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My Firefox has become adware. Adware for Mozilla, but still: Every new tab I open, there is a “WE CARE FOR YOUR PRIVACY” message awaiting for me. Every restart,
by laurent92 5y ago
My Firefox has become adware. Adware for Mozilla, but still: Every new tab I open, there is a “WE CARE FOR YOUR PRIVACY” message awaiting for me. Every restart, “LOOK AT HOW WE HAVE FEWER ADS, MORE PRIVACY”. And from time to time, if I don’t open a tab by myself, it will install Pocket and/or open two tabs at startup, one for the release notes and one for browsing, but still with the little mention “Firefox has been awarded the Firefox of the year by Firefox, thanks to how we don’t let the bad guys follow you with ads. Also please create an online profile so we upload all your passwords to the cloud. Because you’ll be safer.”
Honestly, Mozilla has lost the big picture. The whole point of it was to have fewer messages that occupy the mind and disrupt tasks, and Chrome does it better, as long as I’m logged in.
- corty 5y agoAlso, in my mind, exchanging Chrome's insistence on Google logins is just the same as Firefox's insistence on their proprietary sync and pocket. I'll say no to every one of those things, because I do value my privacy and none of them provide proper self-hosted options.
- ragesh 5y agoI thought it was possible to host your own sync server for Firefox. Is this no longer true?
- corty 5y agoIt is theoretically true. They have changed the protocol at least three times, there are no user-accessible settings (just about:config) to point at your own sync server, there is no documentation. And at their rate of breaking stuff, your sync server will be obsolete as soon as you get it running. Happened to me, will never waste time on it again. And the open-source version of the sync server is bad software, age-old python, tons of code smells. I'd wager it is not what they are using themselves.
- cnst 5y agoChances are it is the version they're using themselves, too. Proprietary software is often way worse than any of the OSS projects.
- the_duke 5y agoSync is optional, and you can use a custom server and self host it.
- charles-m-knox 5y agoLast I checked, self-hosted Firefox sync uses Python 2.7, with dead GitHub activity. Not quite the best state for Firefox sync.
- the_duke 5y agoI believe they have shifted to a Rust implementation. https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
- charles-m-knox 5y agoOk, I'm relieved to see that this exists. Thank you.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoAnd it's end to end encrypted unlike Google and Microsoft's offerings
- yoasif_ 5y agoFirefox Sync is open source: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver
- NelsonMinar 5y agoWait, what? I use Firefox exclusively and there's definitely not a Mozilla ad every new tab or every restart. There is one once a major release (including a couple of days ago), and those always annoy me, but it's only once a month or two. Are you exaggerating or does yours work differently?
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoActually I think there is... I distinctly remember being extremely annoyed at the text ad on the new tab page. Turned it off a long time ago. It's called "Snippets" in settings/home. It's like a Twitter feed from Mozilla.
- NelsonMinar 5y agoOh huh you're right, I must have turned it off and forgotten. I turned it back on again and don't see anything new but maybe it's not all the time.
- laurent92 5y agoIf you had to turn off features from your browser, that’s a pretty good demonstration that the browser was getting in your way, in a sufficient occurrence that you jumped on Google to ask “How to disable Firefox’s new annoyance”. Not everyone wants to spend time disabling features of their browser to be able to use it. Especially if Firefox pretends to not get in your way!