Is Mozilla Firefox Getting Sketchy?
thurrott.com
thurrott.com
And when they recently saw the need to tighten the belts, they fired the people working on core parts of the browser (Servo) as well as those working on the crucial browser documentation on MDN.
Adding spyware and ads to the browser is just the rotten cherry on top of the excrement sundae they expect us to eat.
After using Firefox since it first came out, I recently switched to Vivaldi. It’s Chromium-based these days, but with much of the same configurability and flexibility that I loved about Firefox, and the people behind it at least appear to have their hearts in the right place.
The first "user-enhancing" in-browser ads ("sponsored tiles") were introduced in 2014 https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504
Pocket imposition was 2015 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126
Mr Robot stunt was 2017 https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-back...
Cliqz tracking was 2017 https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...
booking.com ads was 2018 https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/31/mozilla-ad-on-firefoxs-ne...
It's easy to look at the actions of the last few years as if they are the exception, but this has been going on for a long time and Mozilla was given a slide for "reasons"
So far so good, it seems.
TBB looks like Firefox, is that why? Kali makes appearances, too (albeit as an everyday desktop OS).
That's a hard thing for a lot of Firefox's userbase to swallow, their dream being a pristine FOSS project essentially run as donationware. Nonfree things, monetization etc. just really don't sit well with that lot. I know, I was one of the people whining about Pocket when it was integrated into the browser and didn't see the point of it. Now? If Firefox is to live, more things like Pocket need to happen.
Opt-out keylogging in a privacy browser isn't that, though.
Just to clarify, Servo was never a part of Firefox. Maybe that's not what you meant, but I've seen it confused with Gecko before which is the actual browser engine used by Firefox.
And as much as I am puzzled by some of the design choices lately - for the android version of Firefox especially - I think that it would be a loss in more ways than one to lose the last (?) real alternative to the Chromium-based family of browsers.
But Servo, to the best of my knowledge, was* an R&D project to develop an new experimental engine. The parts lifted into Firefox are now presumably maintained and developed as a part of Firefox proper.
Don't get me wrong, I was disappointed when i heard that the Servo team was laid off. We are probably missing out on new exciting things that could have come out of it. I just wanted to clarify that cutting Servo did not, as far as I know, mean that any current part of Firefox is now unmaintained or undeveloped.
* Servo is still alive and developed outside of Mozilla, I don't know if's doing well or not.
This is not “less than perfect”. This is gross incompetence. Firefox has been in steep decline for over a decade, yet the same people who are responsible for this monumental failure are still in charge, still running it (into the ground).
If they do not get some more capable people in charge, Firefox will continue its decline into irrelevancy, and we’ll all be worse off, when Google, Apple and Microsoft are the only browser vendors left standing.
Firefox remains the only way I can get full uBlock Origin and uMatrix on the desktop, and I simply refuse to browse the mind-bogglingly frustrating “modern web” without those.
Also, browser diversity is crucial. We should support the main competition as long as possible.
This appears to be incorrect.[0] The suggestions are offline, based on a list downloaded beforehand. There will be online ads in the future, but it will be opt-in and gated behind a dialog.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/q4f92r/remain_calm...
To turn it off: Goto "Settings" > "Privacy & Security" > "Address bar" > "Include occasional sponsored suggestions".
Also this setting is ON by default even though I have things like the "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" checkbox off.
This was driven by wanting to get away from Chrome (Google in general) and the appalling UI decisions in the latest Safari, which were so terrible I’m lost for words.
Having installed Firefox, I sadly was not impressed with its UI either - coming from Safari 14 which is much more elegant in my opinion.
And now I’ve been reading this steady trickle of worrying articles over the last week which are just totally putting me off.
This is a really sorry state of affairs for web browsers. How do we collectively fix this mess….?
Not affiliated, but perhaps give them a try? There’s some immensely interesting projects in the space coming out these days.
After going into about:config and searching Normandy, I learned I was opted into FF experiments without my consent and I had zero options to opt-out in the regular UI.
That said, officially it is guaranteed to only ever be used for properly vetted academic experiments.
So it should be fine! /s
People are just waking up, slowly, but a little too late, the ship was already sinking since 2010
3.6% market share only, -0.6% YoY
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
2009 - 2021
they got their money, sweet jesus juice, but it cost them their reputation and their product
An organization committed to obtaining most of its income from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo is sketchy, no matter what they say.
Mozilla already admitted it ever since being >80% funded by Google. The fact that they could not help staying with Google over the years and thought that they could do without them tell us that they were compromised on their 'mission' on 'a privacy-focused browser' anyway.
Hence that, Mozilla is finished.