It's a sad end to my literal decades of support for them.
It's sad to see them squander an opportunity to do good work. Mozilla should have gone all-in on ethics/privacy in contrast to tech giants and made an offering like Proton. Or gone with the Wikipedia donate model like another commenter said. Any compromise on their values is insane mismanagement, that was their whole brand.
For making goggle the default search engine.
So they aren't really "in contrast to tech giants" in any way.
To your point, cloning Proton is such an obvious path forward to generate revenue while staying true to their values. Even selling a Firefox Pro with an annual fee offering some developer-specific or power-user features would be great.
Together with certain other services, like Password manager and Firefox Accounts, they could indeed go with your suggestion. However, I really do not want my EU data under a US business or non-profit. I want my data under EU laws, or European at least (Norway, Switzerland are also OK).
IMO, Mozilla should team up with Kagi. They have the numbers of users, and Kagi has the excellent product.
If not LibreWolf then what? The rest seem out of date or worse than Firefox in some way.
As for your Firefox account, you could consider hosting your own sync server. The documentation for it is of varying quality, but you can keep your data off Mozilla's servers without sacrificing some pretty useful functionality.
Combined with their blog posts from the CEO saying "we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term." [1]
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...
Is still present on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
*Update:* Here's the version from Feb 6 that says exactly what the parent comment posted: https://web.archive.org/web/20250206184553/https://www.mozil...
At the time I copy/pasted, the answer was a single line (as shown in your archive link).
I'd be mildly surprised if the current version remains unchanged for a long time. It raises the question of "how do I determine whether I'm one of the 'most people' who wouldn't think of you as selling my data", and I doubt they'll want to answer that.
I wish there was a way to tell the Wayback Machine to do a snapshot for historical preservation.
You can, and I just submitted the https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/ URL.
At the top of the page, click "Web". On the right-hand side of the menu that appears, you'll see:
"Save Page Now
Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future."
And a spot to enter the URL.
Resulting snapshot for today: https://web.archive.org/web/20250227182726/https://www.mozil...
this whole thing and recent change goes contrary to what i thought they were about.
i'm done with them at this point.
the migration will be painful...