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.
In Firefox, type about:config in address bar, search for “sponsored” and “telemetry” and set all the paremeters you see from TRUE to FALSE. Done.
We shouldn’t have to do workarounds like that in the first place. It’s getting to be like the Stockholm syndrome people have about Windows abuses. I didn’t put up that shit, and I’m not gonna put up with this either.
I’d be more worried about how long that flag is going to work. And how long is it going to take us to realize the flag isn’t working.
I’m running Linux and neither Waterfox or LibreWolf are present in repository of one of the most popular distros. Come on?!
If you are using a debian flavor, you can likely add extrepo that searches a central repo of repositories and can add them as needed.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install extrepo -y sudo extrepo enable librewolf sudo apt update && sudo apt install librewolf -yWhy always this Terminal bullshit? Why can’t I just find it and click Install like a normal user and not like a fucking caveman?
Seems like a much simpler solution is to just use LibreWolf where all these things are removed from the program already for you. That’s the point of the fork.
Do you know any trustworthy browsers for android?
Cromite
Ironfox, it’s a privacy focused Fork of the Android version of Firefox browser. So far I’ve had no incompatibility problems or issues with my add-ons pretty much the only difference from Firefox nightly that I was using is that the icon is different
That comes with its own problems and slow releases trailing behind Firefoxes. One of things I absolutely hate about forks.
I would still suggest folks to at least go through Librewolf’s FAQ and Docs. For example, Librewolf disables DNS over HTTPS by default. See https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#doh-whats-the-stance-on-doh
If anyone reading this is not configuring their DNS on their routers or on their Linux machines using systemd-resolved or something similar, I suppose they should probably at least configure their browser to use DNS over HTTPS. It should be better than using the default DNS resolver provided by your ISP.
As far as I’m aware, Librewolf’s team isn’t making significant changes to Firefox’s code or “patching out” some spooky telemetry. Librewolf is essentially pre-configuring a bunch of “privacy” and “security” related settings in Firefox for their users. But alternatively any user can configure these things themeselves and make their own choices. Even pre-installing extensions and add-ons on fresh Firefox profiles can be easily done by any user using Firefox policies (which is what Librewolf uses to pre-install Ublock Origin.) But let’s say you also want another extension like Bitwarden to be pre-installed on every fresh Firefox profile. Or you don’t trust DuckDuckGo and instead want to configure Firefox to use a self-hosted SearXNG instance as your default search engine. Then maintaining your own Firefox policies can help you do all this.
I understand it is far simpler and far more desirable to have “privacy and security” out-of-box without having to configure anything at all. But it is probably not a bad idea to take the time to see what configurations you can make to Firefox yourself, even if you decide to use LibreWolf. You may end up wanting your own configurations in addition to what Librewolf’s team decides for you.
But it erases history. I use history all the time. Very annoying.
You can change this setting, not a big deal.
Is the same checkbox in the settings that Firefox has, it’s just on by default. Have you considered just turning it off?
I haven’t used it in a long time! It didn’t occur to me maybe it’s changed in the meantime.
I’ll give it a shot.
Seems insane that even after disabling all related options in the main settings GUI, there are still like two dozen things enabled in about:config.
some are subcomponents of the main disabled feature. i checked this on my browser which was only modified by GUI, and nothing i saw ‘enabled’ was actually enabled, but instead a subfeature of what I had disabled.
Or use Waterfox which does most of this by default
I like waterfox but the dev of waterfox made a deal with an advertising corp, eventually it fell apart but there was a solid few years where users left waterfox.
People have done audits of Waterfox and of is still mostly private. It is still way better than Firefox from a privacy perspective.
Or switch to librewolf (Ironfox on android).
I wouldn’t use Ironfox on Android since they have decided to promote a F-droid alternative that encourages proprietary software.
Or, just switch to the iron fox fork.
“just”? That sounds like way more work than taking 10 seconds to change the setting.
(I don’t disagree with your suggestion, I’m just baffled at the use of “just”)
Maybe we use our web browsers differently? I only use a couple extensions, never bookmark much (but I didn’t delete Firefox, so I can always go back to look at them) and I don’t leave the m9zilla or google cloud in control of my names and passwords, so no auto fill.
It took me literally 1 minute to switch to using iron fox.
Yeah, so longer than changing a setting, even in your ideal scenario.
But yes, we clearly do. I would spend the first 10 minutes figuring out how to export/import my 80 open browser tabs from one browser to another. And the next 10 copy pasting the URLs one by one manually after deeming it impossible.
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.
Hey, just wanted to point out that xbrowsersync hasn’t seen updates for quite some time. I would suggest folks to read this discussion and to perhaps check out Floccus as an alternative.
Both Floccus and xBrowserSync have Android apps on the F-droid app store as well.
Alternative to FF Sync?
I Iove this shit. Send to devices, multiple devices, bookmarks, passwords…
You can self host firefox sync.
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?
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!
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’.”
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?
The ambiguity is the smoking gun.
It also now is against the terms of service to use Firefox for illegal activity or to use it to watch porn.
Soo… where do we go now? What open source alternative exists that is on the side of its users?
Librewolf
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
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.
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 intirely different thing to maintain pacman than to maintain the freaking kernel.
how something like Zen
Zen is a Firefox fork.
Zen Browser
Ladybird looks promising.
Depends on where you stand on misogyny and transphobia.
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?
There is a link on another FF post to GitHub where someone changed “he” to “they” in the documentation. The main dev told them to “keep their politics to themselves” and refused the fix.
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.
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?
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
IceCat
A different fork from firefox like librewolf
Ladybird in a few years, forks of Firefox for now.
Soon the only private option left will be to curl the website, read the html and picture it in my head.
stallman was right
“Flamed”, that’s a new one
That’s an OLD one. Wow I haven’t heard that term in like 20 years
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
I wanna hear them get SLAMMED
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
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 LibreFox on my PCs.
This fight against surveillance capitalism is exhausting…
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.
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.
Exactly what I expected: a restatement of the terms, pointing out that they’re not onerous at all, and a link to jwz’s blog, the single person on earth with the biggest hate boner for Mozilla.
They need money and they don’t get much from donations. I’d love to hear everyone’s ideas for how they can generate enough revenue to keep the lights on without either making deals with Google or engaging in any form of advertising or data trading.
There’s absolutely a line where I would start looking elsewhere, but this ain’t it.
2 options:
- Ask their users for money. It’s a tried and true system that works for a lot of projects.
- Stop spending their existing money on dumb things that nobody is asking for. A good start would be to cut out the CEO’s pay.
They could offer services that people want with paid tiers.
They do already ask their users for money.
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 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.
I mean people would rather have Firefox propped up by Google (an ad company)'s donations then?
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…)
Where are these grants coming from? They already take in donations and it’s not nearly enough to pay the engineers. Sure I’d love it if the c-suite took a pay cut but the truth is that a modern web browser is a big enough project that it basically requires an enterprise-size team dedicated to its maintenance.
“They already take in donations…”
Where can I dontate to Firefox? Not Mozilla, and not a fund that goes to CEO-pay or other expences, but straight to Firefox
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/
The Mozilla Foundation is the parent non-profit of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation.
But that’s not donating to Firefox, that’s donating to Mozilla, which I don’t want to do, because they seem to be wasting their money.
If your concern is that the money goes to efforts for an open internet, and not too enriching any executives, then you want to donate to the non-profit, not the corporation.
But I don’t want to donate to the “open internet” or the non-profit, I want to donate directly to Firefox. How can I ensure that the money I spend gets spent on that and only that?
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
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.
Discovering that arsenic ingestion is bad for you doesn’t make ingesting cyanide better.
lololololol
I’ve just learned not to say the B word on Lemmy.
no, see, while mozilla may be monetizing its user base, we know brave is.
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…
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
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.
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.
