this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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Asking after the privacy debacle and manifest. I'm not keeping up closely, but iirc Firefox is the browser recommended because of Ublock. After the privacy data issue I've noticed broken trust from Firefox users, recommendations in favor of switching browsers, and predictions saying Firefox is going downhill fast and that their forks won't be maintained for much longer.

So I'm here asking the seasoned sailors' thoughts, aye. Is this just a storm passing by or are you really considering jumping ship?

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[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 159 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

It's mostly overblown. You can watch here or read here. The internet is overreacting again, but Mozilla has done fuck all to grasp why just yoinking understandable language and expecting people to understand legalese and draw lines to their Privacy Policy is making people upset or confused.

Imo, people jumping ship is justified, because a company that makes $37M just on investments should do better about being vocal and prescient champions of privacy. Even if their actual privacy policy is the same as it was a year ago, their failure to communicate with their supporters in a way they can understand should have consequences.

[–] dicksteele@lemm.ee 85 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It may be overblown but I am seriously tired of the way Mozilla is being run. The CEO has a $7 million salary. Big red flags always appear each time they increase the salary also. May be a bit hyperbolic but that’s why I’m just using another fork after 20 years

[–] Mongostein@lemmy.ca 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yup. I’ve been using Firefox for 16 years and I just switched to LibreWolf the other day.

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[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, and while I don't have any technical qualms about the direction of Mozilla with regard to Firefox, I'm personally switching for peace of mind and because of the aforementioned inability to communicate well. I don't like working with or supporting people that can't just say what they mean. I mean, how hard would it have been to have a human-readable version for stupid people like me and have a legalese version for the lawyers?

Regardless, as people make decisions, they deserve to be informed. It would be stupid to decide to leave Firefox if all you knew was the uninformed outrage of the internet.

[–] dicksteele@lemm.ee 11 points 1 week ago

That’s fair. Personally I should have called it quits when they started including pocket in the browser, but better late than never.

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[–] Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 65 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I still recommend it with a little asterisk:

Disable a bunch of shit in it or download a privacy focused fork of it (like Librewolf)

[–] thisismyname@lemm.ee 23 points 1 week ago (8 children)

That asterisk is a problem though, having to go through and make it secure is an issue. What if you miss a setting? What if you misunderstand a setting? None of it is particularly upfront and easy. It doesn't ask you when you first install it to set this stuff up, it encourages you to just get stuck in and start using it straight away.

It's not too complicated for a nerd whose hobby is computers or someone who has studied computers, but for the layperson it's too much.

That's why Librewolf is so good. It's secure by default, with all the settings toggled to privacy and you can ease that off if you wish, for convenience or whatever.

Firefox essentially can't seem to decide if they want to be FOSS or capitalist, that's an issue.

[–] Coldmoon@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 week ago

The other fun part is when it updates and changes your privacy settings.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago

And based on the behavior of other shitty applications and devices what if an update silently changes one of those settings back to a problematic state? If they aren’t there to begin with I don’t have to worry as much

To be fair Mozilla doesn’t have precedent for this behavior but they also didn’t have precedent for this whole nonsense that started this drama a month ago. Things change

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[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 42 points 1 week ago (14 children)
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[–] Ilandar@lemm.ee 38 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

and predictions saying Firefox is going downhill fast and that their forks won’t be maintained for much longer.

Possibly true, but abandoning ship is only bringing us closer to that timeline. People seem to be completely ignorant/delusional about how much work these forks will require to maintain if Mozilla's full time employees stop working on Firefox. If you have a practical reason to use another fork (like maybe a feature Firefox doesn't have) then I totally understand using that instead, but if you are simply making some kind of ethical protest change like all the new LibreWolf users who are so loudly virtue signalling at the moment then you need to think seriously about whether this course of action will ultimately end up hurting your ideals. Mozilla definitely has a big communication problem and I understand the desire to distance oneself from an organisation that repeatedly disrespects its supporters and never learns from its mistakes, as it is very fatiguing to endure their constant failures and the massive fall-outs from them, but ultimately I feel like switching away from Firefox is still an emotional decision rather than a rational one.

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[–] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 37 points 1 week ago (10 children)

I like LibreWolf, it's a privacy and security focused fork of Firefox.

But I'm really looking forward to Servo, hopefully it becomes usable one day.

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[–] erotador@lemmy.blahaj.zone 37 points 1 week ago (19 children)

well Firefox may enshittify, it's still the best option imo, certainly better than chrome or anything chrome based. even better if you use a privacy focused fork like librewolf.

there are other options out there, you can look into qt browsers, those were the basis for webkit browsers. hopefully soon things like servo/verso become more useable.

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[–] simpolomeo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 35 points 1 week ago

The whole firefox controversy was overblown. Hardened firefox is still the way to go.

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 34 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I mean yeah. I'm not a fan of the changes but there's no way in hell anything Chromium based will fare any better... do they even have uBlock still???

Probably turn off the telemetry, try a fork like LibreWolf or maybe the Arkenfox user.js if you'd rather stay close to upstream.

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[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 31 points 1 week ago (5 children)

i wasn't as plussed as everyone else over it, though i am concerned. i still donate to mozilla as, ultimately, i believe they're still good for those who champion an ethical, open, and not for profit internet.

i have switched to librefox, though, just because i like their developers and the fact that they've embraced mastodon and the fediverse. i also have firefox and nightly (though i use fennec on android because it comes through f droid)

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[–] yozul@beehaw.org 30 points 1 week ago

I'm not interested in anything based off Chromium, and I don't really like the idea of going with a Firefox fork much either. You're not only trusting them to actually care about your privacy and security, and you're not even just trusting them to actually catch and fix all of Mozilla's shenanigans as well. You are also trusting them to constantly stay on top of all the latest security patches. There aren't really any Firefox forks I trust with all 3 of those things at once. Even if there was, there are certainly no forks of Firefox that have anything even remotely close to the capacity necessary to maintain a web engine on their own, so you're still trusting Mozilla to keep Firefox updated and secure for your fork of choice to even have a chance.

Until a new browser with a new engine comes along that actually lets me use the full uBlock Origin there's not really any other option besides Firefox that makes sense. At least to me.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Firefox with like 10 different settings checkboxes unticked through its settings to disable phoning home, prevent sponsored suggestions, prevent recommendations, etc. + ublock origin extension installed, obviously.

It used to be just an install and go ordeal. Now you have to have all these caveats. I used to send technical and interaction to Mozilla but given their terms changes I can’t be confident in them with even that much information anymore.

Final thought is I don’t see what Mozilla’s endgame is. It costs a lot of money to develop a competitive and impactful web browser, I understand that much. Where are they supposed to get their money from? Well. I don’t get paid millions a year to solve this problem, but it seems pretty obvious the current leadership have made their minds up to make Firefox yet another advertisement browser.

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Links2 is obviously the best browser. #links2gang

But librewolf is pretty neat.

[–] murmurations 14 points 1 week ago
[–] DARbarian@fedia.io 22 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Nope. LibreWolf & Waterfox are top-tier, Zen and Mullvad Browsers aren't bad at all

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[–] zonnewin@feddit.nl 22 points 1 week ago (6 children)

I would say no. With the recent debacle the writing is on the wall. Mozilla is not taking our privacy seriously. So, I have switched away from vanilla Firefox.

I would recommend using a fork instead: LibreWolf, or Floorp, or Zen; and Ironfox on Android. Mullvad Browser is another option.

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[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The browser project dedicated to open web standards steered by a compromised non-profit or the browser project dedicated to undermining the traditional web browsing experience steered by the largest advertising company on Earth ... Let me think ...

[–] veniasilente@lemm.ee 16 points 1 week ago

It's incredible unfunny to read people here on Lemmy (or in the Fediverse in general) talk about dropping Firefox for Chrome or a Chromium browser. it's like complaining that your country is going wrong by voting Trump.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

All those people leaving Mozilla, I can only assume only read headlines and not the actual articles because they're just blowing a nothing burger out of proportion.

[–] venotic@kbin.melroy.org 10 points 1 week ago

All that we've ever asked from Mozilla is three things:

  • Focus on the performance of your browser so that it is not a hog.

  • Upkeep privacy

  • Keep it secure

Out of all of those things, Mozilla fails at all except maybe the last thing. We didn't ask for AI implementation. We didn't ask for Firefox accounts. We didn't ask for whatever feature flavor of the month that Mozilla got a hair up their ass about that they just had to throw into the browser. We asked for simple things and Mozilla overshot them. How are any of these features meant to uphold the values once held by Mozilla?

If you want to talk about a nothing-burger, think of all of the reasons that Mozilla had danced around to excuse itself by throwing these things in. And the cherry on top was the Terms of Service. Truly, they are tone-deaf.

[–] Pippipartner@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

To be fair nobody asked Mozilla to serve a stupid and detached statement without contextualizing what they meant or try to achieve.

[Edit] it feels like they're asking for the outrage. You can't just drop assurances of not selling data without explaining if your crowd is privacy aware. You can't take broad licenses from your users if you don't explain for what they are for. Having plaintext comment next to the lawyer speak would have fixed all that and none of this had to be this shitty. [/Edit]

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[–] LoveSausage@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yea sticking with firefox , but with arkenfox hardening.. bugfixes are more important than fear of some wordings , at least for now. Vanadium in GOS on the phone.

[–] kevincox@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 week ago

I still recommend it. I'm not fully happy with the situation but for now I consider it my best option.

  1. I consider Chromium-based browsers out of the question as they give too much power to Google. This is already showing to be a problem with new APIs and "features" that Google is pushing into the web platform and the bigger the market share gets the more control they have.
  2. Web browsers are the biggest attack surface that most people have. Displaying untrusted webpages and running untrusted code is incredibly difficult and vulnerabilities are regularly discovered. I don't yet know a Firefox fork that I trust enough to reliably respond to security vulnerabilities quickly and correctly.

So for now I am staying with raw Firefox. Not to mention that as a disto-built Firefox I have some insulation from Mozilla's ToS. But I am very much considering some of the forks, especially the ones that are very light with patches and are mostly configuration tweaks.

[–] giddy@aussie.zone 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I am sticking with Firefox but looking at hardening with https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox

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[–] gunnm@monero.town 16 points 1 week ago

Switched to Zen and Mullvad

[–] Album@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I've been using LW & Mull/IF before the outrage-TOU update and while they're great for me I wouldn't recommend them to everyone. I still keep FF as a backup and many ppl should continue to use FF for the time being as it was JUST A TOU update....for now.

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[–] efscher@lemmit.nyc.what.if.ua 10 points 1 week ago

I switched to Floorp about a month ago.

https://floorp.app/en

[–] warrenson@lemmy.nz 9 points 1 week ago

Just switched to Floorp. Loving it.

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