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.
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 user LibreFox on my PCs.
This fight against surveillance capitalism is exhausting…
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.
Nah, I just misunderstood.
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?
They get access to everything to do in Firefox
The ambiguity is the smoking gun.
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.
So… Donations but more, and cost-cutting measures. That’s not a new revenue stream, unless by “asking the users for money” you mean charging for the software…
Yeah, donations. And yes, more cost-cutting measures. They need both, to gain more revenue, and to cut costs. They seem pretty bloated to me.
They do already ask their users for money.
Sure, but can I spend money on just Firefox? or does it go to unrelated activities? I’m OK spending money on FF, I’m not OK paying for the CEO.
Well, no, you’re funding the foundation itself, but to have the foundation let you pick to solely fund Firefox would require additional management and technical changes to actually make the accounting work the way it’s intended to, that probably just isn’t worth their time, given the small donor base.
I’m sure if more people donated, they could actually be incentivized to make such an option available, but they barely get any donations compared to the revenue they make from the Google subsidy, so it’s just unreasonable to expect them to put in that additional effort, especially when the primary thing the vast majority of the money goes to is Firefox staff, development, and related server hosting anyways.
“…you’re funding the foundation itself…”
But that’s what I don’t want. I don’t care about the foundation, as it doesn’t share my values.
“I’m sure if more people donated, they could actually be incentivized to make such an option available, but they barely get any donations compared to the revenue they make from the Google subsidy, so it’s just unreasonable to expect them to put in that additional effort, especially when the primary thing the vast majority of the money goes to is Firefox staff, development, and related server hosting anyways.”
This is the problem though. How many people don’t donate because, like me, they don’t want to pay for a bloated CEO salary, or unrelated projects? I don’t find it unreasonable at all, rather it would help them focus on what their base actually cares about. They have a lot of fat to cut, and this would point out where their resources should be spent, compared to how their resources are currently spent.
Are they going to make as much money from donations as Google gives them? no, but that’s a good thing. It’ll help them focus.
They could offer services that people want with paid tiers.
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.
That’s fair, nice that they support self cloud store
Alternative to FF Sync?
I Iove this shit. Send to devices, multiple devices, bookmarks, passwords…
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?
Oooh that’s tasty, guess I’ll be adding that to my Configs soon.
Hmm not sure. It’s not something I’ve ever used. Maybe theres something for that.
Though I seem to remember one could host their own sync server?
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!
I wish kde connect was usable for me.
Whatever brand of magic it just finds your device works horribly on my corporate and home network. If I give it a static IP which is only supported in some operating systems, it’s able to find it but then when I change locations it’s totally wrong and refuses to connect.
I’m not surprised by the corporate network, it’s pretty common for those types of networks to severely block inter-device LAN communication. There are two solutions however, for one, KDEconnect has initial Bluetooth support. I think it only support Plasma and Android as of now, and could be documented better, but it does avoid the LAN access problems. The other solution is using a VPN, the easiest off the shelf solution being Tailscale, but I feel this is only worth it if you have multiple use cases for it (I use it for faster Syncthing transfers, Moonlight / Sunshine game streaming. And KDEconnect)
I really wish KDEConnect “just worked”, similar to how Apple’s devices connect to one another, but I guess this is the price you pay sometimes for an open source cross platform solution.
My home and corporate networks are both set up with igmp snooping.
Problem with using tailscale is that if I’m at work, both my desktop and phone would have to be tailscaled home to connect which is not ideal.
When I’m at home I need my phone to connect to my home desktop, when I’m at work I need my phone to connect to my work desktop.
If they supported a list of static IP addresses that would work
If they allowed DNS names as the targets that would work.
If they could add IGMP multicast to their search capabilities that would work. IGMP is the option to be allowed to forward across networks.
Bluetooth could work
They could use MQTT or NTFY
It’s probably about a billion ways to skin this. They basically just need some form of communication without knowing the exact target or being able to specify the target dynamically. I give it a shot every year or so get it to connect a couple of times and then eventually give up.
You can self host firefox sync.
At the moment that would be an option, we’d need somebody to watch the code and make sure they don’t change and send your crap home anyway in an update.
“Flamed”, that’s a new one
That’s an OLD one. Wow I haven’t heard that term in like 20 years
Appropriate callback too given the pun.
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
Come on and SLAM and welcome to the JAM
Does this actually surprise anyone?
The split between non-profit and for profit corporation and the amount the ceo earns should have warned anyone that they are not saints and will sell out their community if it makes them money.
Until now it was just smart for them to be the wolf in disguise. I guess selling the data makes them more money than keeping false front.
It also now is against the terms of service to use Firefox for illegal activity or to use it to watch porn.
It also now is against the terms of service to use Firefox for illegal activity or to use it to watch porn.
I’ve seen this mentioned a few times in the past week, but I don’t see anything about pornography in the ToS.
Can you link me a source?
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.
They make money from targeted advertising
It is hard to misunderstand that
They have many gains from the data they shared. This also includes witnessed data by internal employees to even discover what had to be trimmed down or censored before public release. And then some of those employees moved to other companies and copied the strategy into something profitable. Their ethos was not appropriately measurable and auditable to the degree necessary going forward; it needed to be axed. It’s like Google saying do no evil; the sands of time revealed these points unsustainable and limiting to even achieve their objectives in a vacuum. Funding is a security issue. Easy privacy is nice, but the industry needs a lot of work and people have to eat while we test the risky innovations that will make the future shine. Mozilla is still providing great steps to ensure someone somewhere can still make achievable best practices available for all, and when they fail we’ll be there to clean up the mess.
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.
The premise of ‘sharing’ and then receiving something from who you shared with IS a form of selling. If Mozilla .never. shared data, are you sure you ‘can words’?
Another year another browser to avoid. It’s an endless cycle…
Use their privacy friendly works.
Soon the only private option left will be to curl the website, read the html and picture it in my head.
stallman was right
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.
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.
Or use Waterfox which does most of this by default
You misspelled LibreWolf.
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.
oh cheers for the heads up. Hadn’t heard that!
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.
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.
That comes with its own problems and slow releases trailing behind Firefoxes. One of things I absolutely hate about forks.
It doesn’t seem that slow. A few days normally.
But it erases history. I use history all the time. Very annoying.
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.
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Do you know any trustworthy browsers for android?
Fennec is a pretty clean build of firefox mobile
Don’t forget to harden
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
You could take a look at Fennec or Iceraven (https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser)
How can ome do this on mobile? Doesn’t run search on the terms or load a config page.
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You could take a look at Fennec or Iceraven (https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser)
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.
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?!
huh? what linux distribution are you even using? also librewolf is available in the flathub repository
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?
You aren’t using the Flatpak?
How about, on your favorite operating system, go to “Firefox” and “Uninstall” because these folks aren’t going to get any better going forward.
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.
said Ajit Varma, veep of Firefox Product
Pack up your shit, and get the FUCK out. You’re a fucking disgrace.
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?
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
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.
I mean people would rather have Firefox propped up by Google (an ad company)'s donations then?
I’d rather just use Google if we are throwing privacy out the window
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
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
If you donate dire tly to firefox then mozilla would just contribute less and reserve more for CEO.
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?
I’m fine with that, people should advocate that more. I don’t disagree with you, but a lot of the coverage and commentary seems to reminicse about a nebulous “the way it was before” which wasn’t ideal either.
