this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025

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Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke (www.theregister.com)

submitted 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) by s38b35M5 to c/privacy

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The answer to "what is Firefox?" on Mozilla's FAQ page about its browser used to read:

The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.

Now it just says:

The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.

In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.

A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, "is Firefox free?" Moz used to say:

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.

Now it simply reads:

Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.

Again, a pledge to not sell people's data has disappeared. Varma insisted this is the result of the fluid definition of “sell” in the context of data sharing and privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Are there any specifics about this? It all seems fairly theoretical to me. What do they [want to] do that contradicts "doesn't sell your personal data" within the context of the fluid definition of "sell"? Do they sell my personal data or don't they? What definitions of "sell" are relevant here?

It's all sounding a bit Bill Clinton to me: "it depends on your definition of 'is'."

[–] taanegl 10 points 4 hours ago

The ambiguity is the smoking gun.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 hours ago (4 children)

Now that Mozilla's fucked. What's the next option that's not Chromium?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

IceCat

[–] [email protected] 2 points 40 minutes ago

That isn't ready for common use by most people until there they offer binaries for easy installation.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 hours ago

Mozilla is sliding down a slippery slope to enshitification; but they're still near the top of that slide. The bad stuff hasn't actually come yet. So Firefox is still top-tier in the short term.
In the medium term, we can look towards a fork such as Librewolf or Waterfox.
And in the long term, we'll probably turn to a new project using Ladybird or Servo.

[–] dai 9 points 4 hours ago

Ladybird in a few years, forks of Firefox for now.

[–] SirHery 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

A different fork from firefox like librewolf

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

Librewolf is just some patches added on top of Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 90 points 21 hours ago (23 children)

In Firefox, type about:config in address bar, search for "sponsored" and "telemetry" and set all the paremeters you see from TRUE to FALSE. Done.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 minutes ago

How can ome do this on mobile? Doesn't run search on the terms or load a config page.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Or use Waterfox which does most of this by default

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

I like waterfox but the dev of waterfox made a deal with an advertising corp, eventually it fell apart but there was a solid few years where users left waterfox.

[–] grue 112 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

We shouldn't have to do workarounds like that in the first place. It's getting to be like the Stockholm syndrome people have about Windows abuses. I didn't put up that shit, and I'm not gonna put up with this either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

I'm running Linux and neither Waterfox or LibreWolf are present in repository of one of the most popular distros. Come on?!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 minutes ago

put it innare

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

huh? what linux distribution are you even using? also librewolf is available in the flathub repository

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Or, just switch to the iron fox fork.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

"just"? That sounds like way more work than taking 10 seconds to change the setting.

(I don't disagree with your suggestion, I'm just baffled at the use of "just")

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 16 hours ago (6 children)

"Flamed", that's a new one

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please 26 points 10 hours ago

Tim’s an old one, actually. Back in the old internet forum days, flaming was the act of going off on someone during an argument. Most forums even had “no flaming” rules, that could result in warns or outright bans if a mod thought an argument had gotten out of hand.

To be clear, flaming is the act of insulting the user, not the act of arguing against them. You can argue against a user without attacking the user directly.

[–] glimse 27 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

That's an OLD one. Wow I haven't heard that term in like 20 years

[–] adavis 2 points 7 hours ago

Appropriate callback too given the pun.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (14 children)

Given that this is a privacy community, I would think that it would go without saying, But I just like to point out, We should probably disable Firefox sync if were using it. Log out of Firefox accounts in the browser. Even if you're not giving them telemetry they have all that data.

~~You can use the x bookmarks sync plugin, Don't make an account with them just use the un-logged in plugin to backup and restore your bookmarks between browsers. On the upside it'll even let you copy bookmarks from Firefox derivatives to Chrome derivatives.~~

Go down a comment or two and use Floccus, Just converted it's wonderful

at their location. However the want it

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