When it comes to privacy, default settings matter (2019)

Iceraven helps a bit, but there's virtually no incentive for someone to develop an extension for Fenix now. The pool of potential users would be small enough for Firefox itself, but its vastly smaller for Iceraven. I've been using Kiwi most of the time as it can use just about every extension available for desktop Chromium.

At best we're left to assume that they're so disorganized that Mozilla has put out this article calling out a toxic practice they themselves are happy to continue participating in.

At worst we could look at this as Mozilla violating their user's privacy while also knowing that it's wrong and trying to trick Firefox users into thinking that Mozilla is looking out for the them and that Firefox wouldn't do the harmful things it's actually doing.

I very much wish Mozilla would either stand by the message in this article and disable the harmful defaults in their own browser or stop pretending to hold values they refuse to respect themselves.

In the end, the change being discussed in this article/advertisement is still a good thing for user's privacy and I get why they'd want to promote it as a feature of their browser often missing from others, but they could do that without the dishonest/contradictory messaging.

What? Can't I make an extension and install it in my own browser? Or do you mean that it's not possible with default settings?

that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me

at this point, I'd prefer chromium singularity to this circus. there's no difference. at least that would be one less browser to support

Of course, many have postulated that Google's motivation to pay Mozilla all that money is actually to ensure that Mozilla remains in business, rather than to directly increase Google's own revenue with the added search traffic. By keeping Mozilla in business, Google can more convincingly argue that they do not have a monopoly on browsers. It may be the case that without this argument, Chrome could be subject to regulations that could benefit consumer privacy, but after watching all the recent congressional hearings involving big tech companies, I have very little faith in that happening any time soon. It's better to keep Mozilla around for now, and the only way to do that without turning Mozilla into another Google is for Google to essentially subsidize them.

I wish there was a platform that combined the app containment prowess of Apple platforms with the spam containment prowess of Google platforms.