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 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
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.
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.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.
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?
Most non-profits are not financially sustainable and rely on donations and grants to operate. If the service they provided could be financially sustainable, a for-profit would popup and operate in that space.
But I agree that non-profits can and should find fee-for-service opportunities and generate revenue to reduce their reliance on gifts.
Fair enough. Although, for those reading at home, I’ll reiterate the distinction between nonprofit and charity; all charities are nonprofits, not all nonprofits are charities. Research universities are an example.
On that note, I guess I’m enough of an academic to not consider grants a “gift” … It’s not consumerism-driven revenue, but it’s hard to call it a gift when you’re on the hook to produce something (research papers & prototypes) that you then turn around and use to sell for more revenue (in the form of grants).
They are losing money and their business model is not breaking even. I want getting to make a governance point (though I agree with yours), merely saying they are desperate.
they have to dip something for sure. THEY HAVE TO REDUCE THE CEO PAY BY MEASLY 20% AND FUND DEVELOPMENT FROM THAT!!!
or by even more.
lol. Are you for real? You think the Firefox development team can be funded by 20% of the CEO’s salary?!
certainly not in itself. but it certainly would help significantly as additional budget. and as I said, the more the better
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.
probably saw all the money by having thier browsers info being sold off to companies, like with chrome, and google and reddit/OPEN AI collusion.
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!
and then, “uh, we are removing the URL bar in the next version because our statistics say nobody uses it!!”
and then, “uh, we are removing the URL bar in the next version because our statistics say nobody uses it!!”
Damn we really can’t have anything nice.
Guys Mullvad browser and Librewolf exist.
Zen Browser too
Do they support ubo?
they’re firefox forks and ubo comes automatically installed with them.
LibreWolf is annoying in that it doesn’t work on my Mac with VPN split tunneling, a seemingly known issue they haven’t fixed.
I have librewolf, don’t use it much. Is it functionally the same as FF? In terms of plug-in and website compatibility.
Most consumer sites are optimized for chrome and even safari, firefox & Edge (Obviously) face issues with scripts and plug-ins.
It’s basically the same, but the devil is in the detail. DRM disabled from the get go, which is a show stopper for some sites (say, netflix). Some sites will bork themselve on the strange user-agent. Some advanced privacy features are quite hard to disable willingly, which may or may not be a good thing if you actually have to get things done on sites that breaks.
One would argue that sites that breaks when privacy features are enforced are not worth it, but you don’t always have a choice in that regard.
Most consumer sites are optimized for chrome and even safari, firefox & Edge (Obviously) face issues with scripts and plug-ins.
This is why it’s dangerous that Chrome has such a large amount of market share. Instead of using standard features, sites are using Chrome-specific features and even relying on Chrome bugs that don’t exist in other browsers. It’s exactly the same reason Internet Explorer was bad.
So now what the hell do we have to use to not be spied upon?
Well I suppose LibreWolf (or some other de-branded Firefox) will become more mainstream. Similar to what chromium is to chrome 🤷
That’s not a real equivalence.
Chromium is the basis for Google Chrome, while Librewolf is nothing more than a leech to Firefox. It’s just Firefox, rebranded.
Rebranded, pre-cleaned of all the forced stuff from mozilla, with the built-in integration of more privacy-enhancing features.
So, not “just firefox, rebranded” at all.
They aren’t developing or maintaining the core browser though, they depend on Firefox still being looked after.
If we are comparing it to Chrome, it is more like Ungoogled-Chromium.
In the good/bad old days a web page was just text and images but now a browser is a platform for running software. Each website can do useful computing for the user but the software author is in control and always tempted to make it run for them at the expense of the user.
Crazy idea, maybe we shouldn’t use web browsers.
Soon other web engine will coming, first LadyBird browser and two is Servo Browser. But they’re still along way to go
Am I missing something on Servo Browser? Because when I went to check it out and seems more like next-gen browser engine that looks to be an improvement on Firefox’s Gecko. If so then we will need to wait for a browser team to adopt it.
Servo is also building a web browser UI.
But isn’t Servo funded by Mozilla
After Mozilla laid off all Servo developers in 2020, governance of the project was transferred to Linux Foundation Europe. Development work officially continues at the same GitHub repository with the project itself entirely volunteer driven.
soon! they can come any year now!
I am still waiting desperately for a servo based browser, mozilla kicking it out was one of the reasons I lost all hope in Mozilla a while back.
probably anti-detection browser that ban evaders are using on reddit. its a little more complicated to get to that point though.
Librewolf is still a good alternative
ladybird can’t come fast enough
Ladybird has a platinum sponsorship on their homepage from Shopify so not a good look already.
Well it’s a sponsor, it’s not their product.
What’s that saying about sitting at a table with a Nazi?
Building a browser from scratch is going to cost well over a million dollars in development costs. I don’t think they’d be able to achieve it without sponsors.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t seek funding, but maybe not from companies that hosted and sold literally Nazi tshirts.
For realsies
This comment under the article gave me a chuckle.
I feel like everything is getting corroded, the capitalists are wearing down everything
Is Waterfox a good alternative?
Waterfox’s creator, while not being HOSTILE to privacy, has said in the past that making the most private browser in the world is not the goal of the project. The goal is a more customizable browser for power users
I moved on to Waterfox, is this a good move?
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
I forgot that Pale Moon existed. How’s development going on that these days? I see that it got an update a week ago.
Still going strong. If the community reports issues or incompatibility then it gets fixed quickly.
That would be getting right back in bed with Google, gross.
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/
I stopped following Thorium when some questionable pics were discovered in its repo
Thoughts on Vivaldi?
I mostly use Librewolf on Linux, and Fennec on Android. When I specifically need a Chromium-based browser, I usually open a Chromium guest from nix-shell on Linux, or Kiwi on Android.
Can you elaborate on this?
I want to say thanks but also I hated reading that lol
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.
