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Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] Avenging5 20 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Now that Mozilla's fucked. What's the next option that's not Chromium?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago

Librewolf, degoogled chromium, private windows. If you don't want your data to be sold, don't give out your data.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 22 hours ago

It do be a slippery slope though

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago

Ladybird in a few years, forks of Firefox for now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Disable tor in tor browser.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A different fork from firefox like librewolf

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Librewolf is just some patches added on top of Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Which happen to remove all telemetry, ads, reporting, etc. You know, the reason we don't want to use vanilla Firefox.

Use Librewolf. Please don't use any damned Chromium-based trash.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

I'll stop using Chromium-based trash once Firefox devs stop acting all holier than thou and implement WebUSB and WebSerial instead of some vague notion they are protecting me from myself by not implementing it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

WebUSB isn't a web standard and there isn't a spec for it. If it becomes a standard then they might. However, it is terrible for privacy and security.

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

IceCat

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

How's the security patching? Last time I checked it was way far behind

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago

That isn't ready for common use by most people until there they offer binaries for easy installation.