632
Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Ruh roh. Too late though.
Friendship ended with Firefox,❎ Librewolf is my new best friend. ✅
I need a gif where Scooby Doo removes the Librewolf logo and there's a Firefox logo underneath.
You must recognize that there is no Librewolf without Firefox, right? In fact, Librewolf even says in their privacy policy that you should also refer to the Firefox Privacy Policy because they can't be certain that their browser won't ever try to send data to Mozilla.
I'm not saying this to deter you from using Librewolf. If it works for you then that's awesome. It just made me chuckle when you said that you ended your friendship with Firefox and ran into the warm embrace of... Firefox with different default settings.
In any case, all I'm trying to communicate is that Firefox and all of its many forks are fundamentally reliant on Mozilla and its ability to continue updating Firefox. That means Mozilla needs a sustainable business model, and that we can't all simply abandon our relationship with Mozilla for a tool that is dependent on the work that Mozilla does.
A big problem with such forks (same with packages made by Linux distributors) is that there is a delay between official FF release and the release of the corresponding update of the fork. 99% of the time this doesn't matter much but when there is a severe security issue, the patch needs to be available ASAP.
Past enshittifications of Firefox could be disabled by users. Users who know what to disable don't need such forks then.
I'm not yet clear what Mozilla even intends. Is it just an adjustment of language of things that are already in FF and can be disabled easily? If so, I just keep the following shit disabled and benefit from earlier update releases.
That's called a patched downstream, not a fork.
LibreOffice was a fork of OpenOffice. OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD.
I have not dug too deep into it for now (especially if I end up changing browser), but even with everything in the preferences disabled, examining the content of about:config gives a lot of telemetry.whatever.enabled left to true, sometimes with names that do not seem to match any option given to the user. That's not a good look either.
And you cannot change those in the default mobile Firefox since about:config is disabled (by their claim that it may break stuff in the ui)
The issue is that Mozilla is actively hiding these settings. There's one (I forgot which one) that you can't find by searching for the title in the FF settings, you have to scroll to it yourself.
They are under "Privacy", just as I expected where they would.
🤷
Yes, you can disable the settings that are exposed to you with a checkbox. How about all the other that have no checkboxes and you can find by snooping around in either the code or about:config ?
Which are? Genuine question. I'm not aware of those either.
I'm not going to enumerate them, mostly because I did not keep track of which one was on and which one was off before messing all of them up. If you're curious, open "about:config" and search for "survey*.enabled", "collect*.enabled". Even with all settings disabled, some of them remains on, and they do cause traffic to the (documented) endpoints.
Dude, I'm not talking about the specific settings you've shown. There's more settings you should set regarding privacy, and (at least a couple of months ago) one of them wasn't appearing when searching for it.
Please be more specific.
I've already moved most of my stuff to forks or different software altogether.
Firefox -> LibreWolf and Waterfox
Thunderbird -> Evolution
I'm still trying to decide if I want to move off k9mail on mobile to something else. I probably will but I'm not sure what at this point.
I thought Thunderbird was a separate entitiy from Mozilla these days? And K-9 isn't owned by Thunderbird either? Am I mistaken?
My understanding is that they are all under Mozilla and they're all in danger of the same business decisions.
If that's not the case I'd be more than happy if someone could prove me wrong.
Technically Firefox is operated by the Mozilla Foundation, and thunderbird by its subsidiary, MZLA Technologies Corp. This subsidiary also took over K-9 a while ago iirc.