Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1].
Never say "Never"... Next is Thunderbird.
Let's go Andreas!
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
Never say "Never"... Next is Thunderbird.
Let's go Andreas!
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
I'm still not convinced that Firefox is The Actual Devil for potentially appearing to perform .000001% of the bad behavior that is fully-baked into popular Chromium browsers.
But for the sake of argument, lets say that .0000001% > 99.99999%. What is the browser I can install+configure right now, that will perform what Firefox does every day. For ex:
natively support containers,
provide fully uncrippled element control,
provide reader mode when *I* want it,
locally save and sync windows,
provide granular redirection control,
and the other functions that are mostly unique to Firefox ecosystem
?So, did the internet explode again for no reason?
[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/information-about...
Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.
By that logic, and with some hyperbole, a text editor would need a license from the user to be able to turn their keystrokes into visible text display.
It smells really bad of privacy violation, data hoarding, targeted psychological manipulation (also known as advertisements), and behaviour analysis. That is why people are reacting so furiously.
Every browser I’ve used in the past decade does “search as you type” by default. That does require local access to your browser and your key strokes.
Normal people wouldn’t use a browser that didn’t do search as you type.
wow, that's scary.
So either a) the current license doesn't allow some current basic functionality or b) the basic functionality of firefox is about to change
I can't imagine how a) can be true. So b) must be true and quote implies, that firefox's basic functionality is about to change. And I do not see how it can change for the better regarding the context of the quote.
Usually the answer is something really mundane. They did a privacy policy review and realized a couple of their core fewtures break the policy.
Or someone new joined the team who had an interest in their privacy policy and realized it contradicts.
There could be a thousand mundane reasons for why now.
And their "aquisition" of an adtech company last year, and their rollout of its data collection into the browser: https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-ppa-ad/
And the US DoJ ruling last year that Google had an illegal monopoly on web search, and one of the mooted remedies was to bar Google paying to be the default search engine in other browsers... and about 90% of Mozilla's income is Google paying to be the default search engine.
But sure, "why now", maybe someone reported a typo or something.
Mozilla needs to answer it and your “I’m above it all” snark needs to disappear.
>Mozilla has just deleted the following: “Does Firefox sell your personal data?”
“Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. " https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203096
Yeah, could be a mundane reason for that too....
Edit add: My sibling list some other things that just so happened to be going on...
It's relatively new, but I liked using it more than other of the forks.
I believe the current issue regarding Firefox is it's new terms of use, which are not presently in Zen browser. Other than that is a pretty close copy of Firefox, which is the point, and why I suggested it to parent as an option.
[1] https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927
If you want an actual private Firefox alternative there are already multiple long standing and competent projects such as arkenfox, librewolf, mullvad and tor browser.
I will guess the ability to save containers locally must be possible, based on this: Every night, my desktop ffx profiles are copied over to a VM. The VM hosts firefox as a remote app.
That remote app instance of ffx has all of my sessions and saved passwords. I can access it from anywhere over VPN and they never leave the house. I'm typing on it now.
Included in that are all of my containers - so in theory they're transportable. I've never thought to try to isolate them from the profile - but my gut says it should be possible.
Besides running Ffx, I'm also running Waterfox and Floorp - which just about exhausts my options for modern Ffx forks + Windows + Extensions.
From a pure optics point of view, it looks extremely bad but reading some of the comments, it sounds like that repo is basically a mirror of some upstream project where terms and conditions/faqs etc are stored as pseudo-structured data and that they're migrating parts of that repo to some other project?
I feel like a lot of context is missing publicly but if I squint, that seems to be what this comment is trying to express: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
Don't get me wrong, I love bagging on Mozilla as much as the next person but as extremely bad as it looks, I'm not convinced that it's literally what it looks like?
If a company was being competently "evil"[1] then it probably would look like this!
Personally, I don't know that I consider Mozilla competent enough to reach that bar though given a lot of their previous blunders seemed like, well, blunders and not finely crafted acts of trickery.
> that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous
I suppose in this scenario, if it were innocuous and this is just some automated mirroring thing that someone triggered without realising the optics of, I wouldn't then automatically assume that same organisation would have a level of coordination to recognise or put out a blanket statement about the issue?
I mean, you'd think surely some amount of Firefox/Mozilla folks are very online and this would be raised internally but if this is downstream of some process owned by mostly legal and non-internet/chat using folks, it might make sense that they a) take some time to be notified, b) take some time to realise a lot of the internet is saying "What the fuck" and c) take a while to figure out what to do about it (ie; issue a press release to not make it worse? someone higher up acks and is like reverse whatever this mess is?)
My only real basis for all this is I've occasionally run into some compliance/legal types in tech and they can have extremely bad mental models of the company and product they work for so I can feasibly believe this all being accidental but in saying that, I dunno who works for Mozilla and this is very much a stereotype I'm applying.
Anyway, as above, I'm not saying this isn't malicious, just that personally I think the door is still open that this could all be a complete mess that has no real intent behind it
That being said, I am sad to see this fear of mine come true. Mozilla products were rock solid, and available on virtually every platform imaginable. I do not want to live in a Chromium and WebKit only world.
I didn't realize how much webgl and other cruft slowed things down until I started using librewolf.
The one improvement I'm hoping for is that the project would be checked into the official Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora package repos as those are less risky than the repo controlled by the developers.
Firefox sync is something you can enable, I believe
This has paid off incredibly well for them since anyone pointing out that it's primary purpose was to enrich the CEO while letting her band of merry women support their pet causes was called everything from a fascist to an incel.
Till today the most blatantly farcical situation was that Mozilla funded women who code boot-camps while firing all the women who code inside Mozilla.
I guess people are finally waking up when Mozilla pulled an Ubuntu and decided that everything you do through their software is something they own actually.
They also flag and harass anyone who points out the grift.
I think Mozilla has been a good example of that but the perception has been that resilience has been crumbling for years. Without an independent business model they have been in a really terrible position from the get-go.
That's one way to look at it, I guess. You could also look at it like a business model will inevitably enshittify.
I have never seen those nag screens in Firefox, near the bookmarks toolbar. I think that is working around Debian's policies, IIUC. I have never had software on Debian nag me to update
It seems like this is under the guise of some DRM updates, and the like.
So I'm supposed to update, and then they apply a new Terms and Conditions that I didn't agree to?
And sell my personal data, I guess because there's a big market in AI now.
Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ...
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This reminds me of the Twitter thing where they asked for your phone number for security purposes, and then used it for advertising.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/25/twitter-u...
I think Firefox is forcing updates ostensibly for one reason, but the real reason is because they found a market for data, and want to apply a new T&C
Yes, seems. I think web developers are increasingly neglecting testing on it.
But I’ve noticed I have ublock-origin installed on Firefox and when the 2 sites that I had issues with started working when that was disabled…
Is it Firefox that's buggy or those websites that only test on Chrome?
Yet, sometimes you need to use those websites fore a reason. Firefox should perhaps make it easier so users don't need to fall back to a different browser.
Which version of each are you running? I use esr these days (I don't remember why I switched though).
What is especially funny/insulting, is there is a click here to update button, and I am like "there is approximately a 0% chance that will actually work on openbsd".
update I looked it up, they say it is a certificate issue. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/root-certificate-expiration
I'm taking this as a good reason to wait for an official Ubuntu update, tho, if this thread is accurate, it looks like all I'll need to keep my current version running will be new root certs.
Or a new browser, unfortunately.
Get involved: https://ladybird.org/#gi
Mozilla is ads company, it does activism, outreach, it organizes Marxist conferences, management gets paid millions... Firefox development is just tiny fraction of what Mozilla does.
And frankly Wikipedia has the same overhead problem as Mozilla.
》 “Mozilla isn’t your typical tech brand; it’s a trailblazing, activist organization in both its mission and its approach,”
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-o...
I do not doubt they employ 750 people. I am saying they have tons of other projects. If you go throught their blog posts, Firefox has tiny fraction of posts.
to this: >>It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. 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).
Of course, saying "(in the way that most people think about “selling data“)" makes the guarantee completely meaningless. The rest of the paragraph is just marketing puffery. Its meaningless bromides about how much they value your privacy. Notice they only say they put "lots of work" into stripping identifying information provided to commercial partners (which is just another way of saying selling). Again, this is meaningless. They went from a very strong guarantee to no guarantee at all. Any company that sells your data that makes any effort at all to strip identifying information can make this claim regardless of whether personally identifying information can be recovered with a modicum of effort.
This is actually a much stronger guarantee than "we don't sell your data", which is not actually a strong guarantee at all. "Selling your data" is a nebulous term that means different things from person to person, and any company that doesn't literally exchange money for data could probably claim it with some level of credulity.
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And now without cutting it conveniently before the fun bit:
> 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).
You appear to have cut off the part where they say that actually yeah they have to stop saying they don't sell your data because they are selling your data.
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For example, Firefox runs ads using your language and city/country (on the default new tab page) - but no other data. I think the vast majority people would fine with the privacy implications of that, but this may be legally considered selling your data.
Being specific about what types of data they collect and how they use it is actually far superior to some nebulous promise that has no definition.
Which is unfortunate because WebKit is terrible outside of macOS, so every single alternative browser is built on Blink and thus indirectly giving more power to Google. The web is too important to accept a monoculture, and it saddens me to see that most of my peers have no moral fibre to resist against it.
As much as I dislike Apple, thank god they have a billion devices out there with an alternative engine, though they still happily take the bribe to force Google down your throat.
One-time disable and completely not intrusive. No popups. Nothing. It's the equivalent of firefox's suggested sites on the homepage when you install it that you have to turn off. Do you hold that to the same standard?
> Brendain Eich
Art, artist, etc
And more generally, lack of easy payment is at the root of so many problems with the modern Internet, that I really can't blame Brave for trying this, quite the opposite, that's exactly the kind of feature we need.