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

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 53 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (8 children)

Just keep using Firefox. Nothing in the code has changed, and if it does you can switch to forks. You all are evangelizing about how important FOSS is to prevent this exact scenario and yet you keep switching browsers for no need at all.

Note: I love Foss, I just think this is an overreaction

[–] [email protected] 17 points 23 hours ago (6 children)

Oh sure, but browsers are an entirely different beast.

Eventually, they'll take it closed source, now I know what you're thinking "Then one of the forks will just become the dominant one!"

But here's the thing, the browser engine is very complicated just to keep up with. The W3C spec that all engines must follow is thousands of pages long. So all those forks will wither and die once the engine has been cut off from upstream updates.

None of those forks touch the engine as-is

[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago (5 children)

Do tell how something like Zen or Ladybird has a better chance at doing so. It would be better if instead of this fragmentation the Zen and Ladybird would work in a Firefox fork.