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.
Now that Mozilla’s fucked. What’s the next option that’s not Chromium?
A different fork from firefox like librewolf
Librewolf is just some patches added on top of Firefox.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’m running Linux and neither Waterfox or LibreWolf are present in repository of one of the most popular distros. Come on?!
You aren’t using the Flatpak?
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?
said Ajit Varma, veep of Firefox Product
Pack up your shit, and get the FUCK out. You’re a fucking disgrace.
Soo… where do we go now? What open source alternative exists that is on the side of its users?
Ladybird looks promising.
Depends on where you stand on misogyny and transphobia.
I feel out of the loop on this one. Is there a particular individual on the project that this is about, or is this a company policy issue?
Essentially, someone submitted a PR on GitHub changing a “he” in the build instructions to a gender-neutral “they”, to which the main dev of Ladybird (Andreas Kling) replied:
This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.
This next part’s just my opinion; that’s an insane response to someone suggesting neutral language. As a non-binary person, I wouldn’t feel comfortable around this person after such a reply, and I certainly wouldn’t donate to Ladybird or anything of the sort.
That being said, we all likely use tons of software developed by people way worse than Kling. As long as it’s FOSS and is privacy-respecting, I’ll run code that’s been written by bigots. However I definitely won’t support them by recommending their software to others, or by donating time or money to the project.
I don’t think that’s just opinion anymore, it’s a fairly accurate analysis. Countless serious projects use pronouns and “they,” and that’s fine, but for these few specific groups they’re somehow political and a bad thing.
I’ve heard Andreas’ twitter likes were telling, before those went private, but that information’s out of reach now. That said, I’ve seen the people who frequently interact with him there, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable around them either. He seems to really like it, though. Make of that what you will.
Still, good point on the reality of “moral software use.” For all its issues, I do hope Ladybird succeeds as a new browser engine because the internet needs more of those. I’m just not touching it unless they get their shit sorted.
There is a link on another FF post to GitHub where someone changed “he” to “they” in the documentation. All references to a user being able to do anything in the documentation only uses “He”.
The main dev told them to “keep their politics to themselves” and refused the fix.
In which context? If it was referring to a man I get why he’d say that answer
I think that’s a pretty cheap PR. Ideally it should be rewritten to not to use pronouns. The PR is low effort and feels like it was deliberately done for attention.
Just keep using Firefox. Nothing in the code has changed, and if it does you can switch to forks. You all are evangelizing about how important FOSS is to prevent this exact scenario and yet you keep switching browsers for no need at all.
Note: I love Foss, I just think this is an overreaction
