Moved to firefox and I am glad I did, I want to use a browser that respects my privacy choices
"What ads? Oh you must be running Chrome" needs to be the common refrain.
Really hope this ends up being a surprising tide shift. Firefox has dipped really hard in marketshare, but there's no reason it can't start to gain again/grow steadily.
It's really too bad the Firefox tent wasn't big enough for all the alternative browsers that exist (though of course they're not scratching the surface of real usage either). I skipped the whole Arc wave and I'm glad I did -- it's a distraction from Firefox.
I use a vertical task bar on KDE and a vertical task bar on Windows at work. It's such a huge productivity boost. First, I can see WAY more window previews at one time than before. And second, I can use text to tell the windows apart. 5 Excel workbooks open? No problem, they each have a name. No more clicking on one icon and then squinting at window previews to see which one you need.
And as someone who actually lived through the "IE is the standard, deal with it" - age, I refuse to use any Chromium based browser out of principle. We need more actually viable engines in use or Google will just keep dictating what's allowed on the internet by the fact that Chrome has something like 90% market share on desktop browsers.
I am using Brave right now, which seems fine. I have no idea if it actually respects privacy but they at least claim it does.
Google has billions and billions of dollars to throw at Chromium; I doubt Brave has anywhere near that kind of money. The longer it stays fully forked from core Chromium, the harder it's going to be to pull in updates, and the more expensive it will be to maintain.
There is a reason I stopped using Chrome-based browsers years ago. Killing V2 was never anything but a play to make sure people see ads under the guise of “security”. While there is some security benefit, the main benefit is making sure Google is the only one spying on user’s every move.
This is what you get when people trust their browser development to a monopolist instead of a consortium. You get fast and shiny bells and whistles with support for the latest whatsis, but you also get this.
Librewolf is the way to go now.
Regardless of one's political applications, I do agree who you are elsewhere shouldn't matter unless you actually start spewing that in an inappropriate context.
To the left of oligarchy? I thought it was anything to the left of getting hit repeatedly in the head with a hammer that they labelled as communism? There must have been a massive leftward shift in society since I last checked the news!
Anyway sounds like you're trying to convince me to use it
Can you imagine the outcry if they'd said the opposite...
Also, it seems quite vague to me exactly who/what company/entity is behind it.
It seems waterfox (?) has a legal entity behind it for your exact reason!
Signed binaries ensure that the software comes from a trusted source, reducing the risk of tampering and malicious modifications.
Without it, browsing is unbearable. I wonder if they're not allowed to do so because of their contract with Google?
I use Firefox on other devices and use the sync functionality so prefer to use it where possible.
My home router (Draytek) is also configured to force any connected devices to use NextDNS too.
Definitely worth the €20 annual subscription.
I have had crashes with Firefox in a long time.
In the same way we should chastise the platforms that choose to enshitify, we should praise those that hold out.
But there's no assumption of interest. It's a fact. Not only that, but they did it before. Remember when they removed XUL?
I've moved to LibreWolf personally
'do not sell user data' is too broad legally. It's a challenge in some jurisdictions. So they removed that. But it's not because they sell the data. They do have partnerships (like they did Pocket for example). In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
Correction, they said personal data, which if you go by the EU's definition means "any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual".
Which wouldn't be "anonymous stats", and can you give an example of a jurisdiction where sharing "anonymous stats" would go under selling personal data?
And is "doesn't sell your data to advertisers" also too broad? Because they removed that part too.
Why go by EU's definition when it's used globally? If it was a single location, or a single law like GDPR, that'd be easy to reword.
From the page they launched, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
> 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).
Specifically,
> 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.
If you consider GDPR, even the suggestions on the new tab could send data to third parties and wouldn't be okay with this.
Any request done to a third party server, would send them your IP which is PII under GDPR.
I tried to look up Mozilla's definition for "personal data" first but could only find "personal information":
> For us, "personal information" means information which either directly identifies you (like your name, email address, or billing information) or can be reasonably linked or combined to identify you (like an account identification number or IP address).
And again, what's a jurisdiction where sharing anonymous stats would conflict with "we don't sell your personal data"?
They mentioned CCPA as an example but they define a sale as the "selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration"
But they define "personal information" as "personal information includes any data that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked to you or your household, directly or indirectly" so "anonymous stats" wouldn't conflict with that, would it?
Legal department would probably go with,
> if there exists the possibility of a way to de-anonymize any individual in the dataset then the dataset is PII.
Why open themselves to the possibility of lawsuits and fines when they can change the terms.