’s of course an alternative Mozilla in its current form is unable to consider.
Mozilla is a nonprofit (or it at least it should be, technically it’s a for profit corporation that’s wholly owned by a nonprofit foundation, shady asf).
They shouldn’t be trying to make a profit, they should make enough money to pay their programmers to maintain the browser.
They should not be dumping money into more executive hires and AI bullshit like they are doing.
Being a “non-profit” doesn’t mean the company “shouldn’t make profit” … It means that the owners/investors don’t earn anything extra based on profit. The organization itself still needs to be financially sustainable.
As shady as Mozilla is, they’re competing against a functional monopoly, so the playing field is hardly fair.
As shady as Mozilla is, they’re competing against a functional monopoly
yeah this is a part we need to recognize. right now there are essentially three browsers. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Every other browser is some derivative of one of these- mostly Chromium.
Google can change some small detail about how they render HTML or a small part of their JS engine and that has global effects all over the internet. Without a Firefox to compete, they will implement policies to hurt the consumer. People think just because Chromium is open source that this mitigates the risk.
Google’s V8 javascript engine does not only power all Chrome and chrome-derivatives, it also powers nodeJS and therefore vast swathes of server-side javascript as well.
it’s actually difficult to understate how much raw power Google has in determining what you see on the internet and how you see it
we desperately need Firefox. I really hope that an open source alternative could be viable but it’s been decades and we haven’t had a real browser pop into existence. will the death of Firefox mean something else comes out? Or will the death of Firefox be the last nail in the coffin for a free internet?
Most non-profits are not financially sustainable and rely on donations and grants to operate. If the service they provided could be financially sustainable, a for-profit would popup and operate in that space.
But I agree that non-profits can and should find fee-for-service opportunities and generate revenue to reduce their reliance on gifts.
Fair enough. Although, for those reading at home, I’ll reiterate the distinction between nonprofit and charity; all charities are nonprofits, not all nonprofits are charities. Research universities are an example.
On that note, I guess I’m enough of an academic to not consider grants a “gift” … It’s not consumerism-driven revenue, but it’s hard to call it a gift when you’re on the hook to produce something (research papers & prototypes) that you then turn around and use to sell for more revenue (in the form of grants).
they have to dip something for sure. THEY HAVE TO REDUCE THE CEO PAY BY MEASLY 20% AND FUND DEVELOPMENT FROM THAT!!!
or by even more.
lol. Are you for real? You think the Firefox development team can be funded by 20% of the CEO’s salary?!
Oh, that last paragraph doesn’t give me hope at all. Fucking AI chatbots.
The actual addition to the terms is essentially this:
- If you choose to use the optional AI chatbot sidebar feature, you’re subject to the ToS and Privacy Policy of the provider you use, just as if you’d gone to their site and used it directly. This is obvious.
- Mozilla will collect light data on usage, such as how frequently people use the feature overall, and how long the strings of text are that are being pasted in. That’s basically it.
The way this article describes it as “cushy caveats” is completely misleading. It’s quite literally just “If you use a feature that integrates with third party services, you’re relying on and providing data to those services, also we want to know if the feature is actually being used and how much.”
The problem is the inclusion of the feature to begin with. It should be an opt in add install.
I agree to a point, but I look at this similar to how I’d view any feature in a browser. Sometimes there are features added that I don’t use, and thus, I simply won’t use them.
This would be a problem for me if it was an “assistant” that automatically popped up over pages I was on to offer “help,” but it’s not. It’s just a sidebar you can click a button in the menu to pop out, or you can never click that button and you’ll never have to look at it.
It’s not a feature that auto-enables in a way that actually starts sending data to any AI company, it’s just an optional interface, that you have to click a specific button to open, that can then interface with a given AI model if you choose to use it. If you don’t want to use it, then you ideally won’t even see it open during your use of Firefox.
NOOOOOOO AI BAD ALL THE TIME THERE ARE NO CONCEIVABLE USE CASES FOR AI ITS ALL SLOP NOOOOOOO
Give an example, a first-person example, where it is not slop.
as a glorified search engine, after pretty much all search indexes were neutered on purpose…but even then it’s…mostly passable, but always untrustworthy.
Ok but it kinda is though
Correct 😎
Please let them not ruin Firefox with some bullshit AI. I can’t take much more of this, Firefox is one of the last things I have left.
It’s two things:
- Sidebar you can open from the hamburger menu that is basically just a tiny chat UI
- Right click to paste the selected text into the sidebar
If you don’t want it, they don’t seem to be pushing it any further than that. Just don’t click the option in the menus and you’ll be fine. (I believe you can also fully disable the option from appearing in settings too)
Yes, I gathered that from the previous comment, but thank you for the additional info.
I just hope it doesn’t progress further in the future. AI is quite possibly a more catastrophic technological development than nuclear weapons.
AI is quite possibly a more catastrophic technological development than nuclear weapons.
I wouldn’t go that far. A technology that wastes a lot of energy and creates a lot of bad quality content isn’t the same as a bomb that directly kills millions.
So phone-home telemetry that you can’t opt out of. The ghost of Mitchell Baker will haunt us forever.
So phone-home telemetry that you can’t opt out of.
You can opt out of it. You’ve always been able to opt out of Mozilla’s telemetry. Not to mention that if you actually read the Privacy Notice, there’s an entire section detailing every single piece of telemetry that Mozilla collects, and if you read the section very clearly titled “To provide AI chatbots,” you’ll see what’s collected:
- Technical data
- Location
- Settings data
- Unique identifiers
- Interaction data
The consent required for the collection to even start:
Our lawful basis
Consent, when you choose to enable an AI Chatbot.
And links that lead to the page explaining how to turn off telemetry even if you’re using the in-beta AI features.
It says they’re going to collect usage data. Nothing about opting out.
Look at the links in my comment, and you’ll see that all of the categories of telemetry data there can be opted out of with that single switch.
JFC please read the actual documents instead of going “nothing about opting out” when it’s literally right there.
They use the term telemetry in a special way. If they are collecting info from users, that is telemetry under a different name, ok fine. Not collecting info means they receive 0 bits.
I truly don’t understand what point you’re trying to make here.
Mozilla defines telemetry as “data collection.” Any collection of data by Mozilla is considered telemetry, as is described by the docs page that is cited on the Telemetry Collection & Deletion page.
If you deselect the Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla option, this disables all telemetry, or in other words, all data collection by Mozilla.
That’s good to know actually.
The only acceptable privacy policy for a browser is “we won’t fucking look into anything, take anything, nor send anything anywhere you didn’t actually wish to send explicitly”.
Firefox have an extension system. If mozilla wants to bloat it, they should do it via extension, so that they’re not bloating the actually useful part. As it is, all they’re doing is forcing more work on people to manage forks to remove all the shit every time they push a release.
/usr/lib/firefox-esr/browser/features
has- formautofill@mozilla.org.xpi
- pictureinpicture@mozilla.org.xpi
- screenshots@mozilla.org.xpi
- webcompat-reporter@mozilla.org.xpi
- webcompat@mozilla.org.xpi
hey, why is this significant? I can guess what features these are linked to, but is there any significance to the email address-like formats?
They are the demanded features-as-extension, shipped by default. They do that since they got rid of XUL i think?
About the @, no clue.
I feel like everything is getting corroded, the capitalists are wearing down everything
Good thing LibreWolf and other forks exist, including hard forks like the Goanna browsers.
