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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

To me these are reasonable and quite standard points (the first point only applying to Mozilla's services).

The easy alternative is to just make your own local fork. Download the source code, change the name, compile it yourself and you're no longer bound to any of those terms.

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How is it reasonable? Firefox is a MPL licensed software. Why would they suddenly need a ToS if it is just a software? The speculation is that they are going to expand their data collection for ads and covering their ass via this new ToS.

Because they're providing an executable which interacts with additional services, and they're based in the US where lawsuits is the default way to settle disagreements.

For example, the point about them getting "royalty-free, unrestricted access to your inputs" is almost certainly to protect against frivolous lawsuits along the lines of "I typed something in the Search Bar and Mozilla copied it and that violated my copyright and so I want $1 billion".

Again, you're free to make your own fork, in which case you're not bound by these terms.

Why is Mozilla copying my search? It should only goto the search engine I selected. Mozilla doesn't need that data. Firefox just does the HTTP transfer and display's on my screen. Almost all software does that. Also why Mozilla did not require a ToS for two decades but now?

Because your search history can be stored, and that stored history can get synced if you use the Sync feature. That's kinda the point behind the Sync feature.

Sync is end-to-end encrypted. Even if they want to introduce ToS, it should be only for Sync feature, not the whole software. Also why Sync suddenly requires ToS after two decades?

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