this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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But that post is Mozilla clearly speaking out against SREN because they do not want to be compelled to block certain sites.
Are you then talking about Google Safe Browsing? Which is enabled by default in Firefox, but which does not "monitor your activities". It compares the site you are about to visit to a downloaded list of known bad ones and warns you if it's on the list. Hardly an Orwellian nightmare. Just turn it off or ignore the warning if you do not want it. I keep it on because I've never seen a false positive on that list and I understand that even I'm vulnerable to attack.
And you are. If you don't want to use safe browsing, turn it off, is right there in the menu. They have given you a default that's best for most people and the option to customize.
Further, since it's free software there's really no limit to your power to customize or get rid of what you don't need. (I understand that this is not possible for most people, but that's why you have the menu options, this is just a final line of defense.)
I’ve been a long time Mozilla-supporter, since forever—since much before Firefox was even born. Every browser I use now is also Firefox-based [EDIT: one of them is SeaMonkey, not firefox-bsed but from Mozilla too]. As such, I wouldn’t like to say bad things about Mozilla. While I could clarify what I was trying to say, let’s just say several other people prefer LibreWolf to Firefox (I’m not a LibreWolf user, though).
In the big picture, we don’t want to be abused by big tech companies like Google, and relatively speaking, Firefox is a much better choice. Also, you’re absolutely right about how free software is supposed to work (at least in principle). Like I said, I really hope I’m totally wrong here.
The original (initial) post is a question about Brave, and we’re getting so off-topic now. Besides it seems that most Lemmy users don’t even read anything older than a week anyway, too busy to have a slow, deep conversations. So let’s call it a day. What I was trying to say in passing might become painfully clearer soon enough, or perhaps—hopefully—I’m just overly worrying about nothing. Although maybe Mozilla as an organization can’t exist anymore without Google’s financial supports (and so not in a position to keep saying “No!” to Google for a long time), as you pointed out, let’s hope that the philosophy of free (libre) software will prevail in the end.