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Mozilla: Help us uncover Firefox 3rd party installers (discourse.mozilla.org)

submitted 5 days ago by TheTwelveYearOld to c/[email protected]

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

From the post:

In 2023, a significant portion of Firefox downloads came from unknown sources. We believe many of them came from 3rd party websites that let you download Firefox. While some websites are okay, others can put you at risk of downloading an old version or a build with the wrong locale, leading to security risks, a bad user experience, or even malicious installations.

Help the Firefox team to uncover this mystery by taking part in the Firefox 3rd-party installer campaign 3!

There will be swag, and you’ll be featured in our blog if you manage to report 10 valid reports. So don’t forget to invite your friends too!

Have any questions about this campaign? Join us on Matrix or watch the recording of our community call with Romain Testard, Principal Product Manager at Mozilla.

Please also help spread the word about this campaign by sharing this on your social media.

Keep on rocking the helpful web,

Kiki & Konstantina

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I wonder of they think of all the Linux installs from the various repos. These are nearly all unmodified and will send data to Mozilla, containing an "unknown" install origin.

distro repos
flathub
fedora flatpaks
snap store

These may still pull stuff, not per user but per distro.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

flatpaks and snaps are official now iirc

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Yes but I wonder if they already know these origins.

Afaik they determine "installations" not via downloads from their servers, but started FF apps. All have some unique ID stuff and send that to Mozilla

[–] Cyberjin 4 points 4 days ago

I remember that Firefox had unique identifiers when downloading from the website. https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-a-unique-identifier/ So that's probably how they are tracking everything.

For me I use repos like winget or chocolatey And I guess there are tons of options on Linux.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

Linux version I get from Flatpack

[–] rdri 5 points 5 days ago

I use the one from portableapps because I can't stand going into appdata every time I need to change something.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Well, almost every Linux distro includes Firefox. Maybe that's where these downloads are coming from?