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.
Guys Mullvad browser and Librewolf exist.
Zen Browser too
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.
I moved on to Waterfox, is this a good move?
Oh, that last paragraph doesn’t give me hope at all. Fucking AI chatbots.
So now what the hell do we have to use to not be spied upon?
Librewolf is still a good alternative
Well I suppose LibreWolf (or some other de-branded Firefox) will become more mainstream. Similar to what chromium is to chrome 🤷
If we are comparing it to Chrome, it is more like Ungoogled-Chromium.
That’s not a real equivalence.
Chromium is the basis for Google Chrome, while Librewolf is nothing more than a leech to Firefox. It’s just Firefox, rebranded.
In the good/bad old days a web page was just text and images but now a browser is a platform for running software. Each website can do useful computing for the user but the software author is in control and always tempted to make it run for them at the expenve of the user.
Crazy idea, maybe we shouldn’t use web browsers.
What the fuck?
Is Waterfox a good alternative?
Waterfox’s creator, while not being HOSTILE to privacy, has said in the past that making the most private browser in the world is not the goal of the project. The goal is a more customizable browser for power users
waterfox waterfox waterfox
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.
Well, we had a good run lads, enshitification is here.
Any recommendations for open source alternatives that are convenient and also have an android app supporting ublock origin.
librewolf on pc and ironfox on android. both forks of firefox.
+1 for LibreWolf. Dialy driver and not looking back.
Ice Raven on Android.
This is my pair as well
Danke danke
Why IronFox over fennec?
Waterfox
Wtf is happening, why is now even Firefox going off the rails?
probably saw all the money by having thier browsers info being sold off to companies, like with chrome, and google and reddit/OPEN AI collusion.
You missed the previous memo: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
The writing was on the wall when the Mozilla Corporation was setup under the Foundation. A bunch of SF venture capital types have places on the board, and are in operational leadership, and are slowly transforming Mozilla into a shitty for-profit tech venture. Ads, data collection, subscription services, and a chat bot.
Where’s the gofundme for the firefox fork project?
Was this from google turning off the funding tap?
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!!”
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
Can you elaborate on this?
I want to say thanks but also I hated reading that lol
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”
Privacy policies should legally be called surveillance policies.
Or “Invasion of Privacy” Policy
