this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Privacy

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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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[–] RejZoR@lemmy.ml 56 points 1 week ago (22 children)

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.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 63 points 1 week ago (10 children)

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.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 25 points 1 week ago

I'd be more worried about how long that flag is going to work. And how long is it going to take us to realize the flag isn't working.

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[–] Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 1 week ago (13 children)

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.

[–] ninepointeight@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

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[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago

said Ajit Varma, veep of Firefox Product

Pack up your shit, and get the FUCK out. You're a fucking disgrace.

[–] qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Soon the only private option left will be to curl the website, read the html and picture it in my head.

[–] ruplicant@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 week ago

stallman was right

[–] Avenging5@sh.itjust.works 21 points 1 week ago (8 children)

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

[–] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 38 points 1 week 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.
[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 7 points 1 week ago

It do be a slippery slope though

[–] dai@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago

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

[–] SirHery@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A different fork from firefox like librewolf

[–] kilgore_trout@feddit.it 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Librewolf is just some patches added on top of Firefox.

[–] TheChickenOfDoom@lemm.ee 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 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.

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[–] letsgo@lemm.ee 21 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Are there any specifics about this? It all seems fairly theoretical to me. What do they [want to] do that contradicts "doesn't sell your personal data" within the context of the fluid definition of "sell"? Do they sell my personal data or don't they? What definitions of "sell" are relevant here?

It's all sounding a bit Bill Clinton to me: "it depends on your definition of 'is'."

[–] taanegl@lemmy.world 27 points 1 week ago

The ambiguity is the smoking gun.

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[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Given that this is a privacy community, I would think that it would go without saying, But I just like to point out, We should probably disable Firefox sync if were using it. Log out of Firefox accounts in the browser. Even if you're not giving them telemetry they have all that data.

~~You can use the x bookmarks sync plugin, Don't make an account with them just use the un-logged in plugin to backup and restore your bookmarks between browsers. On the upside it'll even let you copy bookmarks from Firefox derivatives to Chrome derivatives.~~

Go down a comment or two and use Floccus, Just converted it's wonderful

at their location. However the want it

[–] ninepointeight@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Hey, just wanted to point out that xbrowsersync hasn't seen updates for quite some time. I would suggest folks to read this discussion and to perhaps check out Floccus as an alternative.

Both Floccus and xBrowserSync have Android apps on the F-droid app store as well.

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[–] beeng@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 week ago (11 children)

Alternative to FF Sync?

I Iove this shit. Send to devices, multiple devices, bookmarks, passwords..

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[–] Rubanski@lemm.ee 10 points 1 week ago (6 children)

"Flamed", that's a new one

Tim’s an old one, actually. Back in the old internet forum days, flaming was the act of going off on someone during an argument. Most forums even had “no flaming” rules, that could result in warns or outright bans if a mod thought an argument had gotten out of hand.

To be clear, flaming is the act of insulting the user, not the act of arguing against them. You can argue against a user without attacking the user directly.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's an OLD one. Wow I haven't heard that term in like 20 years

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[–] Technotica@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (18 children)

Soo... where do we go now? What open source alternative exists that is on the side of its users?

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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

[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Oh sure, but browsers are an entirely different beast.

Eventually, they'll take it closed source, now I know what you're thinking "Then one of the forks will just become the dominant one!"

But here's the thing, the browser engine is very complicated just to keep up with. The W3C spec that all engines must follow is thousands of pages long. So all those forks will wither and die once the engine has been cut off from upstream updates.

None of those forks touch the engine as-is

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[–] B0NK3RS@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Another year another browser to avoid. It's an endless cycle...

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