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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

> Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1].

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

?

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> We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so I want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice. We’ve added this note to our blog to clarify, so thank you for your feedback.[1]

So, did the internet explode again for no reason?

[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/information-about...

The question I can’t find answered is why now?

They could have done this on literally any date and your question would apply.

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.

Or it could be that they announced an entirely new leadership team last week: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...

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.

Not to mention their new "AI" integration which they likely want to expand to include all interactions with the browser.

And while they were doing this privacy policy review they also just happened to delete their promise not to sell your data?

>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...

Yes, if this happened two years ago or next week my question applies.

Mozilla needs to answer it and your “I’m above it all” snark needs to disappear.

That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that.

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.

> That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that. Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.

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.

But at no point does any of what you type need to be sent to Mozilla. That only needs to be between the browser and the configured search engine and nothing in between.

It's sort of weird that by that argument Chrome is ok, because Google owns both the search engine and the browser.

GP does not imply, that it would be ok for chrome to send all non-google search-queries to google as well.

> We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible

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.

Zen browser which is a relatively modern fork of Firefox. https://zen-browser.app

It's relatively new, but I liked using it more than other of the forks.

Seconded for Zen.

The website looks good, but as I scroll down in mobile Safari the page starts glitching until it fully crashes and Safari says an error repeatedly occurred. It doesn’t inspire much confidence when the web page for a web browser is broken.

FWIW, it works fine in FF mobile.

I rather not

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887594

Have you tested the waters with a request for the devs to remove whatever you consider suspicious in that list?

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.

I did not. However considering that they have advertised themselves as "privacy-focused" Firefox alternative and can't be bothered to do the most superficial of tests, I don't think they care or are competent[1] enough to change it.

[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.

Containers is key. NoScript is wonderful. I cannot live w/o containers, but I'd really like to also have NoScript.

Can I backup my container configuration to a json file on disk or do I still need to sync it to the cloud to save it?

> Can I backup my container configuration to a json file on disk or do I still need to sync it to the cloud to save it?

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.

LibreWolf

Why and how?

It's literally Firefox without all the telemetry and Mozilla's cloud services. Also a few privacy-related settings but it's mostly that.

I will give LibreWolf a legit look-over. My browser conversations always start with "I need containers" - which rules out everything non-Firefox.

Besides running Ffx, I'm also running Waterfox and Floorp - which just about exhausts my options for modern Ffx forks + Windows + Extensions.

Shame they don't sign their macOS builds.

Can they just sign it with their PGP key or something? Or does it require paying money to Apple for no reason?

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