Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
Acceptable Use Policy links to https://www.mozilla.org/about/legal/acceptable-use/ which says "You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to[...]Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence"
It's against the Terms of Use to use Firefox to... watch porn?
Either their legal team made a mistake, in which case they should correct it and issue an apology ASAP, or they really do intend to own you, in which case I recommend switching to an alternative browser which is only a browser, like Dillo, Ladybird, or Netsurf.
So only bookmarks of porn sites if you have Sync active, sending porn tabs to a Firefox instance on another device, browsing porn while on the Mozilla VPN, or using Firefox Relay to sign up to a porn website with an anonymous email address
Fine by me since I don't use a Mozilla account, but sounds to me like I shouldn't get a Mozilla account either
It's pretty odd if you aren't allowed to use their VPN to watch or share porn
- send unsolicited communications (for example cold emailing an employer about a job)
- Deceive or mislead (for example inviting your brother over for a surprise party under false pretenses)
- Purchase legal controlled products (for example sending the pharmacy a refill for your Xanax)
- Collect email addresses without permission (for example putting together a list of emails to contact public officials)
They might clarify that in the agreement. I doubt many people are intimately familiar with Mozilla, Firefox, 'services', etc. to distinguish. I am and I didn't think of it in a brief reading (which is all I have time for).
And yet these terms of service—for Firefox—specifically apply the AUP to “your use of Firefox,” no?
The entire AUP is prefixed “You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to:”. There’s nothing in the AUP that doesn’t refer to “Mozilla’s services.” When the Firefox TOS explicitly includes this AUP, how could it make sense unless they think of Firefox as one of their services?
At the risk of restating the gp’s quote:
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
Mozilla VPN is a service Mozilla provides though. White-labelled Mullvad or not, it a contract between Mozilla and the user and therefore presumably covered by this terms of use.
I would say porn is probably in the top 3 if not number 1 use for VPNs
Welp, they stopped being open source, then. From the OSD:
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Mozilla's management and legal has always been amazing when it comes to unforced errors. These changes are actually pretty normal, but they're also worded more scarily by being more encompassing than they need to be. Mozilla has always sucked when it comes to communicating with the outside world.
The squeeze on any content that religious people find 'yucky' is double-pronged in the US - encouraged both by governments and businesses. Paypal, Visa, Mastercard et al are given complete discretion over what transactions they can block, and they have already extensively used this to deprive legal NSFW platforms and creators of their income.
So, on one end, state governments are trying to strongarm NSFW services by imposing draconian requirements that ask users to submit their private data to some random opaque 'benevolent' third party business - and on the other, payment processors are using their legal right to refuse whatever transaction for any reason so they can starve them of income.
The Puritans have been trying to ban porn here since the concept has existed, it's never stopped, and it's never going to stop. They're miserable and they want everyone else to be too. That's like most of their religion. Going to church, being ashamed of bodies, and judging people.
Confused. What do Firefox's terms of service have to do with puritanism ? Have Firefox developers become puritanist or something ? That would be extremely surprising if true. Any evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) to this ?
It's gonna be a weird few years that's for sure. I'll leave it to the historians to decide when the actual tipping point was but the shift in the GOP from being run by Republicans with a few bones thrown to Conservatives every now and again when it's time to drum up votes to the show now being run by Conservatives is going to be the point between two political eras.
It's by far not the first time
this has happened but it's kinda surreal to be alive for one.
I don't think that's the problem here, as I don't want to see porn on e.g. Mozilla's forums either. There's a place and time for that content and Mozilla shouldn't be the one to decide for others. The problem is whether Firefox is a Mozilla "service" or not, and the way the terms is linked implies that it is.
I'm all down to write off contract law as "puritanism" but the rot is far deeper than an aesthetic (and frankly I'm unclear how puritanism applies to this situation at all).
EDIT: I'm not sure why porn is particularly interesting here when most internet activity seems to be potentially against terms of service.
My conspiracy theory is that gears are slowly turning to revamp the culture, redefine what’s acceptable/not acceptable and eventually suggest that if you won’t have kids you’re not accepted in the society. Basically a funky way to reverse the population decline, as the governments are realizing this problem won’t be fixed by free markets and etc.
> Either their legal team made a mistake, in which case they should correct it and issue an apology ASAP
I don't think it is a mistake but more the translation of a vision and strategy that took hundreds of meetings to be laid down very precisely.
I have nothing to back what I am gonna say but I am wondering if their strategy might be to truly become the default browser of governments who are uncomfortable having Chrome or Edge as the default browser. Especially since now they get augmented by a lot of AI.
Firefox has it largest market share in Europe and Germany it seems and with the concerns with are hearing over there about Big tech I wouldn't be surprised at some point some govs try to make their workstations Firefox only.
Also some governments are trying hard to restrict access to porn, violence and social media for children but we know it is almost impossible to do it at the network level. So they might try at the browser level with the help of Mozilla and some "sanctioned Internet AI safety" inside the browser?
I really don't know but think about it, Mozilla is a dead man walking with it's 2% market share and huge cost of maintaining one of the most complex piece of software. They have to do something about it.
What just tipped me off is reading on Wikipedia [0]:
> On February 8, 2024, Mozilla announced that Baker would be stepping down as CEO to "focus on AI and internet safety"[2] as chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
So the text of the policy itself limits its scope to Mozilla Services.
But the purpose of that section is unclear to me. If it just means you have to comply with that policy when using features that use Mozilla services, why is that section necessary, since the license for the services should already apply.
If it is trying to mean that all the terms for Mozilla services also applies to any use of Firefox... that is really clumisily written, and also just generally terrible.
I'm pretty sure this is about Mozilla services. AFAICT, Firefox itself is licensed under the https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License and as such doesn't put any restrictions on how you use the software.
A bit of an issue is that the Firefox terms of use page [1] says "Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy", and the Acceptable Use Policy link points to their Acceptable Use Policy page regarding Mozilla services [2].
So either they're saying your use of Firefox, regardless of whether you want to use Mozilla services, must also follow the same acceptable use policy that your use of their services would, or it's a massively ambiguous way of saying your use of Firefox in combination with actual Mozilla services must comply with the policy.
If it's the former, their terms of use would be in conflict with the commonly understood definition of open source and free software licensing. If it's the latter, it's just poor legalese that fails to make its intent clear. (Interestingly, the Mozilla Public License does not seem to explicitly say that there are no restrictions regarding the use of the software for any particular purpose, although that is a commonly accepted part of the definition of free software and open source.)
Firefox was the last bastion of freedom on the internet and the replacements aren't ready.
> But do you think these can be a full browser replacement without extension ecosystems like ublock origin et al.?
I'm now actually trying to use qutebrowser as a replacement... it's not easy due to the lack of extensions, but mitigating factors are:
1. it has integrated adblock (though no cosmetic filtering)
2. there are userscripts to integrate with the Bitwarden CLI or a running instance of KeepassXC.
The applicable laws of North-Korea might differ than the applicable laws of Russia which may differ from the law of Qatar, etc. It might be even impossible to uphold this world wide even if you tried.
So i guess it's more a 'we at Mozilla don't want any trouble' thing.
I hate to say this but I am again surprised not by the ToS update from Mozilla but by the people who are surprised that Firefox or Mozilla is doing this.
May be I am way too cynical than average people. What is being stated here is actually inline of what they think is right. They think watching Porn is wrong. Which is why you shouldn't use Firefox to watch porn, or anything else they deemed wrong.
And that is speaking from someone who joined the Firefox 1.0 New York Times Ad.
I guess we will all have to do it again. This time for Ladybird.
No they are not. They are saying exactly: "You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to[...]Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence"
Firefox-the-browser isn't a service, it's a product. Their services are things like profile syncing. It makes sense to me that they wouldn't want content on their servers that they could get in legal trouble for hosting.
Mozilla's ToS applies for Firefox's use, and this is literally written by Mozilla themselves:
“Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy”
There's no distinction between the browser and Mozilla's online services here.
---
And even if it were referring only to features such as “profile syncing” (and it doesn't refer only to that), does this mean that people can't have bookmarks to porn? And why would Mozilla care about how people use profile syncing at all? I thought it was e2e encrypted.
So, as someone else pointed out, saving bookmarks of porn and using their bookmarks sync service would be a problem.
It's easy to laugh and dismiss that. But what if you're a journalist covering war? You're going to have plenty of bookmarks of graphic violence, and therefore run afoul of this license.
I might have differed with Brendan Eich on a few matters, but he was a good steward of Firefox in my book.
When Mitchell Baker took the reins, Mozilla became rather more heavy-handed towards us - the irony being that Waterfox was once proudly displayed on the Mozilla website under their "Powered By" banner.
I appreciate the constant existential wobble Firefox faces, but they've made some peculiar decisions as of late.
On one hand, they're finally implementing features users have been clamouring for ages (tab groups, vertical tabs and the likes) - on the other, rather odd policy choices.
I should point out, it seems daft to me when others suggest using forks with no well-established governance of their own, essentially shifting trust from an organisation at least answerable to certain regulations, to individuals with no proper framework or guidelines.
I've done my best with Waterfox over the years to have it represented by a proper legal entity with policies to follow; so if anyone is interested take a look.
Here's my question: in light of what Mozilla is doing, why don't other forks like Waterfox or Librewolf write a manifesto/contract saying they'll never sell your user data and won't turn "evil" (until they do, of course), and then decide to offer a paid version of their browser.
Two possible outcomes:
1. No one cares. No one pays for it. Nothing changes and nobody loses anything.
2. Enough people pay for it to keep the product healthy and the user-centric promise alive. The Internet is saved.
So why isn't anyone trying to replace Mozilla yet, with a more sane business model than living on the back of Google's fear of antitrust investigation? What's the worse that can happen?
Just sell a bonafide paid version alongside the free one, don't just rely on donations. There is a massive difference between offering a paid product and begging passers-by to spare some change.
The problem with paid versions, is that I don't really trust them either. MBA creep will happen and suddenly the TOS changes and my paid tier is going to have data collection and 'some' ads. I have to move to a high tier to avoid them. After a few cycles of that, one day all the tiers have data collection and ads.
I am at the point where I would happily pay an annual subscription on the order of a few hundred dollars per year just to avoid the headaches of today's browsers. Don't add new features, don't change the look of anything, just give me security updates and bug fixes. The only problem with this model is what we saw happen to the streaming services; paying to avoid ads just means your data is worth that much more. Paying for a higher-tier plan is a signal that you have a greater level of disposable income, and are hence more valuable to advertisers.
When this topic has been discussed on Hacker News in the past, it has also been pointed out that developing a browser with feature parity to Firefox or Chrome would be prohibitively expensive.
This idea of having an moral alignment covenant I think is a great one. I'm fed up of being bait-and-switched by companies that get buy-in by being open and friendly, and then later they decide to kill the golden goose. If you're committed to FOSS then commit! Make it official so that people can trust that you're not going to enshittify later.
Most of the other "forks" (e.g. Librewolf) are just patches on top of vanilla Firefox sources, so it's really not a whole lot to scrutinize by hand. I've skimmed at least most of the patch files personally just out of curiosity. In my distro of choice, NixOS, the sources are built by Hydra or my local machine, so I'm not trusting that their binaries match the source either.
That makes it a bit easier to trust, but it does run into the issue that it stops working if Mozilla hits a certain level of untrustworthiness.
To put that number in perspective, drawing just 1% of that down each year and putting in a bank account earning interest would fund 100 engineers on $500k/year indefinitely.
Yeah Mozilla at this point is really like the kid riding the bike and putting a stick in his own front tire meme. I had an interview with them years ago and even then it was clear they were wasting time on the most pointless bureaucracy while Firefox was languishing. Doesn’t google literally give them millions a year to exist? Like idk if I can even think of something more mismanaged than Mozilla.
> I appreciate the constant existential wobble Firefox faces
The wobble seems to somewhat artificial. I'm having trouble believing Firefox could ever not be able to afford to continue browser development — there are way too many interests at stake. Google alone would have no choice but to bail Firefox out because Chrome can't be the only browser without being regulated to hell and back.
Google providing most of their funding is a fact, and that this provides a large amount of leverage over what Firefox can do is obvious. So how is the balancing act artificial?
For it to be self-imposed there needs to be an comparable amount of money ready to spring forth if Google ever pulled out that Mozilla is somehow keeping a lid on.
I don't see how a regulated entity is better in any way than an individual.
We repeatedly see attacks on freedom and privacy by the people who are supposed to protect them, those so-called "regulators": chatcontrol, recent UK backdoor wishes, repeated French proposals to enforce DRM even on opensource. And I wouldn't even google Russia, China, or other less democratic states.
Regulated is probably worse than some anarchistic who-knows-by-whom software, but FOSS and auditable these days, tbh. Especially as everyone's audit capabilities grow day by day with AI. It's kind of good at grinding tons of code.
A heavily regulated entity with all licenses in the world might be more hostile toward users than some niche project.
> I don't see how regulated entity is better in any way than individual.
I feel you. Regulatory bodies have definitely fallen short in many cases, and we've seen concerning proposals from governments that threaten digital privacy and freedom. "Who watches the watchmen" seems incredibly apt nowadays.
However, I feel there's a fundamental difference between imperfect accountability and no accountability at all. With a legal entity governed by stated policies, users have:
1. Transparency about who makes decisions and how
2. Clear terms that create binding commitments
3. Legal mechanisms for recourse if those commitments are violated
4. A persistent entity that can't simply disappear overnight
Perfect? Not really. The ICO in the UK, for example, hasn't been amazing at enforcing data protection. But the existence of these frameworks means that accountability is at least possible - there are levers that can be pulled if someone can be bothered to.
In contrast, with software maintained by anonymous or loosely affiliated individuals, there's no structural accountability whatsoever. If privacy promises are broken, users have no recourse beyond abandoning the software.
FOSS and auditability are valuable safeguards, sure, but they primarily protect against unintentional privacy violations that might be discovered in code reviews. They don't address the human element of intentional policy changes or decisions about data collection.
do they still make ot worthwhile for developers? are any on the payroll still?
i think the community should mobilize to sign up for adopting A single fork* as the official fork and completely drop mozilla from existence.
* only criteria should be the fork that is most convenient for all the other forks to just point to instead of mozilla and continue to ship with their patches. and that one fork should have the minimum resources to respond to security disclosures in place of mozilla, nothing else as a requirement.
More importantly that fork should be what other forks base off of. Anyone can put a skin on a browser, but someone needs to do the engine. If every fork who wants an engine improvement goes to the one place there is some mass behind making the fork real, and the other forks can still to their skin if they think it useful. That one fork also means that when mozilla comes out with a new version there are enough hands to merge (at least until Mozilla diverges too far from the fork)
>it seems daft to me when others suggest using forks with no well-established governance of their own
Yes, it may be that we are jumping from the frying pan into the fire. On the bright-side this opens up an opportunity for a company, or a suite of companies, to fund an alternative browser. Such an entity might have Signal at its lead, or similar, who's mission is solely to "tighten up" the software stack on which it runs.
> I should point out, it seems daft to me when others suggest using forks with no well-established governance of their own, essentially shifting trust from an organisation at least answerable to certain regulations, to individuals with no proper framework or guidelines
Individuals that care about these things have a far better track record than any business with employees, bills to pay, and investors.
Until that individual tires of the work, and then stops working on it completely or sells it to someone with less scruples or the project gets hijacked by malicious actor.
> I should point out, it seems daft to me when others suggest using forks with no well-established governance of their own, essentially shifting trust from an organisation at least answerable to certain regulations, to individuals with no proper framework or guidelines.
That just shows that trust in Mozilla has sunk below "random stranger" levels. IMO that shift is entirely deserved.
The context to keep in mind here is that Mozilla purchased an ad company back in June. They spent money on it, and they will move to earn a return on investment.
Absent that context this could just be another tone deaf policy choice that gets rolled back when there's enough heat, but with that context in mind it's far more likely to be them laying the legal foundation to incorporate Anonym's targeted advertising into Firefox.
From the Register article about the acquisition:
> Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence for ad watchdog Check My Ads, told The Register in an email that she's generally skeptical of claims about privacy-preserving ad technology.
> "For example, how do Anonym’s audience capabilities, like their lookalike modeling, jibe with what Mozilla considers to be 'exploitative models of data extraction?' The data that is 'securely shared' by platforms and advertisers to enable ad targeting and measurement have to come from somewhere – and there’s more to privacy than not leaking user IDs."
This is not the first time Mozilla bought an ad company, last time it was Qlikz. And last time it cost them most of their German users. Wonder how many users they will lose this time.
1. Is github the best place to report bugs / issues for Waterfox?
2. When (not in your lifetime obviously) Waterfox is broken, what canaries do you have deployed that we can archive now, like Mozilla's tell here?
3. What keeps waterfox afloat? Where/how do you accept funds?
4. How do I find a sync alternative or provide my own? Such that, I'm not reliant on Mozilla sync/backend?
... If none exists, how much would it cost for you to embed one? Would you accept a serious bounty for it assuming the focus is self hosted / no Waterfox backend services?
> When (not in your lifetime obviously) Waterfox is broken, what canaries do you have deployed that we can archive now, like Mozilla's tell here?
This is so melodramatic. It’s a set of patch files applied to the Firefox source tree. If an evil maintainer hatches a maniacal plan to collect user statistics and deletes the patch that removes telemetry or whatever, you can just `git revert`.
To Mozilla: if your intentions are indeed good as you claim in your post[1], then update the ToS accordingly.
Chrome is removing µBlock origin, I and probably a lot of other users saw this as a good moment to promote Firefox to our relatives, you are missing a chance and alienating your user base here.
Absolutely agree. The blog post is claiming the opposite to what their ToS is granting - but one is fluff (that will be forgotten soon) while the other is legally binding. I cannot imagine applications like browsers that would require such an unrestricted license for user input just to do its service. That clearly indicates some "other" future motive that is underlined by the notion to remove the FAQ entry and other past actions towards an advertising future at Mozilla.
Am looking forward to explore some of the alternatives. And no, I don't want a just a correcting/updating/informing follow-up blog post of how we the users got it all wrong.
In fact, the current UPDATE makes it worse:
"UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice."
vs. the ToS:
"You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
No - you don't need a license for my input. Just pass the butter, it's not your job to "use that information" in any way, form or shape. How did you survive 26 years without any license to our input? What did legally change that would require that license? No one asked you to: "We use data to make Firefox functional and sustainable, improve your experience, and keep you safe." (from the blog). What does that even mean? If you have specific use-cases in mind state them clearly, instead of this overreaching general license, that may or may not be misused now or in future. As of this ToS you may very sell my data to AI companies to "help me navigate the internet" which is not even part of the Privacy Notice protection.
Reinstatement your privacy guarantees in the ToS and be transparent about explicit use-cases.
The blog does come from company officials and so you can show it to a judge and state "this is how you should interpret their ToS". It will be harder than if the ToS was clear, but the judge on seeing the ToS and blog differ is likely to come down hard to Mozilla for creating this situation. But you also need a good (expensive) lawyer to pull this off.
> How did you survive 26 years without any license to our input?
Might be a case of covering their asses in the context of services they provide for search suggestions etc. Those are not mere programs users run on their own devices, and they rather make use of services run by Mozilla, which probably leads to their lawyers seeing the need for legally covering Mozilla ass.
A less charitable interpretation is that they actually want to introduce terms for using the software itself, in a way that conflicts with the no-nonsense "no restrictions on use" approach of open source, and thus ignoring open source principles in preference for covering their asses against hypothetical risks, while somehow still trying to look like open source.
In any case I agree the blog post or the update don't make anything better. I don't think the post says anything substantial about the terms of use or their introduction. It doesn't, in concrete terms, clarify anything about the seeming conflict between the introduction of terms of use and the commonly accepted definition of open source (which includes no restrictions on use). The post rather seems like a classic case of trying to make things better with nice-sounding words rather than owning up and actually clarifying any ambiguity.
Based on this, Firefox has a 2.54% market share of browsers worldwide, so if their goal here is to shoot themselves in the foot and get that number under 2%, mission accomplished.
Firefox is still the lesser of two evils when compared to Chrome with all of its telemetry turned on. And at least it supports a proper implementation of uBlock origin, which Google just broke in Chrome.
> Finally, you are in control. We’ve set responsible defaults that you can review during onboarding or adjust in your settings at any time: These simple, yet powerful tools let you manage your data the way you want.
"simple yet powerful tools" (derogatory) is how i would describe the windows popup that gives you the choice between setting up a microsoft account now or being nagged about it later
An interesting implication of this is that it would point to Firefox being considered a service from Mozilla (hence why they need a license to facilitate your use of the program).
If we now look at their "Acceptable Use Policy", we can find this:
> You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to [...] Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence, [...]
So one could interpret this all to say that you're not allowed to view or download porn via Firefox. Additionally, "graphic depictions of violence" could extend to things like the sort of bodycam footage and reporting from war zones frequently seen in news reports.
Yeah, it's annoying, but also nothing particularly new I believe. There seem to be two types of garbage links added by default:
1. "Sponsored shortcuts" that can be "easily" turned off in `about:preferences#home`
2. I guess "non-sponsored" shortcuts? I believe they pointed to Facebook, eBay, and something else (Pinterest maybe). Those have to be removed/"blocked" individually. I think they end up in `browser.newtabpage.blocked` after doing so.
I don't like that this is a thing I have to do whenever I set up a new Firefox install. It's not often, to be fair, but it still sucks nonetheless.
I don't read it the way you say. The more restrictive terms are for use of services. If you use firefox, you have to agree not to use the Mozilla services for the prohibited categories, but there are many uses of the browser that are not using Mozilla services.
If you accessed graphic content using the browser, you are not violating the terms unless you put that content up on a mozilla service somewhere. The obvious issue would be some type of bookmark sync. If you bookmarked a graphic url you might violate the terms when it syncs to mozilla, but even then it would be hard to argue that you are granting access to your future self, so unless you used a bookmark sharing service provided by mozilla, I would say its a gray area. So disable bookmark sync. I typically disable all external services in my browser so this would not be relevant.
But my point is that even though you have to agree to the use policy when downloading the browser, it doesn't mean it governs all use of the browser.
> I don't think their AUP considers the browser software a service.
One would think so, right? But why does Mozilla want me to "license" to them everything I "upload or input [...] through Firefox"[1]. Where do the "facilitated services" start and where do they end? It sure would be nice if they could draw that distinction, without it, the cautious interpretation would be that that everything is a facilitated service.
> I don't think their AUP considers the browser software a service.
It is not just about their services! They clarify it by writing: "Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations." Src.: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
>UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.
From their blog post[1]. Smells like bullshit to me. You haven't had this license for the last 30 years and I've had no trouble browsing. What's changed that you suddenly need it?
There's a hidden motive, or utter incompetence in managing this side of the licensing and communication (either by beginners "better cover you ass" MBA or lawyers thinking, which could mean it's the result of some consulting firm operation).
Either way, the sudden change without proper communication is suspicious.
If you haven't already configured "Firefox Data Collection and Use" and "Website Advertising Preferences" to not share data you should do so immediately.
What basic functionality are they talking about? Do they list it anywhere? Or is "basic functionality" the new "security reasons" for justifying every stupid rule or policy.
Mere speculations: they might have been contemplating the integration of their Orbit add-on into the browser. For that, they might need some extra legal fluffs.
I have no idea what I am talking about but could it be related to future AI related features that process user data locally and/or on their servers? At least that would make some sense to me.
They're covering their asses for something. That could also just mean that the old license/terms/privacy policy doesn't actually cover the data processing they're already doing (i.e. the opt-out telemetry, the account sync mechanism, etc.). If they publicly admit that their previous agreements didn't provide enough legal cover to allow their basic data processing, the class action lawsuit vultures would be all over them.
That lawyers are spooked. That's all there is. California changed the rules and that made every lawyer in an organization that can't have a portrayed legal battle with the state very nervous. Nothing in the language says that they can do things that they couldn't do before.
> Mozilla can suspend or end anyone’s access to Firefox at any time for any reason, including if Mozilla decides not to offer Firefox anymore.
On what planet is that free, open source?
Can you imagine: "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) can suspend anyone's access to GNU Emacs at any time for any reason, including if the FSF decides not to offer GNU Emacs any more".
If that was the intention, the correct term would have been "Mozilla's services". The very first sentence of that document defines Firefox: "Firefox is free and open source web browser software".
Yes, it seems like Mozilla has long had a problem of marketing getting in the way of communication. This keeps happening over and over gain. They make changes for marketing reasons, and then people are confused when they make policy changes because they've solidified their naming so much in the pursuit of brand recognition that their audience (rightly) is confused about what they're actually saying when they use that brand name to refer to a singular component of their offerings.
What’s wrong with transparency for advertisements? If you take offense to the “boosting” of news sites, I see the point but now we have Elon arbitrarily boosting his own content on X.
Not sure how you end up solving that issue other than perhaps a more transparent system like the original Birdwatch.
> If we decide to suspend or end your access, we will try to notify you at the email address associated with your account or the next time you attempt to access your account
It seems like this is not about the browser itself, but rather about Firefox accounts. The wording is pretty ambiguous, though.
They’re referring to the binary release, in this case. You can compile Firefox from source at any time (but if you distribute it, you’re not allowed to call it Firefox due to trademark restrictions)
Open source does technically allow you to put restrictions on binary releases, as long as users can do whatever they want with the source code and compile it from scratch.
It really goes against the spirit of open source though.
This likely refers to Firefox-the-product, not Firefox-the-open-source-project since there's no functional way to revoke your access to a mercurial checkout on your PC.
It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses, either. I recall seeing ones that basically say "If you file a patent suit around this open software, your rights to use it are gone".
> It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses, either. I recall seeing ones that basically say "If you file a patent suit around this open software, your rights to use it are gone".
Trying to take back the license based on use of the software, however, would make it not "open source", since that would be use restriction.
- "It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses,"
Yes, but aside from jokes[0] it's unprecedented for an OSS license to attempt to restrain the purposes for which end-users use software. That's incompatible with the definition of free software ("free", as in "freedom").
- "Before that, the JSLint license[4] was a derivative of the MIT License.[5] The sole modification was the addition of the line "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."
- "According to the Free Software Foundation, this previous clause made the original license non-free."
The problem I have with these kinds of hot-takes is that they often don't tell the full story, and it's seemingly for the purpose of generating rage. For some inexplicable reason, this guy truncates the paragraph from the Terms of Use, repackaging the information without a key part of the final sentence: "....to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
I'm not saying that this definitely makes a material difference, but it certainly changes the framing of it. The way he has framed it makes it sound like Mozilla has given itself carte blanche to do what it wants -- but the little caveat at the end of the sentence really does change the narrative a little bit. So why cut off a sentence half-way through it -- is it maybe to make it sound worse? For that reason alone, I can't take this guy seriously.
I generally wait before jumping on the outrage-train for this reason, but two things stand out:
- Mozilla explicitly deleting "we don't sell your data" statements across their documentation
- Following up to criticism that the statement is vague, bullshitty and open to interpretation with statements that are even more vague, bullshitty and open to interpretation.
By now, they've had time to notice that something is not right and that they need to make a clear statement, and they haven't taken the opportunity.
They didn't delete it. Go to the github diff they reference and check. It's still there. They just removed it from one of the JSON files but people here aren't actually checking facts, they're just jumping on the hate train.
Yes and this phrasing is used in many other products, like credit cards. Additionally, the fact that the phrasing can be interpreted as such means that it will be interpreted as such and so makes Mozilla's new Terms unacceptable to anyone who values their privacy or data.
So, what do you read the end of that sentence mean? Because the way I read it is worse:
> to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
I don't read that as a caveat, so I'm assuming it means something different to you. To reword slightly and hopefully show how that sentence is coming across to me:
> As you have indicated by using Firefox you have given us the right to...
Im fully on board that people should try to include or link as much of a story they can so that I can form my own opinion. There are way too many times that I read a reasonable take, then you read the original source, only to find that the reasonable take is completely off base.
In this case I don't have the reaction, but I will agree that in general its a good idea to include more rather than less.
The redacted part here looks to be a GDPR boilerplate for consent. GDRP require consent to be specific. In order to do so the lawyers of Mozilla seems to have used industry standard phrasing to comply with the law, such as "to help you navigate, enhance experience, and interact with {INSERT SERVICE/PRODUCT}".
For those with some interest in legal history, there is similar stories in other boilerplate texts that consumer get exposed to. I always find the background to the WARRANTY DISCLAIMER text to have a fairly funny historical background that is a few centuries old legal case regarding a mill axle. The current form we see now was created as the first example in a list from US regulation guidelines (which reference the mill axle case). A company can use any other form given in that guideline, but as it happens, everyone just jumped on the first example, slapped it onto stuff and shipped it. Lawyers know it is valid for US trade regulation and that was apparently enough for the rest of the world.
> "....to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
We weren't born yesterday, and companies pull this shit all the time. This sentence is meaningless. You could use this sentence to justify literally any behaviour.
One _easy_ way to read this change:
> "... to help you interact with online content"
Selling your data to have more relevant ads could easily be justified as helping you interact with online content
> as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Using firefox indicates that you want us to do this.
Or,
we made it an opt-out that is quietly rolled out in an update.
Correct, that quote is very typical corporate language that includes selling your data to advertising companies to ""help users discover new experiences which align with their interests"" or some other weasel speak. People acting like that language meaningfully changes the meaning are either painfully naive or think the rest of us are.
If it's simply a matter of principle, quoting the full section with no abridgements because we're larping like we're in a court room or something, whatever. But get real, that section doesn't make Mozilla look any better.
No. We are talking about legality. Quote the whole bloody thing. If you don’t get to say “I picked out the bit I like” in court, then you don’t get to do it here. If you’re so right, then it’s not worth taking out in the first place.
are you replying to wrong post? the linked tweet says:
> Mozilla has just deleted the following:
> “Does Firefox sell your personal data?”
> “Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. "
That tweet is 100% correct, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43209001 for two links, all references to "not selling personal data" are gone. There is no missing context or truncation here, and this says nothing about terms-of-use (except commit message but that's immaterial)
But Mozilla said what they will do. They also had very expensive rebranding to support it! They are now activist AI company that wants to fight disinformation, censor people and sell ads.
You know, I was just wondering why no one has yet shaped the Rust vs C/C++ in US culture war terms. One side is clearly progressive in the sense of wanting to make changes for the sake of a better (more memory safe) future. The other side is more conservative, seeing enormous benefit in keeping the status quo unchanged.
And that's before getting into the politics of the people working on the language, of which I won't say more.
Here was me thinking we had at least one discussion where the US culture war hadn't metastasised. But I guess in the long run twitter.com/lundukejournal and friends will eventually win. Can't say I'm looking forward to it.
I am, unfortunately, looking at alternative browsers because of this. Firefox was the best fit. Big enough that they could reasonably keep up but not one of the corporate browsers that I have 0 trust in. It wasn't perfect but it was better than chrome for sure.
Browsers are like cars now. It is becoming impossible to buy a new(er) car and have your privacy respected, but it is unreasonable to expect any normal life (at least in most of the US) without using cars or browsers. So, things like cars and browsers should have strong protections because there is no avoiding them. Unfortunately that is obviously not the case. You should never be forced to sign an adversarial TOS to earn a living or live a normal life, but here we are. TOS that are effective without you even reading them, that say they own you, everything you type, everything you do, that change and bind you without your consent or knowledge and what are you going to do about it? Given any reasonable choice I will take it, but the reasonable choices are dwindling.
I switched to LibreWolf over this, and it's good so far. A couple of things:
* I had to switch off the fingerprinting protection. For me, running at 60 FPS and without automatic CSS dark mode detection isn't worth whatever fingerprint resistance it provides. Sadly, you don't have granular control over RFP, you have to turn it off entirely.
* It doesn't have Google Search available by default, but it turned out to be fairly straightforward to add. DuckDuckGo is just too slow to load for me compared to Google, and their AI integration is stupid. Google doesn't have AI answers and text fields like DDG does in my region.
* Their implementation of container tabs don't seem to support automatically opening certain URLs in certain containers, which is annoying. Maybe I can get the official container tabs extension working, but I kinda wish LibreWolf either had proper container tabs or left it out in favour of the Mozilla extension.
Otherwise, it seems great. I found it hard to pick between all the different Firefox forks and rebrands, but LibreWolf seemed like one of the more serious ones and I don't regret going with it.
I've been using LibreWolf as my daily driver for a couple of years. Highly recommended!
Available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Ranked as the highest for privacy protection in a 2022 study: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/06/15/privacytests-reveals-how-y...
Occasionally, you might get a broken website but to fix it you just click on the shield icon and lower the privacy settings.
> Wait, now Mozilla operates Firefox for me and I can just lean back while they do the browsing?
Yea, this is the root "shitty attitude:" This idea that programs 1. running on my computer, 2. loaded from my hard drive, 3. into my RAM, 4. outputting to my monitor, are, in reality "Operated by [COMPANY]." Fuck that. Just because you wrote the software, doesn't mean you're "operating" it. I don't want an ongoing relationship with my products' vendors. Their role is to make it and distribute it to me, from that point on, butt out!
This made me look into Firefox forks/alternatives:
Librewolf [1] seems to be fairly active (last commit on Codeberg was last week) and up-to-date with the latest upstream releases (mirrors FF's versioning scheme and matches their latest). Has a nice focus on privacy and no-telemetry.
Floorp [2] also looks active (last commit last week), also claims focus on privacy. Based off FF's extended support releases so it may lag behind in latest features.
Waterfox [3] is also active (last commit a few hours ago), also big focus on privacy, but it uses a custom versioning scheme so I can't tell how closely it follows FF's releases.
GNU IceCat's [4] latest release was in November 02023, so it looks like it may be abandoned.
Does anyone have any experience with any of these, good or bad? With all of them more or less promising the same things it's hard to tell which one may be the better option.
Try going to gitlab.com with librewolf, you'll see a white page with no content. Librewolf is blocked off from half the internet that uses cloudflare, so it's kind of a useless browser.
Every browser that's not a majority browser will be associated with these kind of blocking risk. I can't risk access to my financially important accounts, nobody can. So to me this is not a feasible alternative.
The only way to build a browser is to act like one of the others, and to behave like one of the others. Can't use brave, given their history, but farbling approach is the most sustainable solution in my opinion.
My remaining hope is that ladybird will actively deny implementing web standards that can be used for fingerprinting.
Something as simple as overflow:hidden is used on every website to force people to get tracked by having to activate JS, and things like this should be something a web browser should protect its users from.
We need a CSS engine that denies setting these kinds of things, because JS fingerprint prevention isn't enough if every website breaks because of it.
If you want a headstart, I tried forking webkit and do exactly this. Project is unmaintained because couldn't work fulltime on it without funding. Maybe somebody else picks it up? [1]
This is purely FUD per my experience. I use librewolf on websites behind cloudflare and with plenty of js. They all work just as well as they did in Firefox.
Librewolf sends Firefox in the user agent, and you can toggle Firefox "features" on if a website you use requires them.
Not trying to convince you to switch to it--you do you. Just sharing with someone who might be reading this thread and that hasn't tried librewolf.
I use librewolf as my daily driver after the Firefox "privacy preserving ad measurement" SNAFU last year [1,2]. The fingerprint resistant and anti-canvas functions were different, but I got used to them and I really appreciate the added features.
With that, having everything turned on can break some sites. If a site wasn't all that important and isn't respecting privacy, I just won't visit it. Otherwise, I'll keep another browser around just in case I absolutely must for business or something else.
When Firefox began opting people in by default to leak data to advertisers, it felt like the beginning of the end to me. After looking into canvas and other fingerprinting capabilities, it's somehow still surprising and alarming to me how far companies go to invade our privacy.
Oh, I thought IceWeasel had been renamed to IceCat, but the repo you linked to has recent activity and calls it IceWeasel, now I'm a bit confused. Glad to see it's active though.
thanks for the research. I just quickly tried them all. I have an older mac with older FF. Results: librewolf and waterfox wont run (10.15 min) and the floorp (react) website crashes. IceCat runs! and seems to use LibreJS for javascript, so my first few tests failed because you have to individually allow scripts per site. I quite like that idea! although my quick test of breakout (HN yesterday) runs slow/stuttery. A couple other sites are throwing up js console errors, so I need to play around with it more. It did enable me to access the floorp website, but also 10.15 min. I guess this helps me migrate faster to my asahi setup, although I've been trying to keep that one away from daily browsing and the little web of horrors.
I wonder if this FF change is pre AI infection, which might end up affecting these other builds too. Pretty disappointing after such strong privacy promises for so long, whatever the reason for these changes.
> I have an older mac with older FF. Results: librewolf and waterfox wont run (10.15 min)
That's just because Firefox itself requires at least macOS 10.15. IceCat only works because it's based off of Firefox ESR; once the next ESR comes out IceCat won't work either.
There is a fork of Firefox (which is in fact the web browser I use) that adds back support for older versions of macOS. At the moment, it supports all the way back to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. However, this is all it does; it does not contain any additional privacy features above and beyond mainline Firefox. However, I guess it technically isn't a Mozilla product, so you won't need to agree to Mozilla's Terms of Service.
you should add zen browser[1] too, i tried some from your list, librewolf breaks some websites (online banking doesn't work) floorp is a good one, but in my experience zen is better.
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information,
Taken literally it means that when I use Firefox to upload a file to a customer's web site Mozilla is getting that file too, which does not seem likely. They could get a copy of the text I'm typing right now in Firefox or it means that the browser could do some local processing on those data. But if the results of that processing would stay local why would they ask the permission? It's not that emacs, vim, grep, sed, awk etc have to ask me the permission to use the information I'm inputting into them. So they are definitely sending information back home or they plan to do it.
The point becomes how to block any calls from Firefox to Mozilla. Note that don't have a Firefox account because I never trusted that the data in transit from them would stay private. I'm not logged in into Google as well. Maybe I have to finally install a Pi Hole and route all my traffic through it. Hopefully Blockada will take care of that for my Android devices.
I have seen discussions of this sort of wording so many times over the years. My understanding is as follows (and I could be wrong, but this is my understanding of why that wording is used). If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file. Because of Draconian laws in many countries, to publish a file you have to have a legal right to the file, therefore Mozilla have to establish that if you use them to upload a file that you are granting them the legal right to publish that file. It has to be worldwide because you may be uploading to anywhere in the world.
So why doesn't my backpack come with a mandatory TOS that I won't e.g. put illegal drugs in it and bring it across the border? Why is Firefox any more liable if I used it to publish illegal content on the web than the backpack manufacturer would be if I used it to smuggle illegal content across a border?
Perhaps the legal situation is different somewhere, but I would think the browser isn't acting at all. It has no agency; it's just software running on my computer, following instructions I give it. Mozilla has no agency in that situation either; the software is running on my computer, not theirs.
The new terms grant Mozilla, the corporation a license to do things with my data.
> If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file.
If that's the way the law is interpreted, it's silly.
The "publisher" in this case would be the website the file is uploaded to. If the website doesn't make the file public, then they're not a "publisher".
The browser is merely acting as a tool to do the uploading. Firefox shouldn't be held liable for the contents of the file any more than any other web client. If it did, tools like cURL should be liable in the same way.
Somewhere along the way web browser authors forgot that they're merely building a web user _agent_. It's a tool that acts _on behalf of_ the user, in order to help them access the web in a friendly way. It should in no way be aware of the content the user sends and receives, have a say in matters regarding this content, and let alone share that information with 3rd parties. It's an outrageous invasion of privacy to do otherwise.
> the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file
If that's all is required to be a publisher then ftp, scp, rsync and hundreds of similar tools are also publishers of the files they transfer. However they don't have Terms of Service like the one Mozilla is giving to Firefox.
That’s interesting, do you know of any cases that were decided on that basis? It seems downright ridiculous but then the legal system is pretty dumb, so…
At this point my trust in Mozilla is so low that I could almost believe they intent to run the text I download and upload through an LLM nanny that can scold or ban me if anything offends its Californian sensibilities.
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
That's exactly what Firefox originally claimed was a stark difference compared to Chrome: "use us and you can finally be safe and not need to play cat and mouse anymore"
If you’re planning this, just use a fork of Firefox that does those things. Less setup and you don’t need to update that file whenever they change the domains used for telemetry.
Since Mozilla removed all mention of not selling my data in a recent PR and seems hellbent on an ad-based future, I've deleted my Firefox account and moved to Librewolf across my devices, and I'll encourage everyone I know to do the same.
It's a sad end to my literal decades of support for them.
I use a Firefox fork too, but do you think it would continue to be around without Mozilla?
It's sad to see them squander an opportunity to do good work. Mozilla should have gone all-in on ethics/privacy in contrast to tech giants and made an offering like Proton. Or gone with the Wikipedia donate model like another commenter said. Any compromise on their values is insane mismanagement, that was their whole brand.
I don’t know. I’m hoping that after their attempts at building an ad network fail, they pivot back to developing a browser by focusing on features their users actually want. Or maybe by the time Mozilla fails another alternative springs up, like Ladybird.
To your point, cloning Proton is such an obvious path forward to generate revenue while staying true to their values. Even selling a Firefox Pro with an annual fee offering some developer-specific or power-user features would be great.
Does librewolf maintain their own browser engine? I thought it was just a repackaged Firefox fork?
As for your Firefox account, you could consider hosting your own sync server. The documentation for it is of varying quality, but you can keep your data off Mozilla's servers without sacrificing some pretty useful functionality.
The phrase "we don’t sell access to your data" has been removed, gated behind a feature flag connected to this TOS change. Their FAQ was updated to remove the "Does Firefox sell your personal data? Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise" as well. [0]
Combined with their blog posts from the CEO saying "we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term." [1]
What's the purpose of gating "we don’t sell access to your data" by "if switch('firefox-tou')"?
{% if switch('firefox-tou') %}
<p>Firefox is independent and a part of the not-for-profit Mozilla, which fights for your online rights, keeps corporate powers in check and makes the internet accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe the internet is for people, not profit. You’re in control over who sees your search and browsing history. All that and exceptional performance too.</p>
{% else %}
<p>Firefox is independent and a part of the not-for-profit Mozilla, which fights for your online rights, keeps corporate powers in check and makes the internet accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe the internet is for people, not profit. Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data. You’re in control over who sees your search and browsing history. All that and exceptional performance too.</p>
"No better place to leave for" seems an apt way to put it.
I think/fear that in the long run, there will be fewer and fewer ways to participate in activities and communities on the web on your own terms, as only a vetted, allowlisted set of client builds (that may be "open source" on the tin, but by that point it is effectively meaningless) will be able to pass CDN "anti-abuse" restrictions. It will not be a better web, but it sure will be more profitable for some.
This is an amazingly common psychological trap. You wouldn't believe
the number of people, men as well as women, who end up in the therapy
chair, at the police station or at the hospital A&E, because they are
"stuck" with a violent and abusive partner.
The modern tech landscape is all about abuse. People use fancy names
for it like "enshitification" or "rot economy" - but at the end of the
day it's about domination and abusive relations.
A very common position here is that the victim sees "no alternative".
And... surprise surprise, where they get that idea from is the partner,
friends, group/organisation that is also toxic and colludes in
gas-lighting and co-abusing the victim into a limited worldview.
Once the victim spends any amount of time outside that mental prison,
they regain perspective and say... "Oh, so I actually do have
choices!".
Yes, I’ll be leaving. I used to prefer Firefox but have long since moved to Safari for browsing and <insert Chromium based browser> for web dev. Every year I give switching to FF a try. I’ve been using it for everything since mid-December but it’s honestly a pretty bad user experience. This is the move that’s gonna make me stop for this year’s trial run and all future ones. It’s simply not worth my time if their ideals don’t align with mine anymore. Safari and Chromium have their issues but I know what benefits I’m trading off for. Without ideals, FF has no standout features compared to the alternatives (for me).
I'll look for somewhere else. Web browsers aren't as special as they used to be, there's a lot more choice now. Funny thing was, I was paying for Firefox through some of their services (VPN) that I had no intent to use.
I quit the original l"Firefox" a long time ago, I've been using librewolf since its release and now zen (also a firefox fork) and I keep ungoogled chromium in case a site is broken on firefox.
Yeah, I've been a Firefox user and Mozilla supporter for approaching two decades now, even used to donate monthly to the foundation. I'm furious over this. I installed LibreWolf on my personal machines last night and expect to uninstall Firefox after work today.
I'm a happy LibreWolf for years. The transition from FF to LibreWolf is seamless. And you won't be surprised anymore nor annoyed when Mozilla does moves like that.
> To HN: Will you be quitting firefox over this change, or is there simply no better place to leave for?
Not to be overly whataboutistic, but we tolerate sooo much more from other players. It's annoying how we hold some to a higher standard, but ignore others doing worse. I get people are disappointed in Mozilla and wants them to do better, but it's a bit like the "we live in a society meme", where those doing good must be perfect or else..
I use Firefox, and advocate for people to use Firefox, because I believe it's the one browser that is not evil. It's the entire reason for the existence of Firefox.
Saying, well, why aren't you upset that Chrome is evil is such a confusion of ideas I barely know how to respond. Yes, I know Chrome is evil, I've been telling people that for many years, and I don't use it.
Those perceived to be doing good are often used to lessen the blow of those perceived to be doing bad. Like how it's not so bad if your train sinks of faeces if there's a bus you can take instead. Losing the safe alternative makes the original sin worse.
> Not to be overly whataboutistic, but we tolerate sooo much more from other players. It's annoying how we hold some to a higher standard, but ignore others doing worse.
Who is "we"? It certainly doesn't include me.
Someone who tries to gain your trust only to betray it gets a stronger reaction than a known bad actor doing what they are known for? Color me surprised.
> I get people are disappointed in Mozilla and wants them to do better, but it's a bit like the "we live in a society meme", where those doing good must be perfect or else
You are talking like mozilla made a mistake. Yet their response was not to apologize but to claim people are just confused.
How much shit can Mozilla pull before people are allowed to say enough is enough?
I'll keep using firefox simply because I keep it behind a proxy server with all pocket, mozilla, firefox and google domains blocked.
The larger impact I suspect this will have in my life, is that I'll increasingly turn to not using websites, opting instead to using tools like yt-dlp.
These changes didn't just happen because of a bunch of greedy ad pushers. This and many other changes over the last few decades came about by taking my tax money and pouring it into these companies to gain compliance to state agendas. This isn't something the 'community' will be able to stave off.
If the internet is just going to become another medium like TV, Radio and newspapers were for so many years, adding on top the ability of the producers to watch me watching them, then it's over. The tech community is full of intellectual dishonest sellouts. Game over. Let's push letsencrypt again in response to the state backdooring the certificate authorities, duuurrr. "AI", duurrrr.
It's all so strange. I would happily buy Firefox, either as a one off, or as an annual license, and be done with all the weird license nonsense - presumably they want to sell data to pay the bills.
But instead the choice, realistically, seems to be between giving all my browsing data to Google and to Mozilla. And Chrome works marginally better... :/
I would wager most people that offer to buy software "one off" typically underestimate their lifetime worth earned through other means like ads and data sales.
Would you pay a one-time $10 for a lifetime Firefox license? $100? $1,000? $10,000?
Last time I checked, Mozilla's ARPU was less than $5 pa. I think many of us would pay a multiple of that per annum _iff_ it went towards Firefox and not whatever project/cause of the week that Mozilla has undertaken.
Without thinking much about it, $60 / yr seems reasonable to me.
I never click on any ads, so while I'm sure I contribute to Firefox's revenue as another pair of eyeballs, I don't deliver any end value to their ad-biz end customers.
This logic applies more to Google than Mozilla. Their mission is (or ought to be) to cover development and hosting costs associated with Firefox, not to milk users for all they are worth on the ad market.
Firefox is open source. You can take the source code and strip out all
of the malware, spying, telemetry and corporate harm leaving a safe
and private browser (to the extent any modern browser can be).
There are multiple forks that do that. Download one of them
instead. Mozilla Corporation has no control over those, so if you
don't like what Mozilla make, exercise your software freedom.
The problem with Mozilla, as far as I can see, is not the the
compromises they make for obtaining money (everyone suffers that), its
that they're deceptive and underhand about it. That makes them
unethical. I wrote plenty regarding that here [0]
Anyone can fork. However you need to keep your fork updated as firefox does new releases which means repeating that work often. Either that you are need to support all the security fixes yourself.
Rather than downloading random binaries from random forks (or clamour for governance at the sidelines), you can take back more control by building your own fork.
Librewolf and Waterfox are two fine choices to use for upstream sincr they have saner defaults and make the forking and building easier to wire up.
Ive been running my own FF fork for a few years like this now.
Sigh. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Mozilla's situation. The "weird license nonsense" you're vaguely gesturing at doesn't even make sense in context. Firefox is open source under MPL 2.0.
Your framing that "the choice is between giving all my browsing data to Google and to Mozilla" creates a false equivalence. Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.
And "Chrome works marginally better"? By what metric? Firefox has better memory usage, stronger privacy protections, and doesn't exist primarily as a data collection tool for the world's largest advertising company.
The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web. This kind of uninformed take that ignores the nuances of browser economics is exactly why we can't have nice things on the open web.
Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.
>This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't that the entire brand identity of Firefox is Privacy.
>It's like discovering there's ham in a vegetarian sandwich. When you ask them they look puzzled and say their focus group was clear it tastes a lot better that way, besides it's just a little bit and the bread is vegetarian and there's way more meat in a Big Mac.
Performance, compatibility, security. Chromium runs faster, it works with more websites, it's sandbox is better, particularly on Android. I don't care much about memory usage as I don't need a billion tabs open at once (does anyone). There's options available beyond Chrome that offer most of the same privacy benefits as Firefox does.
I think marginal is an understatement. As for Mozilla's business model, what business model? They're throwing everything at the wall to see if it sticks and virtually nothing has, all the while their browser has languished. Going full cynic, at this point the only reason it is allowed to exist is because Google deem it useful to have it around as a counterpoint to accusations that they have a monopoly.
At the cost of a subpar cache; it's not like Chromium is leaking memory, & its memory pressure effects are both well-studied and well-understood. Yet, Firefox stans keep touting lack of comprehensive caching as some kind of advantage. I'm sorry, this is not 2005. It took Mozilla two years to implement some kind of JIT pipelining, and guess what, Chromium had V8 all along: an engine that can benefit from "open web" cooperation courtesy of Nodejs and the vast ecosystem around it. SpiderMonkey? Please. This is the crux of the issue.
> The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web.
The idea that the web—chaperoned by the likes of Mozilla, can be "open"—is the crazy, unsustainable one. OP is being pragmatic, and considering their privacy carefully. Mozilla's track record is that of a gravely mismanaged, disoriented, and subservient (Google) organisation. Firefox codebase is arcane, was already showing age even ten years ago, & now there's a whole ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers that can benefit from "open web" cooperation.
Firefox has zero moral high-ground, & pretending like it possesses some kind of virtue is a crime against semantics.
I'm shocked when in 2025 the term "you stay in control" regarding browser emerges as something exclusive.
When a web page or a program is downloaded to my computer I cannot imagine anything else, yet every major company tries to do something opposed - take the control from me as soon as possible.
My mental model of a browser is the same as of any tool, as a hammer, purely defined by its technical capabilities to do a job, like to display a website and offer basic functionality like for saving a bookmark.
The very idea of an entity called "we", an anonymous and ever-changing cast of people managing "responsible defaults" and "simple tools to manage your data" and communicating it on their terms, making me try and keep up, is alien to this idea. They lay their hands on our data; want to know how exactly? Follow several links to this page:
The page in its tone trivializes the entire deal and is just another EULA and as such could just as well be presented in a small textbox in all-caps. It's more than the average user will ever read, and way too vague anyway.
"Be informed about what data we process about you, why and who it’s shared with (that’s this Notice!)" they say, but
...how about you show the entire dataset compiled about any user with information who is using it and for what exactly (excluding truly secret law enforcement requests). Everyone involved would be mortified with shame.
I consider a browser as similar as a complicated curl with GUI. Therefore:
- when I see that browser does not allow playing video in the background (youtube on mobile phones)
- when my browser disallows me blocking certain things
- when my browser prevents me from taking screenshot of things I can see on it
... it really angers me, as I feel betrayed. Of course, nowadays, web applications tend to get complicated and hide everything behind 'obscurity-security'; however, this should still be code that is a guest on my device, not me being a guest on their device running their code. I consider it extremely impolite behaviour.
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
It's bad that it says that, because the "us" in this sentence should absolutely not be doing anything that requires such a license, and should not have a copy of it in order to do so; but "Mozilla owns" is also not a correct summary of it.
- nonexclusive, because they're not demanding exclusive rights to your content. If they did, there's no way this would fly.
- royalty free, because otherwise you could charge them money for doing anything with your data, even things you've asked them to do.
- worldwide, because you may ask them to communicate with servers in other countries. i.e. you are using Firefox Sync to sync your bookmarks and you travel overseas, your bookmarks are now traveling between two countries.
The question is "why do they need a license at all", IMO. The qualifiers on the license all make sense to me. It's possible additional qualifiers like 'short-term' could make it less scary.
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
I'm no expert, but this seems to imply that if your government bans accessing the internet (for you, for a subset of people, or for everyone), using Firefox through a VPN is unacceptable to Mozilla? Why would Mozilla proactively side with autocrats?
The "acceptable use" policy they are talking about ( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/acceptable-use/ ) lists heinous actions such as to "send unsolicited communication" and to "display ... content that includes graphic depictions of ... violence". Is Mozilla targeting journalists here?
I sometimes suspect that there is a strong correlation between the effortlessness with which an organisation receives funding and how out of touch it is with reality.
folks, this is NOT good. i guess we're generally at the mercy of big tech day to day, but with firefox in particular -- i use it almost more than any other software, and these terms seem particularly nasty.
i do think we can exert some pressure on mozilla here -- HN users are like 60% of the firefox user base. i recommend writing to legal-notices@mozilla.com to object to this policy. do it right now.
here's what i wrote, feel free to use it as a template:
Dear Mozilla,
I'm not just a long-time user of Firefox -- I'm a Firefox promoter. I've been recommending Firefox to all my friends, esp. since the Chrome privacy fiasco. I even pay for Mozilla Monitor just to support your organization.
I ABSOLUTELY object to your new Firefox terms of use. I DO NOT grant Mozilla any soft of license to information I "upload or input [...] through Firefox". This change is alarming and hostile. If you insist on rolling it out, there should be a clear opt-out in the browser itself. I strongly urge you to reconsider. Otherwise, I will be moving to forks, and urging others to do the same.
> i recommend writing to legal-notices@mozilla.com to object to this policy
denial
anger
bargaining <--- you are here
depression
acceptance
Best accept that the Mozilla that was interested in creating a User Agent as opposed to a consumer product is gone and look for and support the creation of alternatives.
> Mozilla grants you a personal, non-exclusive license to install and use the “Executable Code" version of the Firefox web browser, which is the ready-to-run version of Firefox from an authorized source that you can open and use right away.
Does this mean these Terms of Use apply only to precompiled binaries downloaded from Mozilla, and not to copies built from source code by linux distributions?
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Does this mean they're allowed to collect data that we transmit through Firefox to the sites we visit, so long as they can come up with some justification that they're using it to "help" us?
> Every once in a while, Mozilla may decide to update these Terms. We will post the updated Terms online. We will take your continued use of Firefox as acceptance of such changes.
This kind of one-sided nonsense is something I have come to expect from the likes of Google or Facebook.
I don't know how all this will shake out, but my initial impression leaves me with waning respect for Mozilla.
Notably, this was deleted from the Firefox FAQ on 2025-02-25:
> Does Firefox sell your personal data?
> Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
> Does this mean these Terms of Use apply only to precompiled binaries downloaded from Mozilla, and not to copies built from source code by linux distributions?
I think it applies if the browser is "Firefox" in name and branding. So the Debian rebuilds count for example.
So recompile and remove the Firefox branding and the ToU should definitely no longer cover you.
> Does this mean these Terms of Use apply only to precompiled binaries downloaded from Mozilla, and not to copies built from source code by linux distributions?
Yes. They couldn’t legally enforce anything for the second, except when it pertains to using Mozilla online services. Many of the Linux packages have all telemetry disabled though
For the last 10 years or so I've pendulum swung between the positions "privacy at all cost!" and "what's the point, you can't win". Well, I'm tired now and the pendulum is stuck on the latter. All I care about now is blocking ads. Go ahead Mozilla, Google, Apple, whoever, if you can hoover up my worthless browsing data without me noticing, you can have it. I hope my reading HN and watching inane Youtube videos is worth something to you.
>You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
I'll admit to being utterly confused by literally the first part, even before the emphasis. What follows is nitpicky, but I'd imagine every word is there for a reason. What does "operate" really mean in this context?
Mozilla(the corporate entity) is operating(=controlling?) Firefox(the software) on my machine?
Mozilla(the corporate entity) is operating Firefox(whatever corporate subdivision on their side) to further my interests as a user (gather telemetry, error reports, "privacy preserving" data about me)? In that case, does "acting on your behalf" mean that the corporate entity is browsing on my behalf? Can I download all the Metallica mp3s using Firefox and forward all happiness letters to Mozilla since they were acting on my behalf? (I know, I know, "You Are Responsible..." section disagrees with my take)
And that's before approaching the can of worms of granting a license which I may or may not be able to do depending on the original license.
> Mozilla collects certain data, like technical and settings data, to provide the core functionality of the Firefox browser and associated services, distinguish your device from others [...]
So we are granting them worldwide royalty-free licence to identify us uniquely and transfer that info to others.
Not the best privacy protection or control, and yet they claim "At Mozilla, we believe that privacy is fundamental"
Can someone please explain why they'd need that? Sure, if Firefox sends the data to Mozilla, I can see why they'd might need that type of language. It's just that Firefox is a desktop application, why would it need to send my input to anyone besides the site I'm using?
Have to see what other people (serious people) make of it, but that looks like a deal breaker. That's 100% spying on everything I do, because FF has a copy of it.
"Input information" on the face of it can be taken to mean moving the pointer, clicking, scrolling.
Genuinely asking : Who is behind librewolf and why should i trust them? They don't seem to be available in any official repos yet other than ones they self-published
This is bonkers, utter insanity. Read defensively (which is the only safe way to read legal text), this renders Firefox unsuitable for any sensitive communication: prima facie, accepting this means I violate FERPA when I talk to my students via email through Firefox. Most likely health professionals would violate HIPAA by using Firefox in a similar manner. Furthermore, this has to violate at least the spirit of GDPR in the EU where I am located.
What is this absolute clusterfuck? No, I do not consent to any of that. Which, if any, update, informed me of this change in policy? And how on earth do my data, and which data, pass through Mozilla's servers?
Debian feature request: A system-wide switch to disable all telemetry and "cloud integration" features that make any network connection to the developers' or developers' partners' servers, applied to all software distributed in the official repositories.
If Debian could just stick to free software that'd be grand. It is a good ideology and there is no need to change it. Introducing ideological confusion is one of the paths to organisational rot.
# apt install librewolf
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package librewolf
If the thing that doesn't suck isn't the thing that comes with the OS, it's time to fix the OS.
Also, that feature should exist. The next time I see a story about MS training ChatGPT on your nude selfies, I want to be able to show people the big red switch that says "All Telemetry: OFF" as an example of something Microsoft will never give them.
But you first have to provide it in order to show to them that you provide it.
User explicitly requests connection to a specific server (e.g. navigates to debian.org), so browser makes a connection to debian.org: Not telemetry.
User explicitly requests a connection to a specific server (e.g. navigates debian.org), then browser makes a connection to mozilla.org to upload metadata: Telemetry.
In general telemetry is when the software connects to a server chosen by the developers and not telemetry is when the software connects to a server chosen by the user.
> Remember that to display, edit, transform (underline, italicize, fonts) the documents you write in MacWrite necessarily requires copying your document data from disk to memory to cpu to memory to display – lots of copying. Did Claris need the rights to your copyright to allow you to edit your documents in its software?
This analogy doesn't hold water in the context of giving the coparty access to your intellectual property and detracts from the point the author is trying to make. The answer is no, obviously, because Claris never had the information. The only place that information existed was in some software that lived on and only on your machine did that processing at your request.
Couldn't you add a privacy policy that states just that? "This application doesn't send/save/process/use any user data" for example, should be a valid privacy policy if that's true.
> Firefox also shares information with our marketing partners to measure and improve these campaigns; what information is specifically shared varies (depending on how you discovered Firefox and your operating system) but generally includes how you were referred to our download page and whether you actively use Firefox. Where Firefox is pre-installed on your device, technical and interaction data (your device type and whether Firefox is used) will be sent to our marketing partners, and shared with Mozilla. Learn more about what is collected and shared, and how to opt out.
This is new (There's no link or further reference for that "learn more" in context)
> We may also be required to process your personal data to comply with applicable laws and protection purposes, such as:
> (...)
> Identifying, investigating and addressing potential fraudulent activities, or other harmful activities such as illegal activities, cyberattacks or intellectual property infringement (including filing or defending legal claims).
> Performing internal compliance and security activities, such as audits and enterprise security management.
---
Being US, how far stretch is it to imagine PII being under scope for some anti-DEI (aka anti-terror) audit? Also you better switch browsers if you'll ever be in a lawsuit with Mozilla I guess...
That was great, except everyone just installed chrome because the website google told them to and put them right back in the exact monopoly position that allowed IE6 to stagnate.
If you use chrome still, you are literally part of the problem. I still think Mozilla, just barely treading into the advertising waters, is probably a better option than the literal advertising panopticon that owns our world and data.
> That was great, except everyone just installed chrome [...]
Just to note the Acid 2 test was released April 2005 [1], and Google Chrome from December 2008 [2]. That's about 3,5 years.
At some point (around these mentioned years), Mozilla Firefox had a very good market share since MSIE's was dwindling, Safari's was minor (no iOS yet), and Google Chrome did not yet exist. Those were the days ;)
Also, Safari only exists due to Konqueror (and its dependencies), and Chrome only exists due to Safari, and Konqueror.
> everyone just installed chrome because the website google told them to
I believe we actually went this way because all the techies adopted it first, not because it was some evil overlord that told everyone to. As a teenager, I installed it for some of my family because it had fewer knobs to push than Firefox at the time and it was faster at the time so that was cool as well (especially because they usually had older devices). Can't install toolbars in there etc. Then came Google's cross-site tracking by tricking users into logging into the browser and such. I kept using Firefox myself because I was used to the dev tools, theme customizability, and powerful add-ons, but it's not like I didn't contribute to the problem
That said, I also still wonder how (as you hint at) them advertising a product of theirs on the search engine homepage, a legal monopoly afaik, is not abuse of market power to illegally create a second monopoly. Firefox and any legit browser vendor who asks should be able to get the same ad on there for the same duration (years iirc, perhaps on and off), prominence, freedom of wording, etc. There is certainly an advertising aspect to get the last bit of the market, create a real brand name ("oh yeah I know that icon" when it's shown in the ads, not just know that button on your screen as "the internet"), but the first >50%... I don't know
"If you choose the slightly less evil browser you are literally part of the problem".
Yeah no, both are shit. Mozilla is also literally an advertising company now besides being almost exclusively funded by one.
If Mozilla wants people to choose Firefox over other browsers based on principles they first need to stick to principles themselves. Why are you asking people to give up anything (even if it's just a small amount of convenience) for a company that is run pretty much the same way as the alternatives, run by a CEO whining about a salary of millions per year not being enough. They made their bed.
Mozilla needs to learn that when you're an operation running honestly as a non-profit and no one's getting rich (comfortable != rich, btw), there's nothing wrong with the donate nag in a blank new tab.
Wikipedia figured that out long ago. They probably wouldn't be around without that nag box asking for donations.
There is something deeply wrong with the donate nag: The money goes to funding Mozilla-branded nonsense (e.g. misguided adventures into the VPN space), overpaid executives and bloated administration (as they actively shed developers [1][2]), and not the browser.
I would considering donating except I can't donate to support what I would like to support.
however are the cost of developing a web browser and hosting an internet encyclopedia ran by volunteer comparable ?
mozilla use paid labor, engineer who are very expensive.
wikipedia it's mostly hosting a html page and a few media.
Yet wikipedia has much more user to whom it can show the donation nag when mozilla has a much more limited userbase.
i think that mozilla taking google money to put them as default search engine is fine, people who care about privacy are allowed to change it whenever they want.
I'm simplifying:
Stallman told us that free software was the only way.
ESR said open source was the way with business in mind.
We've ended up with businesses taking advantage of open source. The slew of licence changes to not compete, having special paid versions, and generally shitting on the open source community.
The only thing free, is the labour companies are exploiting.
Firefox's blog post in the change[1] has an update:
> UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox…
Uh, yeah, that's exactly the problem. Mozilla shouldn't be allowed to use all the information I type into Firefox at all. Mozilla doesn't need any rights for Firefox to process my data locally on my behalf, or even for Firefox to send my data to third parties on my behalf (ex. instant search suggestions). Those aren't Mozilla using my information; those are me using my information using Firefox.
They would only "need" extra rights to collect data and process it on their servers for unspecified purposes. They do legitimately process some data on their servers, such as Firefox Sync data, but that's already covered under the Mozilla account terms of service. There's no need for a broad license for all data going through Firefox.
I really hate this kind of response to criticism. No Mozilla, fundamental disagreement does not mean that peole are confused and need to be told what to think.
Yeah, it would be like saying everything I write and draw into my Acer laptop means I now give permission for Acer the company to use my content. It's bonkers.
Not true. I was under the impression that Firefox was a privacy-oriented browser until these Terms were published today. I'm now posting this from LibreWolf, which I have just now installed for the first time.
This is pure speculation, but what are the chances this change is simply an attempt to provide legal cover what they might have started doing 50 versions ago?[1]
Ah but what you are interpreting in layman english is actually a term of art in marketing that means "this will change as soon as it becomes more profitable to do that".
Firefox's own about:license page (reachable through the about firefox dialog) says the sources are available under a wide variety of open source licenses. Does that mean only Mozilla distributed binaries are governed by the "Firefox Terms of Use"? If I download Firefox through my distro package manager, and the distro infrastructure compiled and distributed it undet the terms of the open source licenses, presumably I may use the software solely under the terms of those open source licenses.
Does Mozilla take this into account, or do they act as if they have the rights they assert in the ToU, regardless of what license a Firefox user is using the software under?
> Does that mean only Mozilla distributed binaries are governed by the "Firefox Terms of Use"?
It means that usage of binaries is governed by the terms set by whoever produces and distributes them.
If your distro leaves the "Firefox Terms of Use" notice intact then I imagine it would be in force. The only exception that immediately comes to mind would be if the distro explicitly relicensed Firefox under the GPL (I'm not clear if this is permitted or not) in which case the GPL explicitly invalidates any such additional restrictions.
If your distro provides a binary that includes inaccurate, conflicting, or otherwise problematic terms, such as (ex) on the about:license page, then that would be on them, not on Mozilla.
If your distro removes or modifies the license terms permitting Mozilla to collect data but forgets to modify the data collection code itself, I'm not sure who is at fault. Presumably the distro maintainers. However, given that the entire thing is very clearly without warranty I doubt that you'd have any recourse. In any case I don't think Mozilla would be breaking any rules since they neither compiled nor distributed the binary in question.
Off topic, but one minor issue I noticed is that the about:license page doesn't seem to include either a link to or a copy of the GPLv3 despite the fact that the LGPLv3 states:
> c) For a Combined Work that displays copyright notices during execution, include the copyright notice for the Library among these notices, as well as a reference directing the user to the copies of the GNU GPL and this license document.
"Mozilla" & "Firefox" are trademarks which would come with their own legalese I’m sure, and of course there are some services used by Firefox (the Mozilla addons store, the malware blacklists managed by Google IIRC, etc.) that would still require legal statements even for distro or other 3rd party builds.
Sure, but neither Distribution Policy for Mozilla Software[1] nor Mozilla Trademark Guidelines[2] make any mention of the Terms of Use. Services Firefox connects to have their own Terms of Service, like you say, but those are unrealated to Terms of Use for Firefox itself.
> We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example.
I do not want Mozilla to use or have information I type into Firefox except when I explicitly give them such information. I disable all the settings I can to keep Mozilla from getting any such information.
From what I understand, this crap is only for the Mozilla distributed binaries. So I will now be using third party builds.
It's fascinating how any Firefox thread here inevitably devolves into accusations that Mozilla has abandoned users and a push to switch to alternatives, despite Mozilla working in the interest of users to a infinitely greater degree than any other major browser vendor.
Indeed. Talking about privacy and having spyware and ads activated by default and now this probably to legally safeguard this and more speak a very clear language.
The only reason to still use FF is indeed, that the competition is worse in this regard.
But that will change, once Ladybird becomes mature enough.
It’s about expectations. In very simple language: people expect Microsoft and Google to track the hell out of them. But Mozilla says they are your friend and respects privacy, but then their actions speak the opposite.
A betrayal from a friend is harder to handle than a blow from an enemy.
Mozilla's goals are still much more aligned with my own than any other browser vendor. Not even close. It's not a betrayal, it's a difference of opinion between friends.
Edit: If that. I personally think this Terms of Use thing is a storm in a teacup.
The same effect applies to political parties. The people that care about X focus their complaints to the party that is trying to address issues with X.
You're right, and at the same time those two things go together if you think about it. The browser that does more (or cares at all) is held to the higher standard and inevitably found wanting.
(I'm not taking sides in the debate about it, I just find internet psychology fascinating)
It's disheartening to see people playing villification of users when it is the companies (yeah, mozilla CORPORATION) that went back on their words. Just cos you did something good in the past isn't and shouldn't be an excuse to do bad things now.
Also, why are we talking as if we haven't seen these same things happening to favourite products/companies over and over again? You don't need to be an analyst to put things together.
Tell me why I should care when they gave up Rust and MDN to competitors with the excuse of no money and then gave the boss a heft hike with an ever decreasing userbase? Would any company give a hike of this margin to it's employee when their product is doing bad in the market?
They kept doing things against the community. And then they bought an ad company, then this change. ENSHITTIFICATION IS WRITTEN ON THE WALL IN BOLD LETTERS. Let them backtrack.
Still very very disappointed. We are supposed to be a community who should be thinking through things. This isn't a new scenario. We have seen this so many times.
ELI5: how is any of this legal? Let’s say my distro receives Firefox source code under the terms of MPL, builds it and distributes it to me under the same terms. At no point any of us agreed to any additional terms. Does this apply only to Mozilla-built binaries?
I have been wanting to love Mozilla for a while, but let's be honest: I use Firefox because Mozilla is the least shitty of those companies. I don't like Mozilla, I just hate them less than the alternatives.
Title is a complete lie/misleading. They get a license, not ownership.
Let's dissect what it actually says, and we do it backwards, because given the discussion around this subject it seems like people space out or have their mind clouded by outrage before they get to the end of the sentence:
> help you [do things] as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
So this already only covers things that you indicate you want to do with your use of Firefox. Meaning that if you hit some button, Mozilla now has a license to process the data they need to make that button work and nothing more. That means unless you give them additional permission somewhere, they can't, for example, also store and process that information to train some AI model or whatever. All they're allowed to use it for is making whatever you interacted with work. Seems pretty reasonable.
> to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content
This further narrows the scope to websites and such you interact with (online content). It also says that license only covers "helping" you with these things. The part we looked at previously narrows this to your intent.
> you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license
So just a license. No transfer of ownership is happening.
> When you upload or input information through Firefox
Note that this says "through". They're clearly only trying to cover their butt as an intermediary by obtaining a license to process your information to act as such an intermediary. Explicitly nothing more.
Putting it back together we get:
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
I don't have to grant Word a license to what I type in it. This is a highly unusual clause that other software doesn't have.
When software has to "phone home" to deliver the functionality you requested, then two things happen: One, a number of privacy regulations kick in, and they need to get you to agree to send your data to them. Two, they now get to move your data out of your control. I mean, you trust them today, so here's hoping they don't ever get hacked or hire someone untrustworthy?
It's sad when even to use the basic features of a web browser, you need to agree to send them your data. It's not fundamentally necessary to send your data to Mozilla or their partners in order to load and render a website. It's a dark pattern to obtain consent to collect your data "when it's necessary", and then rewrite your app to make it necessary.
> I don't have to grant Word a license to what I type in it.
Yes you do.
From Microsoft's Services Agreement [1]:
> To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content, for example, to make copies of, retain, transmit, reformat, display, and distribute via communication tools Your Content on the Services.
A license grant like this is common in the context of review systems or forums or the like. For example if I go to addons.mozilla.org and post a review for an addon, Mozilla arguably needs a license grant like this to allow them to publish the review. And preferably they would want to word it in a way that then allows them to use the same review in print or a super bowl spot.
The weird thing is that a) I don't think this license grant covers any of that, since publishing a review doesn't improve my experience, it improves other's experiences, and b) Mozilla Websites like addons.mozilla.org have a completely different TOS [1], with a completely different license grant.
I have no idea what this license grant is supposed to accomplish, or what it would even allow that requires a license grant in the first place
I don't believe that dissection is a good way to understand the implications of this clause.
>When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Rather than go over this word-by-word, please tell me: what limits exactly does this place on Mozilla? What rights does it give to the user? One way to express such a limit is by construction, that is, construct hypothetical acts A, B, and C that would be allowed under these terms, but actions D, E, and F would not be allowed (and be a cause for action by a user). I assert that the first set includes literally anything you can imagine (modulo a sophists ability to morph "help you" into anything they want), and the second set is empty.
To steel-man this concept, let us say that Mozilla wants to store and use your password to your bank to check your balance regularly. I assert that this action is allowed by there terms. Why? First, you used Firefox and therefore enabled the clause. Second, your authentication details are entered through Firefox, and this constitutes "input" or "upload", to which they assert ownership (which I will use as shorthand for a "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license"). One thing they could do with your financial data is show it to you (least harm). Another thing is to aggregate it with other's data (medium harm). Yet another application would be to pool it into a database to be sold to the highest bidder (maximum harm). In the latter case, you could make the argument that such a move "helps you" by giving Mozilla a reliable revenue stream that helps fund continued development of the browser.
Needless to say, I am appalled and feel bad for all the many people I've told about Firefox over the years, described it as a bastion of fairness and privacy in an all too often sinister world. And now that they've assert these extraordinary rights over user data, I feel ashamed of my advocacy. I daresay that even if they rescind this incredible overreach, I will not come back. My trust has been broken and cannot be easily (if ever) repaired.
Mozilla is bound to only use the content to help the use navigate, experience and interact with online content as the user has indicated.
> One thing they could do with your financial data is show it to you (least harm).
Yes - this is what the user indicated.
> Another thing is to aggregate it with other's data (medium harm).
And the user has not indicated that this would be a permitted use of the data - thereby revoking the license of the first clause. If the data is used outside of the final clause of the license, that is unlicensed use of data. This would be a material breach of the contract by the corporation. This could open them up to massive legal penalties.
I think that's just a cover-all and they also have a privacy policy [1] which is explicit about how they use it and how they don't, for example:
"the data stays on your device and is not sent to Mozilla’s servers unless it says otherwise in this Notice."
... "When you perform a search in Firefox, your search query, device data and location data will be processed by your default search engine"
... "Mozilla derives the high level category [...] from keywords in that query [...] privacy preserving technologies such that Mozilla only learns that someone, somewhere, performed a search relating to a particular category, without knowing who."
... Review Checked, AI Chatbots, advertising on new tab page, etc.
So yea Firefox does so much they pretty much have to use your data, but it's not a blank cheque to do what they want.
> First, you used Firefox and therefore enabled the clause.
I believe your confusion stems from a misreading of "as you indicate with your use of Firefox". You're reading it like "by using Firefox, you indicate".
Contemplate the difference between
"The car is allowed to move as you indicate with the controls."
versus
"By using the controls, you indicate the car is allowed to move."
The former explicitly only allows the car to realize your intent, whereas the latter gives the car license to do whatever it pleases.
Given that Mozilla updated their site a couple days ago to remove any wording along the lines of "Firefox will never sell your data to advertisers" when a flag associated with the new Firefox terms of use is enabled (see https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...), I'm not so sure that this is a CYA about standard web browser usage.
<p>Firefox is independent and a part of the not-for-profit Mozilla, which fights for your online rights, keeps corporate powers in check and makes the internet accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe the internet is for people, not profit. You’re in control over who sees your search and browsing history. All that and exceptional performance too.</p>
{% else %}
<p>Firefox is independent and a part of the not-for-profit Mozilla, which fights for your online rights, keeps corporate powers in check and makes the internet accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe the internet is for people, not profit. Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data. You’re in control over who sees your search and browsing history. All that and exceptional performance too.</p>
{% endif %}
> remove any wording along the lines of "Firefox will never sell your data to advertisers"
You mean wording like this?
""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."
My ISP doesn't need a license to everything I do online to facilitate the transfer of bits from my home to the wider internet, so why should Mozilla need that? How about the transit providers, they certainly don't have a license to anything I do.
Assuming that everything is HTTPS, what are they actually licencing? My encrypted data?
This is some Mozilla legally idiot that went WAY to far in a "cover our ass" legal document and nobody stopped to think about the potential damage this would to the Mozilla and Firefox reputation, which already isn't doing so well. They didn't even stop to think if MAYBE this needed some clarification, to avoid unwarranted speculations. It's getting increasingly clear that the people running Mozilla has absolutely no idea what they are doing, nor do they have any respect for the project they've are in charge of. At this point I wouldn't be surprise to learn that the Mozilla CEO uses Edge.
Do you have expertise, for example as an IP attorney? I don't meant to disqualify what you say; at the same time people would benefit from knowing what your analysis comes from.
I am not an expert in this field, and I think the meaning is ambiguous. It could be interpreted as you say; it could be interpreted otherwise.
Mozilla's current intent isn't relevant to what they do later or its legality or enforceablility.
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
So basically they can track everything I upload or type on my keyboard while in Firefox?
This definition of helping me (a user} navigate could be interpreted in many ways, from the obvious all the way through to sending Mozilla my data so they can "improve Firefox" and therefore help me through giving them my information. This signals intent against my interest, regardless of whether that actually is there intent. The 'help' in particular is extremely suspicious and ambiguous
I disagree. I definitely editorialized it to make it attention-grabbing and point out the essence, because I wanted to raise awareness and spur discussion.
But they do own it in the digital sense (i.e. "piracy is not stealing" sense). You get to keep your own copy, but they also get a copy and they own that copy.
> help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content
These terms are vague enough to allow pretty much everything. Google would argue that tracking your information so they target ads is "helping you navigate" ("you see, sponsored links are more relevant!"). As well as "lets train an AI model that helps users experience the internet!"
The change removing "Does Firefox sell your personal data? Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise." makes it pretty clear that the intention in the changes is NOT just covering their bums for using your input to provide the webpage you wanted. They are positioning to sell your personal data.
That promise to never have, never will sell your personal data was highly valued by many Firefox users and Mozilla must be pretty desperate to break it.Particularly given online privacy is suddenly crucial for many out-groups in the US - and pretty much everyone outside the US. The biggest marketing opportunity for years just landed in Mozilla's lap, and they spilled it.
Full context, from the link YOU provided: ""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."
There is no reasonable way to read this as an attempt to sell your data. This quote is also reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
I think everyone is unsettled about the fact that Mozilla was able "to help you ... as you indicate" for twenty years before today without the need of a license agreement. And so we ask: what's changed?
In EU user can not legally give up ownership of their personal data, artwork, or intelectual property. "Giving license" is a legal workaround to get ownership.
Maybe Mozilla doesn't own that information legally, but they grant themselves practically unlimited rights to do what they want, as the restriction they imposed to themselves ("to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.") couldn't be more wishy-washy.
No difference to me. Goodbye Firefox.
By the way, what alternatives are there for Thunderbird?
I think you are bending the meaning of the word license to the breaking point here. What your analysis implies, is that Mozilla needs permission to store and process your data in order to carry out the services implied by your use of Firefox. Obtaining a "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license" is definitely an excessive move in that context.
That'd be a matter for the privacy policy. The section in question is whether they can then go ahead and publish a list of all the buttons you pressed. Which according to this license grant they can, but only if it "helps you navigate, experience, [or] interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox". What does that mean? I have no clue. It's a really strange restriction and I can't decide if that's wide open or so narrow that it is basically never met
Long answer: Unless the button says "phone home my information to Mozilla", this license wouldn't cover that. This license only covers whatever is necessary to make the button itself work - whatever is necessary to realize the user's intent.
The main problem with the "important part in cursive" is that it's Mozilla execs who decide what is actually a "to help you". There is no way to opt-out of "help".
Honestly, I am a bit surprised dang didn't change the title, given all the outrage and huge number of upvotes. Regardless of whether your analysis is missing anything, it just says what license doesn't say, and in that sense, yes, it's a complete lie, and people who were completely ok with what's going on yesterday are completely outraged and are massively switching to brave/chromium(lol)/ladybird again.
And, honestly, at this point this feels seriously misguided. However many bad things I can say about Mozilla, what really has changed on 25 Feb? Nothing much, really. The removed claim that they don't sell user data (linked in another comment) might be actually the bigger news here. But that also is much less important than what data they can actually gather (compared to brave/chromium/ladybird/whatever). If you can still disable tracking as before, well, ok.
Obviously, I don't think it's ideal in any case, and I'd rather like to have the same relationships with my browser as I have with Vim. But that is besides the point, the point being that news aren't really news (at least, definitely not the same news as 90% of posters in the topic are perceiving/discussing).
"(BTW there are opt-outs linked from each chapter/category of data, like sponsored content in new tab experience etc. that should lead you through settings to disable such telemetry. Nothing has changed about that, and you can always find it in the privacy center. The changeset you're looking at here is just to remove things that are unfortunately not that simple, and need explaining in the full legal documents instead.)"
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
The fact that this surprises me must be an indicator that Mozilla still had a good reputation with me. No longer. Starting the search for an alternative browser now.
The problem with Firefox is it almost impossible to sell today (compared to 10 or 20 years ago).
- It doesn't have better performance or security.
- If you want better privacy and ad-blocking out of the box, Brave is the way to go.
- The "supporting an independent implementation" argument doesn't really resonate anymore.
I am wondering if the small market share it has left on desktop (especially in Europe and Germany) might be due to governments and corporations installing it on their computers.
Only very few people are aware or care about the drama between Mozilla and Brave.
Most people will only trust the Data safety / Data Privacy section on the Play / App store (as they should):
- Firefox on Android: This app may share these data types with third parties: Location, Personal info and 3 others [0]
- Firefox on iOS: The following data may be collected and linked to your identity: Contact Info.
Data Not Linked to You. The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity: Location, Identifiers, Usage Data, Diagnostics [1]
- Brave on Android: No data shared with third parties, No data collected [2]
- Brave on iOS: No data shared with third parties, No data collected [3]
Data Not Linked to You. The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity: Identifiers, Usage Data [4]
It's evident, Brave collect way less data than Firefox on those platforms.
Maybe the problem of Mozilla is they feel entitled to the trust they gained when they were the open source browser against IE. But that trust erodes over time.
I tried using Brave ages ago. I wanted to like it, but it crashed even more often than Firefox (which is a feat unto itself) and didn't have the option to tag bookmarks.
> but it crashed even more often than Firefox (which is a feat unto itself)
Er, you maybe should check your RAM and GPU. I've run Firefox on a lot of different systems, with everything from vanilla profiles and no saved tabs to loads of extensions and literally thousands of tabs, and it basically never crashes. Well, the beta version can be a little less stable, but... beta version. Could just be that I'm lucky or you're unlucky, but I'd strongly suggest checking your hardware and maybe GPU drivers.
{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "Does Firefox sell your personal data?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. "
}
},
Remember, "Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language."*
You see that here. Mozilla chose to use legalese and not plain language, despite there being a movement afoot to try to push (and in some cases legally require) for plain language in legal documents. This one isn't so bad, since they mostly avoid passive voice and don't needlessly capitalize much. Maybe the low frequency jargon is necessary but look at those center embeddings...
- you upload or input information through Firefox with your use of Firefox
- When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license with your use of Firefox
- When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information with your use of Firefox.
- When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content with your use of Firefox.
- When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Break it into multiple sentences.
First sentence establishes you input data into
firefox when you use firefox (obviously, but maybe not to everyone!). Second clause establishes that when you input that data you give firefox a license to that data which you otherwise own (this could be more clear in a separate sentence). Third clause establishes that the license is to use the information (not to sell it). Fourth clause establishes that they will use it to help you navigate, experience and interact with online content. Fifth clause (as you indicate) establishes that it is your use of firefox that indicates your intention and how they should use your input to help you. As five separate sentences they could make it seem much more reasonable. The embeddings are instead ineffective because they aren't referring to a common category but instead modify an aspect of the former clause.
I will maintain it is an issue of clarity. Your argument is that Mozilla isn't offering online services but this isn't true and clarifying what actions upload information and exactly how that information would be used would mollify this. The list would probably be quite extensive. Moreover, the clause doesn't necessarily give them a license to all information input through firefox and that clarification should be demanded of them.
Brave has a couple crypto features in the UI but that's about it. I'm big on crypto but I don't use any of the browser's crypto features. Just a browser that cuts most of the bullshit out.
Mozilla's messaging for the last few months has really reminded me of the old anti-smoking ads from the 2000s. Technically performing their responsibility, but actually extremely obnoxious because the people behind the funding didn't agree with its existence and actively degraded it for their own survival.
That's almost exactly describing Librewolf, though it adds a ton of privacy 'hardening' features out-of-the-box, which can be a positive or negative depending on who you ask.
I personally use Librewolf with the Lepton (Photon style) UI[0], which replicates the previous UI style Firefox used a couple years ago, with small square tabs and condensed menus, before the current pseudo-tabletified abomination.
Of course, if you like the current UI—you'd literally be the first person I've met to like it—you can just use librewolf stock and it doesn't apply any changes to the standard Firefix UI.
So that there's plenty to send when they oops-accidentally forget that setting during an upgrade, and ask you to set it again.
They will of course assume opt-out rather than opt-in, and send what they've collected the moment the browser launches, then they're ready to give you the choice of opt-out once again.
The text leaves way too much up for shady interpretation. At that point I might as well fully switch to Chrome, even at home. Privacy was the single last reason for sticking with firefox, and these terms do not sound like privacy anymore.
Chrome is absolutely not a step in the right direction if this is pushing you away from Firefox. Look at the number of forks that strip out this nonsense and behave functionally identically instead.
I'm not going to go out of my way to fetch a modified build for a functionally worse browser. I only use FF at home due to privacy, but since that is no longer covered by Mozilla I might as well use the browser I've already been using for web dev for years at work.
I think this probably isn't as big of a deal as people are making it out to be. But I find a certain kind of joy in Mozilla being judged on the worst possible interpretation of their terms of service, since they do that to others _all the time_ [1].
I tend to agree with you, but I’d hope that given how badly this has been received, Mozilla finds some better writers to put some better thought into the contents of their ToS and issue some corrections in the near future.
When I was a contractor, I worked on a project with this well-intended guy who wanted to make an app for people to store a persistent map of their movement over time using the GPS. On day one, he made it very clear—and I believed him—that a user's private data was sacrosanct. As the project wore on, never finding traction, and costing more and more money, I remember one of the last meetings I attended with him. He was trying to find new sources of revenue to keep the company alive, and he uttered the inevitable phrase: "well, we've got all this user data we could sell." That was one of those moments when you get a little more cynical, and since then I access as an axiom that every company will sell my data eventually, regardless of their promises. It's just a question of limiting their access to it, and being willing to switch to an alternative every once in a while.
I think it's time to bring this to the attention of the EU. The browser race to the bottom may be somewhat acceptable for entertainment, but it is my firm opinion that accessing online government services and banking infrastructure necessary for a modern life shouldn't require me to accept such terms.
I agree but unfortunately very few see this as an issue.
For browsers, they kind of soft-lock-out established niche browsers due to heavy use of JS.
But this is deepter: more and more banks and public institutions' services imply everyone and their grandma possesses G/A-owned device so they start to require these to access their web services (either through exclusive app access via A/G app ecosystem or by enforcing 2FA (T)OTP which implies using such device for non-devlopers).
Some countries force kids to use apple/google-owned devices in class.
All of this requires citizens to accept and agree to (possibly changing) TOS and privacy rules (self) of A+G and opting out is hard often times and sometimes impossible.
very sad
While I think the anger surrounding this is slightly overstated, is there any Desktop fork of Firefox that can essentially just act as a "we prevent Mozilla from doing anything harmful to it's users", while compromising on as little functionality as possible? There's only so many stories of Mozilla deliberately trying to reduce it's browser market share to zero you can put up with before you start looking elsewhere.
I'm thinking something in the same vein as Iceraven, which is a fork of the Android version of Firefox that aims to make the browser more usable for humans instead of servicing the overly restrictive mobile environment/tracking that's bog-standard in most mobile platforms.
I considered Librewolf, but it's willingness to break pages in the name of excessive anti-fingerprinting (the RFP mode breaks a lot of interactables) and ideology (blocking DRM) makes it kind of unacceptable for this purpose. I guess I'm not looking for a privacy fork, just a fork that protects me as a user from anti-features (with widevine in specific not being an anti-feature; I don't like widevine either, but it's kind of necessary for using a browser these days.)
Searching around a bit, this fork does seem to meet the criteria I was looking for (plus a few hidden ones like project age; it's a couple years old and still being updated, which means the dev is willing to put the work in as opposed to abandoning it when they get bored). The blocker on widevine being Googles fault (while still supporting L3 out of the box) rather than deliberate "we're not even going to try" is much more acceptable than the Librewolf one.
Blocking DRM is the only sane stance. And if you are using a free OS it doesn't change much anyway as DRMed content is only available in resolutions that might have been acceptable decades ago. If you must consume that kind of content just use a dedicated device but better would be to ignore it or acquire copies with the DRM stripped.
DRM is absolutely not necessary for using a browser.
[...] When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
If someone already deleted Firefox Sync and wants to get rid of Sync item in main menu, you can disable it by going to "about:config" and setting "identity.fxaccounts.enabled" to false.
AFAIU Firefox Sync is end to end encrypted, right? I interpreted the language here to mean that the data might be sent to Firefox outside of Firefox Sync. Have there been any changes to Firefox Sync that we know about?
Can't wait for Ladybird to become usable. To be fair, it already is fairly usable, but I'd need history syncing / Keychain sync to make it a daily driver.
I suppose I could manually copy paste things, but it's not a great user experience. I'm fine with using beta software, but pre-alpha even is a bit too hard for me to swallow.
People are acting like this is new. This is about:studies. With about:studies you agreed to upload usage data. Right now they are enabling credit card autofill support, a CRL alternative that doesn't give information about the sites you visit, etc. Actual corporate goes out of their way to say "we do whatever we want", Mozilla at least gives a condition.
I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand I just want Firefox to keep being a free software web browser that I can trust. But on the other hand I realise Firefox isn't some hobby project and competing with Google isn't cheap. They already take money from Google and this could be shut off at any time. How can Firefox be independent if it doesn't have some revenue?
Unfortunately they've been stupid and blurred the lines between Firefox the browser and Firefox the "web platform". I don't think anyone would be too concerned if this was clearly about the web platform bit.
Maybe we need a smaller GPL browser that doesn't have the fancy stuff but can actually be maintained by the community. Yeah it won't with with a bunch of "web apps", but it will still provide access to information. This is also why if you are making websites you need to make sure it works without js etc. Otherwise you're basically forcing people to use adware.
They could have had an enormous amount of good will and they do nothing but burn it. Weird how they get a lot of money from google and then, while technically meeting their mission by providing a browser alternative, seem to do a lot of self-sabotage in google's favor.
I honestly think the best thing that could happen to Firefox would be for Mozilla to exactly have their funding removed, have the foundation die, and a better entity focused just on Firefox, perhaps with more earnest and honest fundraising efforts and not a multimillion CEO salary, fills the vacuum.
If you're not blocking your mozilla process from accessing firefox.com, mozilla.com/.org, and mozgcp.net, as well as turning telemetry settings off after every update and keeping a tight policy.json file - then firefox is just as bad as Edge or Chrome re: tracking
Also they actively take down extensions that unfuck websites without notice
Append all Mozilla services and telemetry to Pi-hole? What are the other ways this can be quietly mitigated and, the possible workarounds to exceptions created by DoH?
How much of a financial effort would it be to have some non-profit take a fork of Icecat and Fennec F-Droid, and just maintain a browser for the actual free world (akin to codeberg for example)?
i.e. if we strip down all the corporate overhead what would be the annual cost of maintaining a European sane version of 'land of the free' Firefox?
Clickbait title. I have read what is linked there and it claims no such thing.
At best, if you read through the notices, input data can be used to train personalised AI chatbots (running locally) IF you give your consent at the time of activation.
There's a lot of vitriol in the comments below but nobody seems to have read what is linked here.
The only inaccuracy in the title is that it used the word "owns" as short-hand for "gets a broad license to use". Which isn't unheard of: we talk about owning a copy of a piece of software or music for example even though what we have is a perpetual and broad license to use it.
I wish the title didn't use such hyperbole, but it's closer to true than to false.
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Secondly, text typed into the search/address bar is sent to them for "suggestions" and to broadly categorize the search ("travel"). Turn this off if you don't want it.
Thirdly, they'll be notified if you click an advert on the new tab page. Again, this can be turned off
where does it say "own"?
it says: "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content"
type something - it's "used" to get what "you" want - how is that "own"?
Since facebook was fined for processing friend requests with foreigners on foreign servers, I feel like licenses like this are actually necessary for any product with any remote services components to operate in the EU, with more jurisdictions to come suddenly and unpredictably.
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy
> [you may not] Violate the copyright, trademark, patent, or other intellectual property rights of others
In the near future they'll upload a blacklist to everyone that prevents us from accessing bad sites such as TPB. It's way worse than what we've seen before.
This is very frustrating. It becomes impossible to use the web in a privacy conscious way. I know that Firefox wasn't perfect, but it was the best we had, and I have been a loyal user, despite minor quirks and annoyances. And now this… Guess will have to find another browser.
Okay, can anyone recommend a good, uBlock-Origin supporting browser that isn't controlled by underhanded corporate/for-profit lying-through-their-teeth pieces of shit?
Making these legal terms changes while "summarizing" them with the typical "we care about your privacy" bullshit is of the same nature as punching someone in the face and exclaiming you are caring about their health. It's just evil - misleading and abusive.
I feel like the internet needs a tracker of moral failings of companies/organizations like this, it's still too easy for something like this to slip through and not reach sufficient publicity to affect public opinion and therefore action. They need to be held to the highest account, openly, publicly, and brutally shamed, ostracized and sued if necessary. If they fail and exploit the rights of individuals, mishandle the "implicit consent"/trust of their users, at their scale, they fail and exploit collective humanity.
One may argue this is a non-issue due to the freedom of contract - and people can just choose to use whatever they want - but who among us has such a continuous legal awareness of all the software they use to be able to switch whenever needed due to some software enshittifying?
My only hope may still lie in software managed by legally codified (truly) non-profit organizations. Lichess and the Blender Foundation are led by people who have held to their word, and made the world better for it.
All talk of "Privacy", "Principles" and "Promises" from Mozilla was already empty as they were completely dependent on Google's money.
This should surprise absolutely no-one and Mozilla never cared about their claims of privacy or their users as long as Google was paying them.
So now we know that when it comes down to the wire as their biggest customer (Google) was under anti-trust scrutiny; indirectly threatening Mozilla's deal with Google, They once again chose to violate the privacy of their users to sell their data to other companies like Google.
For Mozilla, money has always crushed their so-called "principles".
The illusion of mozilla having any privacy principles collapsed for me on May 2019 when they required users to enable telemetry to allow using adblock and tracking blocking extensions.
Lately I've been working on strategies to use software in unusual enough ways that I'm essentially off the radar of, well, anyone looking. The dark forest approach to the internet.
To avoid interacting with the web directly, I'm thinking of running some AI software in a container on a home server that would be a translation layer between me and the real web. All webpages would be converted to a simple, and secure, format. Gopher, gemini, asciidoc, or maybe just static html.
Is that a tractable problem with modern AI tools?
The only way to win is not to play, but I'd like to have my cake and eat it too.
Hmm it seems to me a viable solution (at least for the more tech inclined) is to just firewall it so it's unable to call home (although then there's an extension sourcing issue). Unless there's more of a philosophical stance. Or am I missing something else?
I've been a mostly happy Firefox user since v2, and have made it through - though will never forget - the extensions system "upgrade" debacle and more. As long as I have means to maintain reasonable control, I'll continue with it into the foreseeable future, because I consider the Chromium-based alternatives to be worse.
"At least for the more tech inclined" instantly eliminates 99% of users, probably even of Firefox for what you're talking about. I mean I'm tech inclined and I have no idea how you propose to firewall an internet browser from calling home. Maybe it's possible, I've never tried so I legitimately don't know. But if it is, it's an absolutely meaningless portion of users who'd even be able to do so much less go through the effort of actually doing it.
Thanks didn't know, thought Waterfox etc. were just a new UI on top of Firefox rendering/HTTP/HTTPS/etc. engine and were depending on Firefox development. Didn't know they were forks like the Redis forks for example. Will take another look.
Disclaiming ownership is not enough. Making the supposed license that users supposedly grant more limited would be a step. Yes I saw it has some qualifiers but they are not protective enough of the user.
Vivaldi is probably the most ethical company making a for-profit browser now. But note that because it is a for-profit it tracks your installation, with an anonymous but unique id, and phones home every time you use the browser. There were complains about this in the forum, but Vivaldi said they had to do that to know how many unique users they have, to make browser deals with other companies. They refused to change that and instead suggested that interested parties could use an application firewall to block those connections from Vivaldi.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it still an issue that due to Chromium not supporting the V2 manifest, adblockers like Ublock Origin won't function in Vivaldi?
I find this so sad. I would gladly pay/donate to support Firefox, far in excess of however much money they would make from data mining and advertising. I am sure that enough people feel the same way to make it a viable model.
Thunderbird raises more than $8mn a year in donations to support their development. Thunderbird's success has proven that this model would work.
It's missing containers and overall has less privacy features available than firefox.
This is exemplified compared to forks like librewolf that enable the majority of them.
Ungoogled Chromium and stock Firefox are pretty similar privacy-wise though.
The main advantage is all baked-in telemetry is stripped out, but it doesn't do much to protect you from privacy-invasive sites other than disabling WebRTC and blocking 3rd party cookies.
I used it for a number of years, but recently switched to Librewolf ~5 months ago and don't expect to switch back unless Firefox and all downstream forks completely implode.
Ungoogled chromium is a good alternative in terms of privacy because all google-related services are gutted and there are no other built-in telemetry things.
There are some downsides, too.
First, you have to do some research on learning to make this browser work conveniently, e.g. finding alternative services to sync and backup your settings, bookmarks, accounts and passwords, etc.
Second, changes pushed by Google like Manifest V3 is still hard to deal with.
There's no such thing as a corporate promise. There are such things as legal contracts and lawsuits, neither of which likely apply to anything Mozilla says about their browser.
Interesting that in this thread discussing a new Mozilla EULA/AUP (among other things) banning pornography, not one person has mentioned that their image library was once called libpr0n: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66984
Firefox performance has been trash for years, for many reasons. I still stick with it because it was included in my Ubuntu 8.04, which was the first OS I installed by myself, and more recently because of its stand regarding privacy. Now I might as well bite the bullet and move to Chrome or Edge, performance is much much better.
There's chromium, and then, for those who take their privacy more seriously than the average VPN customer that just wants to do piracy, there's ungoogled-chromium.
It's like chromium, just without feeding heaps of your personally-identifying metadata directly to Google, who give it directly to the NSA, who give it directly to Elon Musk and DOGE.
Remember, ALL mass surveillance by ALL intelligence agencies is ALWAYS a threat to your freedom, because you don't get to revoke it. You weren't consenting to sharing your information with the Obama administration, you were consenting to sharing your information with all future administrations, no matter how far removed from your own worldview those future administrations may be.
There is one solution. We the people demand an end to ALL government surveillance as well as severe legal consequences for all US government employees who ever helped build such systems, even if they were "just following orders", because neither following orders nor ignorance of the larger picture is an excuse for facilitating moral atrocities.
These FF forks will all be nonviable within a few years of Mozilla going under. Google and Apple will keep moving the web (for better or worse), and these forks will be unable to keep up for lack of resources.
Whether they get relatively slower, or just can't support some new web tech, the writing will be on the wall.
They made too many decisions on their own to be a 1:1 replacement. I think there needs to be a new fork, which would just remove all of the spyware bits.
I think what was being asked is if there's something like Brave that doesn't use a webkit derived back-end. Good defaults and a good stance on privacy is one reason to use Brave and historically Firefox, but another is that it keeps the browser ecosystem from being too homogeneous. Firefox is the last browser with over sub-percent market share, and even then it's less than 3%, so it's almost gone.
A case can be made that many of the browsers split from webkit (or split from things that split from webkit) long enough ago that there is competition, but IMO that's a far cry from a fully independent solution.
I've been using Mozilla since the browser was literally called Mozilla, and I remain loyal simply because I don't think we should fragment the ecosystem. One company focusing its development resources is a lot better than 3 open source projects.
But fact is that Mozilla is effing up big time. They remain in the bay area where developers are paid super high salaries when they should be a 100% remote company. They have bugs and issues decades old. They keep flirting with big business.
They are also our last big corporate hope against the enshittification of the web.
It's all just part of Mozilla's ebb and flow. Give it until 2027. They will have lost all community support and be trailing in many browser metrics. And then they'll do something that once again builds them a niche of devoted fans.
It has happened before. And before that, and before that.
Sometimes I wish I had the kind of education that allows you to interpret Terms of Use, Privacy Notices and other legal mumbojumbo in a way that answers my questions. It's great practice if you like cryptic crosswords though.
Having access to everyone's ChatGPT sessions does seem pretty valuable as it can now be used for training / fine tuning other AIs. I suspect this is where the business case comes from.
I suppose the main target here is to sell firefox sync bookmark and history data?
It is possible to host your own firefox sync instance but it's too much work. I hope it gets easier with these announcements lighting a fire under people.
The license does not say that Mozilla owns information that the user inputs through Firefox. But the HN title does. If Mozilla owns the information then it would have no need for a license. Further, the license does not specify that it is perpetual. A Firefox user does not grant Mozilla perpetual rights to use the information. These rights can be terminated.
If you don't want this to happen, then a company would need to:
1. Have the capital to build and maintain a browser
2. By selling copies of that browser
3. In sufficient funds to keep the business going and make the owners a profit.
Let's say you can do it with a small team -- if you're forking something like firefox, and pay for the salary of 21 people -- full time, 8 developers, a PM, a manager, Customer support (3 people), 3 sales folks, and 3 testers, and one owner.
If the average salary is $175,000, and the fully loaded cost of each employee (including office space, equipment, benefits) is $250,000, then just to break even -- and not even account for inflation or costs rising -- and not even accounting for capital expenditures, the product would have to sell 105,000 copies at $50 a pop.
If you sold it for $30 a year, that's now 175,000 copies, every year. Realistically, to account for taxes and the fact that Developer salaries are no longer expensible (thanks Trump!), you'd have to sell around twice that number of copies, so around 350,000 copies of this browser, a year. Every year. Just to break even.
When's the last time 350,000 people said, "I want to buy a web browser?". When's the last time 350,000 people bought a web browser?
We've made our own bed in this one, the second folks saw that Internet Explorer was free; and that killed the original Mozilla browser -- that -- by the way -- I happily paid for.
If you want an internet where you're not the product, then that's an internet where the business models have to change, and the customer desire to pay for the software they use has to go up.
And that still -- still -- does not alleviate the problem of capital needing to get started, which is only exacerbated by the Section 174 changes in the TCJA of 2017.
I honestly don't understand why Mozilla isn't succeeding with a "privacy subscription" where for $100/year (or $20/month or something) you get a full kit of digital sovereignty tools. Password manager, Mozilla, email with privacy features, secure file transfer, ephemeral cards...
I'm genuinely curious if people can comment why this isn't working -- because it seems like they've actually already tried versions of this!
Can someone elaborate on what this means? Has Mozilla completely abandoned the "privacy" focus? I.e. should I stop recommending the browser and find an alternative? Deleting sentences like "We never sell your data" is for a long-time fan of the browser very alarming. But frankly I'm confused by the PR/blogs and can't tell from the privacy policy if/how it now allows selling my data.
Disabled auto-update until this is clarified or alternatives can be found.
I for one don't agree to these 'terms of use'. If people are failing to understand Mozilla's legalese, it is Mozilla's fault for making them ambiguous and difficult to understand. They earned 650 million dollars last year. Surely they have the resources for the task.
"When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
This is a license to use, not ownership. If Mozilla owns the information then it does not need a license.
Licenses to use information can be revoked, i.e., terminated.
I was pretty confused about why this even exists (it's weird to read a bunch of paragraphs that are semantically valid but don't seem to convey information), and then I read the [Privacy Notice](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox). Looks like there's a decent amount of surveillance / ad tech built in to Firefox.
From "How is your data used?":
> Firefox also shows its own search suggestions based on information stored on your local device (including recent search terms, open tabs, and previously visited URLs). These suggestions may include sponsored suggestions from Mozilla’s partners
> Mozilla's partners receive de-identified information about interactions with the suggestions they've served.
> Depending on your location, Mozilla derives the high level category (e.g., travel, shopping) of your search from keywords in that query, in order to understand the types and number of searches being made. We utilize privacy preserving technologies such that Mozilla only learns that someone, somewhere, performed a search relating to a particular category, without knowing who.
> Mozilla may also receive location-related keywords from your search (such as when you search for “Boston”) and share this with our partners to provide recommended and sponsored content. Where this occurs, Mozilla cannot associate the keyword search with an individual user once the search suggestion has been served and partners are never able to associate search suggestions with an individual user.
> You may be able to opt into an enhanced search experience, which will result in Mozilla processing additional personal data, including your technical data, location and search data. Some of that information may be shared with our partners on a de-identified and/or aggregated basis.
> We use technical data, language preference, and location to serve content and advertising on the Firefox New Tab page in the correct format (i.e. for mobile vs desktop), language, and relevant location. Mozilla collects technical and interaction data, such as the position, size, views and clicks on New Tab content or ads, to understand how people are interacting with our content and to personalize future content, including sponsored content. This data may be shared with our advertising partners on a de-identified or aggregated basis.
> In some instances, when ads are enabled on New Tab, additional browsing data may also be processed locally on your device to measure the effectiveness of those ads; such data will only be shared with Mozilla and/or our advertising partners via our privacy-preserving technologies on an aggregated and/or de-identified basis.
> When you allow us to do so, Firefox sends Mozilla data about the website domain or specific advertising campaign (if any) that referred you to our download page to help us understand and improve our marketing efforts. Firefox also shares information with our marketing partners to measure and improve these campaigns; what information is specifically shared varies (depending on how you discovered Firefox and your operating system) but generally includes how you were referred to our download page and whether you actively use Firefox. Where Firefox is pre-installed on your device, technical and interaction data (your device type and whether Firefox is used) will be sent to our marketing partners, and shared with Mozilla.
The writing on the wall was there since a long time ago considering the actions of the foundations leadership. They burn money like crazy on some useless stuff, no direction or idea how to bring back FF into the spotlight where it belongs.
Now with the changes with Chrome (basically killing of adblockers) they have a big window to make a play but instead they make the most idiotic move possible. Typical Mozilla - a mix of great tech (e.g. Rust) and detached from reality leadership.
I've been using Firefox since decades, even when it was a slow and buggy piece of crap compared to Chrome but now I think it is time to move to something else. But what will guarantee me I won't get a rug pull when some MBA takes the reins?
It is. The data exfiltration is more through telemetry vectors as they currently use. A VPN can't help you with that and while they can't see your bookmarks stored in the sync service because they don't have the encryption key, they technically could do what they like once that is decrypted and in memory.
Librewolf can use Mozilla's existing Firefox Sync and because of the end-to-end encryption you get the privacy you wanted that way [1].
It is unenforceable by YOU, since Mozilla has reserved all rights to all the data you put through your browser. Which is why I'm currently using LibreWolf for the first time.
I'm not using Firefox because it's functionally superior to Chrome. I use it because it's not a surveillance technology and Chrome is. Privacy is the only reason why I'm using Firefox.
The board governing Firefox development has got to be some of the worst. They don't understand the product nor their users.
I pay for Relay... I'm sure it's a mistake though bc it'll get ended sometime soon and I'll have to figure out how to transfer all my email aliases elsewhere...
I uninstalled Firefox this morning after reading about these sus af changes.
Tried Librewolf and found it to be great,
- No Pocket bullshit.
- I forgot I had the start page set to blank only because Firefox was fixed on ruining it while forbidding using a custom one.
Migrating took me 20m, and I'm glad I did it because it left be a backup of something that so far only Mozilla kept for me.
- Exporting/Importing bookmarks takes 20s. (Ctrl-Shift-o, export/import).
- Exporting passwords is simple (Preferences, search for passwords. Alternatively just go to about:logins).
- I had many extensions to install, but the ones that need heavy customisation all had export/import. Migrating passwords was easy through a (totally not safe) csv file.
- The only troublesome extension was Video Download Helper, but after re-running `vdhcoapp install` I figured I just needed to copy `~/.mozilla/native-messaging-hosts/` into `~/.librewolf/`.
I'm kind of stuck with Android. I don't know of an alternative, but haven't spent time looking for one yet.
only if: there was a firefox module that could run continious scatelogical searches in the background , and repost randon grabs to
a bot only forum, and mozilla would own, a lot of **
Mozilla is going down the path of enshittification. I don't really care what the exact AUP, ToS and other legalese tomes boil down to, I should not need to agree to nothing but the license to use a piece of free software. If they only wanted this shit to apply to the online services, they should state it as such.
I am sad to state this, but this is likely the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I am convinced that there is a huge silent majority of users here that care about the erosion of privacy and data abuse because that's why we were using Firefox in the first place. If I don't have any assurance of my rights, privacy, anonymity and the general assurance of virtues that a capital F - Free Software- should exhibit. If I have to settle for a solution that doesn't respect my rights, I will use something more complete, well supported and user-friendly.
My god people, what a nothing burger. Try clicking the link and reading the actual terms:
> You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Most of the comments here are in bad faith or just people jumping on the hype train. Sad.
Brave was never good: crypto-crap, based on Chromium, and was modifying web pages from the start without your consent. I never understood why people use it.
People use it because it is essentially Chrome with uBlock-Origin built in (I think the developer of uBlock Origin is employed by Brave) and it removes the stupid cookie modals that are on every website. Between running a pi-hole and Brave, I rarely see an advert on a website.
Turning off the "crypto-crap" can be done quite easily (you literally right click on the BAT icon and it is gone) and the new tab ads are removed again with a couple of clicks. I've found it also runs much better than Firefox on older hardware.
Depends, but with this news you will probably not be downgrading too much.
Brave really does have a bunch of very nice features, I particularly enjoyed using them on my phone to download videos from youtube for online listening. Built-in adblocking is very enjoyable too.
Do note that there had been several smaller controversies, including one that 'Honey' got recently into hot water for, which was replacing affiliate links with their own. There is currently an on-going lawsuit with Honey for this.
In honesty, look at the controversies page on wikipedia and decide for yourself, I don't think there is a good or a bad choice here.
In my opinion, if you care about the open web, then you should not be using a Blink (Chromium) based browser like Brave. The less control Google has, the better for the web.
Brave is my favorite so far. You can run an HTTP monitor like Charles Proxy or Fiddler in your OS if you think your browser is snooping on you. I do Brave + Ghostery and works great.
> You agree to indemnify and hold Mozilla and its affiliates harmless for any liability or claim from your use of Firefox, to the extent permitted by applicable law.
Yikes. Good thing i was never informed or agreed to this nonsense.
Isn't limitation of liability part of virtually every open source license?
From MIT license:
> IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
From GPLv3 license:
> ... IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM ...
The issue is indemnification, not liability. I do not have the funds to defend Mozilla and their partners if someone decides to sue them because they don't like how i use their software.
On Wednesday we shared that we’re introducing a new Terms of Use (TOU) and Privacy Notice for Firefox. Since then, we’ve been listening to some of our community’s concerns with parts of the TOU, specifically about licensing. Our intent was just to be as clear as possible about how we make Firefox work, but in doing so we also created some confusion and concern. With that in mind, we’re updating the language to more clearly reflect the limited scope of how Mozilla interacts with user data.
Here’s what the new language will say:
You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.
In addition, we’ve removed the reference to the Acceptable Use Policy because it seems to be causing more confusion than clarity.
Privacy FAQ
We also updated our Privacy FAQ to better address legal minutia around terms like “sells.” While we’re not reverting the FAQ, we want to provide more detail about why we made the change in the first place.
TL;DR 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. We changed our language because some jurisdictions define “sell” more broadly than most people would usually understand that word. Firefox has built-in privacy and security features, plus options that let you fine-tune your data settings.
The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”
Similar privacy laws exist in other US states, including in Virginia and Colorado. And that’s a good thing — Mozilla has long been a supporter of data privacy laws that empower people — but the competing interpretations of do-not-sell requirements does leave many businesses uncertain about their exact obligations and whether or not they’re considered to be “selling data.”
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our Privacy Notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
We’re continuing to make sure that Firefox provides you with sensible default settings that you can review during onboarding or adjust at any time.
Data of UK and EU users is protected. Why doesn't the USA have such sensible data protection laws; the only hostility I see is from surveillance capitalists spreading their FUD.
There is no need for a ToS unless your software has privacy issues because you are spying on users without their 100% informed consent. There is a lot of software that does though.
Does it? How much other OSS has a Terms of Use? I can understand it for firefox services like accounts, but for just using the browser I don't see how this makes sense.
firefox is an open source software, i know it's great to bash it with the many questionable decisions they take but at the end it's still the least worst web browser and no one is entitled to having a free, ads free and privacy respecting web browser.
the author shows that mozilla royalty-free, worldwide license TOS change is now similar to what google always had with chrome.
To me as long as i understand the business model of mozilla, which is quite precarious but still, and it doesn't have some funny connections going in and out, i'm fine with their TOS change.
It's not the best but what you gonna do anyway ? chrome is chrome, 99% of the alternative are still running google chrome under the hood which give google insane leverage. Safari is at the mercy of apple dictatorship on the extension support. and that's all.
maybe once google is forbidden to give money to mozilla to choose the default search engine we will see real change in web browser choice, for instance it could fasten the agonizing mozilla death and prompt privacy or even just power user (as people who want to be able to block ads everywhere, not only where google mv3 allows it) to pay to develop, maintain and ultimately use a web browser.
Mozilla is making decisions in lockstep with Google around privacy in the browser.
Chromium is also open source software, and you'll note that several forks of that codebase don't have this "we're going to train AI models on literally everything you do online" clause.
Hell - Firefox itself has several forks which are also less invasive.
---
> but at the end it's still the least worst web browser and no one is entitled to having a free, ads free and privacy respecting web browser.
No one is entitled to this - yet there are a good number of people who go out of their way to make this available. Use one of their tools instead of pretending that Mozilla is being "the good guy" here. They absolutely are not.
I'm genuinely curious about your leverage comment. Lots of people base their browsers on the open source Chromium project. They rely on Google for the source, but they aren't indebted in any way the company. They're essentially just forking the source every time they update.
On the other hand, Mozilla develops their own source code but is almost entirely funded by Google. They are looking for alternative funding, but does receiving all your paychecks from a company give them less leverage over you than freely copying their code? I'm not convinced.
I'm sad to see Firefox take this direction, but they've been going in a bad direction for a long time, and this is a bit too far for me. Deleted it everywhere. Personally, I like Falkon and Vivaldi. Jon von Tetzchner may not release all his source, but he has a great track record over decades of browser development, and that kind of earned trust is something Mozilla has not been fostering lately. He has never demonstrated that Google, Microsoft or anyone else has "insane leverage" over him or his companies and wasn't afraid to walk away from Opera when he didn't like the direction. We need more of that in the browser space.
> no one is entitled to having a free, ads free and privacy respecting web browser
I disagree. As governments and society at large are increasingly requiring you to be online for basic tasks we do owe it to make sure people have a user agent that doesn't come with strings attached.
However, if someone is going to stop using Firefox because of these new terms, I would assume that person is already not using any products or services from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc. Seems pretty hypocritical otherwise.
Those companies are known to be privacy hostile companies. Mozilla/Firefox, not. In fact, Mozilla claims the reverse!
For them to abandon privacy, is a betrayal, it's backstabbing behaviour. Feeling betrayed and wanting nothing to do with said software, as a result, seems normal to me.
Or in slightly different terms: If I wasn't using Chrome because of privacy issues, then Firefox losing the privacy advantage means they just ditched the only reason I was still using their product.
The type of product/service matters here. We're talking about a browser here, with the name "User Agent" being popularized by Mozilla,for fuck's sake.
I don't use Google or meta services. I do use apple's and Microsoft's OS, but last time I checked, neither of those required me to give a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to Microsoft or Apple for all the data that I input into their OS - even when it goes through the TCP stack. Yet this is what Mozilla has in their own license. (and yes, before you ask, I did review the macOS TOS. You can find them here if you're interested: https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSSequoia.pdf)
For all their problems, MS/Apple TOS are usually for things that interact with their services. Here, firefox's new TOS is ridiculously wide and touches things that do not interact with Mozilla's services, for no reason.
There's also a matter of trust; Google, Apple, Microsoft and Meta are trustworthy in the sense that I have an expectation of them that's already fairly negative insofar as user privacy is concerned. The correct response to "Google tracks you" isn't one of shock, it's one of acknowledgement because it's to be expected at this point. Google hasn't ever pretended that they aren't selling your profile to the highest bidder, so while I have issues with that, they're more in the sense of "it should be illegal to do this in general" rather than "I could never have foreseen this outcome". Same with Microsoft, Meta and especially Apple.
Mozilla was operating under a different set of expectations up to this point - they always made a big deal of protecting the user from bad actors, put privacy pretty front and center (in the sense of not selling your shit to data brokers/using it for advertising) and in general were fairly reliable on that. This dynamic seems to be shifting in a new direction that's closer to the other four mentioned companies and that's violating the trust they've build up over the years. It makes you wonder what Mozillas word is now worth and what it'll be worth in the future.
Hence why people are considering leaving; trust is a pretty major factor in that sort of decision. It arrives by foot (is hard to gain) but leaves by horse (is easy to lose).
I hate it when people get angry about this exact term of phrase. This is the legal definition of how user generated content works. What they're really saying is "if you upload anything to us, we're allowed to distribute it either back to you, or to other people". Yet another case of false panic.
Exactly, I agree. In fact they declare : "You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
They reserve the right to use every bit of information we type into the browser, which is pretty scary.
It means they read and collect every bit of information we input in the browser ... think for example the text we input in a webmail app or in a home banking app ...
If people are misinterpreting mozilla's legalese, that is mozilla's fault for making these terms vague, broad and easy to misinterpret. Also i am not convinced your interpretation is correct.
Mozilla Firefox didn't have a 'Terms of Use' for 20 years. Why now?
Its quite clear they're seeking to expand their rights over their users data with their new privacy policy while simultaneously reducing user rights with this new 'Terms of Use'. i.e. Enshitification
Related ongoing thread:
An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612 - Feb 2025 (119 comments)
The other WTF is here:
Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
Acceptable Use Policy links to https://www.mozilla.org/about/legal/acceptable-use/ which says "You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to[...]Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence"
It's against the Terms of Use to use Firefox to... watch porn?
Either their legal team made a mistake, in which case they should correct it and issue an apology ASAP, or they really do intend to own you, in which case I recommend switching to an alternative browser which is only a browser, like Dillo, Ladybird, or Netsurf.
> It's against the Terms of Use to use Firefox to... watch porn?
Firefox isn't a Mozilla service. The Mozilla services are things like account sync, or the review tool they use.
So only bookmarks of porn sites if you have Sync active, sending porn tabs to a Firefox instance on another device, browsing porn while on the Mozilla VPN, or using Firefox Relay to sign up to a porn website with an anonymous email address
Fine by me since I don't use a Mozilla account, but sounds to me like I shouldn't get a Mozilla account either
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I think Mozilla VPN is a Mozilla service?
It's pretty odd if you aren't allowed to use their VPN to watch or share porn
- send unsolicited communications (for example cold emailing an employer about a job) - Deceive or mislead (for example inviting your brother over for a surprise party under false pretenses) - Purchase legal controlled products (for example sending the pharmacy a refill for your Xanax) - Collect email addresses without permission (for example putting together a list of emails to contact public officials)
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> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy
The fact that Firefox isn't a "Mozilla Service" seems irrelevant.
> Firefox isn't a Mozilla service.
They might clarify that in the agreement. I doubt many people are intimately familiar with Mozilla, Firefox, 'services', etc. to distinguish. I am and I didn't think of it in a brief reading (which is all I have time for).
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And yet these terms of service—for Firefox—specifically apply the AUP to “your use of Firefox,” no?
The entire AUP is prefixed “You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to:”. There’s nothing in the AUP that doesn’t refer to “Mozilla’s services.” When the Firefox TOS explicitly includes this AUP, how could it make sense unless they think of Firefox as one of their services?
At the risk of restating the gp’s quote:
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
The French translation of the Terms of Use says they apply both to services and products:
> Vous ne pouvez pas utiliser les services et produits de Mozilla dans les buts suivants :
It's against ToS to watch R rated movies.
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with this new TOS, Firefox became Mozilla "service"
Mozilla VPN is a service Mozilla provides though. White-labelled Mullvad or not, it a contract between Mozilla and the user and therefore presumably covered by this terms of use.
I would say porn is probably in the top 3 if not number 1 use for VPNs
But it says "Your use of Firefox must follow [the terms of use for Mozilla services]"
So what about synced bookmarks?
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Imagine using Mozilla Sync to ensure you have the same horse porn on your phone as your laptop out of spite.
Welp, they stopped being open source, then. From the OSD:
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
AFAICT there is no restriction on the application itself: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/eula/
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They've had a different license on the binaries vs. the source code for a long time.
Mozilla's management and legal has always been amazing when it comes to unforced errors. These changes are actually pretty normal, but they're also worded more scarily by being more encompassing than they need to be. Mozilla has always sucked when it comes to communicating with the outside world.
A shooting match between AMD and Mozilla would be a good day to be a cobbler
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They know how to send cake at least
We are under an attack by Puritanism that is quite astounding actually. And no one is doing anything. Everyone just keeps bending the knee.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1hqqpbt/newest_ver...
Some of the things that are happening are just from the threat of “something bad might come down from the new administration”. It’s so ridiculous.
The squeeze on any content that religious people find 'yucky' is double-pronged in the US - encouraged both by governments and businesses. Paypal, Visa, Mastercard et al are given complete discretion over what transactions they can block, and they have already extensively used this to deprive legal NSFW platforms and creators of their income.
So, on one end, state governments are trying to strongarm NSFW services by imposing draconian requirements that ask users to submit their private data to some random opaque 'benevolent' third party business - and on the other, payment processors are using their legal right to refuse whatever transaction for any reason so they can starve them of income.
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The Puritans have been trying to ban porn here since the concept has existed, it's never stopped, and it's never going to stop. They're miserable and they want everyone else to be too. That's like most of their religion. Going to church, being ashamed of bodies, and judging people.
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Confused. What do Firefox's terms of service have to do with puritanism ? Have Firefox developers become puritanist or something ? That would be extremely surprising if true. Any evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) to this ?
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It's gonna be a weird few years that's for sure. I'll leave it to the historians to decide when the actual tipping point was but the shift in the GOP from being run by Republicans with a few bones thrown to Conservatives every now and again when it's time to drum up votes to the show now being run by Conservatives is going to be the point between two political eras.
It's by far not the first time this has happened but it's kinda surreal to be alive for one.
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I don't think that's the problem here, as I don't want to see porn on e.g. Mozilla's forums either. There's a place and time for that content and Mozilla shouldn't be the one to decide for others. The problem is whether Firefox is a Mozilla "service" or not, and the way the terms is linked implies that it is.
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IIRC, terms like that have been in agreements for many years. It's boilerplate, almost.
I'm all down to write off contract law as "puritanism" but the rot is far deeper than an aesthetic (and frankly I'm unclear how puritanism applies to this situation at all).
EDIT: I'm not sure why porn is particularly interesting here when most internet activity seems to be potentially against terms of service.
My conspiracy theory is that gears are slowly turning to revamp the culture, redefine what’s acceptable/not acceptable and eventually suggest that if you won’t have kids you’re not accepted in the society. Basically a funky way to reverse the population decline, as the governments are realizing this problem won’t be fixed by free markets and etc.
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"We"? Do we live in the same first world where people fuck like animals and promiscuity is the overwhelming norm?
> Either their legal team made a mistake, in which case they should correct it and issue an apology ASAP
I don't think it is a mistake but more the translation of a vision and strategy that took hundreds of meetings to be laid down very precisely.
I have nothing to back what I am gonna say but I am wondering if their strategy might be to truly become the default browser of governments who are uncomfortable having Chrome or Edge as the default browser. Especially since now they get augmented by a lot of AI.
Firefox has it largest market share in Europe and Germany it seems and with the concerns with are hearing over there about Big tech I wouldn't be surprised at some point some govs try to make their workstations Firefox only.
Also some governments are trying hard to restrict access to porn, violence and social media for children but we know it is almost impossible to do it at the network level. So they might try at the browser level with the help of Mozilla and some "sanctioned Internet AI safety" inside the browser?
I really don't know but think about it, Mozilla is a dead man walking with it's 2% market share and huge cost of maintaining one of the most complex piece of software. They have to do something about it.
What just tipped me off is reading on Wikipedia [0]:
> On February 8, 2024, Mozilla announced that Baker would be stepping down as CEO to "focus on AI and internet safety"[2] as chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
I think Baker is now gone gone.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...
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> Acceptable Use Policy links to https://www.mozilla.org/about/legal/acceptable-use/ which says "You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to[
So the text of the policy itself limits its scope to Mozilla Services.
But the purpose of that section is unclear to me. If it just means you have to comply with that policy when using features that use Mozilla services, why is that section necessary, since the license for the services should already apply.
If it is trying to mean that all the terms for Mozilla services also applies to any use of Firefox... that is really clumisily written, and also just generally terrible.
Is bookmark sync, say, a “Mozilla service”?
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I'm pretty sure this is about Mozilla services. AFAICT, Firefox itself is licensed under the https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License and as such doesn't put any restrictions on how you use the software.
That is what I expected to see, but the title of the page is "Firefox Terms of Use"
I think its a good argument for using a Firefox fork.
A bit of an issue is that the Firefox terms of use page [1] says "Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy", and the Acceptable Use Policy link points to their Acceptable Use Policy page regarding Mozilla services [2].
So either they're saying your use of Firefox, regardless of whether you want to use Mozilla services, must also follow the same acceptable use policy that your use of their services would, or it's a massively ambiguous way of saying your use of Firefox in combination with actual Mozilla services must comply with the policy.
If it's the former, their terms of use would be in conflict with the commonly understood definition of open source and free software licensing. If it's the latter, it's just poor legalese that fails to make its intent clear. (Interestingly, the Mozilla Public License does not seem to explicitly say that there are no restrictions regarding the use of the software for any particular purpose, although that is a commonly accepted part of the definition of free software and open source.)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250228155328/https://www.mozil...
[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/acceptable-use/
That's the Firefox source code though, not necessarily the Firefox binary. A Visual Studio Code situation, basically.
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> I recommend switching to an alternative browser which is only a browser, like Dillo, Ladybird, or Netsurf.
Did not know any of those alternatives thanks for sharing.
After a quick online search, I see they could work for casual browsing and it's great that they don't rely on Chromium
But do you think these can be a full browser replacement without extension ecosystems like ublock origin et al.?
Firefox was the last bastion of freedom on the internet and the replacements aren't ready.
> But do you think these can be a full browser replacement without extension ecosystems like ublock origin et al.?
I'm now actually trying to use qutebrowser as a replacement... it's not easy due to the lack of extensions, but mitigating factors are:
1. it has integrated adblock (though no cosmetic filtering) 2. there are userscripts to integrate with the Bitwarden CLI or a running instance of KeepassXC.
If you're on macOS, then Kagi's Orion seems good:
https://kagi.com/orion
It's been working fine for me anyway.
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None of these three are currently suitable for casual browsing unfortunately.
Dillo is only sporadically developed. They even lost control of the dillo.org domain a long time ago, which pretty much spells amateur hour.
Ladybird would be a better choice, but it's not even fully baked yet. Coming sometime in 2026, supposedly.
I'd recommend the Brave browser for people concerned about recent bad news from Mozilla.
> Dillo is only sporadically developed.
I maintain it.
> They even lost control of the dillo.org domain a long time ago
New website is at: https://dillo-browser.github.io/
See https://dillo-browser.github.io/dillo.org.html and maybe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFJp8JDg8Yg or https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4100-resu...
> ... which pretty much spells amateur hour
?
There are also Firefox forks such as WaterFox, LibreWolf and Floorp.
These seem like a more direct migration path for someone wanting to move off of Firefox.
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The applicable laws of North-Korea might differ than the applicable laws of Russia which may differ from the law of Qatar, etc. It might be even impossible to uphold this world wide even if you tried.
So i guess it's more a 'we at Mozilla don't want any trouble' thing.
I hate to say this but I am again surprised not by the ToS update from Mozilla but by the people who are surprised that Firefox or Mozilla is doing this.
May be I am way too cynical than average people. What is being stated here is actually inline of what they think is right. They think watching Porn is wrong. Which is why you shouldn't use Firefox to watch porn, or anything else they deemed wrong.
And that is speaking from someone who joined the Firefox 1.0 New York Times Ad.
I guess we will all have to do it again. This time for Ladybird.
They're basically saying you can't use Mozilla VPN to get around state age restrictions for access to adult content.
Gives them an out to claim it's already not permitted on their platform and that they're not enabling crime in these states.
No they are not. They are saying exactly: "You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to[...]Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence"
By the wording here there are many Netflix shows you could not watch using Firefox.
Why would you want to watch TV in your browser in the first place?
Firefox-the-browser isn't a service, it's a product. Their services are things like profile syncing. It makes sense to me that they wouldn't want content on their servers that they could get in legal trouble for hosting.
Comments such as yours are missing the point.
Mozilla's ToS applies for Firefox's use, and this is literally written by Mozilla themselves:
“Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy”
There's no distinction between the browser and Mozilla's online services here.
---
And even if it were referring only to features such as “profile syncing” (and it doesn't refer only to that), does this mean that people can't have bookmarks to porn? And why would Mozilla care about how people use profile syncing at all? I thought it was e2e encrypted.
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So, as someone else pointed out, saving bookmarks of porn and using their bookmarks sync service would be a problem.
It's easy to laugh and dismiss that. But what if you're a journalist covering war? You're going to have plenty of bookmarks of graphic violence, and therefore run afoul of this license.
Legal trouble for sexuality and violence? I am sorry, in what jurisdiction are their servers? Iran or North Korea?
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If they're worried by what might be in the profile data they're syncing they should just make it e2e encrypted so they can't know what's in it
But they clearly want to collect and sell that data
I agree with you but I'm jumping ship because it is not worth it for me to stick with Mozilla.
these EULA agreements aren't worth any more than the paper they're written on
TOS has always been a mark of arbitrary service and ownership of all products. None of this is new or surprising.
I might have differed with Brendan Eich on a few matters, but he was a good steward of Firefox in my book.
When Mitchell Baker took the reins, Mozilla became rather more heavy-handed towards us - the irony being that Waterfox was once proudly displayed on the Mozilla website under their "Powered By" banner.
I appreciate the constant existential wobble Firefox faces, but they've made some peculiar decisions as of late.
On one hand, they're finally implementing features users have been clamouring for ages (tab groups, vertical tabs and the likes) - on the other, rather odd policy choices.
I should point out, it seems daft to me when others suggest using forks with no well-established governance of their own, essentially shifting trust from an organisation at least answerable to certain regulations, to individuals with no proper framework or guidelines.
I've done my best with Waterfox over the years to have it represented by a proper legal entity with policies to follow; so if anyone is interested take a look.
Edit: FWIW I've written some more thoughts on it here: https://www.waterfox.net/blog/a-comment-on-mozilla-changes/
Here's my question: in light of what Mozilla is doing, why don't other forks like Waterfox or Librewolf write a manifesto/contract saying they'll never sell your user data and won't turn "evil" (until they do, of course), and then decide to offer a paid version of their browser.
Two possible outcomes:
1. No one cares. No one pays for it. Nothing changes and nobody loses anything.
2. Enough people pay for it to keep the product healthy and the user-centric promise alive. The Internet is saved.
So why isn't anyone trying to replace Mozilla yet, with a more sane business model than living on the back of Google's fear of antitrust investigation? What's the worse that can happen?
Just sell a bonafide paid version alongside the free one, don't just rely on donations. There is a massive difference between offering a paid product and begging passers-by to spare some change.
The problem with paid versions, is that I don't really trust them either. MBA creep will happen and suddenly the TOS changes and my paid tier is going to have data collection and 'some' ads. I have to move to a high tier to avoid them. After a few cycles of that, one day all the tiers have data collection and ads.
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>So why isn't anyone trying to replace Mozilla yet,
Because writing manifestos is easy and making a browser is proper hard work ?
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I am at the point where I would happily pay an annual subscription on the order of a few hundred dollars per year just to avoid the headaches of today's browsers. Don't add new features, don't change the look of anything, just give me security updates and bug fixes. The only problem with this model is what we saw happen to the streaming services; paying to avoid ads just means your data is worth that much more. Paying for a higher-tier plan is a signal that you have a greater level of disposable income, and are hence more valuable to advertisers.
When this topic has been discussed on Hacker News in the past, it has also been pointed out that developing a browser with feature parity to Firefox or Chrome would be prohibitively expensive.
Kagi's Orion browser has a lifetime sponsor price of $150. That plus the Kagi subscription support its development.
It's currently macOS and iPad/iPhone only, but a Linux version is being worked on. I don't know their plans for a Windows version.
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Brave https://brave.com/ has been around for a while
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Kagi is making the Orion browser, which you can pay for. I am a happy customer.
There's also Ladybird and several Webkit wrappers.
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I tip some projects that help me. It's been years since mozilla started to do evolve in ways that feel weird. I'd tip for a fork.
Question is: how many people would jump ship, and then how much money would that represent to pay devs.
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This idea of having an moral alignment covenant I think is a great one. I'm fed up of being bait-and-switched by companies that get buy-in by being open and friendly, and then later they decide to kill the golden goose. If you're committed to FOSS then commit! Make it official so that people can trust that you're not going to enshittify later.
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I'd pay for this.
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Most of the other "forks" (e.g. Librewolf) are just patches on top of vanilla Firefox sources, so it's really not a whole lot to scrutinize by hand. I've skimmed at least most of the patch files personally just out of curiosity. In my distro of choice, NixOS, the sources are built by Hydra or my local machine, so I'm not trusting that their binaries match the source either.
That makes it a bit easier to trust, but it does run into the issue that it stops working if Mozilla hits a certain level of untrustworthiness.
They got more than $7B to build a browser.
"I appreciate the constant existential wobble Firefox faces"
I would also love to face $7B existential wobbles.
To put that number in perspective, drawing just 1% of that down each year and putting in a bank account earning interest would fund 100 engineers on $500k/year indefinitely.
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Yeah Mozilla at this point is really like the kid riding the bike and putting a stick in his own front tire meme. I had an interview with them years ago and even then it was clear they were wasting time on the most pointless bureaucracy while Firefox was languishing. Doesn’t google literally give them millions a year to exist? Like idk if I can even think of something more mismanaged than Mozilla.
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> I appreciate the constant existential wobble Firefox faces
The wobble seems to somewhat artificial. I'm having trouble believing Firefox could ever not be able to afford to continue browser development — there are way too many interests at stake. Google alone would have no choice but to bail Firefox out because Chrome can't be the only browser without being regulated to hell and back.
Google providing most of their funding is a fact, and that this provides a large amount of leverage over what Firefox can do is obvious. So how is the balancing act artificial?
For it to be self-imposed there needs to be an comparable amount of money ready to spring forth if Google ever pulled out that Mozilla is somehow keeping a lid on.
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I don't see how a regulated entity is better in any way than an individual.
We repeatedly see attacks on freedom and privacy by the people who are supposed to protect them, those so-called "regulators": chatcontrol, recent UK backdoor wishes, repeated French proposals to enforce DRM even on opensource. And I wouldn't even google Russia, China, or other less democratic states.
Regulated is probably worse than some anarchistic who-knows-by-whom software, but FOSS and auditable these days, tbh. Especially as everyone's audit capabilities grow day by day with AI. It's kind of good at grinding tons of code.
A heavily regulated entity with all licenses in the world might be more hostile toward users than some niche project.
> I don't see how regulated entity is better in any way than individual.
I feel you. Regulatory bodies have definitely fallen short in many cases, and we've seen concerning proposals from governments that threaten digital privacy and freedom. "Who watches the watchmen" seems incredibly apt nowadays.
However, I feel there's a fundamental difference between imperfect accountability and no accountability at all. With a legal entity governed by stated policies, users have:
1. Transparency about who makes decisions and how
2. Clear terms that create binding commitments
3. Legal mechanisms for recourse if those commitments are violated
4. A persistent entity that can't simply disappear overnight
Perfect? Not really. The ICO in the UK, for example, hasn't been amazing at enforcing data protection. But the existence of these frameworks means that accountability is at least possible - there are levers that can be pulled if someone can be bothered to.
In contrast, with software maintained by anonymous or loosely affiliated individuals, there's no structural accountability whatsoever. If privacy promises are broken, users have no recourse beyond abandoning the software.
FOSS and auditability are valuable safeguards, sure, but they primarily protect against unintentional privacy violations that might be discovered in code reviews. They don't address the human element of intentional policy changes or decisions about data collection.
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Hey, thank you for Waterfox! I'm using it a lot across all my machines. Well done!
we need to clean cut from mozilla.
do they still make ot worthwhile for developers? are any on the payroll still?
i think the community should mobilize to sign up for adopting A single fork* as the official fork and completely drop mozilla from existence.
* only criteria should be the fork that is most convenient for all the other forks to just point to instead of mozilla and continue to ship with their patches. and that one fork should have the minimum resources to respond to security disclosures in place of mozilla, nothing else as a requirement.
More importantly that fork should be what other forks base off of. Anyone can put a skin on a browser, but someone needs to do the engine. If every fork who wants an engine improvement goes to the one place there is some mass behind making the fork real, and the other forks can still to their skin if they think it useful. That one fork also means that when mozilla comes out with a new version there are enough hands to merge (at least until Mozilla diverges too far from the fork)
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>it seems daft to me when others suggest using forks with no well-established governance of their own
Yes, it may be that we are jumping from the frying pan into the fire. On the bright-side this opens up an opportunity for a company, or a suite of companies, to fund an alternative browser. Such an entity might have Signal at its lead, or similar, who's mission is solely to "tighten up" the software stack on which it runs.
That sounds very much like Ladybird's mission.
Truly independent
No code from other browsers. We're building a new engine, based on web standards.
Singular focus
We are focused on one thing: the web browser.
No monetization
No "default search deals", crypto tokens, or other forms of user monetization, ever.
https://ladybird.org/
> I should point out, it seems daft to me when others suggest using forks with no well-established governance of their own, essentially shifting trust from an organisation at least answerable to certain regulations, to individuals with no proper framework or guidelines
Individuals that care about these things have a far better track record than any business with employees, bills to pay, and investors.
Until that individual tires of the work, and then stops working on it completely or sells it to someone with less scruples or the project gets hijacked by malicious actor.
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> I should point out, it seems daft to me when others suggest using forks with no well-established governance of their own, essentially shifting trust from an organisation at least answerable to certain regulations, to individuals with no proper framework or guidelines.
That just shows that trust in Mozilla has sunk below "random stranger" levels. IMO that shift is entirely deserved.
Rather odd policy choices is an understatement.
The context to keep in mind here is that Mozilla purchased an ad company back in June. They spent money on it, and they will move to earn a return on investment.
Absent that context this could just be another tone deaf policy choice that gets rolled back when there's enough heat, but with that context in mind it's far more likely to be them laying the legal foundation to incorporate Anonym's targeted advertising into Firefox.
From the Register article about the acquisition:
> Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence for ad watchdog Check My Ads, told The Register in an email that she's generally skeptical of claims about privacy-preserving ad technology.
> "For example, how do Anonym’s audience capabilities, like their lookalike modeling, jibe with what Mozilla considers to be 'exploitative models of data extraction?' The data that is 'securely shared' by platforms and advertisers to enable ad targeting and measurement have to come from somewhere – and there’s more to privacy than not leaking user IDs."
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
This is not the first time Mozilla bought an ad company, last time it was Qlikz. And last time it cost them most of their German users. Wonder how many users they will lose this time.
1. Is github the best place to report bugs / issues for Waterfox?
2. When (not in your lifetime obviously) Waterfox is broken, what canaries do you have deployed that we can archive now, like Mozilla's tell here?
3. What keeps waterfox afloat? Where/how do you accept funds?
4. How do I find a sync alternative or provide my own? Such that, I'm not reliant on Mozilla sync/backend? ... If none exists, how much would it cost for you to embed one? Would you accept a serious bounty for it assuming the focus is self hosted / no Waterfox backend services?
> When (not in your lifetime obviously) Waterfox is broken, what canaries do you have deployed that we can archive now, like Mozilla's tell here?
This is so melodramatic. It’s a set of patch files applied to the Firefox source tree. If an evil maintainer hatches a maniacal plan to collect user statistics and deletes the patch that removes telemetry or whatever, you can just `git revert`.
To Mozilla: if your intentions are indeed good as you claim in your post[1], then update the ToS accordingly.
Chrome is removing µBlock origin, I and probably a lot of other users saw this as a good moment to promote Firefox to our relatives, you are missing a chance and alienating your user base here.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...
Absolutely agree. The blog post is claiming the opposite to what their ToS is granting - but one is fluff (that will be forgotten soon) while the other is legally binding. I cannot imagine applications like browsers that would require such an unrestricted license for user input just to do its service. That clearly indicates some "other" future motive that is underlined by the notion to remove the FAQ entry and other past actions towards an advertising future at Mozilla.
Am looking forward to explore some of the alternatives. And no, I don't want a just a correcting/updating/informing follow-up blog post of how we the users got it all wrong. In fact, the current UPDATE makes it worse:
"UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice."
vs. the ToS:
"You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
No - you don't need a license for my input. Just pass the butter, it's not your job to "use that information" in any way, form or shape. How did you survive 26 years without any license to our input? What did legally change that would require that license? No one asked you to: "We use data to make Firefox functional and sustainable, improve your experience, and keep you safe." (from the blog). What does that even mean? If you have specific use-cases in mind state them clearly, instead of this overreaching general license, that may or may not be misused now or in future. As of this ToS you may very sell my data to AI companies to "help me navigate the internet" which is not even part of the Privacy Notice protection.
Reinstatement your privacy guarantees in the ToS and be transparent about explicit use-cases.
Meanwhile, so long, and thanks for all the fish.
The blog does come from company officials and so you can show it to a judge and state "this is how you should interpret their ToS". It will be harder than if the ToS was clear, but the judge on seeing the ToS and blog differ is likely to come down hard to Mozilla for creating this situation. But you also need a good (expensive) lawyer to pull this off.
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I haven't read the article. All I know is, Firefox changed their TOS.
> That clearly indicates some "other" future motive
It's training data, isn't it?
(It's always training data).
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> How did you survive 26 years without any license to our input?
Might be a case of covering their asses in the context of services they provide for search suggestions etc. Those are not mere programs users run on their own devices, and they rather make use of services run by Mozilla, which probably leads to their lawyers seeing the need for legally covering Mozilla ass.
A less charitable interpretation is that they actually want to introduce terms for using the software itself, in a way that conflicts with the no-nonsense "no restrictions on use" approach of open source, and thus ignoring open source principles in preference for covering their asses against hypothetical risks, while somehow still trying to look like open source.
In any case I agree the blog post or the update don't make anything better. I don't think the post says anything substantial about the terms of use or their introduction. It doesn't, in concrete terms, clarify anything about the seeming conflict between the introduction of terms of use and the commonly accepted definition of open source (which includes no restrictions on use). The post rather seems like a classic case of trying to make things better with nice-sounding words rather than owning up and actually clarifying any ambiguity.
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Based on this, Firefox has a 2.54% market share of browsers worldwide, so if their goal here is to shoot themselves in the foot and get that number under 2%, mission accomplished.
Firefox is still the lesser of two evils when compared to Chrome with all of its telemetry turned on. And at least it supports a proper implementation of uBlock origin, which Google just broke in Chrome.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36759162
This is such a bad way to look at Firefox browser share. Instead, look at desktop share worldwide, where it's more like 7%.
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I'm one of them 2.54% and I cringe when some kiddie develops websites around some chrome bugs, just to let us and Apple folks down.
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To put some numbers on what a 2.54% market share means, Firefox actually tracks this data. See here: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity:
> Monthly Active Users (MAU) measures the number of Firefox Desktop clients active in the past 28 days.
> February 10, 2025: 163,203,913 clients
> February 17, 2025: 163,742,671 clients
> Finally, you are in control. We’ve set responsible defaults that you can review during onboarding or adjust in your settings at any time: These simple, yet powerful tools let you manage your data the way you want.
"simple yet powerful tools" (derogatory) is how i would describe the windows popup that gives you the choice between setting up a microsoft account now or being nagged about it later
‘“Simple yet powerful tools” (derogatory)’ is my new favorite phrase I think. It seems like it has wide applications outside tech as well.
Or they are taking the gamble that being able to continue to use µBlock outweighs the sale of customer data.
An interesting implication of this is that it would point to Firefox being considered a service from Mozilla (hence why they need a license to facilitate your use of the program).
If we now look at their "Acceptable Use Policy", we can find this:
> You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to [...] Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence, [...]
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/acceptable-use/
And to corroborate the applicability of the Acceptable Use Policy to the Firefox browser:
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, [...]
("Acceptable Use Policy" is hyperlinked to the aforementioned page)
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
So one could interpret this all to say that you're not allowed to view or download porn via Firefox. Additionally, "graphic depictions of violence" could extend to things like the sort of bodycam footage and reporting from war zones frequently seen in news reports.
It is really unfortunate.
My Firefox install lately added links to what could be considered not so nice sites for grandmas like amazon.com and hotels.com to the start screen.
It is quite clear they see it as their program not mine program.
I dunno for how long I will stick to using the least worst alternative. To go for custom builds would be giving up on Mozilla.
edit: Toned down language
>scam sites like amazon.com
Since when is Amazon a scam site?
I don't like em' either, but hyperbole doesn't help.
For what it's worth, it can be removed in about 4 seconds.
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Use LibreWolf. It's just firebox rebuilt and released with better defaults (no suggestions/spying)
Yeah, it's annoying, but also nothing particularly new I believe. There seem to be two types of garbage links added by default:
1. "Sponsored shortcuts" that can be "easily" turned off in `about:preferences#home`
2. I guess "non-sponsored" shortcuts? I believe they pointed to Facebook, eBay, and something else (Pinterest maybe). Those have to be removed/"blocked" individually. I think they end up in `browser.newtabpage.blocked` after doing so.
I don't like that this is a thing I have to do whenever I set up a new Firefox install. It's not often, to be fair, but it still sucks nonetheless.
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> You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to: Do anything illegal or otherwise violate applicable law,
No civil disobedience. Bad Mozilla! Bad, bad Mozilla!
I don't read it the way you say. The more restrictive terms are for use of services. If you use firefox, you have to agree not to use the Mozilla services for the prohibited categories, but there are many uses of the browser that are not using Mozilla services.
If you accessed graphic content using the browser, you are not violating the terms unless you put that content up on a mozilla service somewhere. The obvious issue would be some type of bookmark sync. If you bookmarked a graphic url you might violate the terms when it syncs to mozilla, but even then it would be hard to argue that you are granting access to your future self, so unless you used a bookmark sharing service provided by mozilla, I would say its a gray area. So disable bookmark sync. I typically disable all external services in my browser so this would not be relevant.
But my point is that even though you have to agree to the use policy when downloading the browser, it doesn't mean it governs all use of the browser.
IANAL
Isn't the internet for pr0n?
Firefox has Mozilla facilitated services in it, and the license is saying " we get to use the data we see to help the service".
I don't think their AUP considers the browser software a service.
> I don't think their AUP considers the browser software a service.
One would think so, right? But why does Mozilla want me to "license" to them everything I "upload or input [...] through Firefox"[1]. Where do the "facilitated services" start and where do they end? It sure would be nice if they could draw that distinction, without it, the cautious interpretation would be that that everything is a facilitated service.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
> I don't think their AUP considers the browser software a service.
It is not just about their services! They clarify it by writing: "Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations." Src.: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
>UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.
From their blog post[1]. Smells like bullshit to me. You haven't had this license for the last 30 years and I've had no trouble browsing. What's changed that you suddenly need it?
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-terms-o...
Definitely.
There's a hidden motive, or utter incompetence in managing this side of the licensing and communication (either by beginners "better cover you ass" MBA or lawyers thinking, which could mean it's the result of some consulting firm operation).
Either way, the sudden change without proper communication is suspicious.
They are removing all the text about how they do not sell personal data as well.
My suspicion is that this is somehow related to Mozilla Anonym: https://www.anonymco.com/
If you haven't already configured "Firefox Data Collection and Use" and "Website Advertising Preferences" to not share data you should do so immediately.
What basic functionality are they talking about? Do they list it anywhere? Or is "basic functionality" the new "security reasons" for justifying every stupid rule or policy.
Tactical vagueness.
Mere speculations: they might have been contemplating the integration of their Orbit add-on into the browser. For that, they might need some extra legal fluffs.
I have no idea what I am talking about but could it be related to future AI related features that process user data locally and/or on their servers? At least that would make some sense to me.
“process user data locally”
Ha! As if slowing down browsing and your computer would have a good result.
They're covering their asses for something. That could also just mean that the old license/terms/privacy policy doesn't actually cover the data processing they're already doing (i.e. the opt-out telemetry, the account sync mechanism, etc.). If they publicly admit that their previous agreements didn't provide enough legal cover to allow their basic data processing, the class action lawsuit vultures would be all over them.
Something something malice something incompetence.
> What's changed that you suddenly need it?
That lawyers are spooked. That's all there is. California changed the rules and that made every lawyer in an organization that can't have a portrayed legal battle with the state very nervous. Nothing in the language says that they can do things that they couldn't do before.
Absolute bullshit.
> Mozilla can suspend or end anyone’s access to Firefox at any time for any reason, including if Mozilla decides not to offer Firefox anymore.
On what planet is that free, open source?
Can you imagine: "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) can suspend anyone's access to GNU Emacs at any time for any reason, including if the FSF decides not to offer GNU Emacs any more".
Judging from nearby wording, this is primarily geared towards the Firefox account stuff as opposed to the Firefox browser.
(I'm not happy with Mozilla's decision to name everything Firefox, it makes things like this confusing.)
If that was the intention, the correct term would have been "Mozilla's services". The very first sentence of that document defines Firefox: "Firefox is free and open source web browser software".
As a non-legal word of advice: when reading legal text, always read defensively. Never assume good will when legal matters are concerned.
Yes, it seems like Mozilla has long had a problem of marketing getting in the way of communication. This keeps happening over and over gain. They make changes for marketing reasons, and then people are confused when they make policy changes because they've solidified their naming so much in the pursuit of brand recognition that their audience (rightly) is confused about what they're actually saying when they use that brand name to refer to a singular component of their offerings.
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Let's not forget this post: https://web.archive.org/web/20210109032814/https://blog.mozi...
What’s wrong with transparency for advertisements? If you take offense to the “boosting” of news sites, I see the point but now we have Elon arbitrarily boosting his own content on X.
Not sure how you end up solving that issue other than perhaps a more transparent system like the original Birdwatch.
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This post was what finally pushed me to switch after years of growing dissatisfaction.
Here's the remaining paragraph:
> If we decide to suspend or end your access, we will try to notify you at the email address associated with your account or the next time you attempt to access your account
It seems like this is not about the browser itself, but rather about Firefox accounts. The wording is pretty ambiguous, though.
They’re referring to the binary release, in this case. You can compile Firefox from source at any time (but if you distribute it, you’re not allowed to call it Firefox due to trademark restrictions)
Open source does technically allow you to put restrictions on binary releases, as long as users can do whatever they want with the source code and compile it from scratch.
It really goes against the spirit of open source though.
This likely refers to Firefox-the-product, not Firefox-the-open-source-project since there's no functional way to revoke your access to a mercurial checkout on your PC.
It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses, either. I recall seeing ones that basically say "If you file a patent suit around this open software, your rights to use it are gone".
> It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses, either. I recall seeing ones that basically say "If you file a patent suit around this open software, your rights to use it are gone".
Trying to take back the license based on use of the software, however, would make it not "open source", since that would be use restriction.
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- "It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses,"
Yes, but aside from jokes[0] it's unprecedented for an OSS license to attempt to restrain the purposes for which end-users use software. That's incompatible with the definition of free software ("free", as in "freedom").
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSLint#License
- "Before that, the JSLint license[4] was a derivative of the MIT License.[5] The sole modification was the addition of the line "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."
- "According to the Free Software Foundation, this previous clause made the original license non-free."
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The problem I have with these kinds of hot-takes is that they often don't tell the full story, and it's seemingly for the purpose of generating rage. For some inexplicable reason, this guy truncates the paragraph from the Terms of Use, repackaging the information without a key part of the final sentence: "....to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
I'm not saying that this definitely makes a material difference, but it certainly changes the framing of it. The way he has framed it makes it sound like Mozilla has given itself carte blanche to do what it wants -- but the little caveat at the end of the sentence really does change the narrative a little bit. So why cut off a sentence half-way through it -- is it maybe to make it sound worse? For that reason alone, I can't take this guy seriously.
I generally wait before jumping on the outrage-train for this reason, but two things stand out:
- Mozilla explicitly deleting "we don't sell your data" statements across their documentation
- Following up to criticism that the statement is vague, bullshitty and open to interpretation with statements that are even more vague, bullshitty and open to interpretation.
By now, they've had time to notice that something is not right and that they need to make a clear statement, and they haven't taken the opportunity.
They didn't delete it. Go to the github diff they reference and check. It's still there. They just removed it from one of the JSON files but people here aren't actually checking facts, they're just jumping on the hate train.
See: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
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That bit pretty much sounds like "by using the software you're agreeing to whatever"
Yes and this phrasing is used in many other products, like credit cards. Additionally, the fact that the phrasing can be interpreted as such means that it will be interpreted as such and so makes Mozilla's new Terms unacceptable to anyone who values their privacy or data.
No it doesn't. Most businesses finish that sentence with "...for any purpose" not "... to help you navigate the web"
It will still be interpreted to mean "...for any purpose" by Mozilla somehow.
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So, what do you read the end of that sentence mean? Because the way I read it is worse:
> to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
I don't read that as a caveat, so I'm assuming it means something different to you. To reword slightly and hopefully show how that sentence is coming across to me:
> As you have indicated by using Firefox you have given us the right to...
Im fully on board that people should try to include or link as much of a story they can so that I can form my own opinion. There are way too many times that I read a reasonable take, then you read the original source, only to find that the reasonable take is completely off base.
In this case I don't have the reaction, but I will agree that in general its a good idea to include more rather than less.
The redacted part here looks to be a GDPR boilerplate for consent. GDRP require consent to be specific. In order to do so the lawyers of Mozilla seems to have used industry standard phrasing to comply with the law, such as "to help you navigate, enhance experience, and interact with {INSERT SERVICE/PRODUCT}".
For those with some interest in legal history, there is similar stories in other boilerplate texts that consumer get exposed to. I always find the background to the WARRANTY DISCLAIMER text to have a fairly funny historical background that is a few centuries old legal case regarding a mill axle. The current form we see now was created as the first example in a list from US regulation guidelines (which reference the mill axle case). A company can use any other form given in that guideline, but as it happens, everyone just jumped on the first example, slapped it onto stuff and shipped it. Lawyers know it is valid for US trade regulation and that was apparently enough for the rest of the world.
> "....to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
We weren't born yesterday, and companies pull this shit all the time. This sentence is meaningless. You could use this sentence to justify literally any behaviour.
One _easy_ way to read this change:
> "... to help you interact with online content"
Selling your data to have more relevant ads could easily be justified as helping you interact with online content
> as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Using firefox indicates that you want us to do this.
Or,
we made it an opt-out that is quietly rolled out in an update.
Correct, that quote is very typical corporate language that includes selling your data to advertising companies to ""help users discover new experiences which align with their interests"" or some other weasel speak. People acting like that language meaningfully changes the meaning are either painfully naive or think the rest of us are.
If it's simply a matter of principle, quoting the full section with no abridgements because we're larping like we're in a court room or something, whatever. But get real, that section doesn't make Mozilla look any better.
No. We are talking about legality. Quote the whole bloody thing. If you don’t get to say “I picked out the bit I like” in court, then you don’t get to do it here. If you’re so right, then it’s not worth taking out in the first place.
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are you replying to wrong post? the linked tweet says:
> Mozilla has just deleted the following:
> “Does Firefox sell your personal data?”
> “Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. "
That tweet is 100% correct, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43209001 for two links, all references to "not selling personal data" are gone. There is no missing context or truncation here, and this says nothing about terms-of-use (except commit message but that's immaterial)
I can’t take people seriously who think the little frilly PR bandaids that companies slap on these types of statements mean much of anything at all.
For example, “we promise”.
But Mozilla said what they will do. They also had very expensive rebranding to support it! They are now activist AI company that wants to fight disinformation, censor people and sell ads.
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You know, I was just wondering why no one has yet shaped the Rust vs C/C++ in US culture war terms. One side is clearly progressive in the sense of wanting to make changes for the sake of a better (more memory safe) future. The other side is more conservative, seeing enormous benefit in keeping the status quo unchanged.
And that's before getting into the politics of the people working on the language, of which I won't say more.
Here was me thinking we had at least one discussion where the US culture war hadn't metastasised. But I guess in the long run twitter.com/lundukejournal and friends will eventually win. Can't say I'm looking forward to it.
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You are kind of answering your own question here...
I am, unfortunately, looking at alternative browsers because of this. Firefox was the best fit. Big enough that they could reasonably keep up but not one of the corporate browsers that I have 0 trust in. It wasn't perfect but it was better than chrome for sure.
Browsers are like cars now. It is becoming impossible to buy a new(er) car and have your privacy respected, but it is unreasonable to expect any normal life (at least in most of the US) without using cars or browsers. So, things like cars and browsers should have strong protections because there is no avoiding them. Unfortunately that is obviously not the case. You should never be forced to sign an adversarial TOS to earn a living or live a normal life, but here we are. TOS that are effective without you even reading them, that say they own you, everything you type, everything you do, that change and bind you without your consent or knowledge and what are you going to do about it? Given any reasonable choice I will take it, but the reasonable choices are dwindling.
LibreWolf? It's Firefox without the Mozilla branding
I switched to LibreWolf over this, and it's good so far. A couple of things:
* I had to switch off the fingerprinting protection. For me, running at 60 FPS and without automatic CSS dark mode detection isn't worth whatever fingerprint resistance it provides. Sadly, you don't have granular control over RFP, you have to turn it off entirely.
* It doesn't have Google Search available by default, but it turned out to be fairly straightforward to add. DuckDuckGo is just too slow to load for me compared to Google, and their AI integration is stupid. Google doesn't have AI answers and text fields like DDG does in my region.
* Their implementation of container tabs don't seem to support automatically opening certain URLs in certain containers, which is annoying. Maybe I can get the official container tabs extension working, but I kinda wish LibreWolf either had proper container tabs or left it out in favour of the Mozilla extension.
Otherwise, it seems great. I found it hard to pick between all the different Firefox forks and rebrands, but LibreWolf seemed like one of the more serious ones and I don't regret going with it.
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I've been using LibreWolf as my daily driver for a couple of years. Highly recommended! Available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Ranked as the highest for privacy protection in a 2022 study: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/06/15/privacytests-reveals-how-y...
Occasionally, you might get a broken website but to fix it you just click on the shield icon and lower the privacy settings.
Any recommendations for an Android Firefox replacement?
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I switched because of this. Day 1 so no opinion yet.
You can always buy old cars. Can’t use old browsers unless you really like getting pwned.
Icecat is the GNU build of the open-source base of Firefox. I think that's the best bet until Ladybird is ready for daily diving.
Fennec on Android.
Brave is fantastic.
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> You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox
Wait, now Mozilla operates Firefox for me and I can just lean back while they do the browsing?
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license
Really the whole document looks like it was copy-pasted from some SaaS template.
Does Mozilla not have a lawyer that reviewed this who knows what a browser is?
Sounds like a license to train on your data.
This is exactly it. They're covering their bases as they roll out AI garbage no one asked for.
> Wait, now Mozilla operates Firefox for me and I can just lean back while they do the browsing?
Yea, this is the root "shitty attitude:" This idea that programs 1. running on my computer, 2. loaded from my hard drive, 3. into my RAM, 4. outputting to my monitor, are, in reality "Operated by [COMPANY]." Fuck that. Just because you wrote the software, doesn't mean you're "operating" it. I don't want an ongoing relationship with my products' vendors. Their role is to make it and distribute it to me, from that point on, butt out!
This made me look into Firefox forks/alternatives:
Librewolf [1] seems to be fairly active (last commit on Codeberg was last week) and up-to-date with the latest upstream releases (mirrors FF's versioning scheme and matches their latest). Has a nice focus on privacy and no-telemetry.
Floorp [2] also looks active (last commit last week), also claims focus on privacy. Based off FF's extended support releases so it may lag behind in latest features.
Waterfox [3] is also active (last commit a few hours ago), also big focus on privacy, but it uses a custom versioning scheme so I can't tell how closely it follows FF's releases.
GNU IceCat's [4] latest release was in November 02023, so it looks like it may be abandoned.
Does anyone have any experience with any of these, good or bad? With all of them more or less promising the same things it's hard to tell which one may be the better option.
1: https://librewolf.net/
2: https://floorp.app/en
3: https://www.waterfox.net/
4: https://icecatbrowser.org/
Try going to gitlab.com with librewolf, you'll see a white page with no content. Librewolf is blocked off from half the internet that uses cloudflare, so it's kind of a useless browser.
Every browser that's not a majority browser will be associated with these kind of blocking risk. I can't risk access to my financially important accounts, nobody can. So to me this is not a feasible alternative.
The only way to build a browser is to act like one of the others, and to behave like one of the others. Can't use brave, given their history, but farbling approach is the most sustainable solution in my opinion.
My remaining hope is that ladybird will actively deny implementing web standards that can be used for fingerprinting.
Something as simple as overflow:hidden is used on every website to force people to get tracked by having to activate JS, and things like this should be something a web browser should protect its users from.
We need a CSS engine that denies setting these kinds of things, because JS fingerprint prevention isn't enough if every website breaks because of it.
If you want a headstart, I tried forking webkit and do exactly this. Project is unmaintained because couldn't work fulltime on it without funding. Maybe somebody else picks it up? [1]
[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit
> gitlab.com with librewolf, you'll see a white page with no content
It works fine, even with JS disabled.
This is purely FUD per my experience. I use librewolf on websites behind cloudflare and with plenty of js. They all work just as well as they did in Firefox.
Librewolf sends Firefox in the user agent, and you can toggle Firefox "features" on if a website you use requires them.
Not trying to convince you to switch to it--you do you. Just sharing with someone who might be reading this thread and that hasn't tried librewolf.
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> Try going to gitlab.com with librewolf, you'll see a white page with no content.
> If you want a headstart, I tried forking webkit and do exactly this
> [1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit
I just opened that page on LibreWolf without any problems.
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I use librewolf as my daily driver after the Firefox "privacy preserving ad measurement" SNAFU last year [1,2]. The fingerprint resistant and anti-canvas functions were different, but I got used to them and I really appreciate the added features.
With that, having everything turned on can break some sites. If a site wasn't all that important and isn't respecting privacy, I just won't visit it. Otherwise, I'll keep another browser around just in case I absolutely must for business or something else.
When Firefox began opting people in by default to leak data to advertisers, it felt like the beginning of the end to me. After looking into canvas and other fingerprinting capabilities, it's somehow still surprising and alarming to me how far companies go to invade our privacy.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974112
Iceweasel has been around for sometime:
https://github.com/adonais
https://sourceforge.net/projects/libportable/files/Iceweasel...
Forks can be healthy for a number of reasons =3
Oh, I thought IceWeasel had been renamed to IceCat, but the repo you linked to has recent activity and calls it IceWeasel, now I'm a bit confused. Glad to see it's active though.
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thanks for the research. I just quickly tried them all. I have an older mac with older FF. Results: librewolf and waterfox wont run (10.15 min) and the floorp (react) website crashes. IceCat runs! and seems to use LibreJS for javascript, so my first few tests failed because you have to individually allow scripts per site. I quite like that idea! although my quick test of breakout (HN yesterday) runs slow/stuttery. A couple other sites are throwing up js console errors, so I need to play around with it more. It did enable me to access the floorp website, but also 10.15 min. I guess this helps me migrate faster to my asahi setup, although I've been trying to keep that one away from daily browsing and the little web of horrors.
I wonder if this FF change is pre AI infection, which might end up affecting these other builds too. Pretty disappointing after such strong privacy promises for so long, whatever the reason for these changes.
> I have an older mac with older FF. Results: librewolf and waterfox wont run (10.15 min)
That's just because Firefox itself requires at least macOS 10.15. IceCat only works because it's based off of Firefox ESR; once the next ESR comes out IceCat won't work either.
There is a fork of Firefox (which is in fact the web browser I use) that adds back support for older versions of macOS. At the moment, it supports all the way back to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. However, this is all it does; it does not contain any additional privacy features above and beyond mainline Firefox. However, I guess it technically isn't a Mozilla product, so you won't need to agree to Mozilla's Terms of Service.
https://github.com/i3roly/firefox-dynasty/releases
you should add zen browser[1] too, i tried some from your list, librewolf breaks some websites (online banking doesn't work) floorp is a good one, but in my experience zen is better.
1: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop
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> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information,
Taken literally it means that when I use Firefox to upload a file to a customer's web site Mozilla is getting that file too, which does not seem likely. They could get a copy of the text I'm typing right now in Firefox or it means that the browser could do some local processing on those data. But if the results of that processing would stay local why would they ask the permission? It's not that emacs, vim, grep, sed, awk etc have to ask me the permission to use the information I'm inputting into them. So they are definitely sending information back home or they plan to do it.
The point becomes how to block any calls from Firefox to Mozilla. Note that don't have a Firefox account because I never trusted that the data in transit from them would stay private. I'm not logged in into Google as well. Maybe I have to finally install a Pi Hole and route all my traffic through it. Hopefully Blockada will take care of that for my Android devices.
I have seen discussions of this sort of wording so many times over the years. My understanding is as follows (and I could be wrong, but this is my understanding of why that wording is used). If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file. Because of Draconian laws in many countries, to publish a file you have to have a legal right to the file, therefore Mozilla have to establish that if you use them to upload a file that you are granting them the legal right to publish that file. It has to be worldwide because you may be uploading to anywhere in the world.
So why doesn't my backpack come with a mandatory TOS that I won't e.g. put illegal drugs in it and bring it across the border? Why is Firefox any more liable if I used it to publish illegal content on the web than the backpack manufacturer would be if I used it to smuggle illegal content across a border?
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Perhaps the legal situation is different somewhere, but I would think the browser isn't acting at all. It has no agency; it's just software running on my computer, following instructions I give it. Mozilla has no agency in that situation either; the software is running on my computer, not theirs.
The new terms grant Mozilla, the corporation a license to do things with my data.
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> If you use Firefox to upload a file to a website then, legally speaking,the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file.
If that's the way the law is interpreted, it's silly.
The "publisher" in this case would be the website the file is uploaded to. If the website doesn't make the file public, then they're not a "publisher".
The browser is merely acting as a tool to do the uploading. Firefox shouldn't be held liable for the contents of the file any more than any other web client. If it did, tools like cURL should be liable in the same way.
Somewhere along the way web browser authors forgot that they're merely building a web user _agent_. It's a tool that acts _on behalf of_ the user, in order to help them access the web in a friendly way. It should in no way be aware of the content the user sends and receives, have a say in matters regarding this content, and let alone share that information with 3rd parties. It's an outrageous invasion of privacy to do otherwise.
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By such logic, operating systems would need a disclaimer like this, as would keyboards, screens, etc.
> the browser is acting as a "publisher"of that file
If that's all is required to be a publisher then ftp, scp, rsync and hundreds of similar tools are also publishers of the files they transfer. However they don't have Terms of Service like the one Mozilla is giving to Firefox.
That’s interesting, do you know of any cases that were decided on that basis? It seems downright ridiculous but then the legal system is pretty dumb, so…
They could restrict the language to that specific legal situation, couldn't they?
At this point my trust in Mozilla is so low that I could almost believe they intent to run the text I download and upload through an LLM nanny that can scold or ban me if anything offends its Californian sensibilities.
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
> You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to [...] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/acceptable-use/
“Californian”??...
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As the browser runs locally on our machine, surely its possible to just block firefox phoning home by DNS black holes or even hosts file or something?
That's exactly what Firefox originally claimed was a stark difference compared to Chrome: "use us and you can finally be safe and not need to play cat and mouse anymore"
If you’re planning this, just use a fork of Firefox that does those things. Less setup and you don’t need to update that file whenever they change the domains used for telemetry.
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> is easy to block network access (never plug ethernet)
Some TVs secretly include a modem and SIM card, to make sure they get your personal data back to their masters.
Every company in the world is coming after your privacy. How far are you willing to defend it?
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Since Mozilla removed all mention of not selling my data in a recent PR and seems hellbent on an ad-based future, I've deleted my Firefox account and moved to Librewolf across my devices, and I'll encourage everyone I know to do the same.
It's a sad end to my literal decades of support for them.
I use a Firefox fork too, but do you think it would continue to be around without Mozilla?
It's sad to see them squander an opportunity to do good work. Mozilla should have gone all-in on ethics/privacy in contrast to tech giants and made an offering like Proton. Or gone with the Wikipedia donate model like another commenter said. Any compromise on their values is insane mismanagement, that was their whole brand.
The overwhelming majority of Mozilla foundation's revenue is from Goggle corps.
For making goggle the default search engine.
So they aren't really "in contrast to tech giants" in any way.
> I use a Firefox fork too
If not LibreWolf then what? The rest seem out of date or worse than Firefox in some way.
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I don’t know. I’m hoping that after their attempts at building an ad network fail, they pivot back to developing a browser by focusing on features their users actually want. Or maybe by the time Mozilla fails another alternative springs up, like Ladybird.
To your point, cloning Proton is such an obvious path forward to generate revenue while staying true to their values. Even selling a Firefox Pro with an annual fee offering some developer-specific or power-user features would be great.
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Does librewolf maintain their own browser engine? I thought it was just a repackaged Firefox fork?
As for your Firefox account, you could consider hosting your own sync server. The documentation for it is of varying quality, but you can keep your data off Mozilla's servers without sacrificing some pretty useful functionality.
I'm not familiar with this change, do you have a link?
The phrase "we don’t sell access to your data" has been removed, gated behind a feature flag connected to this TOS change. Their FAQ was updated to remove the "Does Firefox sell your personal data? Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise" as well. [0]
Combined with their blog posts from the CEO saying "we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term." [1]
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...
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I use librewolf with privacy badger on macos (best browser) except when I have to run on battery - then its Orion (also the best browser).
been using mozilla since i was a teenager and now i'm an old family man...
this whole thing and recent change goes contrary to what i thought they were about.
i'm done with them at this point.
the migration will be painful...
Link directly to the Github commit: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b..., which links to the following issue: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/issues/16016
There are a bunch of locked Google docs linked in the issue, probably internal privacy guidelines.
I can't say that this surprises me, perhaps they are looking for alternate revenue streams in case Google cuts them out?
To HN: Will you be quitting firefox over this change, or is there simply no better place to leave for?
What's the purpose of gating "we don’t sell access to your data" by "if switch('firefox-tou')"?
They said in the commit comment that the new TOU will "roll out" to different people at different times.
Does that in multiple places. Maybe they wanted a way to quickly revert it? Or enable on countries where they think they can get away with it?
"No better place to leave for" seems an apt way to put it.
I think/fear that in the long run, there will be fewer and fewer ways to participate in activities and communities on the web on your own terms, as only a vetted, allowlisted set of client builds (that may be "open source" on the tin, but by that point it is effectively meaningless) will be able to pass CDN "anti-abuse" restrictions. It will not be a better web, but it sure will be more profitable for some.
> No better place to leave for
This is an amazingly common psychological trap. You wouldn't believe the number of people, men as well as women, who end up in the therapy chair, at the police station or at the hospital A&E, because they are "stuck" with a violent and abusive partner.
The modern tech landscape is all about abuse. People use fancy names for it like "enshitification" or "rot economy" - but at the end of the day it's about domination and abusive relations.
A very common position here is that the victim sees "no alternative".
And... surprise surprise, where they get that idea from is the partner, friends, group/organisation that is also toxic and colludes in gas-lighting and co-abusing the victim into a limited worldview.
Once the victim spends any amount of time outside that mental prison, they regain perspective and say... "Oh, so I actually do have choices!".
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Yes, I’ll be leaving. I used to prefer Firefox but have long since moved to Safari for browsing and <insert Chromium based browser> for web dev. Every year I give switching to FF a try. I’ve been using it for everything since mid-December but it’s honestly a pretty bad user experience. This is the move that’s gonna make me stop for this year’s trial run and all future ones. It’s simply not worth my time if their ideals don’t align with mine anymore. Safari and Chromium have their issues but I know what benefits I’m trading off for. Without ideals, FF has no standout features compared to the alternatives (for me).
I'll look for somewhere else. Web browsers aren't as special as they used to be, there's a lot more choice now. Funny thing was, I was paying for Firefox through some of their services (VPN) that I had no intent to use.
I quit the original l"Firefox" a long time ago, I've been using librewolf since its release and now zen (also a firefox fork) and I keep ungoogled chromium in case a site is broken on firefox.
> To HN: Will you be quitting firefox over this change, or is there simply no better place to leave for?
It doesn't really concern me yet. I'll wait for the controversy to die down and examine it then.
I'll stay for the time being because there is no better alternative.
Yeah, I've been a Firefox user and Mozilla supporter for approaching two decades now, even used to donate monthly to the foundation. I'm furious over this. I installed LibreWolf on my personal machines last night and expect to uninstall Firefox after work today.
I'm a happy LibreWolf for years. The transition from FF to LibreWolf is seamless. And you won't be surprised anymore nor annoyed when Mozilla does moves like that.
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> To HN: Will you be quitting firefox over this change, or is there simply no better place to leave for?
Not to be overly whataboutistic, but we tolerate sooo much more from other players. It's annoying how we hold some to a higher standard, but ignore others doing worse. I get people are disappointed in Mozilla and wants them to do better, but it's a bit like the "we live in a society meme", where those doing good must be perfect or else..
I use Firefox, and advocate for people to use Firefox, because I believe it's the one browser that is not evil. It's the entire reason for the existence of Firefox.
Saying, well, why aren't you upset that Chrome is evil is such a confusion of ideas I barely know how to respond. Yes, I know Chrome is evil, I've been telling people that for many years, and I don't use it.
> It's annoying how we hold some to a higher standard, but ignore others doing worse.
People use FF, _because_ they can hold it to a higher standard. That's the entire point.
Those perceived to be doing good are often used to lessen the blow of those perceived to be doing bad. Like how it's not so bad if your train sinks of faeces if there's a bus you can take instead. Losing the safe alternative makes the original sin worse.
> Not to be overly whataboutistic, but we tolerate sooo much more from other players. It's annoying how we hold some to a higher standard, but ignore others doing worse.
Who is "we"? It certainly doesn't include me.
Someone who tries to gain your trust only to betray it gets a stronger reaction than a known bad actor doing what they are known for? Color me surprised.
> I get people are disappointed in Mozilla and wants them to do better, but it's a bit like the "we live in a society meme", where those doing good must be perfect or else
You are talking like mozilla made a mistake. Yet their response was not to apologize but to claim people are just confused.
How much shit can Mozilla pull before people are allowed to say enough is enough?
I'll keep using firefox simply because I keep it behind a proxy server with all pocket, mozilla, firefox and google domains blocked.
The larger impact I suspect this will have in my life, is that I'll increasingly turn to not using websites, opting instead to using tools like yt-dlp.
These changes didn't just happen because of a bunch of greedy ad pushers. This and many other changes over the last few decades came about by taking my tax money and pouring it into these companies to gain compliance to state agendas. This isn't something the 'community' will be able to stave off.
If the internet is just going to become another medium like TV, Radio and newspapers were for so many years, adding on top the ability of the producers to watch me watching them, then it's over. The tech community is full of intellectual dishonest sellouts. Game over. Let's push letsencrypt again in response to the state backdooring the certificate authorities, duuurrr. "AI", duurrrr.
What other tools are you using instead of Firefox and/or a browser?
How does discovery work with tools like yt-dlp?
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I have long left the sinking ship and switched to enshitified and actually private https://librewolf.net/
Which will go under within a few years of FF dying. (Yes, the current code may still work, but the web will move on without it.)
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It's all so strange. I would happily buy Firefox, either as a one off, or as an annual license, and be done with all the weird license nonsense - presumably they want to sell data to pay the bills.
But instead the choice, realistically, seems to be between giving all my browsing data to Google and to Mozilla. And Chrome works marginally better... :/
I would wager most people that offer to buy software "one off" typically underestimate their lifetime worth earned through other means like ads and data sales.
Would you pay a one-time $10 for a lifetime Firefox license? $100? $1,000? $10,000?
Last time I checked, Mozilla's ARPU was less than $5 pa. I think many of us would pay a multiple of that per annum _iff_ it went towards Firefox and not whatever project/cause of the week that Mozilla has undertaken.
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Without thinking much about it, $60 / yr seems reasonable to me.
I never click on any ads, so while I'm sure I contribute to Firefox's revenue as another pair of eyeballs, I don't deliver any end value to their ad-biz end customers.
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This logic applies more to Google than Mozilla. Their mission is (or ought to be) to cover development and hosting costs associated with Firefox, not to milk users for all they are worth on the ad market.
Firefox is open source. You can take the source code and strip out all of the malware, spying, telemetry and corporate harm leaving a safe and private browser (to the extent any modern browser can be).
There are multiple forks that do that. Download one of them instead. Mozilla Corporation has no control over those, so if you don't like what Mozilla make, exercise your software freedom.
The problem with Mozilla, as far as I can see, is not the the compromises they make for obtaining money (everyone suffers that), its that they're deceptive and underhand about it. That makes them unethical. I wrote plenty regarding that here [0]
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
The problem with these privacy-first Firefox forks is none have the resources to match FF.
If Firefox dies, eventually so will they, as the code stagnates relative to better-funded browsers.
Saying "switch to a privacy-first fork" is not a long-term solution.
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Anyone can fork. However you need to keep your fork updated as firefox does new releases which means repeating that work often. Either that you are need to support all the security fixes yourself.
Rather than downloading random binaries from random forks (or clamour for governance at the sidelines), you can take back more control by building your own fork.
Librewolf and Waterfox are two fine choices to use for upstream sincr they have saner defaults and make the forking and building easier to wire up.
Ive been running my own FF fork for a few years like this now.
> presumably they want to sell data to pay the bills.
Can't the EU just sponsor Firefox?
That's the surest way to kill it, and that is before taking their recent anti-privacy policies into consideration.
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Personally I don't think it's about the money, I think it's about what they actually want to do. I think they like their plan and are happy with it.
Sigh. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Mozilla's situation. The "weird license nonsense" you're vaguely gesturing at doesn't even make sense in context. Firefox is open source under MPL 2.0.
Your framing that "the choice is between giving all my browsing data to Google and to Mozilla" creates a false equivalence. Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.
And "Chrome works marginally better"? By what metric? Firefox has better memory usage, stronger privacy protections, and doesn't exist primarily as a data collection tool for the world's largest advertising company.
The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web. This kind of uninformed take that ignores the nuances of browser economics is exactly why we can't have nice things on the open web.
Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.
>This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't that the entire brand identity of Firefox is Privacy.
>It's like discovering there's ham in a vegetarian sandwich. When you ask them they look puzzled and say their focus group was clear it tastes a lot better that way, besides it's just a little bit and the bread is vegetarian and there's way more meat in a Big Mac.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30715947
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> "Chrome works marginally better"
Performance, compatibility, security. Chromium runs faster, it works with more websites, it's sandbox is better, particularly on Android. I don't care much about memory usage as I don't need a billion tabs open at once (does anyone). There's options available beyond Chrome that offer most of the same privacy benefits as Firefox does.
I think marginal is an understatement. As for Mozilla's business model, what business model? They're throwing everything at the wall to see if it sticks and virtually nothing has, all the while their browser has languished. Going full cynic, at this point the only reason it is allowed to exist is because Google deem it useful to have it around as a counterpoint to accusations that they have a monopoly.
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> Firefox has better memory usage
At the cost of a subpar cache; it's not like Chromium is leaking memory, & its memory pressure effects are both well-studied and well-understood. Yet, Firefox stans keep touting lack of comprehensive caching as some kind of advantage. I'm sorry, this is not 2005. It took Mozilla two years to implement some kind of JIT pipelining, and guess what, Chromium had V8 all along: an engine that can benefit from "open web" cooperation courtesy of Nodejs and the vast ecosystem around it. SpiderMonkey? Please. This is the crux of the issue.
> The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web.
The idea that the web—chaperoned by the likes of Mozilla, can be "open"—is the crazy, unsustainable one. OP is being pragmatic, and considering their privacy carefully. Mozilla's track record is that of a gravely mismanaged, disoriented, and subservient (Google) organisation. Firefox codebase is arcane, was already showing age even ten years ago, & now there's a whole ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers that can benefit from "open web" cooperation.
Firefox has zero moral high-ground, & pretending like it possesses some kind of virtue is a crime against semantics.
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I'm shocked when in 2025 the term "you stay in control" regarding browser emerges as something exclusive.
When a web page or a program is downloaded to my computer I cannot imagine anything else, yet every major company tries to do something opposed - take the control from me as soon as possible.
My mental model of a browser is the same as of any tool, as a hammer, purely defined by its technical capabilities to do a job, like to display a website and offer basic functionality like for saving a bookmark.
The very idea of an entity called "we", an anonymous and ever-changing cast of people managing "responsible defaults" and "simple tools to manage your data" and communicating it on their terms, making me try and keep up, is alien to this idea. They lay their hands on our data; want to know how exactly? Follow several links to this page:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#notice
The page in its tone trivializes the entire deal and is just another EULA and as such could just as well be presented in a small textbox in all-caps. It's more than the average user will ever read, and way too vague anyway.
"Be informed about what data we process about you, why and who it’s shared with (that’s this Notice!)" they say, but
...how about you show the entire dataset compiled about any user with information who is using it and for what exactly (excluding truly secret law enforcement requests). Everyone involved would be mortified with shame.
I consider a browser as similar as a complicated curl with GUI. Therefore:
- when I see that browser does not allow playing video in the background (youtube on mobile phones)
- when my browser disallows me blocking certain things
- when my browser prevents me from taking screenshot of things I can see on it
... it really angers me, as I feel betrayed. Of course, nowadays, web applications tend to get complicated and hide everything behind 'obscurity-security'; however, this should still be code that is a guest on my device, not me being a guest on their device running their code. I consider it extremely impolite behaviour.
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Browsers are becoming SmartTVs.
Either you control the software, or the software controls you, yadda yadda...
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
It's bad that it says that, because the "us" in this sentence should absolutely not be doing anything that requires such a license, and should not have a copy of it in order to do so; but "Mozilla owns" is also not a correct summary of it.
why does this require "a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license"?
Speculatively:
- nonexclusive, because they're not demanding exclusive rights to your content. If they did, there's no way this would fly.
- royalty free, because otherwise you could charge them money for doing anything with your data, even things you've asked them to do.
- worldwide, because you may ask them to communicate with servers in other countries. i.e. you are using Firefox Sync to sync your bookmarks and you travel overseas, your bookmarks are now traveling between two countries.
The question is "why do they need a license at all", IMO. The qualifiers on the license all make sense to me. It's possible additional qualifiers like 'short-term' could make it less scary.
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
I'm no expert, but this seems to imply that if your government bans accessing the internet (for you, for a subset of people, or for everyone), using Firefox through a VPN is unacceptable to Mozilla? Why would Mozilla proactively side with autocrats?
The "acceptable use" policy they are talking about ( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/acceptable-use/ ) lists heinous actions such as to "send unsolicited communication" and to "display ... content that includes graphic depictions of ... violence". Is Mozilla targeting journalists here?
I sometimes suspect that there is a strong correlation between the effortlessness with which an organisation receives funding and how out of touch it is with reality.
folks, this is NOT good. i guess we're generally at the mercy of big tech day to day, but with firefox in particular -- i use it almost more than any other software, and these terms seem particularly nasty.
i do think we can exert some pressure on mozilla here -- HN users are like 60% of the firefox user base. i recommend writing to legal-notices@mozilla.com to object to this policy. do it right now.
here's what i wrote, feel free to use it as a template:
Dear Mozilla,
I'm not just a long-time user of Firefox -- I'm a Firefox promoter. I've been recommending Firefox to all my friends, esp. since the Chrome privacy fiasco. I even pay for Mozilla Monitor just to support your organization.
I ABSOLUTELY object to your new Firefox terms of use. I DO NOT grant Mozilla any soft of license to information I "upload or input [...] through Firefox". This change is alarming and hostile. If you insist on rolling it out, there should be a clear opt-out in the browser itself. I strongly urge you to reconsider. Otherwise, I will be moving to forks, and urging others to do the same.
Sincerely,
> HN users are like 60% of the firefox user base
lol
> i recommend writing to legal-notices@mozilla.com to object to this policy
denial
anger
bargaining <--- you are here
depression
acceptance
Best accept that the Mozilla that was interested in creating a User Agent as opposed to a consumer product is gone and look for and support the creation of alternatives.
> Mozilla grants you a personal, non-exclusive license to install and use the “Executable Code" version of the Firefox web browser, which is the ready-to-run version of Firefox from an authorized source that you can open and use right away.
Does this mean these Terms of Use apply only to precompiled binaries downloaded from Mozilla, and not to copies built from source code by linux distributions?
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Does this mean they're allowed to collect data that we transmit through Firefox to the sites we visit, so long as they can come up with some justification that they're using it to "help" us?
> Every once in a while, Mozilla may decide to update these Terms. We will post the updated Terms online. We will take your continued use of Firefox as acceptance of such changes.
This kind of one-sided nonsense is something I have come to expect from the likes of Google or Facebook.
I don't know how all this will shake out, but my initial impression leaves me with waning respect for Mozilla.
This commit looks particularly bad:
https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
Notably, this was deleted from the Firefox FAQ on 2025-02-25:
> Does Firefox sell your personal data?
> Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
> Does this mean these Terms of Use apply only to precompiled binaries downloaded from Mozilla, and not to copies built from source code by linux distributions?
I think it applies if the browser is "Firefox" in name and branding. So the Debian rebuilds count for example.
So recompile and remove the Firefox branding and the ToU should definitely no longer cover you.
> Does this mean these Terms of Use apply only to precompiled binaries downloaded from Mozilla, and not to copies built from source code by linux distributions?
Yes. They couldn’t legally enforce anything for the second, except when it pertains to using Mozilla online services. Many of the Linux packages have all telemetry disabled though
For the last 10 years or so I've pendulum swung between the positions "privacy at all cost!" and "what's the point, you can't win". Well, I'm tired now and the pendulum is stuck on the latter. All I care about now is blocking ads. Go ahead Mozilla, Google, Apple, whoever, if you can hoover up my worthless browsing data without me noticing, you can have it. I hope my reading HN and watching inane Youtube videos is worth something to you.
> I hope my reading HN and watching inane Youtube videos is worth something to you.
Oh it is. It definitely is
Only if they can use it for ads which was blocked in this discussion.
Of course in the real world odds are they can't block ads perfectly and thus the data has value.
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>You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Emphasis added.
I've read that a few times now and I'm trying to decide what I think they are actually asking for. It's a bit too vague to pin down.
Mozilla does not need a world wide royalty free licence to use anyone's content if the browser is just a pipe through which connect to the web.
So what exactly are they going to use that licence to your content for and how long are they going to retain it?
Mozilla does a lot of talking about creepy behaviour. Maybe it's just the wording of this but so far it feels a bit off to me.
Mozilla.ai
I'll admit to being utterly confused by literally the first part, even before the emphasis. What follows is nitpicky, but I'd imagine every word is there for a reason. What does "operate" really mean in this context?
Mozilla(the corporate entity) is operating(=controlling?) Firefox(the software) on my machine?
Mozilla(the corporate entity) is operating Firefox(whatever corporate subdivision on their side) to further my interests as a user (gather telemetry, error reports, "privacy preserving" data about me)? In that case, does "acting on your behalf" mean that the corporate entity is browsing on my behalf? Can I download all the Metallica mp3s using Firefox and forward all happiness letters to Mozilla since they were acting on my behalf? (I know, I know, "You Are Responsible..." section disagrees with my take)
And that's before approaching the can of worms of granting a license which I may or may not be able to do depending on the original license.
> Mozilla collects certain data, like technical and settings data, to provide the core functionality of the Firefox browser and associated services, distinguish your device from others [...]
So we are granting them worldwide royalty-free licence to identify us uniquely and transfer that info to others.
Not the best privacy protection or control, and yet they claim "At Mozilla, we believe that privacy is fundamental"
Can someone please explain why they'd need that? Sure, if Firefox sends the data to Mozilla, I can see why they'd might need that type of language. It's just that Firefox is a desktop application, why would it need to send my input to anyone besides the site I'm using?
That looks like end of road for FF for me.
Have to see what other people (serious people) make of it, but that looks like a deal breaker. That's 100% spying on everything I do, because FF has a copy of it.
"Input information" on the face of it can be taken to mean moving the pointer, clicking, scrolling.
I hate to say that I am probably in the same boat.
Mozilla is totally out of touch with their users. Going to give LibreWolf a try for a while I guess.
In case anyone is unaware...
https://librewolf.net/
Genuinely asking : Who is behind librewolf and why should i trust them? They don't seem to be available in any official repos yet other than ones they self-published
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I was unaware, thank you!
This is bonkers, utter insanity. Read defensively (which is the only safe way to read legal text), this renders Firefox unsuitable for any sensitive communication: prima facie, accepting this means I violate FERPA when I talk to my students via email through Firefox. Most likely health professionals would violate HIPAA by using Firefox in a similar manner. Furthermore, this has to violate at least the spirit of GDPR in the EU where I am located.
What is this absolute clusterfuck? No, I do not consent to any of that. Which, if any, update, informed me of this change in policy? And how on earth do my data, and which data, pass through Mozilla's servers?
Unbranded forks of Firefox are not covered by that terms of service document.
Debian feature request: A system-wide switch to disable all telemetry and "cloud integration" features that make any network connection to the developers' or developers' partners' servers, applied to all software distributed in the official repositories.
It's time for distributions to only include browsers developed by non-profits
If Debian could just stick to free software that'd be grand. It is a good ideology and there is no need to change it. Introducing ideological confusion is one of the paths to organisational rot.
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Just use https://librewolf.net
So:
If the thing that doesn't suck isn't the thing that comes with the OS, it's time to fix the OS.
Also, that feature should exist. The next time I see a story about MS training ChatGPT on your nude selfies, I want to be able to show people the big red switch that says "All Telemetry: OFF" as an example of something Microsoft will never give them.
But you first have to provide it in order to show to them that you provide it.
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Why Librewolf and not Waterfox or any other open source fork?
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Surely you mean a systemwide switch you can optionally enable to allow programs to send telemetry.
Or just disable it altogether because there is no real user benefit.
Which network access is telemetry?
User explicitly requests connection to a specific server (e.g. navigates to debian.org), so browser makes a connection to debian.org: Not telemetry.
User explicitly requests a connection to a specific server (e.g. navigates debian.org), then browser makes a connection to mozilla.org to upload metadata: Telemetry.
In general telemetry is when the software connects to a server chosen by the developers and not telemetry is when the software connects to a server chosen by the user.
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Relevant discussion: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/information-about...
> Remember that to display, edit, transform (underline, italicize, fonts) the documents you write in MacWrite necessarily requires copying your document data from disk to memory to cpu to memory to display – lots of copying. Did Claris need the rights to your copyright to allow you to edit your documents in its software?
This analogy doesn't hold water in the context of giving the coparty access to your intellectual property and detracts from the point the author is trying to make. The answer is no, obviously, because Claris never had the information. The only place that information existed was in some software that lived on and only on your machine did that processing at your request.
Yet, modern mobile app stores insist on a privacy policy even if you don't send data to a server owned by the app vendor.
Couldn't you add a privacy policy that states just that? "This application doesn't send/save/process/use any user data" for example, should be a valid privacy policy if that's true.
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Previous version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250219051713/https://www.mozil...
New version: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
> Firefox also shares information with our marketing partners to measure and improve these campaigns; what information is specifically shared varies (depending on how you discovered Firefox and your operating system) but generally includes how you were referred to our download page and whether you actively use Firefox. Where Firefox is pre-installed on your device, technical and interaction data (your device type and whether Firefox is used) will be sent to our marketing partners, and shared with Mozilla. Learn more about what is collected and shared, and how to opt out.
This is new (There's no link or further reference for that "learn more" in context)
This is also new, and very broad and unqualified:
> We may also be required to process your personal data to comply with applicable laws and protection purposes, such as:
> (...)
> Identifying, investigating and addressing potential fraudulent activities, or other harmful activities such as illegal activities, cyberattacks or intellectual property infringement (including filing or defending legal claims).
> Performing internal compliance and security activities, such as audits and enterprise security management.
---
Being US, how far stretch is it to imagine PII being under scope for some anti-DEI (aka anti-terror) audit? Also you better switch browsers if you'll ever be in a lawsuit with Mozilla I guess...
Remember the time, when browsers were competing who will load website fastest or who will render Acid2 test correctly? Those were the days.
That was great, except everyone just installed chrome because the website google told them to and put them right back in the exact monopoly position that allowed IE6 to stagnate.
If you use chrome still, you are literally part of the problem. I still think Mozilla, just barely treading into the advertising waters, is probably a better option than the literal advertising panopticon that owns our world and data.
> That was great, except everyone just installed chrome [...]
Just to note the Acid 2 test was released April 2005 [1], and Google Chrome from December 2008 [2]. That's about 3,5 years.
At some point (around these mentioned years), Mozilla Firefox had a very good market share since MSIE's was dwindling, Safari's was minor (no iOS yet), and Google Chrome did not yet exist. Those were the days ;)
Also, Safari only exists due to Konqueror (and its dependencies), and Chrome only exists due to Safari, and Konqueror.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome
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> everyone just installed chrome because the website google told them to
I believe we actually went this way because all the techies adopted it first, not because it was some evil overlord that told everyone to. As a teenager, I installed it for some of my family because it had fewer knobs to push than Firefox at the time and it was faster at the time so that was cool as well (especially because they usually had older devices). Can't install toolbars in there etc. Then came Google's cross-site tracking by tricking users into logging into the browser and such. I kept using Firefox myself because I was used to the dev tools, theme customizability, and powerful add-ons, but it's not like I didn't contribute to the problem
That said, I also still wonder how (as you hint at) them advertising a product of theirs on the search engine homepage, a legal monopoly afaik, is not abuse of market power to illegally create a second monopoly. Firefox and any legit browser vendor who asks should be able to get the same ad on there for the same duration (years iirc, perhaps on and off), prominence, freedom of wording, etc. There is certainly an advertising aspect to get the last bit of the market, create a real brand name ("oh yeah I know that icon" when it's shown in the ads, not just know that button on your screen as "the internet"), but the first >50%... I don't know
"If you choose the slightly less evil browser you are literally part of the problem".
Yeah no, both are shit. Mozilla is also literally an advertising company now besides being almost exclusively funded by one.
If Mozilla wants people to choose Firefox over other browsers based on principles they first need to stick to principles themselves. Why are you asking people to give up anything (even if it's just a small amount of convenience) for a company that is run pretty much the same way as the alternatives, run by a CEO whining about a salary of millions per year not being enough. They made their bed.
Mozilla needs to learn that when you're an operation running honestly as a non-profit and no one's getting rich (comfortable != rich, btw), there's nothing wrong with the donate nag in a blank new tab.
Wikipedia figured that out long ago. They probably wouldn't be around without that nag box asking for donations.
There is something deeply wrong with the donate nag: The money goes to funding Mozilla-branded nonsense (e.g. misguided adventures into the VPN space), overpaid executives and bloated administration (as they actively shed developers [1][2]), and not the browser.
I would considering donating except I can't donate to support what I would like to support.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/06/mozilla_foundation_la...
That's the other problem:
Mozilla just needs to focus on Firefox.
Something about doing one thing and doing it well...
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Isn't the Mozilla Foundation (non-profit org) distinct from Mozilla Corporation?
overpaid executives and bloated administration
It sounds like Mozilla needs to be DOGE'd too.
Edit: this was what came to mind: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/lswv11/my_firefox_...
Wikipedia is really not a good example here. They ask for way more than they need to run Wikipedia itself.
Personally, I refuse to let any nagware on my computer. Free software is supposed to be a better experience than shareware.
however are the cost of developing a web browser and hosting an internet encyclopedia ran by volunteer comparable ?
mozilla use paid labor, engineer who are very expensive. wikipedia it's mostly hosting a html page and a few media.
Yet wikipedia has much more user to whom it can show the donation nag when mozilla has a much more limited userbase.
i think that mozilla taking google money to put them as default search engine is fine, people who care about privacy are allowed to change it whenever they want.
In 2023 the Wikimedia Foundation had 700 paid employees/contractors working for them.
At the end of 2023 Mozilla Corporation had 964 employees and Mozilla Foundation had 118.
So the difference isn’t that large…
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We're entering the end days now. Stallman showed us the light and then ESR closed the blinds.
People really don't get it.
I'm simplifying: Stallman told us that free software was the only way. ESR said open source was the way with business in mind.
We've ended up with businesses taking advantage of open source. The slew of licence changes to not compete, having special paid versions, and generally shitting on the open source community.
The only thing free, is the labour companies are exploiting.
Firefox's blog post in the change[1] has an update:
> UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox…
Uh, yeah, that's exactly the problem. Mozilla shouldn't be allowed to use all the information I type into Firefox at all. Mozilla doesn't need any rights for Firefox to process my data locally on my behalf, or even for Firefox to send my data to third parties on my behalf (ex. instant search suggestions). Those aren't Mozilla using my information; those are me using my information using Firefox.
They would only "need" extra rights to collect data and process it on their servers for unspecified purposes. They do legitimately process some data on their servers, such as Firefox Sync data, but that's already covered under the Mozilla account terms of service. There's no need for a broad license for all data going through Firefox.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...
I really hate this kind of response to criticism. No Mozilla, fundamental disagreement does not mean that peole are confused and need to be told what to think.
Yeah, it would be like saying everything I write and draw into my Acer laptop means I now give permission for Acer the company to use my content. It's bonkers.
Since it's mostly just people who care about this privacy who still use Firefox, these changes seem particularly tin eared.
People who care about privacy have already moved on to LibreWolf or some other Firefox alternative.
Not true. I was under the impression that Firefox was a privacy-oriented browser until these Terms were published today. I'm now posting this from LibreWolf, which I have just now installed for the first time.
This is pure speculation, but what are the chances this change is simply an attempt to provide legal cover what they might have started doing 50 versions ago?[1]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082856
If that's the case they should stop doing that no give them selves the legal right to do it.
According to the tweet, Mozilla claimed
> “Does Firefox sell your personal data?”
> “Nope. Never have, never will.”
I do believe that never is a very, very clear statement (concerning every possible future) that needs no legal cover.
Ah but what you are interpreting in layman english is actually a term of art in marketing that means "this will change as soon as it becomes more profitable to do that".
Firefox's own about:license page (reachable through the about firefox dialog) says the sources are available under a wide variety of open source licenses. Does that mean only Mozilla distributed binaries are governed by the "Firefox Terms of Use"? If I download Firefox through my distro package manager, and the distro infrastructure compiled and distributed it undet the terms of the open source licenses, presumably I may use the software solely under the terms of those open source licenses.
Does Mozilla take this into account, or do they act as if they have the rights they assert in the ToU, regardless of what license a Firefox user is using the software under?
> Does that mean only Mozilla distributed binaries are governed by the "Firefox Terms of Use"?
It means that usage of binaries is governed by the terms set by whoever produces and distributes them.
If your distro leaves the "Firefox Terms of Use" notice intact then I imagine it would be in force. The only exception that immediately comes to mind would be if the distro explicitly relicensed Firefox under the GPL (I'm not clear if this is permitted or not) in which case the GPL explicitly invalidates any such additional restrictions.
If your distro provides a binary that includes inaccurate, conflicting, or otherwise problematic terms, such as (ex) on the about:license page, then that would be on them, not on Mozilla.
If your distro removes or modifies the license terms permitting Mozilla to collect data but forgets to modify the data collection code itself, I'm not sure who is at fault. Presumably the distro maintainers. However, given that the entire thing is very clearly without warranty I doubt that you'd have any recourse. In any case I don't think Mozilla would be breaking any rules since they neither compiled nor distributed the binary in question.
Off topic, but one minor issue I noticed is that the about:license page doesn't seem to include either a link to or a copy of the GPLv3 despite the fact that the LGPLv3 states:
> c) For a Combined Work that displays copyright notices during execution, include the copyright notice for the Library among these notices, as well as a reference directing the user to the copies of the GNU GPL and this license document.
"Mozilla" & "Firefox" are trademarks which would come with their own legalese I’m sure, and of course there are some services used by Firefox (the Mozilla addons store, the malware blacklists managed by Google IIRC, etc.) that would still require legal statements even for distro or other 3rd party builds.
Sure, but neither Distribution Policy for Mozilla Software[1] nor Mozilla Trademark Guidelines[2] make any mention of the Terms of Use. Services Firefox connects to have their own Terms of Service, like you say, but those are unrealated to Terms of Use for Firefox itself.
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/distribu...
[2]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/
This is concerning.
From the new Tos:
> We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example.
I do not want Mozilla to use or have information I type into Firefox except when I explicitly give them such information. I disable all the settings I can to keep Mozilla from getting any such information.
From what I understand, this crap is only for the Mozilla distributed binaries. So I will now be using third party builds.
Make sure the third party build you choose doesn't use official Firefox branding too.
Been using Firefox as main browser since it was called Mozilla.
It's the only desktop application I've consistently installed on every desktop for that long. This is the end of that era and ends the streak.
It's as frustrating as it's sad.
What are you replacing it with?
This is getting niche enough that I'd doxx myself :^)
Check out everything recommended elsewhere in this thread though! And strive to compile your own fork based on whatever.
It's fascinating how any Firefox thread here inevitably devolves into accusations that Mozilla has abandoned users and a push to switch to alternatives, despite Mozilla working in the interest of users to a infinitely greater degree than any other major browser vendor.
Actions speak louder than words. Firefox (including derivatives) is by far the most fingerprint resistant and adblock friendly webbrowser there is.
In terms of features, it's very rich and always improving.
Mozilla also maintains arguably the best web development resource there is, which is MDN.
Mozilla's internal problems aside, some people really don't appreciate how successful Firefox, Thunderbird and MDN have been and still are.
"Actions speak louder than words. "
Indeed. Talking about privacy and having spyware and ads activated by default and now this probably to legally safeguard this and more speak a very clear language.
The only reason to still use FF is indeed, that the competition is worse in this regard.
But that will change, once Ladybird becomes mature enough.
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> Firefox (including derivatives) is by far the most fingerprint resistant
Do you have a source? The fingerprint detectors [0] as well as reddit's banned/duplicate account system suggests otherwise.
Maybe at one point Firefox stopped the fingerprinting, but the tools have quickly found other ways to uniquely identify me.
[0] - https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/kcarter?aat=1 https://firstpartysimulator.org/kcarter?&aat=1&a=11&t=11&dnt...
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It’s about expectations. In very simple language: people expect Microsoft and Google to track the hell out of them. But Mozilla says they are your friend and respects privacy, but then their actions speak the opposite.
A betrayal from a friend is harder to handle than a blow from an enemy.
Mozilla's goals are still much more aligned with my own than any other browser vendor. Not even close. It's not a betrayal, it's a difference of opinion between friends.
Edit: If that. I personally think this Terms of Use thing is a storm in a teacup.
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The same effect applies to political parties. The people that care about X focus their complaints to the party that is trying to address issues with X.
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>despite Mozilla working in the interest of users to a infinitely greater degree than any other major browser vendor.
Obviously not anymore, it's a add company now.
But at least they have "cool" party's in Zambia.
> it's a add company now
Note that "any other major browser vendor" is a short list of ad companies with a much worse track record.
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You're right, and at the same time those two things go together if you think about it. The browser that does more (or cares at all) is held to the higher standard and inevitably found wanting.
(I'm not taking sides in the debate about it, I just find internet psychology fascinating)
It's disheartening to see people playing villification of users when it is the companies (yeah, mozilla CORPORATION) that went back on their words. Just cos you did something good in the past isn't and shouldn't be an excuse to do bad things now.
Also, why are we talking as if we haven't seen these same things happening to favourite products/companies over and over again? You don't need to be an analyst to put things together.
Tell me why I should care when they gave up Rust and MDN to competitors with the excuse of no money and then gave the boss a heft hike with an ever decreasing userbase? Would any company give a hike of this margin to it's employee when their product is doing bad in the market?
They kept doing things against the community. And then they bought an ad company, then this change. ENSHITTIFICATION IS WRITTEN ON THE WALL IN BOLD LETTERS. Let them backtrack.
Still very very disappointed. We are supposed to be a community who should be thinking through things. This isn't a new scenario. We have seen this so many times.
[flagged]
My dream team of execs would send lawyers back to the drawing table on at least one of these clauses.
"Imagine that someday we get taken over by bad people. Write this as if our today selves want to protect everyone against our future selves."
ELI5: how is any of this legal? Let’s say my distro receives Firefox source code under the terms of MPL, builds it and distributes it to me under the same terms. At no point any of us agreed to any additional terms. Does this apply only to Mozilla-built binaries?
I have been wanting to love Mozilla for a while, but let's be honest: I use Firefox because Mozilla is the least shitty of those companies. I don't like Mozilla, I just hate them less than the alternatives.
Please see this helpful clarification post: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...
If anything, it just confirms Mozilla is selling data.
So, is firefox no longer open source?
If it is open source, how do I compile and use it without agreeing to the terms of use?
(I have no interest in using their “services”.)
[flagged]
Title is a complete lie/misleading. They get a license, not ownership.
Let's dissect what it actually says, and we do it backwards, because given the discussion around this subject it seems like people space out or have their mind clouded by outrage before they get to the end of the sentence:
> help you [do things] as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
So this already only covers things that you indicate you want to do with your use of Firefox. Meaning that if you hit some button, Mozilla now has a license to process the data they need to make that button work and nothing more. That means unless you give them additional permission somewhere, they can't, for example, also store and process that information to train some AI model or whatever. All they're allowed to use it for is making whatever you interacted with work. Seems pretty reasonable.
> to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content
This further narrows the scope to websites and such you interact with (online content). It also says that license only covers "helping" you with these things. The part we looked at previously narrows this to your intent.
> you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license
So just a license. No transfer of ownership is happening.
> When you upload or input information through Firefox
Note that this says "through". They're clearly only trying to cover their butt as an intermediary by obtaining a license to process your information to act as such an intermediary. Explicitly nothing more.
Putting it back together we get:
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Important part in cursive.
So broadly what is the license for?
> license [..] to help you [..] as you indicate
Thanks—we've updated the title to mention licenses now. I think probably we'll end up merging all these threads; not sure yet.
Edit: merging into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065, which had that title.
I don't have to grant Word a license to what I type in it. This is a highly unusual clause that other software doesn't have.
When software has to "phone home" to deliver the functionality you requested, then two things happen: One, a number of privacy regulations kick in, and they need to get you to agree to send your data to them. Two, they now get to move your data out of your control. I mean, you trust them today, so here's hoping they don't ever get hacked or hire someone untrustworthy?
It's sad when even to use the basic features of a web browser, you need to agree to send them your data. It's not fundamentally necessary to send your data to Mozilla or their partners in order to load and render a website. It's a dark pattern to obtain consent to collect your data "when it's necessary", and then rewrite your app to make it necessary.
> I don't have to grant Word a license to what I type in it.
Yes you do.
From Microsoft's Services Agreement [1]:
> To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content, for example, to make copies of, retain, transmit, reformat, display, and distribute via communication tools Your Content on the Services.
That's broader than what Mozilla is asking for.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en/servicesagreement
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A license grant like this is common in the context of review systems or forums or the like. For example if I go to addons.mozilla.org and post a review for an addon, Mozilla arguably needs a license grant like this to allow them to publish the review. And preferably they would want to word it in a way that then allows them to use the same review in print or a super bowl spot.
The weird thing is that a) I don't think this license grant covers any of that, since publishing a review doesn't improve my experience, it improves other's experiences, and b) Mozilla Websites like addons.mozilla.org have a completely different TOS [1], with a completely different license grant.
I have no idea what this license grant is supposed to accomplish, or what it would even allow that requires a license grant in the first place
1: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/mozilla/
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>Let's dissect what it actually says
I don't believe that dissection is a good way to understand the implications of this clause.
>When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Rather than go over this word-by-word, please tell me: what limits exactly does this place on Mozilla? What rights does it give to the user? One way to express such a limit is by construction, that is, construct hypothetical acts A, B, and C that would be allowed under these terms, but actions D, E, and F would not be allowed (and be a cause for action by a user). I assert that the first set includes literally anything you can imagine (modulo a sophists ability to morph "help you" into anything they want), and the second set is empty.
To steel-man this concept, let us say that Mozilla wants to store and use your password to your bank to check your balance regularly. I assert that this action is allowed by there terms. Why? First, you used Firefox and therefore enabled the clause. Second, your authentication details are entered through Firefox, and this constitutes "input" or "upload", to which they assert ownership (which I will use as shorthand for a "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license"). One thing they could do with your financial data is show it to you (least harm). Another thing is to aggregate it with other's data (medium harm). Yet another application would be to pool it into a database to be sold to the highest bidder (maximum harm). In the latter case, you could make the argument that such a move "helps you" by giving Mozilla a reliable revenue stream that helps fund continued development of the browser.
Needless to say, I am appalled and feel bad for all the many people I've told about Firefox over the years, described it as a bastion of fairness and privacy in an all too often sinister world. And now that they've assert these extraordinary rights over user data, I feel ashamed of my advocacy. I daresay that even if they rescind this incredible overreach, I will not come back. My trust has been broken and cannot be easily (if ever) repaired.
> what limits exactly does this place on Mozilla?
Mozilla is bound to only use the content to help the use navigate, experience and interact with online content as the user has indicated.
> One thing they could do with your financial data is show it to you (least harm).
Yes - this is what the user indicated.
> Another thing is to aggregate it with other's data (medium harm).
And the user has not indicated that this would be a permitted use of the data - thereby revoking the license of the first clause. If the data is used outside of the final clause of the license, that is unlicensed use of data. This would be a material breach of the contract by the corporation. This could open them up to massive legal penalties.
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I think that's just a cover-all and they also have a privacy policy [1] which is explicit about how they use it and how they don't, for example:
"the data stays on your device and is not sent to Mozilla’s servers unless it says otherwise in this Notice."
... "When you perform a search in Firefox, your search query, device data and location data will be processed by your default search engine"
... "Mozilla derives the high level category [...] from keywords in that query [...] privacy preserving technologies such that Mozilla only learns that someone, somewhere, performed a search relating to a particular category, without knowing who."
... Review Checked, AI Chatbots, advertising on new tab page, etc.
So yea Firefox does so much they pretty much have to use your data, but it's not a blank cheque to do what they want.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
Not so say I like some of those things - advertising and categorizing searches. But still, it's finite and explicit.
> First, you used Firefox and therefore enabled the clause.
I believe your confusion stems from a misreading of "as you indicate with your use of Firefox". You're reading it like "by using Firefox, you indicate".
Contemplate the difference between
"The car is allowed to move as you indicate with the controls."
versus
"By using the controls, you indicate the car is allowed to move."
The former explicitly only allows the car to realize your intent, whereas the latter gives the car license to do whatever it pleases.
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Given that Mozilla updated their site a couple days ago to remove any wording along the lines of "Firefox will never sell your data to advertisers" when a flag associated with the new Firefox terms of use is enabled (see https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...), I'm not so sure that this is a CYA about standard web browser usage.
> {% if switch('firefox-tou') %}
The proof is in the code, great work.
> remove any wording along the lines of "Firefox will never sell your data to advertisers"
You mean wording like this?
""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."
Which is contained in both the link you provided, and on their official Privacy FAQ: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
I'm really confused how you can possibly claim that they removed the wording when it's right there for you.
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Are lawyers OK with a client doing things like this? Or is this a client you fire?
My ISP doesn't need a license to everything I do online to facilitate the transfer of bits from my home to the wider internet, so why should Mozilla need that? How about the transit providers, they certainly don't have a license to anything I do.
Assuming that everything is HTTPS, what are they actually licencing? My encrypted data?
This is some Mozilla legally idiot that went WAY to far in a "cover our ass" legal document and nobody stopped to think about the potential damage this would to the Mozilla and Firefox reputation, which already isn't doing so well. They didn't even stop to think if MAYBE this needed some clarification, to avoid unwarranted speculations. It's getting increasingly clear that the people running Mozilla has absolutely no idea what they are doing, nor do they have any respect for the project they've are in charge of. At this point I wouldn't be surprise to learn that the Mozilla CEO uses Edge.
Do you have expertise, for example as an IP attorney? I don't meant to disqualify what you say; at the same time people would benefit from knowing what your analysis comes from.
I am not an expert in this field, and I think the meaning is ambiguous. It could be interpreted as you say; it could be interpreted otherwise.
Mozilla's current intent isn't relevant to what they do later or its legality or enforceablility.
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
So basically they can track everything I upload or type on my keyboard while in Firefox?
Yes they can and will, they are a add company now, the money from google will stop flowing so they do everything to make money with your data.
No, they cannot.
You're replying to a comment where I've broken the sentence down into smaller parts. It's the best I can do.
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> to help you navigate
This definition of helping me (a user} navigate could be interpreted in many ways, from the obvious all the way through to sending Mozilla my data so they can "improve Firefox" and therefore help me through giving them my information. This signals intent against my interest, regardless of whether that actually is there intent. The 'help' in particular is extremely suspicious and ambiguous
> complete lie
I disagree. I definitely editorialized it to make it attention-grabbing and point out the essence, because I wanted to raise awareness and spur discussion.
But they do own it in the digital sense (i.e. "piracy is not stealing" sense). You get to keep your own copy, but they also get a copy and they own that copy.
> help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content
These terms are vague enough to allow pretty much everything. Google would argue that tracking your information so they target ads is "helping you navigate" ("you see, sponsored links are more relevant!"). As well as "lets train an AI model that helps users experience the internet!"
Look at what they are ACTUALLY doing:
https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
The change removing "Does Firefox sell your personal data? Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise." makes it pretty clear that the intention in the changes is NOT just covering their bums for using your input to provide the webpage you wanted. They are positioning to sell your personal data.
That promise to never have, never will sell your personal data was highly valued by many Firefox users and Mozilla must be pretty desperate to break it.Particularly given online privacy is suddenly crucial for many out-groups in the US - and pretty much everyone outside the US. The biggest marketing opportunity for years just landed in Mozilla's lap, and they spilled it.
Full context, from the link YOU provided: ""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."
There is no reasonable way to read this as an attempt to sell your data. This quote is also reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
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I think everyone is unsettled about the fact that Mozilla was able "to help you ... as you indicate" for twenty years before today without the need of a license agreement. And so we ask: what's changed?
In EU user can not legally give up ownership of their personal data, artwork, or intelectual property. "Giving license" is a legal workaround to get ownership.
That varies between EU countries.
Maybe Mozilla doesn't own that information legally, but they grant themselves practically unlimited rights to do what they want, as the restriction they imposed to themselves ("to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.") couldn't be more wishy-washy.
No difference to me. Goodbye Firefox.
By the way, what alternatives are there for Thunderbird?
I think you are bending the meaning of the word license to the breaking point here. What your analysis implies, is that Mozilla needs permission to store and process your data in order to carry out the services implied by your use of Firefox. Obtaining a "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license" is definitely an excessive move in that context.
I still don't get it. Is Mozilla phoning home the fact that I pressed the button?
That'd be a matter for the privacy policy. The section in question is whether they can then go ahead and publish a list of all the buttons you pressed. Which according to this license grant they can, but only if it "helps you navigate, experience, [or] interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox". What does that mean? I have no clue. It's a really strange restriction and I can't decide if that's wide open or so narrow that it is basically never met
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Unless the button says "phone home my information to Mozilla", this license wouldn't cover that. This license only covers whatever is necessary to make the button itself work - whatever is necessary to realize the user's intent.
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https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
This commit says that they can know sell your data as well, which does look beyond using them for improving their software
> Title is a complete lie/misleading. They get a license, not ownership.
I completely agree. Saw the HN title, clicked through to the page and saw nothing relevant to the title. I've flagged the topic now.
The main problem with the "important part in cursive" is that it's Mozilla execs who decide what is actually a "to help you". There is no way to opt-out of "help".
Honestly, I am a bit surprised dang didn't change the title, given all the outrage and huge number of upvotes. Regardless of whether your analysis is missing anything, it just says what license doesn't say, and in that sense, yes, it's a complete lie, and people who were completely ok with what's going on yesterday are completely outraged and are massively switching to brave/chromium(lol)/ladybird again.
And, honestly, at this point this feels seriously misguided. However many bad things I can say about Mozilla, what really has changed on 25 Feb? Nothing much, really. The removed claim that they don't sell user data (linked in another comment) might be actually the bigger news here. But that also is much less important than what data they can actually gather (compared to brave/chromium/ladybird/whatever). If you can still disable tracking as before, well, ok.
Obviously, I don't think it's ideal in any case, and I'd rather like to have the same relationships with my browser as I have with Vim. But that is besides the point, the point being that news aren't really news (at least, definitely not the same news as 90% of posters in the topic are perceiving/discussing).
And how do I deny Mozilla this request to grant them a license “to help me”?
Firefox is dead. What do I use now?
From the link that was already provided:
"(BTW there are opt-outs linked from each chapter/category of data, like sponsored content in new tab experience etc. that should lead you through settings to disable such telemetry. Nothing has changed about that, and you can always find it in the privacy center. The changeset you're looking at here is just to remove things that are unfortunately not that simple, and need explaining in the full legal documents instead.)"
Trash take. Don't try to make this seem ok.
Thank you sir.
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
The fact that this surprises me must be an indicator that Mozilla still had a good reputation with me. No longer. Starting the search for an alternative browser now.
The problem with Firefox is it almost impossible to sell today (compared to 10 or 20 years ago).
- It doesn't have better performance or security.
- If you want better privacy and ad-blocking out of the box, Brave is the way to go.
- The "supporting an independent implementation" argument doesn't really resonate anymore.
I am wondering if the small market share it has left on desktop (especially in Europe and Germany) might be due to governments and corporations installing it on their computers.
I'm sorry mate, that does not make sense
I am appalled by this change, but I am not switching to Brave. Mozilla is loosing trust, Brave started with zero.
Only very few people are aware or care about the drama between Mozilla and Brave.
Most people will only trust the Data safety / Data Privacy section on the Play / App store (as they should):
- Firefox on Android: This app may share these data types with third parties: Location, Personal info and 3 others [0]
- Firefox on iOS: The following data may be collected and linked to your identity: Contact Info.
Data Not Linked to You. The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity: Location, Identifiers, Usage Data, Diagnostics [1]
- Brave on Android: No data shared with third parties, No data collected [2]
- Brave on iOS: No data shared with third parties, No data collected [3]
Data Not Linked to You. The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity: Identifiers, Usage Data [4]
It's evident, Brave collect way less data than Firefox on those platforms.
Maybe the problem of Mozilla is they feel entitled to the trust they gained when they were the open source browser against IE. But that trust erodes over time.
- [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...
- [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/
- [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...
- [3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brave-browser-search-engine/
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I tried using Brave ages ago. I wanted to like it, but it crashed even more often than Firefox (which is a feat unto itself) and didn't have the option to tag bookmarks.
> but it crashed even more often than Firefox (which is a feat unto itself)
Er, you maybe should check your RAM and GPU. I've run Firefox on a lot of different systems, with everything from vanilla profiles and no saved tabs to loads of extensions and literally thousands of tabs, and it basically never crashes. Well, the beta version can be a little less stable, but... beta version. Could just be that I'm lucky or you're unlucky, but I'd strongly suggest checking your hardware and maybe GPU drivers.
https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
They removed this:
They bought an ad company back in November I think, so this is not a surprise to me. Boiling frogs
> "That’s a promise."
That always has been a lie, ever since they accepted Google's money.
Now due to the anti-trust lawsuit, 'principles' don't pay the bills. Now you are seeing that Firefox doesn't care about the privacy of its users.
Remember, "Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language."*
You see that here. Mozilla chose to use legalese and not plain language, despite there being a movement afoot to try to push (and in some cases legally require) for plain language in legal documents. This one isn't so bad, since they mostly avoid passive voice and don't needlessly capitalize much. Maybe the low frequency jargon is necessary but look at those center embeddings...
Break it into multiple sentences.
First sentence establishes you input data into firefox when you use firefox (obviously, but maybe not to everyone!). Second clause establishes that when you input that data you give firefox a license to that data which you otherwise own (this could be more clear in a separate sentence). Third clause establishes that the license is to use the information (not to sell it). Fourth clause establishes that they will use it to help you navigate, experience and interact with online content. Fifth clause (as you indicate) establishes that it is your use of firefox that indicates your intention and how they should use your input to help you. As five separate sentences they could make it seem much more reasonable. The embeddings are instead ineffective because they aren't referring to a common category but instead modify an aspect of the former clause.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002772...
The term itself is bad here. The problem isn't just because it's hard to understand.
> Second clause establishes that when you input that data you give firefox a license to that data which you otherwise own
Firefox doesn't need a license, because it's not a legal entity; it's software acting on behalf of a person (the user).
Mozilla doesn't need a license to all information input through Firefox, because Mozilla doesn't need that data for Firefox to operate.
It isn't just software: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/access-mozilla-services...
I will maintain it is an issue of clarity. Your argument is that Mozilla isn't offering online services but this isn't true and clarifying what actions upload information and exactly how that information would be used would mollify this. The list would probably be quite extensive. Moreover, the clause doesn't necessarily give them a license to all information input through firefox and that clarification should be demanded of them.
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I see a lot of people suggesting Brave, but is it still full of crypto nonsense?
The coin is still baked into the browser, but it's disabled by default and doesn't really nag you about it.
At least, that's how it was when I used Brave around 2021-2022.
I've long-since moved to Librewolf, but it's my 'plan C' browser if SHTF with firefox and its downstream forks ('plan B' being Ungoogled Chromium)
Brave has a couple crypto features in the UI but that's about it. I'm big on crypto but I don't use any of the browser's crypto features. Just a browser that cuts most of the bullshit out.
Yes.
Only if you enable it?
The problem with the other mainstream browsers is they're embedded with ad-tech nonsense which you can't get rid of.
Mozilla's messaging for the last few months has really reminded me of the old anti-smoking ads from the 2000s. Technically performing their responsibility, but actually extremely obnoxious because the people behind the funding didn't agree with its existence and actively degraded it for their own survival.
So... for the most practical question:
Anyone have a favourite Firefox fork that removes this and doesn't add other spyware or reinvent the UI too much?
That's almost exactly describing Librewolf, though it adds a ton of privacy 'hardening' features out-of-the-box, which can be a positive or negative depending on who you ask.
I personally use Librewolf with the Lepton (Photon style) UI[0], which replicates the previous UI style Firefox used a couple years ago, with small square tabs and condensed menus, before the current pseudo-tabletified abomination.
Of course, if you like the current UI—you'd literally be the first person I've met to like it—you can just use librewolf stock and it doesn't apply any changes to the standard Firefix UI.
[0] https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
Thank you, it seems pretty neat so far!
Librewolf seems to be the best. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/
What I ask myself is why is Firefox collecting months of telemetry data if sending telemetry is disabled.
If I disable telemetry, I would also expect it to not get collected.
So that there's plenty to send when they oops-accidentally forget that setting during an upgrade, and ask you to set it again.
They will of course assume opt-out rather than opt-in, and send what they've collected the moment the browser launches, then they're ready to give you the choice of opt-out once again.
Like they say, die early or live long enough to become a villain.
I never thought I would live to see the day when Mozilla's ethics would shift away so much from the "ethical" alignment.
Does anyone have any idea of what has changed inside Mozilla to prompt this?
Maybe business necessity finally caught up with them
The text leaves way too much up for shady interpretation. At that point I might as well fully switch to Chrome, even at home. Privacy was the single last reason for sticking with firefox, and these terms do not sound like privacy anymore.
Chrome is absolutely not a step in the right direction if this is pushing you away from Firefox. Look at the number of forks that strip out this nonsense and behave functionally identically instead.
I'm not going to go out of my way to fetch a modified build for a functionally worse browser. I only use FF at home due to privacy, but since that is no longer covered by Mozilla I might as well use the browser I've already been using for web dev for years at work.
I think this probably isn't as big of a deal as people are making it out to be. But I find a certain kind of joy in Mozilla being judged on the worst possible interpretation of their terms of service, since they do that to others _all the time_ [1].
[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/
> being judged on the worst possible interpretation
That's the correct way-- contract terms must be read defensively.
I tend to agree with you, but I’d hope that given how badly this has been received, Mozilla finds some better writers to put some better thought into the contents of their ToS and issue some corrections in the near future.
They sell your data now. Their strings are pulled.
The first few steps on a slippery slope never do seem like a big deal, do they?
Mozilla became an ads company after acquiring ads tech startup Anonym. These changes follow that direction.
When I was a contractor, I worked on a project with this well-intended guy who wanted to make an app for people to store a persistent map of their movement over time using the GPS. On day one, he made it very clear—and I believed him—that a user's private data was sacrosanct. As the project wore on, never finding traction, and costing more and more money, I remember one of the last meetings I attended with him. He was trying to find new sources of revenue to keep the company alive, and he uttered the inevitable phrase: "well, we've got all this user data we could sell." That was one of those moments when you get a little more cynical, and since then I access as an axiom that every company will sell my data eventually, regardless of their promises. It's just a question of limiting their access to it, and being willing to switch to an alternative every once in a while.
I think it's time to bring this to the attention of the EU. The browser race to the bottom may be somewhat acceptable for entertainment, but it is my firm opinion that accessing online government services and banking infrastructure necessary for a modern life shouldn't require me to accept such terms.
I agree but unfortunately very few see this as an issue. For browsers, they kind of soft-lock-out established niche browsers due to heavy use of JS. But this is deepter: more and more banks and public institutions' services imply everyone and their grandma possesses G/A-owned device so they start to require these to access their web services (either through exclusive app access via A/G app ecosystem or by enforcing 2FA (T)OTP which implies using such device for non-devlopers). Some countries force kids to use apple/google-owned devices in class. All of this requires citizens to accept and agree to (possibly changing) TOS and privacy rules (self) of A+G and opting out is hard often times and sometimes impossible. very sad
So my bank password is now licensed to mozilla? This is not great...
While I think the anger surrounding this is slightly overstated, is there any Desktop fork of Firefox that can essentially just act as a "we prevent Mozilla from doing anything harmful to it's users", while compromising on as little functionality as possible? There's only so many stories of Mozilla deliberately trying to reduce it's browser market share to zero you can put up with before you start looking elsewhere.
I'm thinking something in the same vein as Iceraven, which is a fork of the Android version of Firefox that aims to make the browser more usable for humans instead of servicing the overly restrictive mobile environment/tracking that's bog-standard in most mobile platforms.
I considered Librewolf, but it's willingness to break pages in the name of excessive anti-fingerprinting (the RFP mode breaks a lot of interactables) and ideology (blocking DRM) makes it kind of unacceptable for this purpose. I guess I'm not looking for a privacy fork, just a fork that protects me as a user from anti-features (with widevine in specific not being an anti-feature; I don't like widevine either, but it's kind of necessary for using a browser these days.)
Floorp may be what you're looking for. Pretty similar to native Firefox.
https://floorp.app/
Oh interesting, I'll check it out.
Searching around a bit, this fork does seem to meet the criteria I was looking for (plus a few hidden ones like project age; it's a couple years old and still being updated, which means the dev is willing to put the work in as opposed to abandoning it when they get bored). The blocker on widevine being Googles fault (while still supporting L3 out of the box) rather than deliberate "we're not even going to try" is much more acceptable than the Librewolf one.
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Blocking DRM is the only sane stance. And if you are using a free OS it doesn't change much anyway as DRMed content is only available in resolutions that might have been acceptable decades ago. If you must consume that kind of content just use a dedicated device but better would be to ignore it or acquire copies with the DRM stripped.
DRM is absolutely not necessary for using a browser.
[...] When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
https://xcancel.com/LundukeJournal/status/189524980533888659...
The Vivaldi browser takes donations FYI. https://login.vivaldi.net/profile/donations
I note LibreWolf is built from FF sources.
Zen also.
Are they specifically removing the telemetry stuff Moz are going to use to collect user data?
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/
Librewolf has less spyware than waterfox.
They just use Gecko, right? Is telemetry actually built into the rendering engine
If someone already deleted Firefox Sync and wants to get rid of Sync item in main menu, you can disable it by going to "about:config" and setting "identity.fxaccounts.enabled" to false.
AFAIU Firefox Sync is end to end encrypted, right? I interpreted the language here to mean that the data might be sent to Firefox outside of Firefox Sync. Have there been any changes to Firefox Sync that we know about?
Shout-out to Vivaldi. If you're looking for alternatives, give it a chance.
The engine monoculture is not great, but they're a small team and doing a great job to create a useful browser.
Sibling discussion (might be worth unifying): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194536
Can't wait for Ladybird to become usable. To be fair, it already is fairly usable, but I'd need history syncing / Keychain sync to make it a daily driver.
Do you really? Seems you can wait, as do many of us. By waiting, what behavior do we encourage in software makers?
I suppose I could manually copy paste things, but it's not a great user experience. I'm fine with using beta software, but pre-alpha even is a bit too hard for me to swallow.
People are acting like this is new. This is about:studies. With about:studies you agreed to upload usage data. Right now they are enabling credit card autofill support, a CRL alternative that doesn't give information about the sites you visit, etc. Actual corporate goes out of their way to say "we do whatever we want", Mozilla at least gives a condition.
I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand I just want Firefox to keep being a free software web browser that I can trust. But on the other hand I realise Firefox isn't some hobby project and competing with Google isn't cheap. They already take money from Google and this could be shut off at any time. How can Firefox be independent if it doesn't have some revenue?
Unfortunately they've been stupid and blurred the lines between Firefox the browser and Firefox the "web platform". I don't think anyone would be too concerned if this was clearly about the web platform bit.
Maybe we need a smaller GPL browser that doesn't have the fancy stuff but can actually be maintained by the community. Yeah it won't with with a bunch of "web apps", but it will still provide access to information. This is also why if you are making websites you need to make sure it works without js etc. Otherwise you're basically forcing people to use adware.
I'm of one mind about this because
> Unfortunately they've been stupid
They could have had an enormous amount of good will and they do nothing but burn it. Weird how they get a lot of money from google and then, while technically meeting their mission by providing a browser alternative, seem to do a lot of self-sabotage in google's favor.
I honestly think the best thing that could happen to Firefox would be for Mozilla to exactly have their funding removed, have the foundation die, and a better entity focused just on Firefox, perhaps with more earnest and honest fundraising efforts and not a multimillion CEO salary, fills the vacuum.
Maybe Google is paying them to self-sabotage?
If you're not blocking your mozilla process from accessing firefox.com, mozilla.com/.org, and mozgcp.net, as well as turning telemetry settings off after every update and keeping a tight policy.json file - then firefox is just as bad as Edge or Chrome re: tracking
Also they actively take down extensions that unfuck websites without notice
Nice picture-in-picture implementation tho
Append all Mozilla services and telemetry to Pi-hole? What are the other ways this can be quietly mitigated and, the possible workarounds to exceptions created by DoH?
I see this thread pop up about once every 3 months for a different service. Its always the same license term that spooks people.
How much of a financial effort would it be to have some non-profit take a fork of Icecat and Fennec F-Droid, and just maintain a browser for the actual free world (akin to codeberg for example)?
i.e. if we strip down all the corporate overhead what would be the annual cost of maintaining a European sane version of 'land of the free' Firefox?
Clickbait title. I have read what is linked there and it claims no such thing.
At best, if you read through the notices, input data can be used to train personalised AI chatbots (running locally) IF you give your consent at the time of activation.
There's a lot of vitriol in the comments below but nobody seems to have read what is linked here.
The only inaccuracy in the title is that it used the word "owns" as short-hand for "gets a broad license to use". Which isn't unheard of: we talk about owning a copy of a piece of software or music for example even though what we have is a perpetual and broad license to use it.
I wish the title didn't use such hyperbole, but it's closer to true than to false.
> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Secondly, text typed into the search/address bar is sent to them for "suggestions" and to broadly categorize the search ("travel"). Turn this off if you don't want it.
Thirdly, they'll be notified if you click an advert on the new tab page. Again, this can be turned off
where does it say "own"? it says: "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content" type something - it's "used" to get what "you" want - how is that "own"?
Since facebook was fined for processing friend requests with foreigners on foreign servers, I feel like licenses like this are actually necessary for any product with any remote services components to operate in the EU, with more jurisdictions to come suddenly and unpredictably.
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy
> [you may not] Violate the copyright, trademark, patent, or other intellectual property rights of others
In the near future they'll upload a blacklist to everyone that prevents us from accessing bad sites such as TPB. It's way worse than what we've seen before.
This is very frustrating. It becomes impossible to use the web in a privacy conscious way. I know that Firefox wasn't perfect, but it was the best we had, and I have been a loyal user, despite minor quirks and annoyances. And now this… Guess will have to find another browser.
Related on 27-feb-2025:
Mozilla owns "information you input through Firefox" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200806 211 comments
As Far as I can understand, Firefox is paid by Google just to justify chrome is not the only choice, and avoid anti-trust lawsuit.
I read the Google money are the true income, and it is a pity, because this technology merits more now than in the past.
Okay, can anyone recommend a good, uBlock-Origin supporting browser that isn't controlled by underhanded corporate/for-profit lying-through-their-teeth pieces of shit?
Making these legal terms changes while "summarizing" them with the typical "we care about your privacy" bullshit is of the same nature as punching someone in the face and exclaiming you are caring about their health. It's just evil - misleading and abusive.
I feel like the internet needs a tracker of moral failings of companies/organizations like this, it's still too easy for something like this to slip through and not reach sufficient publicity to affect public opinion and therefore action. They need to be held to the highest account, openly, publicly, and brutally shamed, ostracized and sued if necessary. If they fail and exploit the rights of individuals, mishandle the "implicit consent"/trust of their users, at their scale, they fail and exploit collective humanity.
One may argue this is a non-issue due to the freedom of contract - and people can just choose to use whatever they want - but who among us has such a continuous legal awareness of all the software they use to be able to switch whenever needed due to some software enshittifying?
My only hope may still lie in software managed by legally codified (truly) non-profit organizations. Lichess and the Blender Foundation are led by people who have held to their word, and made the world better for it.
https://librewolf.net/
All talk of "Privacy", "Principles" and "Promises" from Mozilla was already empty as they were completely dependent on Google's money.
This should surprise absolutely no-one and Mozilla never cared about their claims of privacy or their users as long as Google was paying them.
So now we know that when it comes down to the wire as their biggest customer (Google) was under anti-trust scrutiny; indirectly threatening Mozilla's deal with Google, They once again chose to violate the privacy of their users to sell their data to other companies like Google.
For Mozilla, money has always crushed their so-called "principles".
I bet there are still some software developers there who genuinely care about the mission.
Other than that, I've had to backspace and abort comments so much tonight, because I was angry beyond decorum, at the repeated betrayals.
Cool down friend.
There will always be great people building alternatives.
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The illusion of mozilla having any privacy principles collapsed for me on May 2019 when they required users to enable telemetry to allow using adblock and tracking blocking extensions.
Lately I've been working on strategies to use software in unusual enough ways that I'm essentially off the radar of, well, anyone looking. The dark forest approach to the internet.
To avoid interacting with the web directly, I'm thinking of running some AI software in a container on a home server that would be a translation layer between me and the real web. All webpages would be converted to a simple, and secure, format. Gopher, gemini, asciidoc, or maybe just static html.
Is that a tractable problem with modern AI tools?
The only way to win is not to play, but I'd like to have my cake and eat it too.
The more unique your habits, the easier to fingerprint. That said, with those habits, you may be a less attractive audience.
Wht does Open Source needs any terms of use?
This is into the opposite direction about what "free open-source" means.
You get that software into your computer, you are entitled to free unrestricted use or modify in any way you want.
Except by the Firefox trademark of course.
Hmm it seems to me a viable solution (at least for the more tech inclined) is to just firewall it so it's unable to call home (although then there's an extension sourcing issue). Unless there's more of a philosophical stance. Or am I missing something else?
I've been a mostly happy Firefox user since v2, and have made it through - though will never forget - the extensions system "upgrade" debacle and more. As long as I have means to maintain reasonable control, I'll continue with it into the foreseeable future, because I consider the Chromium-based alternatives to be worse.
"At least for the more tech inclined" instantly eliminates 99% of users, probably even of Firefox for what you're talking about. I mean I'm tech inclined and I have no idea how you propose to firewall an internet browser from calling home. Maybe it's possible, I've never tried so I legitimately don't know. But if it is, it's an absolutely meaningless portion of users who'd even be able to do so much less go through the effort of actually doing it.
Windows user, 32 years FF user (Mosaic, Netscape, Firefox), what to do now?
Anyone forking? (I don't want a derivate which Mozilla controls)
[edit] Switched to Waterfox (Macos, Windows, Linux, Android), no fork but better than FF for now
Firefox forks:
* Waterfox
* Librewolf
* GNU IceCat
* Pale Moon
* Seamonkey
Chromium forks:
* Ungoogled-Chromium
* Thorium
* Iridium
You'll have to do your own due diligence as far as how trustworthy or suitable these are, but nominally privacy-respecting alternatives do exist.
Thorium is regularly 3 months behind on updates
Iridium brings me to a 404 when I try to download it for MacOS
Sadly, neither seem like good options.
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Thanks didn't know, thought Waterfox etc. were just a new UI on top of Firefox rendering/HTTP/HTTPS/etc. engine and were depending on Firefox development. Didn't know they were forks like the Redis forks for example. Will take another look.
"Ungoogled-Chromium"
Can't be a fork? Don't they just patch Chromium?
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A detailed listing of whats collected and why:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#lawful-bases
It's times like these I look forward to the likes of the Ladybird browser [1] making progress.
[1] https://ladybird.org/
Disclaiming ownership is not enough. Making the supposed license that users supposedly grant more limited would be a step. Yes I saw it has some qualifiers but they are not protective enough of the user.
Switched to Vivaldi long time ago. For reasons like this, ToS, Mozilla changing their mission, etc.
Vivaldi respects your privacy, supports Chrome extensions, and all the customizations you'd ever need.
Vivaldi is probably the most ethical company making a for-profit browser now. But note that because it is a for-profit it tracks your installation, with an anonymous but unique id, and phones home every time you use the browser. There were complains about this in the forum, but Vivaldi said they had to do that to know how many unique users they have, to make browser deals with other companies. They refused to change that and instead suggested that interested parties could use an application firewall to block those connections from Vivaldi.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it still an issue that due to Chromium not supporting the V2 manifest, adblockers like Ublock Origin won't function in Vivaldi?
What does that mean for the Tor browser [0] which is based on Firefox?
[0] https://www.torproject.org/
Nothing. The ToS is not part of the license to the code.
It means that the state got a two-for-one deal.
Anyone using a fork? I'm thinking on migrating to https://floorp.app
I've been using Zen (https://github.com/zen-browser) for a while now, it's still in beta but is very cool.
I find this so sad. I would gladly pay/donate to support Firefox, far in excess of however much money they would make from data mining and advertising. I am sure that enough people feel the same way to make it a viable model.
Thunderbird raises more than $8mn a year in donations to support their development. Thunderbird's success has proven that this model would work.
Does using Firefox now force you to use some Mozilla services?
On Android, Fennic isn't bad. Is there a desktop version of Fennec?
Ask HN: Is ungoogled chromium a good alternative ?
It's missing containers and overall has less privacy features available than firefox.
This is exemplified compared to forks like librewolf that enable the majority of them.
Ungoogled Chromium and stock Firefox are pretty similar privacy-wise though.
The main advantage is all baked-in telemetry is stripped out, but it doesn't do much to protect you from privacy-invasive sites other than disabling WebRTC and blocking 3rd party cookies.
I used it for a number of years, but recently switched to Librewolf ~5 months ago and don't expect to switch back unless Firefox and all downstream forks completely implode.
The main question for me is can ungoogled Chromium run uBlock Origin?
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Ungoogled chromium is a good alternative in terms of privacy because all google-related services are gutted and there are no other built-in telemetry things.
There are some downsides, too.
First, you have to do some research on learning to make this browser work conveniently, e.g. finding alternative services to sync and backup your settings, bookmarks, accounts and passwords, etc.
Second, changes pushed by Google like Manifest V3 is still hard to deal with.
How does corporate promises work? Like, I used Firefox when they promised never to sell my data. So I should be grandfathered, right?
There's no such thing as a corporate promise. There are such things as legal contracts and lawsuits, neither of which likely apply to anything Mozilla says about their browser.
There’s also agreements and tos
Interesting that in this thread discussing a new Mozilla EULA/AUP (among other things) banning pornography, not one person has mentioned that their image library was once called libpr0n: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66984
So since last year's debacle with Mozilla being an add-on company plus this ToU was the boiling point for me:
-Removed Firefox from all machines, replaced with LibreWolf.
-Deleted my Mozilla account.
-Changed to brave on mobile
Took about 15 minutes.
When evil shows it's real face and wants to tell me how and for what I can use my software, that's a goodbye Mozilla....so much for your ethics.
The only surprise here is that people are surprised by this. Mozilla is an advertising company, since almost a year ago.
Fully agree, here is a context for those who missed it https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...
Firefox performance has been trash for years, for many reasons. I still stick with it because it was included in my Ubuntu 8.04, which was the first OS I installed by myself, and more recently because of its stand regarding privacy. Now I might as well bite the bullet and move to Chrome or Edge, performance is much much better.
How do you define performance? For my use case I don't see any difference in speed compared to say, Safari.
[flagged]
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There's Chromium
There's chromium, and then, for those who take their privacy more seriously than the average VPN customer that just wants to do piracy, there's ungoogled-chromium.
It's like chromium, just without feeding heaps of your personally-identifying metadata directly to Google, who give it directly to the NSA, who give it directly to Elon Musk and DOGE.
Remember, ALL mass surveillance by ALL intelligence agencies is ALWAYS a threat to your freedom, because you don't get to revoke it. You weren't consenting to sharing your information with the Obama administration, you were consenting to sharing your information with all future administrations, no matter how far removed from your own worldview those future administrations may be.
There is one solution. We the people demand an end to ALL government surveillance as well as severe legal consequences for all US government employees who ever helped build such systems, even if they were "just following orders", because neither following orders nor ignorance of the larger picture is an excuse for facilitating moral atrocities.
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Time to switch: https://librewolf.net/
These FF forks will all be nonviable within a few years of Mozilla going under. Google and Apple will keep moving the web (for better or worse), and these forks will be unable to keep up for lack of resources.
Whether they get relatively slower, or just can't support some new web tech, the writing will be on the wall.
"A few years" is at least 10 years, though. That's a lot of time to pivot or get morally sounder funding sources (users for example).
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They made too many decisions on their own to be a 1:1 replacement. I think there needs to be a new fork, which would just remove all of the spyware bits.
If you think Librewolf is too opinionated, try Waterfox [1]
[1] https://github.com/BrowserWorks/Waterfox
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Which decisions? LibreWolf ist exactly that + hardening used in tor browser maybe you mean those but all of them you can change in setting.
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Is there a “brave” browser that uses Firefox?
Yes, though I've never used it: https://librewolf.net/
I've had good luck with LibreWolf on Windows
IceCat, maybe?
I too am looking for alternatives.
Official site: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
Binary build available here but not official:
https://icecatbrowser.org/index.html
edit:
I linked to a non-official site first, added the official site and made clear that the site offering binarys is non-official.
For which OS? Waterfox is nice https://waterfox.net
Zen browser https://zen-browser.app/
There is a Brave browser.
I think what was being asked is if there's something like Brave that doesn't use a webkit derived back-end. Good defaults and a good stance on privacy is one reason to use Brave and historically Firefox, but another is that it keeps the browser ecosystem from being too homogeneous. Firefox is the last browser with over sub-percent market share, and even then it's less than 3%, so it's almost gone.
A case can be made that many of the browsers split from webkit (or split from things that split from webkit) long enough ago that there is competition, but IMO that's a far cry from a fully independent solution.
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I'd go with Ungoogled Chromium at that point.
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I've been using Mozilla since the browser was literally called Mozilla, and I remain loyal simply because I don't think we should fragment the ecosystem. One company focusing its development resources is a lot better than 3 open source projects.
But fact is that Mozilla is effing up big time. They remain in the bay area where developers are paid super high salaries when they should be a 100% remote company. They have bugs and issues decades old. They keep flirting with big business.
They are also our last big corporate hope against the enshittification of the web.
It's all just part of Mozilla's ebb and flow. Give it until 2027. They will have lost all community support and be trailing in many browser metrics. And then they'll do something that once again builds them a niche of devoted fans.
It has happened before. And before that, and before that.
Sometimes I wish I had the kind of education that allows you to interpret Terms of Use, Privacy Notices and other legal mumbojumbo in a way that answers my questions. It's great practice if you like cryptic crosswords though.
Having access to everyone's ChatGPT sessions does seem pretty valuable as it can now be used for training / fine tuning other AIs. I suspect this is where the business case comes from.
I suppose the main target here is to sell firefox sync bookmark and history data?
It is possible to host your own firefox sync instance but it's too much work. I hope it gets easier with these announcements lighting a fire under people.
Title is inaccurate. Mozilla get a nonexclusive license. That is different from ownership.
The license grant in these terms does not specify the license is irrevocable. The licensor, i.e., the Firefox user, reserves the right to revoke.
Thanks—we've updated the title to mention licenses now. I think probably we'll end up merging all these threads; not sure yet.
Edit: merging into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065, which had that title.
The license does not say that Mozilla owns information that the user inputs through Firefox. But the HN title does. If Mozilla owns the information then it would have no need for a license. Further, the license does not specify that it is perpetual. A Firefox user does not grant Mozilla perpetual rights to use the information. These rights can be terminated.
(Note to self: Initially points went to -2.)
Does Chrome have a similar policy that says that it owns a license to your data?
> Without it [the license], we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example.
That is EXACTLY what we WANT: DON'T use information we type in Firefox!
If that's a problem for you, let us pay you i.e. $5/month.
if i want to block data collection by Mozilla, what do i configure in pi-hole?
If you don't want this to happen, then a company would need to:
1. Have the capital to build and maintain a browser 2. By selling copies of that browser 3. In sufficient funds to keep the business going and make the owners a profit.
Let's say you can do it with a small team -- if you're forking something like firefox, and pay for the salary of 21 people -- full time, 8 developers, a PM, a manager, Customer support (3 people), 3 sales folks, and 3 testers, and one owner.
If the average salary is $175,000, and the fully loaded cost of each employee (including office space, equipment, benefits) is $250,000, then just to break even -- and not even account for inflation or costs rising -- and not even accounting for capital expenditures, the product would have to sell 105,000 copies at $50 a pop.
If you sold it for $30 a year, that's now 175,000 copies, every year. Realistically, to account for taxes and the fact that Developer salaries are no longer expensible (thanks Trump!), you'd have to sell around twice that number of copies, so around 350,000 copies of this browser, a year. Every year. Just to break even.
When's the last time 350,000 people said, "I want to buy a web browser?". When's the last time 350,000 people bought a web browser?
We've made our own bed in this one, the second folks saw that Internet Explorer was free; and that killed the original Mozilla browser -- that -- by the way -- I happily paid for.
If you want an internet where you're not the product, then that's an internet where the business models have to change, and the customer desire to pay for the software they use has to go up.
And that still -- still -- does not alleviate the problem of capital needing to get started, which is only exacerbated by the Section 174 changes in the TCJA of 2017.
I promise, I will never die.
I honestly don't understand why Mozilla isn't succeeding with a "privacy subscription" where for $100/year (or $20/month or something) you get a full kit of digital sovereignty tools. Password manager, Mozilla, email with privacy features, secure file transfer, ephemeral cards...
I'm genuinely curious if people can comment why this isn't working -- because it seems like they've actually already tried versions of this!
Google pays them south of a $billion/year. Your money means nothing.
> Google pays them south of a $billion/year
Until it doesn't.
Can someone elaborate on what this means? Has Mozilla completely abandoned the "privacy" focus? I.e. should I stop recommending the browser and find an alternative? Deleting sentences like "We never sell your data" is for a long-time fan of the browser very alarming. But frankly I'm confused by the PR/blogs and can't tell from the privacy policy if/how it now allows selling my data.
How does this matter? If it said "never" it cannot be changed by deleting it, because never means for eternity. Otherwise it wasn't a promise.
Disabled auto-update until this is clarified or alternatives can be found.
I for one don't agree to these 'terms of use'. If people are failing to understand Mozilla's legalese, it is Mozilla's fault for making them ambiguous and difficult to understand. They earned 650 million dollars last year. Surely they have the resources for the task.
Do be aware of the missing security updates if you follow this advice
I would expect half of that is funding developers for their numerous different projects. How naive would that assumption be?
You seem to be in the ballpark : "260 million for 'software development expenses'" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
Still that leaves ~ 400 million dollars for a privacy policy that doesn't read like it came from a sleazy big-tech company.
HN title: "Mozilla owns "information you input through Firefox"
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
"When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
This is a license to use, not ownership. If Mozilla owns the information then it does not need a license.
Licenses to use information can be revoked, i.e., terminated.
Good catch—thanks! I've put that more accurate quote in the title above (or rather, a shortened version that fits HN's 80 char limit).
Edit: merging into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065, which had that title.
Anyone think this is to afford the ability to run a remote AI service which provides services that would be improbable to run locally?
I was pretty confused about why this even exists (it's weird to read a bunch of paragraphs that are semantically valid but don't seem to convey information), and then I read the [Privacy Notice](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox). Looks like there's a decent amount of surveillance / ad tech built in to Firefox.
From "How is your data used?":
> Firefox also shows its own search suggestions based on information stored on your local device (including recent search terms, open tabs, and previously visited URLs). These suggestions may include sponsored suggestions from Mozilla’s partners
> Mozilla's partners receive de-identified information about interactions with the suggestions they've served.
> Depending on your location, Mozilla derives the high level category (e.g., travel, shopping) of your search from keywords in that query, in order to understand the types and number of searches being made. We utilize privacy preserving technologies such that Mozilla only learns that someone, somewhere, performed a search relating to a particular category, without knowing who.
> Mozilla may also receive location-related keywords from your search (such as when you search for “Boston”) and share this with our partners to provide recommended and sponsored content. Where this occurs, Mozilla cannot associate the keyword search with an individual user once the search suggestion has been served and partners are never able to associate search suggestions with an individual user.
> You may be able to opt into an enhanced search experience, which will result in Mozilla processing additional personal data, including your technical data, location and search data. Some of that information may be shared with our partners on a de-identified and/or aggregated basis.
> We use technical data, language preference, and location to serve content and advertising on the Firefox New Tab page in the correct format (i.e. for mobile vs desktop), language, and relevant location. Mozilla collects technical and interaction data, such as the position, size, views and clicks on New Tab content or ads, to understand how people are interacting with our content and to personalize future content, including sponsored content. This data may be shared with our advertising partners on a de-identified or aggregated basis.
> In some instances, when ads are enabled on New Tab, additional browsing data may also be processed locally on your device to measure the effectiveness of those ads; such data will only be shared with Mozilla and/or our advertising partners via our privacy-preserving technologies on an aggregated and/or de-identified basis.
> When you allow us to do so, Firefox sends Mozilla data about the website domain or specific advertising campaign (if any) that referred you to our download page to help us understand and improve our marketing efforts. Firefox also shares information with our marketing partners to measure and improve these campaigns; what information is specifically shared varies (depending on how you discovered Firefox and your operating system) but generally includes how you were referred to our download page and whether you actively use Firefox. Where Firefox is pre-installed on your device, technical and interaction data (your device type and whether Firefox is used) will be sent to our marketing partners, and shared with Mozilla.
I wonder if LibreWolf is of any help with those (and previous) changes. Would love to see LibreWolf maintainers chime in on this.
Is there another browser that can do "container tabs" really the only thing that's keeping on Firefox now
LibreWolf can do it.
Fuck it I am going back to Internet Explorer.
The writing on the wall was there since a long time ago considering the actions of the foundations leadership. They burn money like crazy on some useless stuff, no direction or idea how to bring back FF into the spotlight where it belongs.
Now with the changes with Chrome (basically killing of adblockers) they have a big window to make a play but instead they make the most idiotic move possible. Typical Mozilla - a mix of great tech (e.g. Rust) and detached from reality leadership.
I've been using Firefox since decades, even when it was a slow and buggy piece of crap compared to Chrome but now I think it is time to move to something else. But what will guarantee me I won't get a rug pull when some MBA takes the reins?
To the people that forced their friends and family to switch to Firefox be sure to schedule the tech support visit.
Mozilla lost its missing a long time ago. The previous CEO was a disaster, and it looks like this one is too.
I think it's safe now to call Mozila's management as criminals. They are using old Mozilla's reputation to profit off people's data.
IANAL - does that mean if I, in the UK, get arrested for wrong think on X I can redirect the police to Mozilla?
This seems poorly worded, intentionally or not. Doesn't feel like the Mozilla I've known.
What would complete the irony would be Google declaring they are abandoning ads in the age of AI :)
I thought Firefox sync and VPN was end to end encrypted.
That is a far bigger wtf than dumb unenforceable tos text.
It is. The data exfiltration is more through telemetry vectors as they currently use. A VPN can't help you with that and while they can't see your bookmarks stored in the sync service because they don't have the encryption key, they technically could do what they like once that is decrypted and in memory.
Librewolf can use Mozilla's existing Firefox Sync and because of the end-to-end encryption you get the privacy you wanted that way [1].
[1] https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-...
>dumb unenforceable tos text
It is unenforceable by YOU, since Mozilla has reserved all rights to all the data you put through your browser. Which is why I'm currently using LibreWolf for the first time.
I'm not using Firefox because it's functionally superior to Chrome. I use it because it's not a surveillance technology and Chrome is. Privacy is the only reason why I'm using Firefox.
The board governing Firefox development has got to be some of the worst. They don't understand the product nor their users.
This is not your computer. This is not your operating system. This is not your browser.
Urgh Mozilla needs to focus on being a good web browser, Id even pay, but you cant
I pay for Relay... I'm sure it's a mistake though bc it'll get ended sometime soon and I'll have to figure out how to transfer all my email aliases elsewhere...
Just installed Librewolf last night and will gladly support the end of Mozilla.
What choice do we have then?
I guess Brave is the best we have until something more complete comes out of this crop of new browser engines like ladybird.
Chromium and a bunch of its forks, all the Firefox forks, Gnome Web (Epiphany), Falkon, Ladybird, probably a bunch of others I don't know about...
I uninstalled Firefox this morning after reading about these sus af changes.
Tried Librewolf and found it to be great,
Migrating took me 20m, and I'm glad I did it because it left be a backup of something that so far only Mozilla kept for me.
I'm kind of stuck with Android. I don't know of an alternative, but haven't spent time looking for one yet.
Well that clearly sucks. Does anyone know alternatives for firefox sync?
only if: there was a firefox module that could run continious scatelogical searches in the background , and repost randon grabs to a bot only forum, and mozilla would own, a lot of **
ignore the rage-bait and learn contract law and terminology.
We need an open and independent alternative to Firefox Sync.
Mozilla is going down the path of enshittification. I don't really care what the exact AUP, ToS and other legalese tomes boil down to, I should not need to agree to nothing but the license to use a piece of free software. If they only wanted this shit to apply to the online services, they should state it as such.
I am sad to state this, but this is likely the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I am convinced that there is a huge silent majority of users here that care about the erosion of privacy and data abuse because that's why we were using Firefox in the first place. If I don't have any assurance of my rights, privacy, anonymity and the general assurance of virtues that a capital F - Free Software- should exhibit. If I have to settle for a solution that doesn't respect my rights, I will use something more complete, well supported and user-friendly.
Guess they have to pay the CEO's seven million dollar salary somehow ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
That's all! Thanks for watching folks.
My god people, what a nothing burger. Try clicking the link and reading the actual terms:
> You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Most of the comments here are in bad faith or just people jumping on the hype train. Sad.
Adieu Mozilla!
We need an EU alternative to Firefox.
Just sponsor Servo[1], it will be much safer than Chrome or Firefox once ready.
[1] https://opencollective.com/servo
Is it EU based though?
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Ask HN: Is Brave an ok alternative?
Brave was never good: crypto-crap, based on Chromium, and was modifying web pages from the start without your consent. I never understood why people use it.
People use it because it is essentially Chrome with uBlock-Origin built in (I think the developer of uBlock Origin is employed by Brave) and it removes the stupid cookie modals that are on every website. Between running a pi-hole and Brave, I rarely see an advert on a website.
Turning off the "crypto-crap" can be done quite easily (you literally right click on the BAT icon and it is gone) and the new tab ads are removed again with a couple of clicks. I've found it also runs much better than Firefox on older hardware.
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The Youtube adblock always works
Depends, but with this news you will probably not be downgrading too much.
Brave really does have a bunch of very nice features, I particularly enjoyed using them on my phone to download videos from youtube for online listening. Built-in adblocking is very enjoyable too.
Do note that there had been several smaller controversies, including one that 'Honey' got recently into hot water for, which was replacing affiliate links with their own. There is currently an on-going lawsuit with Honey for this.
In honesty, look at the controversies page on wikipedia and decide for yourself, I don't think there is a good or a bad choice here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
In my opinion, if you care about the open web, then you should not be using a Blink (Chromium) based browser like Brave. The less control Google has, the better for the web.
Well that ship has sailed.
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I use it. Turning off the ads and annoyances can be done in literally 20 seconds. It has uBlock Origin built in and removes the cookie modal popups.
It has a nice sync feature so my bookmarks / extensions are sync'd. The developer tools are exactly the same as Chromes.
It has some controversies in the past, but generally it has been ok IMO.
Brave is my favorite so far. You can run an HTTP monitor like Charles Proxy or Fiddler in your OS if you think your browser is snooping on you. I do Brave + Ghostery and works great.
It’s just sad that everything eventually comes to this.
Is it an inevitable law that everything eventually enshittifies? Firefox has had a good run, but it still pisses me off.
Yes. Even biological cells do this. It is called cancer.
> You agree to indemnify and hold Mozilla and its affiliates harmless for any liability or claim from your use of Firefox, to the extent permitted by applicable law.
Yikes. Good thing i was never informed or agreed to this nonsense.
Isn't limitation of liability part of virtually every open source license?
From MIT license:
> IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
From GPLv3 license:
> ... IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM ...
The issue is indemnification, not liability. I do not have the funds to defend Mozilla and their partners if someone decides to sue them because they don't like how i use their software.
Mozilla too?
Et tu, Mozilla?
Sell out
i switched to Firefox because of Google's Chrome's nonsense on ublock origin. turn out Mozilla's firefox also have its own nonsense.
Mozilla really keeps making missteps.
So, what are the forks?
"Never" always means "Until we decide otherwise".
Great. We need to sue Mozilla to death for GDPR violation, it seems. I guessed Mozilla would eventually die, but not like this.
Since it’s relevant to the discussion, here’s a repost of their latest response.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...
On Wednesday we shared that we’re introducing a new Terms of Use (TOU) and Privacy Notice for Firefox. Since then, we’ve been listening to some of our community’s concerns with parts of the TOU, specifically about licensing. Our intent was just to be as clear as possible about how we make Firefox work, but in doing so we also created some confusion and concern. With that in mind, we’re updating the language to more clearly reflect the limited scope of how Mozilla interacts with user data.
Here’s what the new language will say:
You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.
In addition, we’ve removed the reference to the Acceptable Use Policy because it seems to be causing more confusion than clarity.
Privacy FAQ
We also updated our Privacy FAQ to better address legal minutia around terms like “sells.” While we’re not reverting the FAQ, we want to provide more detail about why we made the change in the first place.
TL;DR 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. We changed our language because some jurisdictions define “sell” more broadly than most people would usually understand that word. Firefox has built-in privacy and security features, plus options that let you fine-tune your data settings.
The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”
Similar privacy laws exist in other US states, including in Virginia and Colorado. And that’s a good thing — Mozilla has long been a supporter of data privacy laws that empower people — but the competing interpretations of do-not-sell requirements does leave many businesses uncertain about their exact obligations and whether or not they’re considered to be “selling data.”
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our Privacy Notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
We’re continuing to make sure that Firefox provides you with sensible default settings that you can review during onboarding or adjust at any time.
Obligatory GDPR post.
Data of UK and EU users is protected. Why doesn't the USA have such sensible data protection laws; the only hostility I see is from surveillance capitalists spreading their FUD.
Did you not see all the surveillance capitalists at the inauguration?
Haven't you heard? Protecting liberty is against freedom. Ask Mr. Vance about it. /s
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Software running on my machine is not a "service", so it does not need a "Terms of Service".
Firefox Sync needs a ToS. Firefox Relay (the email masking thing) needs a ToS. Firefox web browser does not.
There is no need for a ToS unless your software has privacy issues because you are spying on users without their 100% informed consent. There is a lot of software that does though.
https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
The only ToS of a free software should be the chosen free software license (and if applicable, a trademark policy). Anything else is questionable.
Does it? How much other OSS has a Terms of Use? I can understand it for firefox services like accounts, but for just using the browser I don't see how this makes sense.
I kept getting flagged for calling out Firefox/Mozilla, for years
Now you get what you deserve, folks
I'm sure there is a better source than that culture warrior twitter account.. Like the commit on github itself, for instance.
Apple removed encryption for iCloud users in UK. I don't see the outrage on HN why?
Because you're looking at a thread about Mozilla, the outrage is in the threads about Apple removing ADP for iCloud users in the UK.
Yes. Thank you.:)
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Misleading framing.
Apple removed encryption for iCloud users in the UK rather than pretending to keep it while giving the UK a backdoor.
In this, Apple was the good guy and the UK the bad actor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43128253
firefox is an open source software, i know it's great to bash it with the many questionable decisions they take but at the end it's still the least worst web browser and no one is entitled to having a free, ads free and privacy respecting web browser.
the author shows that mozilla royalty-free, worldwide license TOS change is now similar to what google always had with chrome.
To me as long as i understand the business model of mozilla, which is quite precarious but still, and it doesn't have some funny connections going in and out, i'm fine with their TOS change.
It's not the best but what you gonna do anyway ? chrome is chrome, 99% of the alternative are still running google chrome under the hood which give google insane leverage. Safari is at the mercy of apple dictatorship on the extension support. and that's all.
maybe once google is forbidden to give money to mozilla to choose the default search engine we will see real change in web browser choice, for instance it could fasten the agonizing mozilla death and prompt privacy or even just power user (as people who want to be able to block ads everywhere, not only where google mv3 allows it) to pay to develop, maintain and ultimately use a web browser.
I think this argument is tired.
Mozilla is making decisions in lockstep with Google around privacy in the browser.
Chromium is also open source software, and you'll note that several forks of that codebase don't have this "we're going to train AI models on literally everything you do online" clause.
Hell - Firefox itself has several forks which are also less invasive.
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> but at the end it's still the least worst web browser and no one is entitled to having a free, ads free and privacy respecting web browser.
No one is entitled to this - yet there are a good number of people who go out of their way to make this available. Use one of their tools instead of pretending that Mozilla is being "the good guy" here. They absolutely are not.
I'm genuinely curious about your leverage comment. Lots of people base their browsers on the open source Chromium project. They rely on Google for the source, but they aren't indebted in any way the company. They're essentially just forking the source every time they update.
On the other hand, Mozilla develops their own source code but is almost entirely funded by Google. They are looking for alternative funding, but does receiving all your paychecks from a company give them less leverage over you than freely copying their code? I'm not convinced.
I'm sad to see Firefox take this direction, but they've been going in a bad direction for a long time, and this is a bit too far for me. Deleted it everywhere. Personally, I like Falkon and Vivaldi. Jon von Tetzchner may not release all his source, but he has a great track record over decades of browser development, and that kind of earned trust is something Mozilla has not been fostering lately. He has never demonstrated that Google, Microsoft or anyone else has "insane leverage" over him or his companies and wasn't afraid to walk away from Opera when he didn't like the direction. We need more of that in the browser space.
> no one is entitled to having a free, ads free and privacy respecting web browser
I disagree. As governments and society at large are increasingly requiring you to be online for basic tasks we do owe it to make sure people have a user agent that doesn't come with strings attached.
There are valid criticisms to make of these ToS.
However, if someone is going to stop using Firefox because of these new terms, I would assume that person is already not using any products or services from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc. Seems pretty hypocritical otherwise.
Those companies are known to be privacy hostile companies. Mozilla/Firefox, not. In fact, Mozilla claims the reverse!
For them to abandon privacy, is a betrayal, it's backstabbing behaviour. Feeling betrayed and wanting nothing to do with said software, as a result, seems normal to me.
Or in slightly different terms: If I wasn't using Chrome because of privacy issues, then Firefox losing the privacy advantage means they just ditched the only reason I was still using their product.
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The type of product/service matters here. We're talking about a browser here, with the name "User Agent" being popularized by Mozilla,for fuck's sake.
I don't use Google or meta services. I do use apple's and Microsoft's OS, but last time I checked, neither of those required me to give a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to Microsoft or Apple for all the data that I input into their OS - even when it goes through the TCP stack. Yet this is what Mozilla has in their own license. (and yes, before you ask, I did review the macOS TOS. You can find them here if you're interested: https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSSequoia.pdf)
For all their problems, MS/Apple TOS are usually for things that interact with their services. Here, firefox's new TOS is ridiculously wide and touches things that do not interact with Mozilla's services, for no reason.
So, no, I do not see the hypocrisy.
There's also a matter of trust; Google, Apple, Microsoft and Meta are trustworthy in the sense that I have an expectation of them that's already fairly negative insofar as user privacy is concerned. The correct response to "Google tracks you" isn't one of shock, it's one of acknowledgement because it's to be expected at this point. Google hasn't ever pretended that they aren't selling your profile to the highest bidder, so while I have issues with that, they're more in the sense of "it should be illegal to do this in general" rather than "I could never have foreseen this outcome". Same with Microsoft, Meta and especially Apple.
Mozilla was operating under a different set of expectations up to this point - they always made a big deal of protecting the user from bad actors, put privacy pretty front and center (in the sense of not selling your shit to data brokers/using it for advertising) and in general were fairly reliable on that. This dynamic seems to be shifting in a new direction that's closer to the other four mentioned companies and that's violating the trust they've build up over the years. It makes you wonder what Mozillas word is now worth and what it'll be worth in the future.
Hence why people are considering leaving; trust is a pretty major factor in that sort of decision. It arrives by foot (is hard to gain) but leaves by horse (is easy to lose).
If I'm using a worse product (arguable, I know--depends on use-case) for their virtue signaling, and they quit even pretending...
I might just choose the best browser, then.
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I hate it when people get angry about this exact term of phrase. This is the legal definition of how user generated content works. What they're really saying is "if you upload anything to us, we're allowed to distribute it either back to you, or to other people". Yet another case of false panic.
Can you please cite the part that you think corresponds to what you claim?
To me the words
> When you upload or input information through Firefox
Indicate this is not only about uploading to them, but also just using Firefox to upload anything to somewhere.
The terms do not mention being limited to uploading stuff to Mozilla.
Exactly, I agree. In fact they declare : "You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
They reserve the right to use every bit of information we type into the browser, which is pretty scary. It means they read and collect every bit of information we input in the browser ... think for example the text we input in a webmail app or in a home banking app ...
Time to switch to LibreWolf and Mullvad Browser.
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If people are misinterpreting mozilla's legalese, that is mozilla's fault for making these terms vague, broad and easy to misinterpret. Also i am not convinced your interpretation is correct.
Mozilla Firefox didn't have a 'Terms of Use' for 20 years. Why now?
Its quite clear they're seeking to expand their rights over their users data with their new privacy policy while simultaneously reducing user rights with this new 'Terms of Use'. i.e. Enshitification