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.
waterfox waterfox waterfox
Man all this makes me want to just use Links2 for everything and being a luddite. Complete with cabin in the woods. So frustrating.
There’s a links2!?!?!?
Good thing LibreWolf and other forks exist, including hard forks like the Goanna browsers.
Yeesh. So what’s an alternative?
Chromium I guess? Let’s wait and see first.
How in the absolute fuck is chromium an alternative?
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.
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
I’m very happy with librewolf on desktop and ironfox on mobile
Same.
I feel like everything is getting corroded, the capitalists are wearing down everything
What the fuck?
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”
I moved on to Waterfox, is this a good move?
AI is going to fail, and it can’t happen soon enough. The Mozilla leadership really needs to pay attention to that reality.
Mozilla leadership needs to be removed
100%. I can’t decide whether I think the organization being dissolved completely is a good idea or not, but I’m at least open to it.
It just became bigger: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
There’s never enough money to maintain the browser but there’s always enough to dump more into executives pockets.
i think MS? admitted AI isnt generating useful profit for them, yea its hype like crypto is.
It’s not going to disappear, it has its place, but its not going to be shoehorned into every single thing.
Sorry, I realized I’m using my personal jargon in public again. When I said “AI,” I meant this overhyped put-it-in-your-mouse garbage. When I’m talking about the actually useful stuff, I usually call it “ML.”
Of course you have no reason to know that or care. My apologies.
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.
Not really open source, but want to mention it anyways. Take a look at the Norwegian browser Vivaldi. I made the switch recently and am really happy with it. Their privacy policy seems good, and they have a clear no AI stance. Their android browser is by far the best android browser from a UX standpoint in my opinion.
I might be biased as a Norwegian 😉
Yeah, I’ll +1 Vivaldi - great tool with (mostly) useful features
Not sure how it will do with the Chrome / Chromium v3 addon API thingie - just not looked into that at all. Hope it’s not relevant
Mange tak! 😁
librewolf on pc and ironfox on android. both forks of firefox.
Why IronFox over fennec?
More privacy related defaults. Essentially the about:config is more or less filled out for you on Ironfox.
+1 for LibreWolf. Dialy driver and not looking back.
Ice Raven on Android.
This is my pair as well
I looked into how to install IronFox and fell into a huge rabbit hole about F-droid vs grapheneos etc I had no idea there was all this contention. https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/issues/7
Danke danke
Librewolf, Servo looks promising but is very far off and just an engine I think? Idk I keep looking at it and want it.
Servo isn’t a full browser, it’s a tech testbed for Mozilla to test out their various rewritten Rust components. I wish they would have promoted it to full browser status, but I think intention was always to take pieces of Servo as they were completed and drop them into Firefox.
Damn, maybe I can’t read but I didnt find that info on their page.
Hmm seems like it’s only partially true these days. Looking at their webpage they have a screenshot of their Wikipedia entry (why they didn’t just link to it I have no idea) that provides some more up to date info. It was a testbed and they mention a project Quantum where the tech was added into Firefox’s Gecko engine. In 2020 Mozilla laid off all their Servo devs and handed the project over to Linux Foundation Europe. It seems like since then they’ve reenvisioned the project as an embeddable rendering engine similar to WebKit or V8.
Oh, well thank you for the info. I guess its a good thing Librewolf already exists.
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.
Yeah but the line between them and google is not there anymore in that case
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.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.
Damn we really can’t have anything nice.
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
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.
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.
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.
ladybird can’t come fast enough
Ladybird has a platinum sponsorship on their homepage from Shopify so not a good look already.
Building a browser from scratch is going to cost well over a million dollars in development costs. I don’t think they’d be able to achieve it without sponsors.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t seek funding, but maybe not from companies that hosted and sold literally Nazi tshirts.
Well it’s a sponsor, it’s not their product.
What’s that saying about sitting at a table with a Nazi?
