> Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1].
I'm still not convinced that Firefox is The Actual Devil for potentially appearing to perform .000001% of the bad behavior that is fully-baked into popular Chromium browsers.
But for the sake of argument, lets say that .0000001% > 99.99999%. What is the browser I can install+configure right now, that will perform what Firefox does every day. For ex:
natively support containers,
provide fully uncrippled element control,
provide reader mode when *I* want it,
locally save and sync windows,
provide granular redirection control,
and the other functions that are mostly unique to Firefox ecosystem
?
> We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so I want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice. We’ve added this note to our blog to clarify, so thank you for your feedback.[1]
That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that.
Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.
By that logic, and with some hyperbole, a text editor would need a license from the user to be able to turn their keystrokes into visible text display.
It smells really bad of privacy violation, data hoarding, targeted psychological manipulation (also known as advertisements), and behaviour analysis. That is why people are reacting so furiously.
> That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that.
Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.
Every browser I’ve used in the past decade does “search as you type” by default. That does require local access to your browser and your key strokes.
Normal people wouldn’t use a browser that didn’t do search as you type.
But at no point does any of what you type need to be sent to Mozilla. That only needs to be between the browser and the configured search engine and nothing in between.
> We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible
wow, that's scary.
So either
a) the current license doesn't allow some current basic functionality or
b) the basic functionality of firefox is about to change
I can't imagine how a) can be true. So b) must be true and quote implies, that firefox's basic functionality is about to change. And I do not see how it can change for the better regarding the context of the quote.
And the US DoJ ruling last year that Google had an illegal monopoly on web search, and one of the mooted remedies was to bar Google paying to be the default search engine in other browsers... and about 90% of Mozilla's income is Google paying to be the default search engine.
But sure, "why now", maybe someone reported a typo or something.
Have you tested the waters with a request for the devs to remove whatever you consider suspicious in that list?
I believe the current issue regarding Firefox is it's new terms of use, which are not presently in Zen browser. Other than that is a pretty close copy of Firefox, which is the point, and why I suggested it to parent as an option.
I did not. However considering that they have advertised themselves as "privacy-focused" Firefox alternative and can't be bothered to do the most superficial of tests, I don't think they care or are competent[1] enough to change it.
If you want an actual private Firefox alternative there are already multiple long standing and competent projects such as arkenfox, librewolf, mullvad and tor browser.
The website looks good, but as I scroll down in mobile Safari the page starts glitching until it fully crashes and Safari says an error repeatedly occurred. It doesn’t inspire much confidence when the web page for a web browser is broken.
> Can I backup my container configuration to a json file on disk or do I still need to sync it to the cloud to save it?
I will guess the ability to save containers locally must be possible, based on this: Every night, my desktop ffx profiles are copied over to a VM. The VM hosts firefox as a remote app.
That remote app instance of ffx has all of my sessions and saved passwords. I can access it from anywhere over VPN and they never leave the house. I'm typing on it now.
Included in that are all of my containers - so in theory they're transportable. I've never thought to try to isolate them from the profile - but my gut says it should be possible.
I don't have any special insight on these events but I've seen that commit linked a lot.
From a pure optics point of view, it looks extremely bad but reading some of the comments, it sounds like that repo is basically a mirror of some upstream project where terms and conditions/faqs etc are stored as pseudo-structured data and that they're migrating parts of that repo to some other project?
Don't get me wrong, I love bagging on Mozilla as much as the next person but as extremely bad as it looks, I'm not convinced that it's literally what it looks like?
I also lack any inside info, but that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous. And if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?
> if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?
If a company was being competently "evil"[1] then it probably would look like this!
Personally, I don't know that I consider Mozilla competent enough to reach that bar though given a lot of their previous blunders seemed like, well, blunders and not finely crafted acts of trickery.
> that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous
I suppose in this scenario, if it were innocuous and this is just some automated mirroring thing that someone triggered without realising the optics of, I wouldn't then automatically assume that same organisation would have a level of coordination to recognise or put out a blanket statement about the issue?
I mean, you'd think surely some amount of Firefox/Mozilla folks are very online and this would be raised internally but if this is downstream of some process owned by mostly legal and non-internet/chat using folks, it might make sense that they a) take some time to be notified, b) take some time to realise a lot of the internet is saying "What the fuck" and c) take a while to figure out what to do about it (ie; issue a press release to not make it worse? someone higher up acks and is like reverse whatever this mess is?)
My only real basis for all this is I've occasionally run into some compliance/legal types in tech and they can have extremely bad mental models of the company and product they work for so I can feasibly believe this all being accidental but in saying that, I dunno who works for Mozilla and this is very much a stereotype I'm applying.
Anyway, as above, I'm not saying this isn't malicious, just that personally I think the door is still open that this could all be a complete mess that has no real intent behind it
Getting to know about this through here, and tbh I believe the writing has been on the wall for Mozilla for quite a while. This honestly does not surprise me as much as I thought it would.
That being said, I am sad to see this fear of mine come true. Mozilla products were rock solid, and available on virtually every platform imaginable. I do not want to live in a Chromium and WebKit only world.
I think forks, such as Librewolf or Waterfox, will live for a while even if (and that’s a big if IMO) Mozilla comes down. Consider donating to them (and to Ladybird).
Vouching for librewolf. Not only does it not bother me with things like pocket and "Firefox sync", it also does not track me, and the browsing experience is genuinely superior.
I didn't realize how much webgl and other cruft slowed things down until I started using librewolf.
The one improvement I'm hoping for is that the project would be checked into the official Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora package repos as those are less risky than the repo controlled by the developers.
Is it possible to do things like "send tab to device" using Librewolf? Sometimes I'll stumble upon a programming library in my feed on my phone and I want to send it to my desktop, and Firefox sync makes that possible.
Yea, I use Firefox sync since I'm still using Firefox, but with the way things are going I'm looking for a ship to jump to that still supports my workflows.
Mozilla has been pink washing itself for a decade.
This has paid off incredibly well for them since anyone pointing out that it's primary purpose was to enrich the CEO while letting her band of merry women support their pet causes was called everything from a fascist to an incel.
Till today the most blatantly farcical situation was that Mozilla funded women who code boot-camps while firing all the women who code inside Mozilla.
I guess people are finally waking up when Mozilla pulled an Ubuntu and decided that everything you do through their software is something they own actually.
They also flag and harass anyone who points out the grift.
I guess the quality here is resilience more so than immunity. I guess you can say opensource is much more resilient to enshittification.
I think Mozilla has been a good example of that but the perception has been that resilience has been crumbling for years. Without an independent business model they have been in a really terrible position from the get-go.
What's crazy is that Firefox on Debian has been nagging me for weeks that I won't be able to use it after March 14th?
I have never seen those nag screens in Firefox, near the bookmarks toolbar. I think that is working around Debian's policies, IIUC. I have never had software on Debian nag me to update
It seems like this is under the guise of some DRM updates, and the like.
So I'm supposed to update, and then they apply a new Terms and Conditions that I didn't agree to?
And sell my personal data, I guess because there's a big market in AI now.
Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ...
---
This reminds me of the Twitter thing where they asked for your phone number for security purposes, and then used it for advertising.
In my experience it is usually something related to cookies that work on Chrome and not in Firefox, and in those cases I find hard to blame Firefox.
Yet, sometimes you need to use those websites fore a reason. Firefox should perhaps make it easier so users don't need to fall back to a different browser.
I am getting them on openbsd, I assumed it was going to be some sort of certificate issue, I was going to update, but with these recent reports of Mozilla getting ready to turn full bore into a ad company, I might just wait until after March 14th and see what happens.
What is especially funny/insulting, is there is a click here to update button, and I am like "there is approximately a 0% chance that will actually work on openbsd".
I got the same message on an older version of Ubuntu where Firefox isn't installed via snap. On my main machine with Ubuntu / firefox snap I do not get this msg.
I get it on my desnapified Ubuntu, but Ubuntu says firefox is up-to-date, and the "download update" button downloads firefox-135.0.1.tar.xz but there are ZERO docs on how to update my current firefox. And running the unzipped firefox executable gives me a message that it can't find my current config, so I guess that means no addons (ublock, privacy badger, container-tabs), bookmarks, or config.
I'm taking this as a good reason to wait for an official Ubuntu update, tho, if this thread is accurate, it looks like all I'll need to keep my current version running will be new root certs.
You know what the really sad part about this is? If we switch to an alternative browser, fingerprinting makes us even more easily tracked. It's lose-lose nowadays. We need political changes to make selling off our private data no longer profitable.
I truly can't understand. We live in world where you can potentially make business in so many ways, even if Mozilla asked me for some money to continue as a good faith browser I don't mind to pay for it. But for god's sake, can't a single human being come up with a business model that *IS NOT* related to our fucking private data?
I don't think most people realize how huge Mozilla is. Their annual revenue has been flirting breaking a billion dollars for some time now and was ~$500 mil as of 2023 - primarily due to 'partnering' with Google, which was always a bellwether to anybody who cared to see it. Wikimedia has never broken $200 million per year. In other words, it's Mozilla that could buy Wikipedia, not the other way around.
But how much goes into firefox development? Maybe 2% of revenue like with Linux Fiundation and Linux kernel?
Mozilla is ads company, it does activism, outreach, it organizes Marxist conferences, management gets paid millions... Firefox development is just tiny fraction of what Mozilla does.
And frankly Wikipedia has the same overhead problem as Mozilla.
》 Mozilla isn’t just another tech company — we’re a global crew of activists, technologists and builders, all working to keep the internet free, open and accessible.
》 “Mozilla isn’t your typical tech brand; it’s a trailblazing, activist organization in both its mission and its approach,”
I do not doubt they employ 750 people. I am saying they have tons of other projects. If you go throught their blog posts, Firefox has tiny fraction of posts.
The Wikimedia Foundation has developed many of the same corruption issues that Mozilla has. It would just be kicking the can down the road, and not very far at that.
I don't understand what the issue is with that change in wording. They seem to indicate that nothing has changed as far as privacy and personal data is concerned.
Deleting or obsoleting every mention of "we don’t sell your personal data" is pretty ominous. Yes, they don't come out and say "we now sell your personal data", but why would they remove the former if they didn't intend the latter?
They're not linking to a change in wording? The "Does Firefox sell your personal data?" question was deleted entirely. Unless the parent comment or link was edited at some point, maybe.
To be clear on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/ they changed this
>>It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.
to this:
>>It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Of course, saying "(in the way that most people think about “selling data“)" makes the guarantee completely meaningless. The rest of the paragraph is just marketing puffery. Its meaningless bromides about how much they value your privacy. Notice they only say they put "lots of work" into stripping identifying information provided to commercial partners (which is just another way of saying selling). Again, this is meaningless. They went from a very strong guarantee to no guarantee at all. Any company that sells your data that makes any effort at all to strip identifying information can make this claim regardless of whether personally identifying information can be recovered with a modicum of effort.
If we manage to read the next 2 questions on the list, or spend 30 seconds on a web search, one would find the link to Firefox's privacy policy which details the specific types of data they collect and how they use it, and has enumerated rights for users: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
This is actually a much stronger guarantee than "we don't sell your data", which is not actually a strong guarantee at all. "Selling your data" is a nebulous term that means different things from person to person, and any company that doesn't literally exchange money for data could probably claim it with some level of credulity.
Speaking on "reading the next thing", let me repeat yjftsjthsd-h's comment below, which of course you ignored (a pattern for people excusing Mozilla in these recent convos):
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yjftsjthsd-h 2 hours ago | unvote | root | parent | prev | next [–]
And now without cutting it conveniently before the fun bit:
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
You appear to have cut off the part where they say that actually yeah they have to stop saying they don't sell your data because they are selling your data.
No, actually, they don't say that. They very clearly say that they don't (and don't believe most people will) consider what they are doing "selling your data", but that it may legally considered selling your data in some countries.
For example, Firefox runs ads using your language and city/country (on the default new tab page) - but no other data. I think the vast majority people would fine with the privacy implications of that, but this may be legally considered selling your data.
Being specific about what types of data they collect and how they use it is actually far superior to some nebulous promise that has no definition.
I wish to some day have as much optimism about anything as you have about Mozilla. How you can see the ToS change and this diff and conclude that the outrage is astroturfing is difficult for me to grasp. Both this FAQ entry and the ToS are specifically about the Firefox browser, the wording was unambiguous...
They literally went and deleted a paragraph that said Firefox would "never" sell your personal data. If they needed to clarify a technicality, they wouldn't need to delete that.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. ...
There are valid complaints you could have about this change (for example, I wish they were more specific about the potential legal issues), but calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling.
And now without cutting it conveniently before the fun bit:
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
You appear to have cut off the part where they say that actually yeah they have to stop saying they don't sell your data because they are selling your data.
No, actually, they don't say that. They very clearly say that they don't (and don't believe most people will) consider what they are doing "selling your data", but that it may legally considered selling your data in some countries.
For example, Firefox runs ads using your language and city/country (on the default new tab page) - but no other data. I think the vast majority people would fine with the privacy implications of that, but this may be legally considered selling your data.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“)
> calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling.
It's not. One of their biggest selling (!) points is that they are privacy focused so when they make these changes, it is extra alarming. It's not like, e.g. Google, saying the same thing (which would be equally shocking but for opposite reasons.
The paragraph I'm referring to in that diff does not appear to be replaced directly by anything, it just got removed. They did, however, add that non-answer paragraph separately, apparently hours ago.
Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious. They're making steps in a certain direction. Enshittification doesn't usually happen entirely overnight, but you don't have to extrapolate a whole lot to see the blatantly obvious eventuality this is all pointing to. This is well beyond typical levels of brazen for a first step.
Realistically, Google removing "Don't be evil" also didn't really mean anything directly, either... but that doesn't mean it doesn't tell you anything.
"the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate"
Agreed, it's a ridiculous mischaracterization and part of a pattern that's become a self-sustaining spiral with no quality control.
I don't believe it's astroturfing, simply just mind bogglingly awful arguments. Claiming the decline in market share is tied to inadequate browser features with no two conversations ever agreeing on what those features are. No coherent theory of cause and effect between features and market share while ignoring structural advantages that are much more important drivers, which Google leverages. Claims that CEO pay is the problem when it's 1% of annual revenue. Idiosyncratic interpretations of their published statements that make unfalsifiable assumptions about intentions. And a basic inability to grasp and compare the relative scale of different types of transgressions (e.g. Google is increasingly driving the web into deeper dependence on Chromium, but Mozilla once did a Mr. Robot promo!)
I think the worst of the worst were on Lemmy where similar conversations happen and one person looked at a 990 form from the Mozilla Foundation, a standard non-profit disclosure form, and breathlessly went through the lines as if they were evidence of a conspiracy.
I don't think everyone makes arguments that bad, but I think exposure to this normalized, low-quality discourse has socialized people into perpetuating the narrative with increasingly tenuous arguments.
It's perfectly normal to hold good actors to a higher standard than bad actors. And the leadership should be fired instead of rewarding itself. What if they put 10% of the hundred million a year they got from Google for the last dozen years into an endowment instead? They'd be sustainable without needing to sell out.
I don't know if you read everything that I laid out, but none of the above had anything to do with holding the good actors to hire standards. Thinking that a 990 form is secret evidence of a conspiracy because the nonprofit spent like $10,000 on a consultant here and there is at a fundamental level a form of information illiteracy. It's not like a principled attempt to hold them to a higher standard.
And my contention is that it's things like those that increasingly are what people mean when they say "everything" bad Mozilla is doing. It's more like a tulip craze than a well thought out argument.
> Claims that CEO pay is the problem when it's 1% of annual revenue.
I fully support Mozilla. I don't think this change is bad. However, I do think executive pay should be reined in. Not just the CEO but the board as well. It is also not just about the money but the culture as well. I sincerely believe the CEO shouldn't make more than the median employee salary. This is too much.
If a CEO typically works 12-16 hours a day with no overtime pay I'm fine if he earns more than the employee who doesn't do overtime or gets paid. I also don't care if he earns slightly more than everybody else. It being median pay is certainly exaggerating.
But unfortunately, many CEOs make at least 10 times the money of the median and often 100x or more.
In my experience, I have been "exempt" even though I have zero supervisory or management authority as an individual contributor. If there are people like me in any organization, the CEO should not get extra pay for being exempt.
Yes, it is a little extreme to demand median pay but this is the starting point of a conversation to highlight that CEO make 10 or 100 maybe more times the median salary.
>However, I do think executive pay should be reined in.
I do too, but let's keep our eye on the ball for a second. CEO pay is not (1) driving Mozilla towards unprofitability, (2) taking developer resources away from critical investments in the browser (3) the reason why the market share is lower (4) a revelation of malevolent intent regarding user data and privacy (5) an indicator of moral equivalence with Google.
It's a vague generality that's barely about anything, but it's half made arguments like these that are driving perceptions in these threads.
Firefox has been trash for the past 10 years, let alone the Mozilla Foundation. There are some idealistic people that still vouch for them, they're only making a fool of themselves, lol.
Firefox is the lesser of the evils. I hate what Mozilla is doing, but I also don't want to cede control of the web to Google. Vote with your feet. I'm hopeful for Ladybirds future.
I don't have a rabid hateboner like most of HN for Brave, but I refuse to help Google/Blink expand their monopoly on the web so I'll continue to put up with Mozilla and their silliness until a decent enough competitor appears.
Which is unfortunate because WebKit is terrible outside of macOS, so every single alternative browser is built on Blink and thus indirectly giving more power to Google. The web is too important to accept a monoculture, and it saddens me to see that most of my peers have no moral fibre to resist against it.
As much as I dislike Apple, thank god they have a billion devices out there with an alternative engine, though they still happily take the bribe to force Google down your throat.
One-time disable and completely not intrusive. No popups. Nothing. It's the equivalent of firefox's suggested sites on the homepage when you install it that you have to turn off. Do you hold that to the same standard?
It's not even a "one-time disable", it's off by default until you enable it and the icon in the URL takes two clicks to hide.
And more generally, lack of easy payment is at the root of so many problems with the modern Internet, that I really can't blame Brave for trying this, quite the opposite, that's exactly the kind of feature we need.
Never say "Never"... Next is Thunderbird.
Let's go Andreas!
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...