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.
The only acceptable privacy policy for a browser is “we won’t fucking look into anything, take anything, nor send anything anywhere you didn’t actually wish to send explicitly”.
Firefox have an extension system. If mozilla wants to bloat it, they should do it via extension, so that they’re not bloating the actually useful part. As it is, all they’re doing is forcing more work on people to manage forks to remove all the shit every time they push a release.
/usr/lib/firefox-esr/browser/features
has- formautofill@mozilla.org.xpi
- pictureinpicture@mozilla.org.xpi
- screenshots@mozilla.org.xpi
- webcompat-reporter@mozilla.org.xpi
- webcompat@mozilla.org.xpi
hey, why is this significant? I can guess what features these are linked to, but is there any significance to the email address-like formats?
They are the demanded features-as-extension, shipped by default. They do that since they got rid of XUL i think?
About the @, no clue.
I’ve been willingly enabling data collection features for Mozilla but I guess that time is revolute, they don’t feel trustworthy anymore.
Same here. Just turned off all data collection checkboxes. Fuck Mozilla!
Is this because some middle manager at Mozilla has to pretend to be productive?
Overhyped 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’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.
ladybird can’t come fast enough
Damn we really can’t have anything nice.
This comment under the article gave me a chuckle.
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
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.
PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT
Conveniently missed note above ☝️
The remainder of the executive team is paid what appears to be a fairly reasonable salary for the industry, low even.
The biggest cost ($6mill) is paid by the for profit Mozilla corporation.
Browser development is crazy hard, and expensive, work. Mozilla has honestly done a TON with the resources at hand. Google over here spending hundreds of millions for Chrome
It just sucks that they are seeing financial pressures that drive them into the profit corner.
Yeesh. So what’s an alternative?
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.
Man all this makes me want to just use Links2 for everything and being a luddite. Complete with cabin in the woods. So frustrating.
Where’s the gofundme for the firefox fork project?
Was this from google turning off the funding tap?
does this affect forks?
Looking forward to seeing the cope from the Mozilla fanboys for that one.
can a chromium fork reasonably be maintained with adblock support?
This new policy doesn’t apply to Firefox forks so you’re better off with one of those
so in a similar vein: can the community reasonably maintain an up-to-date and secure gecko-based browser we can universally move to instead of firefox? can we make google back the fuck off while we do so? because thats what seems to be the way, with how things are going down.
You mean like Pale Moon
deleted by creator
i also hate it, but i see no one else putting the amount of work necessary to maintain an entire browser engine. and mozilla clearly wants to enshittify.
firefox has its days numbered. even if its not overnight and we have some time, we have to come up with something.
anyone up to date on how servo is doing rn, btw?
Thorium certainly does https://thorium.rocks/
Brave supports extensions still but it has its own issues.
It’s getting hard to boycott companies and products when it starting to look like most are dipping their toes into stuff their users don’t like.
I feel like everything is getting corroded, the capitalists are wearing down everything
