Firefox Now Sends Your Address Bar Keystrokes to Mozilla
howtogeek.com
howtogeek.com
I have "Provide Search Suggestions" disabled. All 3 of the options underneath them are disabled, because search suggestions are disabled. This makes sense.
THEN, I click "change settings for other address bar suggestions" and in *THERE* everything is in there, INCLUDING "Contextual suggestions".
What do you think the first disabling of suggestions meant? You're searching without my consent. If I would have consented, it would have been in that first check box. What are you guys doing? What happened to the Firefox I trust and choose over Google to avoid the monoculture?
It's going to take me a few weeks of research to pick my new permanent browser. I want something far-removed from Google, but with an active enough developer community that it doesn't fall apart after an OS update or turn out to have a back-door hidden in the code base.
In the address bar suggestions I do have everything ticked. The full list is: Browsing history, Bookmarks, Open tabs, Shortcuts and Search engines.
Edit: having now read the linked article, I realise this is a US-only (anti-)feature, at least for now.
I don't care how few users Firefox has. I do care that the product has become a pile of garbage. I already tolerate the dumb tab bar, the update nag screen that interrupts my work, the telemetry setting that doesn't actually disable telemetry, the web services I don't want like Pocket, the ads, the memory issues that hobble my machine when I stream video...
I won't move to a browser like Chromium with a connection to Google, but I'm moving to something. I'm done with Firefox.
If you're on Linux, exclude it from automatic updates in your package manager, and it won't interrupt you. On Windows, you should be able to set app.update.auto to false in about:config, but I don't know if that still works.
https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
The reason I stopped donating to Mozilla is because they have too many people not doing things I think are important and are paying their executives too much.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Moon_(web_browser)
People here complain about it having some sort of cryptocurrency embedded, but it's opt-in, so as long as you don't enable it, I don't see the issue. Plus it comes with an ad-blocker / anti-tracker out of the box.
Seems to me that Brendan Eich actually knows what he's doing.
Last I used Brave, it gave me stupid little popups on my notification bar and that's, to me, worse than in-page ads.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/pl2lgi/were_bre...
The discussion is always the same, I'm not sure what can be added at this point. Yes the way they're actively destroying it is mystifying, yes, maybe money issues are part of that but god can't you just make your own browser? Mozilla's problem, more than any specific incident like this, is that they've become completely incapable of thinking for themselves. Everything is a follower move, trying to find something popular and than emulating it.
I'll continue to use FF, but only because it's easier to massively "tweak" into a usable product than chrome.
Their products suck because they don’t care about them. They don’t genuinely want to compete with or anger Google for fear of losing funding.
They’d be better off cutting down to a lean $5/year spend and just making a browser.
I think.
It seems to me there are entirely too many people feeding at the trough at Mozilla and they are not managing their money very well.
It seems like I am going to MITM our browser traffic and set up custom filters or something.
Of course, that doesn't make this any less of a scumbag move.
In any case, when people act like this, I do not trust that turning off the option actually stops them from keylogging, which is why I am going to look into inspecting traffic.
The issue wasn't so much that they added this functionality to grub some extra money, the issue was the opt-in happened on our targets without any notification or informed consent.
In fact I would say the lack of explicit statements on what data is sent is a deliberate attempt to hide that fact from users. Note how similar the language is to the privacy options on Google's Android.
I have been under the operating assumption since circa 2006 that anything done in a browser is potentially sent of somewhere to somebody's server. If I want privacy, I use tor.
Anything that's not the body of an https request is at minimum going to be logged somewhere.
What frustrates me is that everyone goes out of their way to make fragile, internet connected and internet dependent applications when there basically no need to.
There was pandemonium back when Ubuntu first started doing that in its search line, for example.
Now, no one cares and thinks it's "just how it is", except for some privacy holdouts, like myself.
This isn't the way the world used to be.
They shouldn't be. Logs containing URLs are commonly considered private information, and while it's a bad practice to put passwords, etc. in the URLs, people still do it, and even more often things like tokens, keys, object IDs etc. are part of the URLs. Disclosing this to a third party is essentially a MITM attack, and even though we're talking only about user input, this still includes stuff like URLs copies from emails, terminals, documentation files, etc. - and those may contain very un-public thing. Simplest example - do you consider the password reset URL many sites send to be public or private? Of course, not many people would type it - but people would copy-paste it and then maybe type something else - and who can guarantee the whole URL isn't then sent to an untrusted party?
(There's also the part about showing ads, which bleugh, but that's separate from the 'sending' part)
So this title is an important warning for folks who want privacy - and I would guess that a higher percentage of ffx users care about that than chrome.
It wasn't until the OS started alerting the user to this clipboard read that it started to look very suspicious.
Maybe sprinkle in a bit of users didn't consider it suspicious until it was reported that some apps were abusing the privilege.
dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
To false
Edit: my mental molasses delayed my seeing that the feature was removed and that you've moved on. I'll leave the comment though.
Worse thing is Mozilla keeps projecting this empty message of ‘privacy’ whilst still continuing to be more than 80% funded by one of the most anti-privacy companies in the world who directly goes against their entire mission statement.
This is hardly surprising.
I've been using Firefox since version 1, but this is the first time I'm considering switching to something else. (like ungoogled-chromium)
"We haven't quite hit our mark. We've received feedback that it's difficult to figure out which Firefox experience you've got enabled. We are hard at work to address this and continue to improve the feature."
There is a time tested and effective political solution: separation of powers. If Abine Blur blocks Mozilla from doing this stuff, and the Firefox plugin auditors keep an eye on what rorts Abine is pulling, then we dumb punters are in with a chance. Abine and Mozilla could gang up, but that puts them in a prisoner's dilemma—either one could win free advertising, then customers, by dobbing the other in to 60 Minutes. Some people are capable of resolving the prisoner's dilemma superrationally, but they don't become shonks, spivs, or chancers, so this is a fairly reliable solution. I think the priority for a privacy respecting internet should be to get Mozilla, Abine, and Duck Duck Go to start acting as if the others exist, and users of any are likely to use them all.
Maybe, in the end, big tech bastards are just another kind of bastard. That would be nice. In 200 years of democratic reform, the people have invented some sophisticated and effective ways of stuffing the bastards back underneath whatever rock they most recently slithered out from.
Scroll down to Address Bar — Firefox Suggest
uncheck Contextual suggestions
This is unacceptable.
Why do you trust google with this data over Mozilla?