This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The great part of open source is forking.
And forking it will, Firefox will be forked with a version of a different name that doesn't have this shit, and then the name Firefox will fade into history as a once great product that formed the basis of a different grey product.
Fork you, Mozilla
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.
Also turns out that drying up donations for privacy protecting browsers means there is less demand for it
Or, hear me out, that former donors don't trust them anymore!
But also that a lot of people don't want to donate, basically when they could only donate an immeasurably small amount, to a company whose CEO gets an unimaginably huge pay, that could be used for significantly boosting development.
Personally that's a big reason I rather want to support smaller projects, or even that of size like Bitwarden.
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.
Yeah but the line between them and google is not there anymore in that case
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.
Oh, that last paragraph doesn't give me hope at all. Fucking AI chatbots.
The actual addition to the terms is essentially this:
The way this article describes it as "cushy caveats" is completely misleading. It's quite literally just "If you use a feature that integrates with third party services, you're relying on and providing data to those services, also we want to know if the feature is actually being used and how much."
The problem is the inclusion of the feature to begin with. It should be an opt in add install.
I agree to a point, but I look at this similar to how I'd view any feature in a browser. Sometimes there are features added that I don't use, and thus, I simply won't use them.
This would be a problem for me if it was an "assistant" that automatically popped up over pages I was on to offer "help," but it's not. It's just a sidebar you can click a button in the menu to pop out, or you can never click that button and you'll never have to look at it.
It's not a feature that auto-enables in a way that actually starts sending data to any AI company, it's just an optional interface, that you have to click a specific button to open, that can then interface with a given AI model if you choose to use it. If you don't want to use it, then you ideally won't even see it open during your use of Firefox.
Privacy policies should legally be called surveillance policies.
Or "Invasion of Privacy" Policy
Damn we really can't have anything nice.
Is this because some middle manager at Mozilla has to pretend to be productive?
No it’s because Firefox isn’t profitable and to try to survive in its current form they have to do something.
It might be more productive to die and live on as an open source effort. I personally doubt there’s enough open source engagement to keep Firefox current and competitive but it’s of course an alternative Mozilla in its current form is unable to consider.
Mozilla is a nonprofit (or it at least it should be, technically it's a for profit corporation that's wholly owned by a nonprofit foundation, shady asf).
They shouldn't be trying to make a profit, they should make enough money to pay their programmers to maintain the browser.
They should not be dumping money into more executive hires and AI bullshit like they are doing.
Being a "non-profit" doesn't mean the company "shouldn't make profit" ... It means that the owners/investors don't earn anything extra based on profit. The organization itself still needs to be financially sustainable.
As shady as Mozilla is, they're competing against a functional monopoly, so the playing field is hardly fair.
As shady as Mozilla is, they’re competing against a functional monopoly
yeah this is a part we need to recognize. right now there are essentially three browsers. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Every other browser is some derivative of one of these- mostly Chromium.
Google can change some small detail about how they render HTML or a small part of their JS engine and that has global effects all over the internet. Without a Firefox to compete, they will implement policies to hurt the consumer. People think just because Chromium is open source that this mitigates the risk.
Google's V8 javascript engine does not only power all Chrome and chrome-derivatives, it also powers nodeJS and therefore vast swathes of server-side javascript as well.
it's actually difficult to understate how much raw power Google has in determining what you see on the internet and how you see it
we desperately need Firefox. I really hope that an open source alternative could be viable but it's been decades and we haven't had a real browser pop into existence. will the death of Firefox mean something else comes out? Or will the death of Firefox be the last nail in the coffin for a free internet?
Good thing LibreWolf and other forks exist, including hard forks like the Goanna browsers.
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!
Wtf is happening, why is now even Firefox going off the rails?
You missed the previous memo: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
The writing was on the wall when the Mozilla Corporation was setup under the Foundation. A bunch of SF venture capital types have places on the board, and are in operational leadership, and are slowly transforming Mozilla into a shitty for-profit tech venture. Ads, data collection, subscription services, and a chat bot.
I feel like everything is getting corroded, the capitalists are wearing down everything
ladybird can't come fast enough
Ladybird has a platinum sponsorship on their homepage from Shopify so not a good look already.
Overhyped AI is going to fail, and it can't happen soon enough. The Mozilla leadership really needs to pay attention to that reality.
Well, we had a good run lads, enshitification is here.
Any recommendations for open source alternatives that are convenient and also have an android app supporting ublock origin.
This comment under the article gave me a chuckle.
