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I've been a daily user and advocate of Firefox since Opera changed to using Chromium. But recently I've grown tired of their privacy hypocrisy and company decis

I've been a daily user and advocate of Firefox since Opera changed to using Chromium. But recently I've grown tired of their privacy hypocrisy and company decisions that I've uninstalled it and started to try out Edge/Brave/Vivaldi as my daily. It has pained me to do this as FF was my last safe haven away from Chromium. If you dig into some settings and follow tech news, I have begun to question some of Mozilla's controversial settings, deals with 3rd parties and their political blog posts. I also have a problem with the CEO making $3m per year yet a continued market share decline since she came on. Just a few of the things off the top of my head that I feel betray my trust of Firefox (all of these pertain to default Windows install): 1) Enabled by default all of your website DNS requests going to Cloudflare with a "promise" this information is not being used or sold. We all know how solid this promise has been for other large tech companies. All under the promotion that DoH protects you from your own ISP. 2) Upon install, FF installs a scheduled service that runs daily. From what I've found out, that service is sending back to Mozilla what your default browser is on YOUR PC (why is that their business). This scheduled service remains on your PC even after uninstalling Firefox and continues to run daily. 3) Enabled by default are Browser Studies and testing a clean install one is already installed and active called "F100 Snippets". Studies allow the Firefox team to install stuff right to your browser whenever they want, to gather telemetry . 4) "Recommended extensions" enabled by default. Got a nag for a recommended extension after few days of browsing. So FF must be scanning your browsing history in order for this to work? 5) this result: https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traffic-results/ https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff... . While it was from 2019 so needs to be updated, but upon first-run I was shocked at the results for FF here. 6) Firefox on Android has a known tracker embedded and enabled by default called Leanplum. From Mozilla's own website they state "Leanplum is a mobile marketing vendor" I'd love to support and use FF solely again, but I think they need some serious shaking up, starting with a new CEO (who allows this stuff).

Synaesthesia 6y ago
Yeah that's all true maybe but the other vendors are far worse AFAIK.
- krn 6y ago
  I have no issues with Brave after disabling all of their crypto stuff and widgets. It's safer, smoother, and much better at ad-blocking than bare Firefox. I don't care about CNAME-uncloaking by uBlock Origin, because that's already being taken care of by NextDNS at OS level.
- favadi 6y ago
  > Upon install, FF installs a scheduled service that runs daily. From what I've found out, that service is sending back to Mozilla what your default browser is on YOUR PC (why is that their business). This scheduled service remains on your PC even after uninstalling Firefox and continues to run daily. This is shocking to me. More information, if anyone is not aware yet: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/mozapps/defaultagent/default-browser-agent/index.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/mozapps/defa.... > The Default Browser Agent is a Windows-only scheduled task which runs in the background to collect and submit data about the browser that the user has set as their OS default (that is, the browser that will be invoked by the operating system to open web links that the user clicks on in other programs).
  - onenite 6y ago
    Isn't default browser usage potentially useful statistical information? What's the worst that will likely happen if people have that data?
    - account42 6y ago
      It being useful does not mean that Mozilla has any right to collect that information without informed consent. Leaving behind a telemetry service when uninstalling the software it came with is certainly scummy.
Vinnl 6y ago
I don't have the background behind all of those and I'm sure not everything is rainbows and butterflies (especially Firefox for Android has some iffy stuff, I think), but for a couple of your points... > 1) Enabled by default all of your website DNS requests going to Cloudflare with a "promise" this information is not being used or sold. We all know how solid this promise has been for other large tech companies. All under the promotion that DoH protects you from your own ISP. AIUI, this is only in the US, where for practically everybody the alternative is indeed that they're going through your ISP, with a promise that the information is being used and sold. Kind of a rock and a hard place situation. > 4) "Recommended extensions" enabled by default. Got a nag for a recommended extension after few days of browsing. So FF must be scanning your browsing history in order for this to work? To clarify, it's not the extensions themselves that are enabled, but the recommendations, right? If so, yes, Firefox is analysing your usage, but that is your local Firefox install, i.e. the thing that already has and uses your full browser history. AFAIK the rules for when to recommend what are the same for everyone and run just on your computer.
onenite 6y ago
> 5) this result: https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff... . While it was from 2019 so needs to be updated, but upon first-run I was shocked at the results for FF here. The article states: "Firefox remains one of the chattiest browsers during a first run. At 117 requests, it lead the pack with individual requests. It should be noted, however, that this isn’t the browser itself making all of these calls, but another page that is present during startup." So it seems that the initial page is the thing making most of the network calls, and not the browser itself. Wouldn't this mean that we can simply disable the wi-fi/internet temporarily to load the browser initially, closing unnecessary tabs, and customizing it as we needed? In general, this seems like a good practice for opening up apps in general, even though it's a minor inconvenience and we theoretically shouldn't have to do this. Anyway, I don't mind the telemetry if it will help and not be used against us.

Synaesthesia 6y ago

Yeah that's all true maybe but the other vendors are far worse AFAIK.

krn 6y ago
I have no issues with Brave after disabling all of their crypto stuff and widgets. It's safer, smoother, and much better at ad-blocking than bare Firefox. I don't care about CNAME-uncloaking by uBlock Origin, because that's already being taken care of by NextDNS at OS level.
favadi 6y ago
> Upon install, FF installs a scheduled service that runs daily. From what I've found out, that service is sending back to Mozilla what your default browser is on YOUR PC (why is that their business). This scheduled service remains on your PC even after uninstalling Firefox and continues to run daily. This is shocking to me. More information, if anyone is not aware yet: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/mozapps/defaultagent/default-browser-agent/index.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/mozapps/defa.... > The Default Browser Agent is a Windows-only scheduled task which runs in the background to collect and submit data about the browser that the user has set as their OS default (that is, the browser that will be invoked by the operating system to open web links that the user clicks on in other programs).
- onenite 6y ago
  Isn't default browser usage potentially useful statistical information? What's the worst that will likely happen if people have that data?
  - account42 6y ago
    It being useful does not mean that Mozilla has any right to collect that information without informed consent. Leaving behind a telemetry service when uninstalling the software it came with is certainly scummy.

Vinnl 6y ago

I don't have the background behind all of those and I'm sure not everything is rainbows and butterflies (especially Firefox for Android has some iffy stuff, I think), but for a couple of your points... > 1) Enabled by default all of your website DNS requests going to Cloudflare with a "promise" this information is not being used or sold. We all know how solid this promise has been for other large tech companies. All under the promotion that DoH protects you from your own ISP. AIUI, this is only in the US, where for practically everybody the alternative is indeed that they're going through your ISP, with a promise that the information is being used and sold. Kind of a rock and a hard place situation. > 4) "Recommended extensions" enabled by default. Got a nag for a recommended extension after few days of browsing. So FF must be scanning your browsing history in order for this to work? To clarify, it's not the extensions themselves that are enabled, but the recommendations, right? If so, yes, Firefox is analysing your usage, but that is your local Firefox install, i.e. the thing that already has and uses your full browser history. AFAIK the rules for when to recommend what are the same for everyone and run just on your computer.

onenite 6y ago

> 5) this result: https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff... . While it was from 2019 so needs to be updated, but upon first-run I was shocked at the results for FF here. The article states: "Firefox remains one of the chattiest browsers during a first run. At 117 requests, it lead the pack with individual requests. It should be noted, however, that this isn’t the browser itself making all of these calls, but another page that is present during startup." So it seems that the initial page is the thing making most of the network calls, and not the browser itself. Wouldn't this mean that we can simply disable the wi-fi/internet temporarily to load the browser initially, closing unnecessary tabs, and customizing it as we needed? In general, this seems like a good practice for opening up apps in general, even though it's a minor inconvenience and we theoretically shouldn't have to do this. Anyway, I don't mind the telemetry if it will help and not be used against us.