Honest question for people in this thread:
Would you pay a subscription to use Firefox, and if no, what would you propose as a means of sustaining Firefox's professional development budget if they lose Google's Monopoly money?
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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I don't have the money to pay for every project, but I would be fine with ads respecting my privacy. I don't understand where Anonym came from while EFF DNT policy has existed for ages and they could just have bundled https://www.eff.org/files/effdntlist.txt like the AdNauseam extension does and I have been using the list with uBlock Origin for ages without issues.
I pay for email so I'd be fine paying for a version of Firefox that is stripped of AI and other shit to support them.
It's about time the community throws its weight behind a hard Firefox fork. Mozilla has been blinded by Google's money for more than a decade consistently doing the bare minimum to stay an alternative.
"never will" "promise"
I do not think these words mean what you think they mean.
If everybody would as a consequence use Librewolf, Mozilla would be forced to change minds.
The LibreWolf Debian repository was down all of last week. I peeked over at their forum and it looks like the team is really struggling to maintain the project since a key member left. Its struggles to keep up with security updates is why its no longer being recommended by Privacy Guides. I'm trying out Mullvad browser right now to see how it fairs
Hey can you link me to a source where it shows that privacy guides doesn't recommend it due to security updates slowing down? I cannot find it.
I was going to use mullvad browser instead, however it wants you to use DoH. If you turn it off, you're now fingerprintable. This is rough since i use network filter tools and it'll bypass it if i use doh. So i was gonna try librewolf.
Here's the forum discussion on including Librewolf as a recommended browser:
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/librewolf-browser-firefox-fork/148
It's quite long as the topic has been open since 2022; all other posts about Librewolf are closed by mods and the discussion is redirected here.
Thanks. I looked through this and a few threads. It seems like they did lose a key member. But it also seems like they've kept up with Firefox security updates, which is the most important part. It's still concerning though but it seems perfectly fine to use. What do you think?
As for mullvad browser, like i said, I'd use that but unfortunately I can't use DoH which is rhe default in that browser. It will bypass my network filtering.
Oh no, that's sad to hear. Society really needs to start doing more clever decisions. A project like Librewolf could be so incredibly useful for most of people. Somehow should find a way to foster those efforts.
Is it on Android with ublock?
No, you want the fork of Mull called Ironfox https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox
Droid-ify just added it to their list of repos in the latest update
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Does LibreWolf not have a mobile client? The ability to sync with my desktop will unfortunately keep me on Firefox, unless I'm just missing it.
Ironfox has Firefox sync
This is where not understanding how to use GitHub becomes a problem for me
You can use Obtanium to pull from Github, Gitlab, and a few others, it has a search function. So you can search 'Ironfox' and it will find it on Gitlab, then Obtanium will ask if you want to install it.
Obtanium is available on F-Droid, or from Github...
Usually you want to look for the “releases” tab.
Nods knowingly, oh yeah these are some links alright
Apk is a package file, grab the one that matches the architecture of your device, probably the arm64 one unless you know otherwise.
They have an f-droid repo on the main page, would recommend installing that way
GitHub is so effing confusing, I can't even. You'd think I'd get the hang of it as often as I need to use it. I feel like UIs for the last like 20 years just get harder and harder for me to follow as everything is condensed into wordless little icons and countless images tile across my screen.
I was thinking the same thing but then I realised that 20 years ago, most software UI was completely built from even tinier wordless images crammed into obtuse tiny buttons or hidden options in nested drop-down menus but we didn't really have much trouble with it back then. Maybe we're all just getting old and our brains don't want to learn new things anymore. Curse you lack of neuroplasticity!
Images not mine but shamelessly stolen from a web search.
I copied this from my other reply in case you don't see it
You can use Obtanium to pull from Github, Gitlab, and a few others, it has a search function. So you can search 'Ironfox' and it will find it on Gitlab, then Obtanium will ask if you want to install it.
Obtanium is available on F-Droid, or from Github...
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
OK, Mozilla, I'll use a damn fork, since you insist! WTF...
I’m kind of worried about the knee jerk reactions from people that haven’t read the full communications from Mozilla or looked into their approaches to anonymise data (which they’ve done for years as part of analyzing new feature tests).
Building an application as complex as Firefox requires full-time developers. It’s similar in scale to the Linux Kernel.
To keep building a competitive browser and continue to challenge there ubiquity of Chromium, Firefox needs to exist. Mozilla need to figure out how to make money (their previous attempts at additional services like VPN etc didn’t have much impact). If Google pull the rug from under them regarding their payments to be the default search engine, Mozilla could swiftly fall under.
Advertising, done in a privacy preserving way which they’ve an awful lot of experience at doing, in the near term gives them additional revenue streams to keep the ship afloat.
If we lose Firefox, Google owns the internet. We need to keep talking with Mozilla, not abandon them.
That's fair, but I think not totally right.
I think Firefox is a great browser, which is why I'm using forks, not ditching it entirely. I still use Mozilla services, and I will continue to keep tabs on and support the development of the browser. However, I will not sacrifice the little privacy I can scrape up by agreeing to terms of use that gather my data, even if anonymized, for use in serving me ads, regardless of whether I think the company behind these practices needs to exist or not---and in this case, I do think Mozilla, and Firefox as a project, must remain strong if we want a free internet for all.
This implicit trust you seem to have in Mozilla, however, is not something I share. First, AI integration, then it's the terms of use, then it's the language around data privacy... Google used to say "Don't Be Evil." I don't believe Mozilla will stay good because it's Mozilla and it's been good. I don't like the recent steps they've been taking, and so I'll stop using Firefox; that's as far as it goes.
Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but I don't want to compromise on this.
for use in serving me ads
You use(d) FF without an adblocker?
I don’t think you’re being unreasonable and in truth I share your concerns. Forks are doing a good job at refining the experience but should the Firefox project collapse, I doubt any fork can meaningfully continue the development needed for such a huge and complex project without the full-time and experienced development team who have been working on the project for an incredibly long time.
I wish Mozilla could figure out a more powerful way to generate revenue that doesn’t require advertising in any form.
I wonder if a yearly fundraising drive like Wikipedia could help. They generated $250Mil+ last time they did.
should the Firefox project collapse, I doubt any fork can meaningfully continue the development
Yeah, that's probably right, unfortunately.
I wonder if a yearly fundraising drive like Wikipedia could help.
I doubt it would hurt, at least! They do get some money, <$20M... Which isn't close to being enough, of course, but it does prove there's at least some interest in supporting Mozilla financially, on the users' side.
We need Mozilla corp to be better and there is currently no good way of forcing that to happen.
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~~They removed that question from the FAQ, but it still states in multiple other sections, in the same link, that they do not sell user data~~
~~Am I reading this wrong?~~
Edit: New FAQ
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).
Ah, so it's not that they sell data, it's that they share data in order to achieve commercial viability. I don't sell items on ebay, I share them in a commercially viable way!
Yeah, this kind of semantic gymnastics is what makes them so suspicious.
“You’re gonna make a lot of money?”
“Yep.”
“And the data’s not yours?”
“Well, it becomes ours.”
I am so fucking tired of PR speak. This is removed now so that they can sell your data later. That and the ToS change is the canary in the coalmine.
"We akchually don't sell your data because it isn't the legal definition everywhere". Fuck you
I feel like it would've been really helpful if it had provides an example of something that legally counts as "selling your data", but that any sane person would not define as such.
Marked as deprecated and will be removed outright not to be replaced.
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I've been using Mozilla since version 1.0, and have gone through the highs and lows. This is the point where I get off, what a shame.
Get off to what? Everything else is chromium based. Or do you have a tip?
A more privacy focused fork of Firefox, I haven't decided which yet.
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So, it's Librewolf and IronFox on mobile.
IronFox
Dang, I was out of the loop, I'm still on Mull. Guess I'll be moving to IronFox.
Yanks gonna yank to be honest
Cambridge Analytica
looks to me like they just changed the phrasing. am I misreading it?
To some extent they have changed the wording, as clarified here: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e#commitcomment-153095625
Saying the new wording is:
"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)."
Which seems to be because of the legal definition of selling data. Note this quote is now live on their privacy FAQ: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
However, this part:
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)
Sounds an awful lot like straight up selling our data. It would be nice to have specifics. The privacy FAQ page doesn't seem to actually provide clarity.
Yeah, specifics would be great. "Someone clicked this ad", or potentially even "someone in Germany clicked this ad" is a big difference from "a 20-year old man who likes blahaj in Hamburg has opened a new tab".
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