A Comment on Mozilla's Policy Changes
waterfox.net
waterfox.net
> UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we 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, 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. (Emphasis mine)
And they mention that we need to see the context behind this change -- but what they don't to -- is point out that the update clarification makes the whole situation even more problematic than it was previously.
The private notice indicates they use data to:
1. To provide and improve search functionality 2. To serve relevant content and advertising on Firefox New Tab 3. To provide Mozilla accounts 4. To provide AI Chatbots 5. To provide Review Checker, including serving sponsored content 6. To provide and enable add-ons (addons.mozilla.org) 7. To maintain and improve features, performance and stability 8. To improve security 9. To understand usage of Firefox 10. To market our services 11. To pseudonymize, de-identify, aggregate or anonymize data 12. To communicate with you 13. To comply with applicable laws, and identify and prevent harmful, unauthorized or illegal activity
1,2,4,5,10 are problematic. We don't want those things. Mozilla wants those things. The problem isn't the lack of context behind the changes, the problem is Mozilla wants to be able to use our 'input' data for whatever they want, and I don't want them to.
They said they're the privacy focused browser; and they're not. That's a lie. I moved from Chrome to Firefox precisely because I couldn't trust Google. Now I can't trust Firefox.
It was supposed to be User's Agent, dammit.
What's with the mixup of their browser and services policies?
[1] Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
[2] You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to:
* Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence,
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/#you... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/acceptable-use/
2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20181223004526/http://www.mozill...
Wording was slightly different earlier than that, e.g. 2015:
"Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that:
[...]
Is inappropriate such as obscene or pornographic materials, graphic depictions of sexuality or violence, or images that exploit or harm children"
https://web.archive.org/web/20150331013034/https://www.mozil...
But the same AUP for the services is now explicitly referenced in the TOS for the browser. How are you supposed to read it - the AUP only applies to your use of the browser to access the services? Isn't that already implicit if you're using the services? Surely it can't be attempting to apply the services AUP to any non-service use of the browser?
Very confusing, it seems badly written to me.
Same thing with the "Some Services in Firefox Require a Mozilla Account" and then the "Termination" with a notification to the (optional) account. Somewhat disconcerting.
[1] Mozilla can suspend or end anyone’s access to Firefox at any time for any reason, including if Mozilla decides not to offer Firefox anymore. If we decide to suspend or end your access, we will try to notify you at the email address associated with your account or the next time you attempt to access your account.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/#moz...
The 2015 policy I quoted applied to "Mozilla’s services and products". The 2018 version just references "services", leaving out the "products" part.
I don't know. They've muddied the water and I'm disappointed with recent changes.
Firefox is released under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0, a Free and Open Source licence approved by both the FSF and the OSI. Both those organisations require that in order to be approved, a licence must not forbid any particular kind of use. The FSF calls this Freedom 0, The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose, and the OSI calls it Criterion 6, No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor. [0][1]
Is Mozilla's position that Firefox is actually subject to the union of the MPL2.0 and their other terms? If so, that disqualifies it as Free and Open Source software according to the usual definitions.
edit I see I'm not the first to point this out on HN. [2]
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms
From the MPL 2.0 text: "If You distribute Covered Software in Executable Form then: [...] You may distribute such Executable Form under the terms of this License, or sublicense it under different terms, provided that the license for the Executable Form does not attempt to limit or alter the recipients’ rights in the Source Code Form under this License."
If you compile Firefox yourself, you can do whatever you want with it, subject to the MPL's terms. You can even put your own Terms of Use on your own executable copy. Though if you do this, Mozilla may demand that you rename it so that it doesn't use their trademarks (see: the whole Iceweasel story).
So Mozilla, an organisation that commends itself for working to put control of the internet back in the hands of the people using it, [0] is creating a situation where the FOSS community needs to maintain its own 'cleansed' builds, akin to VS Code/VS Codium [1] and, to a lesser extent, Chrome/Chromium. [2] (The Chromium case is somewhat different; Google maintains both the FOSS Chromium builds and the non-Free Chrome builds.)
4 years ago I commented that It's just non-stop with Mozilla, isn't it? They have the curious pairing of technical excellence, and a long history of awful non-technical decision-making. Little seems to have changed. [3]
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/about/
If you'd like an alternative, the State of Utopia[1] could eventually finish building one.
Our browser does not currently have any usage terms (we are still writing our code of laws so it is too early to have terms and conditions), you can use it to browse whatever you want right now, but it barely works:
https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/feb2025/84toy-toy-browser-w...
(Read it, install the required libraries and run it with Python.)
The browser can access URL's and can load and display images. It currently doesn't include all of html, css, and JavaScript because that is too difficult for AI to do.
If there is interest we will continue to use state resources to create our state-run browser. It doesn't collect any analytics of any kind.
You might want to see some proof that State of Utopia will actually be able to make useful things for you:
- A complete free implementation of chess, it is fun for people and has no analytics or ads:
https://taonexus.com/chess.html
- a fun version that shows blunders, so you can practice not making serious mistakes:
https://taonexus.com/blunderfreechess.html
- an alternative rendering of it, with heatmaps on the squares:
https://taonexus.com/blunderfreechess2.html
- infrastructure:
here is a Skype/Zoom replacement that is free, peer-to-peer, has no analytics or terms of use, and supports video, audio, and chat via WebRTC. It is the Utopian communications infrastructure at the moment:
http://taonexus.com/p2p-voice-video-chat.html
If you want us to continue to put resources into a working browser, we believe that html, css, and javascript are very well-defined and AI will be able to autonomously make a complete state-run browser eventually.
At the moment the State of Utopia owns $221/month in AI and $180/month in compute. We are exploring the possibility of letting people get to Utopia faster by donating computing resources, but so far the feedback has been mixed. People would like to get free stuff without contributing anything themselves. This is fine, the State of Utopia will still happen, but since the State owns such little infrastructure at present, it will be a bit slower than if people contribute their GPU's.
Let us know if you are interested in the State completing our browser, and if so, we will put additional resources into it.
[1] a sovereign state where AI controls everything and owns state-run companies, giving out free money, goods and services to citizens/beneficiaries. It will be available at: https://stateofutopia.com or https://stofut.com when ready. Citizenship is free (compare Form N-400 to become a U.S. citizen which costs $640 plus an $85 biometric services fee, totaling $725). The difference between a company and a country is that companies exist to maximize the value of their shareholders whereas countries exist to maximize the welfare of their citizens.
Do we get any of those with Mozilla? They can change their ToC whenever they want and keep adding things that users don't want. I don't think they are much better than a random developer building their own fork.
Mozilla is very clear at its communication! They even got new leadership and rebranded recently! Their updated Privacy Policy is also very clear! Maybe they had not implement everything yet, but they are heading in clear direction. And real hammer will come in a few months, if they lose deal with Google!
At this point Mozilla is a toxic organization when it comes to privacy, something like Google with Chrome. Dismissing it as a "communication issue" is not sufficient! Waterfox needs clear separation from Mozilla!
In the United States of America, freedom of speech is a fundamental right guaranteed by our constitution. That means you can use language or show content that I may find offensive. I may do the same for you. My choice is whether or not I wish to view it or permit my non-adult children to view it. This is not the vendor's prerogative; it is my responsibility as a parent.
Mozilla's "terms and conditions" mean that fear has taken hold.
Freedom is hard. Allowing a vendor to restrict use that infringes on a basic right is unacceptable. In the final analysis, their terms of use are probably unenforceable. Think about it. What are they going to do? Stop me and everyone else from sharing cute baby pictures? Ones in our grandparents' scrapbooks?
Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Ctr does establish that free speech protection can be used against other private citizens
The browser is supposed to be transparent -- what you send is what I see. How I react is up to me. It is not up to the intervening service to add or remove content.
This is what the internet was intended to be.
Oh, nice! I might check it out again at some point.
Also, are you the author per chance? If so, really nice work!
If not, you can perhaps see why people didn't want Eich's bigotry around their project.
I think a closer analogy is no boss or CEO will likely have political views that match my own and I tolerate that and will work for such people.
When the CEO is donating to causes which directly discriminate against you - would you apply to work there?
Worse, you are making stuff up in claiming that volunteers in substantial numbers "propped up" Mozilla. The Google money was still good enough to pay all essential personnel.
* Focus on employee wellness, including mental wellbeing
* Support for making the internet free, open and accessible to all
* History of working for non-profits and traditionally neglected sectors
* Stated opposition to current influence of money and big tech in politics
It was a good bet. But it did not work out. No leader is infallible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231216111510/https://gerda.tec... https://archive.luxferre.top/gerdaos
That's what I understood from their postmortem post:
"Engineering — Have a clear separation between “chrome” and web content rather than try to force the web to do things it isn’t suited to. Create device APIs using REST & WebSockets on the server side of the web stack rather than privileged JavaScript DOM APIs on the client side. Create a community curated directory of web apps on the web rather than an app store of submitted packaged apps."
https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-story-of-firefox-os-cb5bf79...
Without getting into the politics of Eich's firing, It simply looked like people there just didn't care about the browser there anymore.
If they did, the people who were vocal enough to get a CEO fired would obviously have raised a voice against the dropping marketshare (aka their own bottomline), money squandered on various non browser projects (pocket), all these PR nightmares (mr robot, recent layoffs ) etc ...
Needless to say when i say people, i mean at least the vocal ones in power and obviously not everyone.
You mean the guy who then did the Brave browser, which inserted referral codes and installed VPN services without users' consent, and wants you to earn monopoly money for watching ads? Yeah, he surely would've been the savior of Firefox.
Also angry crowd: “No! No! Not that thing! How dare you explore alternative revenue streams! You are Mozilla, just pick and the execute a successful 100 million dollar idea!”
Also angry crowd: "No, not ads or AI, it's stupid."
What was your point anyway?
Now the ship has beached itself and the crew is frantically trying something - anything - to plug the leaks, prevent her from capsizing and trying to get her back afloat. I don't know if they'll manage, or if ladybird is the alternative to the new IE that is Chrome
Mozilla: what? acquire a bookmarking service?
Angry crowd: no! develop your browser!
Mozilla: ok, got it! I'll make a VPN service!
Angry crowd: WORK ON YOUR FUCKING BROWSER
Mozilla: AI? Did I hear AI from someone over there?
E.g. VPN, search, bookmarking service - great. Charge for them, have the money go into browser dev, focus on privacy and be done with it.
I feel like once you state these questions out loud it becomes clear that none of this cause and effect necessary to make the argument work is being critically thought through at all.
There was a time when this complaint about core browser experience had some legitimacy and that was in the 2010s up through 2016. They rebuilt their whole engine into Quantum in 2017, which was a major leap forward. And ever since then the differences have been real, but subtle. Meanwhile Google has leveraged its dominant position in search, and it's major investments into Android and Chromebooks to push people to its browser. They've also used their revenue to invest in an embrace extend extinguish strategy in the browser space.
The vast majority of the vibes about Mozilla transgressions are more like a self-perpetuating oral tradition than a thoughtful narrative grounded in causality.
People say "all the stuff going on with Mozilla" like there's a list of real things that really happened when it's upwards of 90% smoke and vibes. And this is coming from someone who thinks the recent subtraction of language about not selling your data actually was a bad move and rather damning.
But it's a real thing in a long line of nothingburgers, and it's amazing once the comment gets to the part where it's supposed to make a specific charge and instead it's just "all the things going on".
>I don't believe it's astroturfing, simply just mind bogglingly awful arguments. Claiming the decline in market share is tied to inadequate browser features with no two conversations ever agreeing on what those features are. No coherent theory of cause and effect between features and market share while ignoring structural advantages that are much more important drivers, which Google leverages. Claims that CEO pay is the problem when it's 1% of annual revenue. Idiosyncratic interpretations of their published statements that make unfalsifiable assumptions about intentions. And a basic inability to grasp and compare the relative scale of different types of transgressions (e.g. Google is increasingly driving the web into deeper dependence on Chromium, but Mozilla once did a Mr. Robot promo!)
These aren't good arguments. These aren't coming from a place of coherent thinking about the actual drivers of market share, and there's no coherent theory of cause and effect that ties other side bets to the trajectory. It's all incredibly low effort vibes because people seem to have lost grasp of how to make real arguments.
Firefox had its rise when Microsoft had basically slowed IE development to a crawl, which allowed them to build a lead of how much better they were than IE that no browser developer would be dumb enough to allow to reoccur. Tabs, Adblock, Firebug, performance for youtube and google maps that wasn't appalling at a time when these apps were themselves new and exciting.
Like you could show a normal person who was using IE6 tabs and adblock, and that's a clear use case to switch browsers. The only feature anywhere near that compelling in the recent or not-so-recent past is sync, which is why every browser manufacturer has their own version of it. And sync still isn't tabs or adblock.
And they had a clear revenue model with Google (and not yet irrelevant competitors) paying for search and not yet starting to squeeze them. I'm sure that revenue model was partly undermined when they moved to yahoo in the US and everyone just went and switched back to Google, which caused Google to question how valuable that really was.
At the same time, Google developed Chrome because it let them push features that were useful for their revenue generating products. And google pushed hard. Some of its early market share was to wooing us with performance and tab isolation, for sure. But a lot of it was bundling with new laptops, flash player, anti-virus programs etc. to automatically set it as the default for non-tech users who may not recognise what a browser is really.
And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop.
One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android. They couldn't have Firefox on iOS, and it took ages for government regulation to meaningfully change that, but they could have been on Android much sooner, and used some of their desktop network effects and sync to build market share, but instead they left it so late and missed the mobile market such that their poor mobile market share turned browser sync into something that harmed their desktop market share, as people wanted a desktop browser to sync their mobile Chrome tabs etc.
Firefox's headcount (and the pace of web platform development) had ballooned over this period, and this was fine when the Google money was still a given, but now that's looked to be decreasing or entirely at risk, Mozilla has needed to make Firefox pay for Firefox (unlike Chrome, which doesn't really need to pay for Chrome as long as it's a channel for Google's revenue generating products). This has put them in pretty direct conflict with their users, as ways to monetise the browser goes against a lot of why their remaining users are their users to begin with.
The tech influencer effect also switched to pushing Chrome at the time, especially outside of Linux/FLOSS communities.
Chrome was released back when Google was still viewed favorably. People were high on gmail, google docs, and they still had "don't be evil." It took pretty much no time at all to start seeing Chrome everywhere Firefox used to be.
So yeah, I agree with you - no doubt some of it is Mozilla's doing, but I think more or less it was out of their control and I think "we" (the tech crowd) are just as much at fault for Chrome's dominance and the downfall of Firefox. It only took 5 years from release for Chrome to surpass Firefox, and the tech crowd were very much the early adopters and drivers of that.
In the modern era, Google is the opposite problem. They DDoS the community by developing standards fast enough that nobody can keep up with them. Actually, it seems impossible to compete with them on their turf. We need an alternative that somehow avoids that competition.
Unfortunately Google is quite good, they managed to embrace-extend the whole internet. Not sure what the options are. Somewhere a filter needs to be applied to reject more proposals.
Was 2011 "so late"? It was already there when Android 4 came out, still before Android gained a really significant market share (15%, same as Blackberry and half as much as Symbian at the time). Two years before that there were versions for Maemo too (which was much easier to port to), and Android versions used the same codebase at the time.
Figures I found for global share are Android 48%, iOS 20%, Symbian 16%, Blackberry 10% (https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/2011-handset-and-sma...) which matches my memory of that time much better.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...
For context, the first stable release of Firefox for Android was made just a few months after Nokia N8 release.
Off-topic; it’s great to see a good old-fashioned XHTML web page – with a Strict doctype to boot! I remember hand-crafting websites using XHTML (at first Transitional, then Strict) using Server Side Includes as the only backend technology and being proud at how semantic and human-readable the source code was. The markup on this page is elegant, clear and readable while the rendered XHTML is both accessible and responsive.
>can be installed on Windows 7 or newer as well as Linux from the repositories, as a flatpak and as a snap. https://userbase.kde.org/Falkon
> We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses
The text is confusing on purpose and mixes Firefox, the Mozilla Services (Sync maybe? That's it?), AI, and their new AD-platform (without mentioning the last two). And why are they talking about a license when it's a ToS? Everything is confusing about it, even their answers.
> to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible
The very same thing they did for more than 20 year without such a ToS? Why now? I think it's about AI and ads but I'm sure they are smarter than me and will explain everything in precise details to clear up such a "big confusion."
> we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches
That's a fucking lie of course. They did that last year without any issue. You can get the text from the search box (like mSearchBox->getText() in C++, wow I'm a Mozilla engineer), and put that in the URL of my favorite search engine as part of the query.
> or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice
I don't care about the ownership, I want to know why, why now, and I want them to explain all the details that definitely do NOT appear in their Privacy Notice.
My conclusion is that they are moving away from Firefox for some reason, they pretended to fire the last CEO which keeps on working on the AI, and they want a lot of information like everyone else which is difficult when you're supposed to be the open-source knight of privacy.
But I'm only typing that because I am bitter and have already moved on. They fucked with us too many times, I don't care anymore even if the only alternative left was Links.
There hasn’t been confusion. There’s almost never confusion. Making an announcement requires clear communication. If reasonable people are interpreting their communication in a way they didn’t intend, it isn’t confusion, they just miscommunicated at best.
If the charity is a non-profit specifically for development of a non-profit web browser, what's the problem?
The point of incorporating as a charity is that it makes you exempt from taxes. Obviously the government that collects taxes wants to make sure that every corporation doesn't incorporate as a charity solely to avoid taxes, so it places strict limits on what you're allowed to do with charitable donations.
The Mozilla Foundation (as distinct from the Mozilla Corporation) is specifically a 501(c)(3) charity under US law. That means it can use its funds for the following:
"The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency."
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
Notably, developing a free web browser is not one of the charitable activities that the IRS recognizes.
I find your argument uninsightful. If I were on a jury, I would find developing a free web browser to be charitable under multiple statements:
- preventing cruelty to children
Childrens' browsing habits should not should not be available for sale.
- relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged
A free browser will help the poor, and the distressed, and the underprivileged. There are poor people who are poor because they are data-mined by advertisers. There are people who are distressed about their privacy. There are underprivileged people whose livelihoods are abused by corporations.
- advancement of education or science
A free browser is both educational (handy for learning how to write software or build websites) and scientific (generating studies and reports on internet capabilities and safety).
> defending human and civil rights secured by law
Do you really want to argue that a free browser does not defend freedom and privacy in the US (since you cite US definition of charity) as heavily implied by the US Bill of Rights and as supported by US Courts [0]?
Why not?
An organization like Mozilla should take a stance and do the opposite by making their policy as narrow as possible.
This costs more in legal costs, but for an organization that defines itself as a champion of user privacy and control this should be the natural choice.
It was impossible to get that point across, especially as S1 wanted to have the final say on what was said. A lot of heartache all across the board could've been saved by just being able to say things as a matter of fact.
But unfortunately people jump to conclusions, don't have good faith discussions and loved just get involved in internet drama.
Librewolf has sensible but annoying default settings that you have to change. For example, cookies are deleted when quitting, or you can't have night mode out of the box since it could be a privacy issue. IMHO it's a cleaner Firefox and I enjoy it so far.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...
`LibreWolf: Always store cookies/data for this site`
That's great, and I think I will now switch over
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/comments/1j0ckr9/recent_f...
I hate the Mozilla 'clarification' because they gave no example. The only information I type into Firefox is using websites. Them being 100% vague makes it feel even worse.