I mean people would rather have Firefox propped up by Google (an ad company)'s donations then?
I’d rather just use Google if we are throwing privacy out the window
No, that’s a bullshit false dichotomy.
People would rather have Firefox developed ethically by a proper foundation that’s supported by grants and donations even if its total operating budget is vastly lower. (It wouldn’t be able to have a grossly overpaid CEO like Mozilla does now. Oh noooooooo…)
Where are these grants coming from? They already take in donations and it’s not nearly enough to pay the engineers. Sure I’d love it if the c-suite took a pay cut but the truth is that a modern web browser is a big enough project that it basically requires an enterprise-size team dedicated to its maintenance.
“They already take in donations…”
Where can I dontate to Firefox? Not Mozilla, and not a fund that goes to CEO-pay or other expences, but straight to Firefox
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/
The Mozilla Foundation is the parent non-profit of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation.
But that’s not donating to Firefox, that’s donating to Mozilla, which I don’t want to do, because they seem to be wasting their money.
If your concern is that the money goes to efforts for an open internet, and not too enriching any executives, then you want to donate to the non-profit, not the corporation.
But I don’t want to donate to the “open internet” or the non-profit, I want to donate directly to Firefox. How can I ensure that the money I spend gets spent on that and only that?
If you donate dire tly to firefox then mozilla would just contribute less and reserve more for CEO.
I’m fine with that, people should advocate that more. I don’t disagree with you, but a lot of the coverage and commentary seems to reminicse about a nebulous “the way it was before” which wasn’t ideal either.
Actually? Oh my God yes. We got to have our cake and eat it too. Google, in an effort to skirt monopoly laws actually paid for the open source browser we were using.
I personally love the idea of Google’s ads paying for our untracked browsing
Well, a browser is extremely complex, and hence super expensive to make. So if Mozilla doesn’t find any other way to monetize, I guess they have to do something about user data?
Mozilla payed their last CEO seven million bucks a year. Seems like they were doing just fine without the ad tracking gravy train to afford that salary.
Holy wild speculation pulled right out of your arse, Batman!
https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Mozilla
Scroll down to Excessive Executive Pay.
Mozilla has zero financial issues. Mozilla is a non-profit that is actively investing, and receiving dividends and interest in return. A nonprofit that is generating millions in revenue for essentially nothing and paying their executives fat stacks. They have zero reason to need to do this beyond greed and disregard for their user base.
Stop citing this dude like he knows anything. Many of his videos he says he’s just yapping and doesn’t know why anyone watches. He’s not a citation of any value
Now that Mozilla’s fucked. What’s the next option that’s not Chromium?
IceCat
That isn’t ready for common use by most people until there they offer binaries for easy installation.
- 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.
It do be a slippery slope though
Ladybird in a few years, forks of Firefox for now.
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.
https://wicg.github.io/webusb plenty of spec here and a draft to become web standard.
It’s up to me to decide what is sufficient secure and private for me, I don’t have the same threat model as others. It’s the same bullshit line Firefox throws around.
There is a reason why Firefox is constantly losing adoption. People want things to work.
They can easily add it behind a flag until it’s ready, but those that need it can use it in it’s current form. I need it for keyboards and mice to be configurable on Linux. Many hardware manufacturers are starting to use it to make cross platform tools for their prepherial hardware. I’m not gonna wait for Firefox overlords to deem it “safe enough” by their whims. They don’t even have a framework for how to qualify something is safe. It’s just at the personal preferences of Mozilla devs.
They have implemented plenty of things that were drafts, and posed just as many security or privacy issues.
Disable tor in tor browser.
Librewolf, degoogled chromium, private windows. If you don’t want your data to be sold, don’t give out your data.
Another year another browser to avoid. It’s an endless cycle…
“Flamed”, that’s a new one
That’s an OLD one. Wow I haven’t heard that term in like 20 years
Appropriate callback too given the pun.
Its pretty accurate
I wanna hear them get SLAMMED
Come on and SLAM and welcome to the JAM
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.
Mozilla shares your data under certain circumstances. This helps people realize that Mozilla is able to share your data, regardless of ‘selling’ potential. Some people assumed ‘we dont sell your data’ meant ‘we dont share your data’ when that was impossible for the definition of how some built in features work.
They make money from targeted advertising
It is hard to misunderstand that
They have many gains from the data they shared. This also includes witnessed data by internal employees to even discover what had to be trimmed down or censored before public release. And then some of those employees moved to other companies and copied the strategy into something profitable. Their ethos was not appropriately measurable and auditable to the degree necessary going forward; it needed to be axed. It’s like Google saying do no evil; the sands of time revealed these points unsustainable and limiting to even achieve their objectives in a vacuum. Funding is a security issue. Easy privacy is nice, but the industry needs a lot of work and people have to eat while we test the risky innovations that will make the future shine. Mozilla is still providing great steps to ensure someone somewhere can still make achievable best practices available for all, and when they fail we’ll be there to clean up the mess.
They literally purchased an ad company
I could give you some very long stories related to this. In the end of it, it comes down to how can they ‘sterilize’ the avenues of data collection and allow more opt-out scenarios, and more nuanced potentials that would provide comfort in your browsing habits and privacy desires. It remains to be seen how the situation pans out, but this isn’t a 100% done with them action. They have opportunities here, and we’ll see if their course turns evil or not.
Just because “some people” can’t words, that doesn’t mean that you should change the words to suit the people who can’t them.
The premise of ‘sharing’ and then receiving something from who you shared with IS a form of selling. If Mozilla .never. shared data, are you sure you ‘can words’?
said Ajit Varma, veep of Firefox Product
Pack up your shit, and get the FUCK out. You’re a fucking disgrace.
Orion is much better. Vote with your computing power.
Orion is a closed-source browser for MacOS and IOS only.
Man! I’ve been out of touch for just a few weeks. I just switched from Mull to IronFox a few weeks ago. I use FF sync. I user LibreFox on my PCs.
This fight against surveillance capitalism is exhausting…
On your edit, how do you know this?
Edit: I’m more awake now. LW strips out tracking and dumb features (like PPA), buy I dont know if IF does the same. In short: Anyone using LW is still fine.
I was looking here: https://librewolf.net/
What is LibreWolf?
This project is a custom and independent version of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom.
LibreWolf is designed to increase protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques, while also including a few security improvements. This is achieved through our privacy and security oriented settings and patches. LibreWolf also aims to remove all the telemetry, data collection and annoyances, as well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM.
I thought you meant lemmy world.
That’s my fault.
Nah, I just misunderstood.
Well, now, I guess all the people who like to lecture me every time the topic of Brave comes up will just chill the f*** out now.
Discovering that arsenic ingestion is bad for you doesn’t make your ingestion of cyanide better.
lololololol
I’ve just learned not to say the B word on Lemmy.
Or we could just not use either? Just a thought.
Are you saying that Brave does not sell you out?
No, they’re saying that people have been shittong on them for years for using Brave, now that the Firefox people are in the same boat maybe they’ll stop shitting on them.
Looks at thread Nope, people are just going to shit harder.
The thing is: it’s going to happen to Firefox, it has been happening to Brave.
It has always been the case with brave it’s not that it happened or didn’t happen They never alluded that it wouldn’t so we knew not to put anything there. People have been adding stuff to Firefox for ages and now the business model is changing.
Hell if anything that puts Firefox a little worse off at the moment
While Mozilla is in a worse place at the moment, Firefox has been forked many times.
Naw brother (or friend if I’m being too presumptuous), they’re just going to double down on being hypocritical.
Now theyll pull out all the things that Brave did most of a decade ago to stay afloat and laud it over you like it’s not something mozilla’s got on the table right now.
But their crypto… but their search… But that seven-million dollar moz CEO isn’t going to pay for himself either.
Brave is going to sell my shit. That was never in question. But knowing that up front I don’t give them anything that I want to play close to the heart.
Firefox has a fuckton on everone that they’ve had for ages that they can now sell because they changed their business model.
And sure we can turn telemetry off if we haven’t already, But how long do you think that feature is going to work as intended once it’s the only thing paying their top man to stay.
It would be hypocritical if they said something is not an issue when Firefox does it, that they criticise Brave about.
What I’m seeing here is everyone is up with pitchforks against Firefox, so looks like they are applying their rules consistently.
I see so that’s why this person has negative 30 upvotes for mentioning they hope people will leave them alone for using a different browser…
My guess is that they got downvoted because their comment makes no sense, while being angry about it.
If people were criticising their usage of Brave, why would they stop now? It makes no sense. Firefox getting worse doesn’t make Brave any better. People who disliked it will still dislike it and people who liked it will still like it.
He is right to be annoyed about getting lectured, but it’s silly to think that this news about a different, unrelated browser has any bearing on it.
Person A->Person B: Doing X is stupid you shouldn’t do X you should do Y
Person A: Y is now X. Person A is now doing X.
Person B:-> I can finally stop having people bitch about me doing X
Person A: Nuh uh X is stupid
How’s that comment makes no sense break down in logical terms?
no, see, while mozilla may be monetizing its user base, we know brave is.
But we’ve always known that Brave is and if we put any information into it it was because we were okay with that.
Now you’ve got a whole lot of people that have a whole lot of information swimming around and MOZ changes their business plan…
They both are pretty bad.
Its a sad day for sure, when the example of privacy and user respect just… Isn’t anymore.
People are just largely naive. Your privacy, at least since 2001, has always been in your own hands. (Not unlike how, if you don’t want to get a virus, you’re stuck moderating your own behavior, as the community around you is largely careless.)
A comparison to malware isn’t quite accurate because in this case, the software itself is already attacking you when it ideally should be neutral.
Nah, fuck brave.
It also now is against the terms of service to use Firefox for illegal activity or to use it to watch porn.
It also now is against the terms of service to use Firefox for illegal activity or to use it to watch porn.
I’ve seen this mentioned a few times in the past week, but I don’t see anything about pornography in the ToS.
Can you link me a source?
Does this actually surprise anyone?
The split between non-profit and for profit corporation and the amount the ceo earns should have warned anyone that they are not saints and will sell out their community if it makes them money.
Until now it was just smart for them to be the wolf in disguise. I guess selling the data makes them more money than keeping false front.
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.
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.
That’s fair, nice that they support self cloud store
Alternative to FF Sync?
I Iove this shit. Send to devices, multiple devices, bookmarks, passwords…
For sending things to devices I use KDE Connect. I realize it is a fundamentally different application, but it is what I use generally to send / receive links between devices, as well as documents, images etc. It also is good for notification mirroring, and really just integrating Android devices into Windows / Linux computers.
For passwords I used KeePass (and I sync them between devices with SyncThing), but I usually recommend Bitwarden (which is what I used to use). Both are open source, have apps for all platforms, can integrate into your browser if you choose. The main advantage of Bitwarden is that it is open source, all necessary features are free, and you can host the server yourself if you want. It also integrates into some services, notably email aliasing ones, to allow you to generate new emails every time you make a new account.
For bookmarks / history your best bet is the extension everyone else is recommending here!
I wish kde connect was usable for me.
Whatever brand of magic it just finds your device works horribly on my corporate and home network. If I give it a static IP which is only supported in some operating systems, it’s able to find it but then when I change locations it’s totally wrong and refuses to connect.
I’m not surprised by the corporate network, it’s pretty common for those types of networks to severely block inter-device LAN communication. There are two solutions however, for one, KDEconnect has initial Bluetooth support. I think it only support Plasma and Android as of now, and could be documented better, but it does avoid the LAN access problems. The other solution is using a VPN, the easiest off the shelf solution being Tailscale, but I feel this is only worth it if you have multiple use cases for it (I use it for faster Syncthing transfers, Moonlight / Sunshine game streaming. And KDEconnect)
I really wish KDEConnect “just worked”, similar to how Apple’s devices connect to one another, but I guess this is the price you pay sometimes for an open source cross platform solution.
My home and corporate networks are both set up with igmp snooping.
Problem with using tailscale is that if I’m at work, both my desktop and phone would have to be tailscaled home to connect which is not ideal.
When I’m at home I need my phone to connect to my home desktop, when I’m at work I need my phone to connect to my work desktop.
If they supported a list of static IP addresses that would work
If they allowed DNS names as the targets that would work.
If they could add IGMP multicast to their search capabilities that would work. IGMP is the option to be allowed to forward across networks.
Bluetooth could work
They could use MQTT or NTFY
It’s probably about a billion ways to skin this. They basically just need some form of communication without knowing the exact target or being able to specify the target dynamically. I give it a shot every year or so get it to connect a couple of times and then eventually give up.
You can self host firefox sync.
At the moment that would be an option, we’d need somebody to watch the code and make sure they don’t change and send your crap home anyway in an update.
Xbrowsersync for bookmark syncing. Works across browsers. A real password Manager, like Bitwarden, for passwords.
I think the killer feature of ff sync is being able to see open tabs on other devices. Is there any other way to achieve that?
Oooh that’s tasty, guess I’ll be adding that to my Configs soon.
Hmm not sure. It’s not something I’ve ever used. Maybe theres something for that.
Though I seem to remember one could host their own sync server?
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.
How can ome do this on mobile? Doesn’t run search on the terms or load a config page.
How about on mobile?
You could take a look at Fennec or Iceraven (https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser)
Or use Waterfox which does most of this by default
I like waterfox but the dev of waterfox made a deal with an advertising corp, eventually it fell apart but there was a solid few years where users left waterfox.
oh cheers for the heads up. Hadn’t heard that!
You misspelled LibreWolf.
Or switch to librewolf (Ironfox on android).
I wouldn’t use Ironfox on Android since they have decided to promote a F-droid alternative that encourages proprietary software.
Seems insane that even after disabling all related options in the main settings GUI, there are still like two dozen things enabled in about:config.
some are subcomponents of the main disabled feature. i checked this on my browser which was only modified by GUI, and nothing i saw ‘enabled’ was actually enabled, but instead a subfeature of what I had disabled.
How about, on your favorite operating system, go to “Firefox” and “Uninstall” because these folks aren’t going to get any better going forward.
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?
huh? what linux distribution are you even using? also librewolf is available in the flathub repository
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.
Or, just switch to the iron fox fork.
“just”? That sounds like way more work than taking 10 seconds to change the setting.
(I don’t disagree with your suggestion, I’m just baffled at the use of “just”)
Maybe we use our web browsers differently? I only use a couple extensions, never bookmark much (but I didn’t delete Firefox, so I can always go back to look at them) and I don’t leave the m9zilla or google cloud in control of my names and passwords, so no auto fill.
It took me literally 1 minute to switch to using iron fox.
Yeah, so longer than changing a setting, even in your ideal scenario.
But yes, we clearly do. I would spend the first 10 minutes figuring out how to export/import my 80 open browser tabs from one browser to another. And the next 10 copy pasting the URLs one by one manually after deeming it impossible.
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.
But it erases history. I use history all the time. Very annoying.
Is the same checkbox in the settings that Firefox has, it’s just on by default. Have you considered just turning it off?
I haven’t used it in a long time! It didn’t occur to me maybe it’s changed in the meantime.
I’ll give it a shot.
You can change this setting, not a big deal.
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.
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.
Do you know any trustworthy browsers for android?
You could take a look at Fennec or Iceraven (https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser)
Fennec is a pretty clean build of firefox mobile
Don’t forget to harden
Ironfox, it’s a privacy focused Fork of the Android version of Firefox browser. So far I’ve had no incompatibility problems or issues with my add-ons pretty much the only difference from Firefox nightly that I was using is that the icon is different
Exactly what I expected: a restatement of the terms, pointing out that they’re not onerous at all, and a link to jwz’s blog, the single person on earth with the biggest hate boner for Mozilla.
They need money and they don’t get much from donations. I’d love to hear everyone’s ideas for how they can generate enough revenue to keep the lights on without either making deals with Google or engaging in any form of advertising or data trading.
There’s absolutely a line where I would start looking elsewhere, but this ain’t it.
2 options:
- Ask their users for money. It’s a tried and true system that works for a lot of projects.
- Stop spending their existing money on dumb things that nobody is asking for. A good start would be to cut out the CEO’s pay.
They could offer services that people want with paid tiers.
They do already ask their users for money.
Sure, but can I spend money on just Firefox? or does it go to unrelated activities? I’m OK spending money on FF, I’m not OK paying for the CEO.
Well, no, you’re funding the foundation itself, but to have the foundation let you pick to solely fund Firefox would require additional management and technical changes to actually make the accounting work the way it’s intended to, that probably just isn’t worth their time, given the small donor base.
I’m sure if more people donated, they could actually be incentivized to make such an option available, but they barely get any donations compared to the revenue they make from the Google subsidy, so it’s just unreasonable to expect them to put in that additional effort, especially when the primary thing the vast majority of the money goes to is Firefox staff, development, and related server hosting anyways.
“…you’re funding the foundation itself…”
But that’s what I don’t want. I don’t care about the foundation, as it doesn’t share my values.
“I’m sure if more people donated, they could actually be incentivized to make such an option available, but they barely get any donations compared to the revenue they make from the Google subsidy, so it’s just unreasonable to expect them to put in that additional effort, especially when the primary thing the vast majority of the money goes to is Firefox staff, development, and related server hosting anyways.”
This is the problem though. How many people don’t donate because, like me, they don’t want to pay for a bloated CEO salary, or unrelated projects? I don’t find it unreasonable at all, rather it would help them focus on what their base actually cares about. They have a lot of fat to cut, and this would point out where their resources should be spent, compared to how their resources are currently spent.
Are they going to make as much money from donations as Google gives them? no, but that’s a good thing. It’ll help them focus.
So… Donations but more, and cost-cutting measures. That’s not a new revenue stream, unless by “asking the users for money” you mean charging for the software…
Yeah, donations. And yes, more cost-cutting measures. They need both, to gain more revenue, and to cut costs. They seem pretty bloated to me.
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’.”
They get access to everything to do in Firefox
One thing to keep in mind is thar mozilla is now an ad company and can use this data itself for whatever advertising it wants to sell, so they dont even need a third party they can just sell targeted ads directly to companies while not technically “sharing” the info they gather to anyone.
Basically, why sell the data to other people when you can profit from using it directly?
The ambiguity is the smoking gun.
