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Firefox Now Sends Your Address Bar Keystrokes to Mozilla
- dingdongbing 5y agoI honestly believe that the leaders at Mozilla are actively trying to ruin Firefox, and are perhaps paid off/run by people with interests in another competing browser. Even if that's the case I can't keep using this shitty browser, Chromium here I come
- uniqueid 5y agoI'm out! I don't care how few users Firefox has. I do care that the product has become a pile of garbage. I already tolerate the dumb tab bar, the update nag screen that interrupts my work, the telemetry setting that doesn't actually disable telemetry, the web services I don't want like Pocket, the ads, the memory issues that hobble my machine when I stream video... I won't move to a browser like Chromium with a connection to Google, but I'm moving to something. I'm done with Firefox.
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago>the update nag screen that interrupts my work If you're on Linux, exclude it from automatic updates in your package manager, and it won't interrupt you. On Windows, you should be able to set app.update.auto to false in about:config, but I don't know if that still works.
- seoaeu 5y agoAnd what browser would that be? Mozilla keeps doing these things because they're desperately searching for a revenue stream that doesn't make them beholden to their biggest competitor. There aren't any other viable options because no one else knows of any better revenue streams for web browsers either
- goalieca 5y agoOf Wikipedia can survive on donation, why not Firefox and MDN?
- contravariant 5y agoFirefox might survive, but the salaries of the people in charge of that decision might not.
- dandotway 5y agoBoom. "Mozilla Firefox Usage Down 85% but why are Exec’s Salary Up 400%?" https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-execs-salary-up-400/2050/ https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
- kbelder 5y agoFirefox could, I think. I don't think the Mozilla Foundation could. And that's the rub, at least to those in charge at the Mozilla Foundation.
- seoaeu 5y agoTo avoid significant layoffs they'd something like 10% of their user base to donate $20/year. I'm far from an expert on nonprofit finances, but that strikes me as a tough but potentially doable goal
- mulmen 5y agoThere is no single piece of software I use more than Firefox. At $20.00/month it would be a bargain. Assuming it wasn’t a dumpster fire.
- prepend 5y agoTheir cost base is too bloated. The reason I stopped donating to Mozilla is because they have too many people not doing things I think are important and are paying their executives too much.
- magnaton 5y agoTry LibreWolf -- it's Firefox with the nasty stuff stripped out. You can use your existing Firefox profile, but be sure to go through LibreWolf's settings as some of the defauts may be different than what you already have set up (they select privacy-protecting options by default).
- moralestapia 5y agoTry Brave, really. I always had issues with Chrome and RAM usage. Brave behaves better, plus the UI is slick. People here complain about it having some sort of cryptocurrency embedded, but it's opt-in, so as long as you don't enable it, I don't see the issue. Plus it comes with an ad-blocker / anti-tracker out of the box. Seems to me that Brendan Eich actually knows what he's doing.
- t-writescode 5y agoBrave would be better if they replaced ads with their own ads. Last I used Brave, it gave me stupid little popups on my notification bar and that's, to me, worse than in-page ads.
- dandotway 5y agoUsing Brave right now and no stupid popups. Make sure you turn off "Brave ads" or whatever causes popups. Always scan through every option in Settings at least once and turn all the junk off. The only mild annoyance left after doing this is that sometimes the new tab page has a little box shilling some Crypto coin biz which you can then silence. If this is all I have to suffer in order to fund a solid de-googled Chromium it's not too bad.
- BrendanEich 5y agoWe don't put any popups anywhere by default. Are you sure the website wasn't trying, which flies a permission prompt same as in Chrome and other browsers?
- hsod 5y agoNot sure your definition of pop ups but the brave ad units definitely “pop up” over my browser screen and I never opted in (iOS)
- t-writescode 5y agoI turned on the special, approved Brave ads thing last time I used it because I wanted to support Brave; and they only showed up as little pop ups on the systray and were infinitely more annoying to me than a static banner ad.
- cedilla 5y agoChromium also has search suggestions by Google per default.
- pcwalton 5y agoJust so I understand you, is your position that Sundar Pichai or Tim Cook or whoever is approaching Mozilla employees in dark alleys, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Slugworth style, and offering cash to covertly sabotage the product?
- jobigoud 5y agoAnd to protest they go use their product instead.
- ergot_vacation 5y agoIt's really amazing how far Firefox has fallen. This used to be a browser people bought TSHIRTS for. TSHIRTS! And wore them! And not just in SV: I'd see them in the wild in small cities too. The discussion is always the same, I'm not sure what can be added at this point. Yes the way they're actively destroying it is mystifying, yes, maybe money issues are part of that but god can't you just make your own browser? Mozilla's problem, more than any specific incident like this, is that they've become completely incapable of thinking for themselves. Everything is a follower move, trying to find something popular and than emulating it. I'll continue to use FF, but only because it's easier to massively "tweak" into a usable product than chrome.
- prepend 5y agoThey fired Eich and turned from a company of smart engineers and users of their product to randos who work on weird projects using their big paycheck from Google. Their products suck because they don’t care about them. They don’t genuinely want to compete with or anger Google for fear of losing funding. They’d be better off cutting down to a lean $5/year spend and just making a browser. I think.
- tdeck 5y agoA lot of their lack of focus predated Brendan Eich's 11 day CEO tenure. By 2014 Firefox had already lost a ton of mindshare and Mozilla was working on their unsuccessful Firefox Phone.
- revolvingocelot 5y agoBefore reading TFA, I would have called you paranoid. Now I wonder... Excluding Firefox from my package manager won't work for long -- surely I'll have to update, just for security purposes. Does anyone know of a good Firefox fork?
- nanis 5y agoI cannot overstate my disgust with everyone at Mozilla for doing this. This is the straw that broke the camel's back. I have been using Firefox begrudgingly every since the "studies" feature got unearthed. It seems to me there are entirely too many people feeding at the trough at Mozilla and they are not managing their money very well. It seems like I am going to MITM our browser traffic and set up custom filters or something.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoAs stated in the article, disabling Firefox Suggest will disable the key logging. Of course, that doesn't make this any less of a scumbag move.
- nanis 5y agoWhen I looked, I saw that the option was automatically checked during the upgrade with not a notice given. This is the latest in a series of scummy moves. I spent the last hour trawling through Firefox source code. In any case, when people act like this, I do not trust that turning off the option actually stops them from keylogging, which is why I am going to look into inspecting traffic.
- swiley 5y agoI don't fucking care if this can be disabled. It's a shit default and the people at Mozilla should personally feel bad it shipped.
- chuckee 5y agoI think this is the correct way of phrasing it. "Suggestions based on X" merely implies that information on X is now sent to an (additional) 3rd party, and doesn't state so explicitly. In fact I would say the lack of explicit statements on what data is sent is a deliberate attempt to hide that fact from users. Note how similar the language is to the privacy options on Google's Android.
- rvz 5y agoI don’t think phoning home by default is part of the mission of being a ‘Privacy focused browser’. Worse thing is Mozilla keeps projecting this empty message of ‘privacy’ whilst still continuing to be more than 80% funded by one of the most anti-privacy companies in the world who directly goes against their entire mission statement. This is hardly surprising.
- skarz 5y agoabout:preferences#privacy Scroll down to Address Bar — Firefox Suggest uncheck Contextual suggestions
- moralestapia 5y agoNo, this is a slippery slope that attemps against your right to privacy.
- t-writescode 5y agoWhat's worse is that even if you have "Search Suggestions" disabled, which I do, then the "other address bar suggestions", which includes "contextual suggestions" *remains enabled*. This is unacceptable.
- xerofuzzion 5y agoWhy isn't it off by default! We always get mad at all these companies invading our privacy by default, or why aren't we notified and given the chance to turn it off from the start.
- DemiGuru 5y agoSadly It doesn’t come as a complete surprise to me. About 2 years ago using Firefox Focus on iOS I came across an odd behavior - each time I launched the app it was accessing and reading the device’s clipboard. I called it out to Mozilla both through the app review and Mozilla support. The only response I got was that it was a feature. That I misunderstood what they were attempting to do. They removed that “feature” in the following version.
- bink 5y agoJust a guess, but it could've been a way for them to determine if you were about to paste content into the address bar. I worked for a company that did something similar. It would compare the clipboard to the contents of the input field. If it was a URL and they matched it would assume you had pasted a URL and would take some extra actions based on that. It wasn't until the OS started alerting the user to this clipboard read that it started to look very suspicious.
- DemiGuru 5y agoI’ll grant you that it’s a possibility. But it’s unsettling when your clipboard has your recently used password.
- kymaz 5y ago> It wasn't until the OS started alerting the user to this clipboard read that it started to look very suspicious. Maybe sprinkle in a bit of users didn't consider it suspicious until it was reported that some apps were abusing the privilege.
- intelMgmntEnema 5y agoIn about:config, while it lasts -- if it's even available--, try flipping the bool for: dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled To false Edit: my mental molasses delayed my seeing that the feature was removed and that you've moved on. I'll leave the comment though.
- okdjnfweonfe 5y agoIf you had a URL in the clipboard, it would allow you to 1 press open the URL
- seoaeu 5y agoThe title is misleading. Sending keystrokes isn't new. Both Firefox and Chrome have "keylogged" address bar tying for a long time to perform search suggestions. What's changed is that now Mozilla gets a copy too instead of just Google (There's also the part about showing ads, which bleugh, but that's separate from the 'sending' part)
- jhhh 5y ago"Firefox Now Sends Your Address Bar Keystrokes to Mozilla like it already did for Google but only if you had search suggestions turned on in the address bar" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
- ajdude 5y agoAs others have mentioned[0], this happens even when search suggestions have already been disabled. I’m pretty disappointed over this, I’m not moving to a chrome based browser but I wish we had more options. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28805896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28805896
- stevenicr 5y agoI dunno if I agree the title is misleading - it's right on the spot for someone like me - I always turn off search suggestions when I install ffx - for the privacy. So this title is an important warning for folks who want privacy - and I would guess that a higher percentage of ffx users care about that than chrome.
- thisrod 5y agoThere's no technical solution to this, short of writing your own browser. Web browsers are big, and there will only ever be a few organisations capable of building one. Like Boeing and Airbus. Those organisations are rich targets for all kinds of shonks, spivs and chancers, who are more motivated than you are. Resistance is as futile as wearing a parcahute on a 737 Max. There is a time tested and effective political solution: separation of powers. If Abine Blur blocks Mozilla from doing this stuff, and the Firefox plugin auditors keep an eye on what rorts Abine is pulling, then we dumb punters are in with a chance. Abine and Mozilla could gang up, but that puts them in a prisoner's dilemma—either one could win free advertising, then customers, by dobbing the other in to 60 Minutes. Some people are capable of resolving the prisoner's dilemma superrationally, but they don't become shonks, spivs, or chancers, so this is a fairly reliable solution. I think the priority for a privacy respecting internet should be to get Mozilla, Abine, and Duck Duck Go to start acting as if the others exist, and users of any are likely to use them all. Maybe, in the end, big tech bastards are just another kind of bastard. That would be nice. In 200 years of democratic reform, the people have invented some sophisticated and effective ways of stuffing the bastards back underneath whatever rock they most recently slithered out from.
- kortex 5y agoMaybe this is a bit naive of me, but has anyone been of the impression that keystrokes in an address bar are not public (or at least un-private)? I have been under the operating assumption since circa 2006 that anything done in a browser is potentially sent of somewhere to somebody's server. If I want privacy, I use tor. Anything that's not the body of an https request is at minimum going to be logged somewhere.
- jhhh 5y agoI still use a split address bar and search bar with "Show search suggestions in the address bar" toggled off, so until this version the address bar suggestions were only from bookmarks and history items.
- Yoofie 5y agoYou are not alone. I operate under the assumption that any application that connects to the internet indeed sends back my activity in that app back home. What frustrates me is that everyone goes out of their way to make fragile, internet connected and internet dependent applications when there basically no need to.
- t-writescode 5y agoThis was not previously the case and shows an evolution of this tragedy from the past to the present. There was pandemonium back when Ubuntu first started doing that in its search line, for example. Now, no one cares and thinks it's "just how it is", except for some privacy holdouts, like myself. This isn't the way the world used to be.
- Gigachad 5y agoMy thoughts. I have never once in my life typed something in to the browser search bar that I intended to be local or private.
- _Anima_ 5y agoFirefox has been using Google's safe search since version 6. So unless you disable or block it, Google knows about your whereabouts, even if you used Bing.
- xlaacid 5y agoWhy doesnt this idiot write about all the data chrome collects on you?
- nanis 5y agoI think there is ambiguity about to which particular idiot you are referring. In any case, if I wanted spyware parity with Chrome, I'd use Chrome.
- joecool1029 5y agoFurious. I encourage users on Linux distros to file distro bugs about this. I just handled the Gentoo bug report[1]. We can't trust Mozilla upstream at this point to resolve these issues. The issue wasn't so much that they added this functionality to grub some extra money, the issue was the opt-in happened on our targets without any notification or informed consent. [1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/817014 https://bugs.gentoo.org/817014
- LanternLight83 5y agoThanks for filing the report! I don't know that we can expect distributions to have the manpower to manage these issues, but neither can we expect users in the middle of the "Juse Use Chrome -> GHacks User Config" to be served by any other mechanism right now. I'd like to see Mozilla respond to the expressions in this thread, but that's frankly unlikely, so at the very least; it warms my heart to that this despise exists, has representation, calls to action, and demands which may someday be fulfilled, be it by leadership at Mozilla or elsewhere.
- t-writescode 5y agoI'm sure Firefox developers read Hacker News, so I'm going to talk here. I have "Provide Search Suggestions" disabled. All 3 of the options underneath them are disabled, because search suggestions are disabled. This makes sense. THEN, I click "change settings for other address bar suggestions" and in *THERE* everything is in there, INCLUDING "Contextual suggestions". What do you think the first disabling of suggestions meant? You're searching without my consent. If I would have consented, it would have been in that first check box. What are you guys doing? What happened to the Firefox I trust and choose over Google to avoid the monoculture?
- uniqueid 5y agoWhen I was still a Firefox user, I just ended up blocking any domain owned by mozilla. And by 'when I was still a Firefox user' I mean 'until approximately 12 hours ago.' What priorities and values Mozilla has left I don't seem to share.
- hammyhavoc 5y agoWhat have you switched to?
- uniqueid 5y agoI'm currently using Brave to reply to this comment because it was already on my drive. I don't like Brave's philosophy and I don't like its proximity to Google. I'm using it as a stop gap till I find something better. It's going to take me a few weeks of research to pick my new permanent browser. I want something far-removed from Google, but with an active enough developer community that it doesn't fall apart after an OS update or turn out to have a back-door hidden in the code base.
- smsm42 5y agoFirefox is alive because of Google money. It looks like they don't like this single-source dependency too much, and want to find their own monetization model. Unfortunately, it's looks like it's the same old one - sell user's eyeballs (and maybe also tracking data, who knows) to advertisers.
- guerrilla 5y agoIs it not possible to embed Gecko anymore? Why aren't there a couple of browsers with the Firefox engine but wothout the horrible Firefox UI decisions?
- dflock 5y agoIirc, it's mostly not practical to embed gecko anymore. Mozilla stopped maintaining/caring that ability and the best you can realistically do is to just fork Firefox now. Gecko is basically intended to just be part of Firefox nowadays.
- pseudalopex 5y agoMozilla killed Gecko embedding about 10 years ago to focus on Firefox. They resurrected it just for Android.
- happynacho 5y agoWhen I thought Firefox couldn't go any lower, Mozilla manages to surprise me. Impressive.
- fxtentacle 5y agoThat's why their management is so highly paid. They're true DISRUPTORS.
- fhrow4484 5y agoI explicitly chose the option to have a Search bar separate from the address bar... why would I want Search suggestions or Contextual suggestions in the address bar. I've been using Firefox since version 1, but this is the first time I'm considering switching to something else. (like ungoogled-chromium)
- _Anima_ 5y agoTo me Chromium is not "ungoogled" as long as google engineers have such a powerful influence over it.
- Lammy 5y agoHere's the page the in-preferences "Learn more" link takes you to, which I didn't see linked in the article: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/navigate-web-faster-firefox-suggest https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/navigate-web-faster-fir... "We haven't quite hit our mark. We've received feedback that it's difficult to figure out which Firefox experience you've got enabled. We are hard at work to address this and continue to improve the feature."
- thinkingemote 5y agoDoes that mean they are rolling this back?
- wodenokoto 5y agoBut they’ve always send them to third parties. Why do you trust google with this data over Mozilla?
- rav3ndust 5y agoI don't trust any company that much. But in this regard, its even worse - Google makes it no secret that theyre collecting your data, while mozilla goes all-in on the privacy messaging and then pulls a stunt like this.
- rank0 5y agoWhere else can I go to get a quality, privacy focused FOSS browser? I want non-chromium. Someone on HN the other day suggested using the TOR browser without connecting to a tor circuit, but that seems overkill.
- xorcist 5y agoWhat are the about:config settings I need to set to stop every kind of snooping like this?
- faebi 5y agoMaybe it's time for Firefox premium. Same as on youtube premium or gitlab premium, no ads, no annoyances, additional features, maybe better performance, maybe some value add cloud features, all for 1-20$ a month.
- smsm42 5y agoWith premium it'd probably be worse, because signing up you'd surely sign an agreement that somewhere on page 37 says "we can track you any way we like, and do anything we like with the data" and you couldn't claim you didn't know - you made an explicit action to sign up and even paid money for it, surely you knew what you're doing!
- wsostt 5y agoYouTube Premium is riddled with the same type of user tracking Firefox is implementing. Firefox Premium would probably do the same.
- hammyhavoc 5y agoFrankly, fuck that. It's a browser.
- Engineering-MD 5y agoThe time has come to fork Firefox. That’s the benefit of open source software, it’s not beholden to one entity. Don’t give in to a chromium monoculture.
- hammyhavoc 5y agoThere's plenty of forks already.
- Engineering-MD 5y agoI suppose I meant a ‘fork coup’ where it takes the dominant position. More libreoffice style than waterfox style.