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Mozilla drops new Privacy Note and Terms of Service; People are saying it is Bad News (blog.mozilla.org)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Not a good look for Firefox. Third partners and device fingerprinting clearly mentioned in the documents.

The move is the latest development in a series of shifts Mozilla has undergone over the past year.

The gecko engine and Firefox forks, such as Tor, Mullvad, Librewolf, and Arkenfox, are stables of private, open source web browsing.

In fact, Mozilla's is one of the few browser engines out there, in a protocol-heavy industry that many say only corporate or well-funded non-profits can reliably develop.

What is more, daily driving the more hardened-for-privacy Firefox derivatives can be frowned upon by many sites, including your bank and workplace.

Mozilla's enshittification leaves the open source community without a good alternative to Firefox, after years of promoting it as a privacy-friendly alternative to spyware-cum-browser Chrome.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Being halfway between both sides, I can see the need for a monetary model to sustain development, yet I am challenged by the opacity that this feels like. The OP's point that it feels like a downward slide toward principles compromise is challenging. Especially in light of the enshittification of everything lately, Mozilla needs to do a better job communicating how this is not going down that path and yet also trying to sustain itself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Being halfway between both sides

People really need to stop playing devil advocate, «Especially in light of the enshittification of everything lately». Mozilla has gone downhill for a good while now, being gentled by sweet Google money and spending it in trends far too late only to waste it, employees keep getting fired while the CEO gets a regular raise and Firefox barely got improved over the years. And now they want to jump head first into AI, way too late again, all the while we already know all AI compagnies run at a tremendous loss. Can you even call that « trying to sustain itself» at this point ? Seems surreal to me.

All I really see is another breach of trust in a full history of mistakes, probably the last one.