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Comment by bobcall | Hacker News Reader

This will be the first version of Firefox that I won't be using. The final straw with me was the "Studies" integration. I've wanted to stop using Firefox since Pocket and EME was integrated, but I have failed to find anything else that works for me. I can no longer pretend to trust the Mozilla Foundation or the Firefox team, given their track record over the last few years. In our current era, the browser has become a critical piece of software and it is dangerous to trust an organization who wishes to censor [1][2] and track users.

[1] Brendan Eich https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...

[2] Mozilla Information Trust Initiative : https://archive.fo/jcJWg

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FWIW Palemoon (https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml) is a fork of Firefox that attempts to maintain a power user environment and negate some of the ridiculous changes Mozilla rolls out. Updated pretty regularly and works more or less as well as vanilla Firefox. I've been using it on Linux Mint and Windows 7-10 for years now.

Could you elaborate on how the second source is about censoring/tracking users?

Creating a single entity who gets to control what is true from its point of view?

> Mozilla’s Open Innovation team will work with ["like-minded"] technologists and artists to develop technology that combats misinformation. Mozilla will partner with global media organizations to do this, and also double down on our existing product work in the space, like Pocket, Focus, and Coral.

Firefox is the gatekeeper to the web for many and if Mozilla or this initiative is going to inject their bias in the browser, then it means that anyone that Mozilla or the Mozilla Information Trust Initiative disagrees with will get censored or their speech altered. No organization that is run by humans can make the claim that they won't have a bias one way or another. In order to have a free society, we must have the freedom to express any idea (no matter how stupid they might be). People have become too lazy to look at other sources or challenge what they hear. Ideas need to be challenged in the open and be able to hold their own weight. We should not need an organization or a browser making those calls.

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