33 ms·

Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

• 12ian34 2y ago
  ignore the rage-bait and learn contract law and terminology.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• bberenberg 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • SahAssar 2y ago
    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.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • pabs3 2y ago
    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 https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
  • mimasama 2y ago
    The only ToS of a free software should be the chosen free software license (and if applicable, a trademark policy). Anything else is questionable.
  • azornathogron 2y ago
    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.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• tomwphillips 2y ago
  >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.
  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
    In case anyone is unaware... https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
    • mozball 2y ago
      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
      • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
        > Who is behind librewolf and why should i trust them? https://librewolf.net/#core-contributors https://librewolf.net/#core-contributors They also have links to join other community spaces so you can probably ask them yourself. > They don't seem to be available in any official repos yet other than ones they self-published The only official repos are the ones which the community decides are so. https://codeberg.org/librewolf https://codeberg.org/librewolf They've been around long enough that if they're not on github (for example), it's probably intentional. (One can imagine why this particular community might prefer to avoid directing people to Microsoft-owned github.)
      • ndriscoll 2y ago
        I'm not sure what you think of as "official", but it's been in nixpkgs for years at least. You can also take a look at what it's doing. The librewolf repo itself is basically a collection of generally small patches. Mostly you've got patches to change branding and remove antifeatures, plus fixes like preventing pages from detecting you've opened devtools and enabling JXL support.
• fwn 2y ago
  > 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/ 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.
• baobun 2y ago
  Previous version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250219051713/https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250219051713/https://www.mozil... New version: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ 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)
  • baobun 2y ago
    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...
• irq-1 2y ago
  A detailed listing of whats collected and why: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#lawful-bases https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#lawful-bases
• sunshine-o 2y ago
  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.
  • worik 2y ago
    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.
    • sunshine-o 2y ago
      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.firefox https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi... - [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/ - [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.browser https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow... - [3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brave-browser-search-engine/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brave-browser-search-engine/
• foresto 2y ago
  > 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.
  • mimasama 2y ago
    > 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.
  • foresto 2y ago
    This commit looks particularly bad: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e#diff-a24e74e4595fa85440a2f4e7e5dcfe68aba6e1e593aef05a2d35581a91423847 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.
  • odo1242 2y ago
    > 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
• bwidlar 2y ago
  [...] 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.
• sksrbWgbfK 2y ago
  > 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.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• goldsteinq 2y ago
  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?
• winkelmann 2y ago
  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/ 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/ 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.
  • rightbyte 2y ago
    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
    • winkelmann 2y ago
      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.
• xena 2y ago
  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.
  • pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
    The terms do not mention being limited to uploading stuff to Mozilla.
    • Daril 2y ago
      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.
      • quesera 2y ago
        > It means they read and collect every bit of information we input in the browser It does not mean that. It means some lawyer is concerned that Mozilla is in possession of some kind of data that is subject to other regulatory claims in some country. This could easily be trivial, benign, or wrong. I'll be shocked if a clarification/correction is not issued within 24 hours. And I'll be shocked if some portion of HN doesn't argue that the clarification is a coverup and now that we've seen the real Mozilla we can never trust them again and we should all use Chrome because if we're going to get eaten we should all be eaten by the same monster.
• hellcow 2y ago
  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.
  • torben-friis 2y ago
    I'm not familiar with this change, do you have a link?
    • hellcow 2y ago
      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/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b... [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...
      • ziddoap 2y ago
        >Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you. Is still present on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
        • ilyagr 2y ago
          I'm curious whether it changed in the last two hours, but now it sounds a lot less clear. Also, it sheds some light of how people at Mozilla currently think about it (so much so that I'm guessing the text will change again): > 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. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP). *Update:* Here's the version from Feb 6 that says exactly what the parent comment posted: https://web.archive.org/web/20250206184553/https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250206184553/https://www.mozil...
• mozball 2y ago
  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.
  • raxxorraxor 2y ago
    I would expect half of that is funding developers for their numerous different projects. How naive would that assumption be?
    • mozball 2y ago
      You seem to be in the ballpark : "260 million for 'software development expenses'" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances 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.
  • lucb1e 2y ago
    Do be aware of the missing security updates if you follow this advice
• CGamesPlay 2y ago
  > 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.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • jasonjayr 2y ago
    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.
    • diggan 2y ago
      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.
      • TingPing 2y ago
        Yes. I’ve used that in my software. App stores just require a policy.
• Apreche 2y ago
  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.
  • roblabla 2y ago
    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 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.
    • noirscape 2y ago
      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).
• nh2 2y ago
  > 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/ 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?
  • dvaun 2y ago
    Sounds like a license to train on your data.
    • drpossum 2y ago
      This is exactly it. They're covering their bases as they roll out AI garbage no one asked for.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    > 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!
• noirscape 2y ago
  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.)
  • zefalt 2y ago
    Floorp may be what you're looking for. Pretty similar to native Firefox. https://floorp.app/ https://floorp.app/
    • noirscape 2y ago
      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.
      • kennysoona 2y ago
        > 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. I don't know, I think not caving in to support some proprietary BS is pretty justifiable.
• lenerdenator 2y ago
  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.
  • aucisson_masque 2y ago
    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.
    • janc_ 2y ago
      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…
      • aucisson_masque 2y ago
        Google - mozilla contract alone gives mozilla 500 000 000$. Wikimedia budget is 170 000 000$. I'm sure that developing a browser is more expensive, would mozilla be able to make it work with at best a third of the budget ? I don't think so..
  • drpossum 2y ago
    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-growth-planning-updates/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt... [2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/06/mozilla_foundation_layoffs/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/06/mozilla_foundation_la...
• hedora 2y ago
  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”.)
  • drpossum 2y ago
    [flagged]
• butz 2y ago
  Remember the time, when browsers were competing who will load website fastest or who will render Acid2 test correctly? Those were the days.
  • mrguyorama 2y ago
    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.
    • lucb1e 2y ago
      > 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
    • Fnoord 2y ago
      > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome
• _Algernon_ 2y ago
  So my bank password is now licensed to mozilla? This is not great...
• GrantMoyer 2y ago
  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?
  • janc_ 2y ago
    "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.
    • GrantMoyer 2y ago
      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/distribution-policy/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/distribu... [2]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/
  • fc417fc802 2y ago
    > 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.
• bmacho 2y ago
  So, what are the forks?
• natch 2y ago
  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.
• BlackFly 2y ago
  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. * https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027722000580 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002772...
  • GrantMoyer 2y ago
    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.
• GrantMoyer 2y ago
  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/firefox-terms-of-use/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...
  • mimasama 2y ago
    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.
  • account42 2y ago
    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.
• aucisson_masque 2y ago
  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.
  • ewzimm 2y ago
    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.
  • horsawlarway 2y ago
• butz 2y ago
  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.
  • r0uv3n 2y ago
    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?
• igor47 2y ago
  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,
  • account42 2y ago
    > 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.
• drpossum 2y ago
  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.
• waltercool 2y ago
  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.
• ulfbert_inc 2y ago
  I wonder if LibreWolf is of any help with those (and previous) changes. Would love to see LibreWolf maintainers chime in on this.
• okanat 2y ago
  Great. We need to sue Mozilla to death for GDPR violation, it seems. I guessed Mozilla would eventually die, but not like this.
• rascul 2y ago
  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.
  • mimasama 2y ago
    Make sure the third party build you choose doesn't use official Firefox branding too.
• MaximilianEmel 2y ago
  We need an open and independent alternative to Firefox Sync.
• michaelmrose 2y ago
  Anyone think this is to afford the ability to run a remote AI service which provides services that would be improbable to run locally?
• ilyagr 2y ago
  Sibling discussion (might be worth unifying): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194536
• kragen 2y ago
  > 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.
  • lunarmony 2y ago
    why does this require "a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license"?
    • kevingadd 2y ago
      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.
• kazinator 2y ago
  > 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".
  • kevingadd 2y ago
    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".
    • yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      > 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.
      • kevingadd 2y ago
        Mozilla has had their own dedicated license - the Mozilla Public License - for as long as I remember. My understanding is that FF and Thunderbird's source code are both still under this license. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/ Whether or not the MPL counts as 'open source' is a question for the people who steward that term, I guess. But they've not been using a Standard Open Source License for a while.
        • chippiewill 2y ago
          It's OSI approved which is about as official as 'open source' gets: https://opensource.org/license/mpl-2-0 https://opensource.org/license/mpl-2-0
• avsteele 2y ago
  Since it's mostly just people who care about this privacy who still use Firefox, these changes seem particularly tin eared.
  • plagiarist 2y ago
    People who care about privacy have already moved on to LibreWolf or some other Firefox alternative.
    • simpaticoder 2y ago
      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.
• 5g4545g4ghhhh 2y ago
  Fuck it I am going back to Internet Explorer.
• czk 2y ago
  Is there a “brave” browser that uses Firefox?
  • cactusplant7374 2y ago
    There is a Brave browser.
    • ASalazarMX 2y ago
      I'd go with Ungoogled Chromium at that point.
      • czk 2y ago
        I’m kind of addicted to tab containers right now and I have them set up in a way where I can proxy specific containers out different socks proxies that go through different VPN tunnels. Niche I know but it’s keeping me on FF.
        • Rafuino 2y ago
          OMG do you have a writeup on how you do that?
          • czk 2y ago
            its mostly a bunch of stuff i whipped together myself, but the short of it is i have a docker container that acts as a "vpn broker", establishing multiple vpn connections and then exposing access to them over socks proxies, and in the tab containers you can natively assign a socks proxy per container group there's probably software already out there that does this same thing and probably does it better, id be hesitant to open-source what i have without a lot of cleanup and security changes. so certain tab container groups go out certain proxies which in turn egress specific vpn tunnels
        • excalq 2y ago
          Tab containers are a godsend when managing multiple AWS accounts as well.
• oceanhaiyang 2y ago
  What choice do we have then?
  • infogulch 2y ago
    I guess Brave is the best we have until something more complete comes out of this crop of new browser engines like ladybird.
  • dismalaf 2y ago
    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...
• userbinator 2y ago
  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/ 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.
  • jcranmer 2y ago
    > 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.
    • laszlokorte 2y ago
      So what about synced bookmarks?
      • pentagrama 2y ago
        And synced history.
      • kg 2y ago
        If you're syncing a bookmark that is somehow illegal content, it would come to rest on their servers and they'd potentially be liable for it. (IIRC they encrypt everything at rest, so this is a speculative risk)
        • llm_trw 2y ago
          Porn is not illegal, either are the Rambo movies.
• neilv 2y ago
  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."
• anvuong 2y ago
  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.
  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    There's Chromium
    • anonym29 2y ago
      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.
      • huang_chung 2y ago
        > metadata directly to Google, who give it directly to the NSA, who give it directly to Elon Musk and DOGE Source?
        • anonym29 2y ago
          sources: - Google's own privacy policy - Extensive evidence provided by brave national heroes and civil rights legends like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, including training materials for specific named NSA programs like PRISM that offer explicit lists of cooperating partners, including Google, Microsoft, Apple - basically every big tech company, but also smaller but popular ones, such as Skype (pre-Microsoft acquisition); this is well known among technology's civil rights advocates, and isn't hard to find discussion of by credible technologists, including the folks behind Protonmail¹ - Elon & DOGE: see literally every major American news network besides Fox pretty much since the inauguration, large swathes of the internet, several prominent discussions on HN. It's not just illegally mass-surveilled stuff either, they're going through all sorts of classified stuff right now! ¹ Here's one such example literally on the front page as of the time of writing this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43201732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43201732
• clvx 2y ago
  Well that clearly sucks. Does anyone know alternatives for firefox sync?
• chmod775 2y ago
  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
  • lopatin 2y ago
    I still don't get it. Is Mozilla phoning home the fact that I pressed the button?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • chmod775 2y ago
      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.
• cute_boi 2y ago
  https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e#commitcomment-153095625 https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b... They removed this: { "@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. " } },
  • replete 2y ago
    They bought an ad company back in November I think, so this is not a surprise to me. Boiling frogs
  • rvz 2y ago
    > "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.
• maxrmk 2y ago
  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/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/
  • johnklos 2y ago
    The first few steps on a slippery slope never do seem like a big deal, do they?
  • koolala 2y ago
    They sell your data now. Their strings are pulled.
  • Marsymars 2y ago
    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.
  • nullc 2y ago
    > being judged on the worst possible interpretation That's the correct way-- contract terms must be read defensively.
• talles 2y ago
  Anyone using a fork? I'm thinking on migrating to https://floorp.app https://floorp.app
  • arch1e 2y ago
    I've been using Zen (https://github.com/zen-browser https://github.com/zen-browser) for a while now, it's still in beta but is very cool.
• erikbye 2y ago
  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.
  • thisislife2 2y ago
    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.
  • MrDresden 2y ago
    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?
• pilaf 2y ago
  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/ https://librewolf.net/ 2: https://floorp.app/en https://floorp.app/en 3: https://www.waterfox.net/ https://www.waterfox.net/ 4: https://icecatbrowser.org/ https://icecatbrowser.org/
  • Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    Iceweasel has been around for sometime: https://github.com/adonais https://github.com/adonais https://sourceforge.net/projects/libportable/files/Iceweasel/Stable/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/libportable/files/Iceweasel... Forks can be healthy for a number of reasons =3
    • pilaf 2y ago
      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.
      • Joel_Mckay 2y ago
        The Gnu Icecat is still active as well. Compiling Firefox without telemetry is just a flag, as we discovered while doing something over the debugging interface not available in the Windmill Test Framework. Tip: running profiles off a ram drive reaches ludicrous speeds. Tor Browser also works: https://www.torproject.org/download/languages/ https://www.torproject.org/download/languages/ Best of luck =3
• cam_l 2y ago
  I thought Firefox sync and VPN was end to end encrypted. That is a far bigger wtf than dumb unenforceable tos text.
  • simpaticoder 2y ago
    >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.
  • terminalbraid 2y ago
    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-librewolf-is-it-safe-to-do-so https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-...
• m-schuetz 2y ago
  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.
  • drpossum 2y ago
    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.
    • m-schuetz 2y ago
      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.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  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.
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
    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.
  • dang 2y ago
    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=43185909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185909. Earlier thread (in this case) was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065, which had that title.
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
    (Note to self: Initially points went to -2.)
• temptemptemp111 2y ago
  [dead]
• archsurface 2y ago
  IANAL - does that mean if I, in the UK, get arrested for wrong think on X I can redirect the police to Mozilla?
• im3w1l 2y ago
  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.
  • Piraty 2y ago
    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
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• boredatoms 2y ago
  Urgh Mozilla needs to focus on being a good web browser, Id even pay, but you cant
  • Rafuino 2y ago
    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...
• jmward01 2y ago
  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.
  • ivolimmen 2y ago
    LibreWolf? It's Firefox without the Mozilla branding
    • zorrolovsky 2y ago
      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-your-web-browser-does-privacy-wise/ 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.
    • pixelpoet 2y ago
      Any recommendations for an Android Firefox replacement?
      • hans_castorp 2y ago
        I am using IronFox (on GrapheneOS). But I don't really use my phone for browsing the internet very often.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• p0w3n3d 2y ago
  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.
  • UweSchmidt 2y ago
    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 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.
    • p0w3n3d 2y ago
      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.
• zombot 2y ago
  > 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.
• protocolture 2y ago
  I see this thread pop up about once every 3 months for a different service. Its always the same license term that spooks people.
• oaththrowaway 2y ago
  Is there another browser that can do "container tabs" really the only thing that's keeping on Firefox now
  • AlgebraFox 2y ago
    LibreWolf can do it.
• kernal 2y ago
  To the people that forced their friends and family to switch to Firefox be sure to schedule the tech support visit.
• Animats 2y ago
  Does using Firefox now force you to use some Mozilla services? On Android, Fennic isn't bad. Is there a desktop version of Fennec?
• sub7 2y ago
  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
  • iszomer 2y ago
    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?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• renegat0x0 2y ago
  This is not your computer. This is not your operating system. This is not your browser.
• _zagj 2y ago
  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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66984
• maxrf 2y ago
  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"?
• LeChuck 2y ago
  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.
  • _Algernon_ 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • yupyupyups 2y ago
    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.
    • lukan 2y ago
      "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.
      • gf000 2y ago
        Pinging a Mozilla server to see if there is an active and usable internet connection is not spyware, let's stop with these useless accusations. It's a product which optionally does accept some help from the users, e.g. opt-in error reports, which is a huge help. Certain people consider that a blatant violation of their rights for some reason, and they would apparently rather see the last bastion of a non-chrome internet die.
        • 2y ago
• anacrolix 2y ago
  We're entering the end days now. Stallman showed us the light and then ESR closed the blinds.
  • anacrolix 2y ago
    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.
• _Algernon_ 2y ago
  >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-of-use/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-terms-o...
  • chinathrow 2y ago
    Absolute bullshit.
  • mnmalst 2y ago
    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.
    • xtiansimon 2y ago
      “process user data locally” Ha! As if slowing down browsing and your computer would have a good result.
  • Juliate 2y ago
    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.
    • Figs 2y ago
      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/ 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.
• skwee357 2y ago
  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.
• globular-toast 2y ago
  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.
  • drpossum 2y ago
    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.
    • plipt 2y ago
      Maybe Google is paying them to self-sabotage?
• _mitterpach 2y ago
  Link directly to the Github commit: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b..., which links to the following issue: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/issues/16016 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?
  • rvense 2y ago
    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.
    • Parae 2y ago
      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.
      • rvense 2y ago
        I probably will, actually. It was good to have an ally with their stature and history.
      • linker3000 2y ago
        It's seamless-ish. Sometimes the more aggressive privacy settings stop some sites from rendering properly unless you add canvas exceptions, for example Openstreetmap and UK National Rail. I'm happy to make the effort. /Librewolf on desktop, Waterfox on mobile.
  • c0l0 2y ago
    "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.
• askonomm 2y ago
  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.
  • j-bos 2y ago
    Do you really? Seems you can wait, as do many of us. By waiting, what behavior do we encourage in software makers?
    • askonomm 2y ago
      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.
• lifeinthevoid 2y ago
  Does Chrome have a similar policy that says that it owns a license to your data?
• jimjimwii 2y ago
  > 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.
  • Evidlo 2y ago
    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 ...
    • jimjimwii 2y ago
      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.
• rvz 2y ago
  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".
  • neilv 2y ago
    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.
    • arjunaaqa 2y ago
      Cool down friend. There will always be great people building alternatives.
      • neilv 2y ago
        We need a trustworthy Web browser. There isn't one. And such a massive complexity moat has been created with de facto standards, and also made a moving target, that some nice programmer's temporary hobby project isn't a viable solution.
  • orangepanda 2y ago
    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.
• tpoacher 2y ago
  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.
  • Symbiote 2y ago
    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
  • mort96 2y ago
    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.
• rich_sasha 2y ago
  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... :/
  • createaccount99 2y ago
    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.
    • scheeseman486 2y ago
      > "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.
      • 2y ago
• geomark 2y ago
  Ask HN: Is Brave an ok alternative?
  • orng 2y ago
    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.
    • rs186 2y ago
      Well that ship has sailed.
      • orng 2y ago
        The internet used to be controlled in large by Microsoft. Then it wasn't. It does not have to continue to be controlled by Google in the future. Not using Chromium based browsers is a first step.
  • JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
    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.
    • Tepix 2y ago
      The Youtube adblock always works
    • EndShell 2y ago
      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.
• DoingIsLearning 2y ago
  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?
• corv 2y ago
  Adieu Mozilla!
• pmontra 2y ago
  > 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.
  • Digit-Al 2y ago
    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.
    • Zak 2y ago
      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.
      • 2y ago
• Tepix 2y ago
  if i want to block data collection by Mozilla, what do i configure in pi-hole?
• PTGreat 2y ago
  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.
  • Propelloni 2y ago
    Haven't you heard? Protecting liberty is against freedom. Ask Mr. Vance about it. /s
  • captainbland 2y ago
    Did you not see all the surveillance capitalists at the inauguration?
• LightHugger 2y ago
  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.
• INTPenis 2y ago
  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.
  • caseyy 2y ago
    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.
• nbzso 2y ago
  Apple removed encryption for iCloud users in UK. I don't see the outrage on HN why?
  • coaksford 2y ago
    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.
    • nbzso 2y ago
      Yes. Thank you.:)
      • windward 2y ago
        It got 1700 points.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • alt227 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43128253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43128253
  • procaryote 2y ago
    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.
• nico42 2y ago
  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/firefox-terms-of-use/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...
  • walrus01 2y ago
    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://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share previous discussion from mid 2023 on low firefox market share: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36759162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36759162
    • m2f2 2y ago
      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.
      • ta1243 2y ago
        I'm also the 2.54% and have been since the phoenix days. I am beyond thankful every day for apple keeping both desktop safari and ios running to prevent the internet being even more monoculture than in the IE6 days
        • weikju 2y ago
          > I am beyond thankful every day for apple keeping both desktop safari and ios running to prevent the internet being even more monoculture than in the IE6 days Don't worry, EU regulators (and other countries soon I suppose) are doing their best to fix that "bug".
• Ferret7446 2y ago
  The only surprise here is that people are surprised by this. Mozilla is an advertising company, since almost a year ago.
  • zihotki 2y ago
    Fully agree, here is a context for those who missed it https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-a-privacy-tech-startup-founded-by-two-top-former-meta-execs/ https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...
• boesboes 2y ago
  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.
• KoftaBob 2y ago
  Time to switch: https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
  • ac130kz 2y ago
    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.
    • akimbostrawman 2y ago
      Which decisions? LibreWolf ist exactly that + hardening used in tor browser maybe you mean those but all of them you can change in setting.
      • ac130kz 2y ago
        Like I need to watch DRM for my job, and it doesn't work at all. I also already ported most of their configs that I actually researched each and every line of myself + Waterfox + Arkenfox's configs into my generic Mozilla Firefox, and it works great.
        • akimbostrawman 2y ago
          There is literally a "enable DRM" setting (might also need disable resist fingerprint). Also librewolf is almost 1:1 with arkenfox.
    • Propelloni 2y ago
      If you think Librewolf is too opinionated, try Waterfox [1] [1] https://github.com/BrowserWorks/Waterfox https://github.com/BrowserWorks/Waterfox
      • ac130kz 2y ago
        Waterfox seemed a bit too opinionated as well, especially in terms of extra code, weird versioning, patch delays.
• 7373737373 2y ago
  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.
  • akimbostrawman 2y ago
    https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
• MrAlex94 2y ago
  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/ https://www.waterfox.net/blog/a-comment-on-mozilla-changes/
  • Propelloni 2y ago
    Hey, thank you for Waterfox! I'm using it a lot across all my machines. Well done!
  • jchw 2y ago
    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.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • dmantis 2y ago
    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.
• AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  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.
  • akimbostrawman 2y ago
    Just use https://librewolf.net https://librewolf.net
    • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      So: # 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.
      • rasmus-kirk 2y ago
        Apt is basically just a bad package manager: nix run nixpkgs#librewolf But I do agree, it's hard to find these alternatives, and have them be "just works". Librewolf still sometimes have weird issues (for good reasons!), but it means I don't recommend it to "normies". I just tell them to use firefox and most importantly adblock, giving up ads is a huge ROI both in terms of quality of life and data privacy. Everything else is almost marginal in comparison.
        • blueflow 2y ago
          Apt being a bad package manager is not related to the selection of packages that Debian ships or doesn't.
      • 2y ago
• amelius 2y ago
  We need an EU alternative to Firefox.
  • xvilka 2y ago
    Just sponsor Servo[1], it will be much safer than Chrome or Firefox once ready. [1] https://opencollective.com/servo https://opencollective.com/servo
    • Phelinofist 2y ago
      Is it EU based though?
      • xvilka 2y ago
        Overseed[1] by Linux Foundation Europe. [1] https://servo.org/about/ https://servo.org/about/
• procaryote 2y ago
  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?
  • DaSHacka 2y ago
    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 https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
    • procaryote 2y ago
      Thank you, it seems pretty neat so far!
  • AyyEye 2y ago
    Librewolf seems to be the best. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/ https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/
• BSDobelix 2y ago
  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.
• baobun 2y ago
  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.
  • aembleton 2y ago
    What are you replacing it with?
    • baobun 2y ago
      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.
• RobotToaster 2y ago
  Guess they have to pay the CEO's seven million dollar salary somehow ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
• tux 2y ago
  Ask HN: Is ungoogled chromium a good alternative ?
  • DaSHacka 2y ago
    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.
    • dheerajvs 2y ago
      The main question for me is can ungoogled Chromium run uBlock Origin?
      • DaSHacka 2y ago
        Yes, it's just a downstream fork of chromium. It can run any extension that runs on the equivalent upstream build of chromium. For the same reasons you can install it on Librewolf too, and it actually comes with ublock origin pre-installed.
        • weikju 2y ago
          > Yes, it's just a downstream fork of chromium. It can run any extension that runs on the equivalent upstream build of chromium. Therefore, no, it cannot run uBlock Origin, or soon will be unable to run it.
          • DaSHacka 2y ago
            It can run ublock origin right now, and will be able to run ublock origin lite into the future. No chromium-based browser currently plans to keep MV2 support. It's just not feasible for a small group to keep it maintained ontop of the inevitable breaking changes that will be introduced in upstream over time. If this bothers you, use a real browser that isn't sourced from an ad company. Otherwise, you'll be getting exactly what you should expect, and nothing more.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• MortyWaves 2y ago
  I see a lot of people suggesting Brave, but is it still full of crypto nonsense?
  • TingPing 2y ago
    Yes.
  • DaSHacka 2y ago
    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)
  • andirk 2y ago
    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.
  • justsee 2y ago
    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.
• HelloUsername 2y ago
  Related on 27-feb-2025: Mozilla owns "information you input through Firefox" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065 271 comments Mozilla's new terms of use are out of step with Firefox's direct competition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194536 139 comments Mozilla Introducing 'Terms of Use' to Firefox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43187423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43187423 40 comments Welcome to Ladybird, a truly independent web browser https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200806 211 comments
• nanis 2y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082856
  • aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    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.
    • account42 2y ago
      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".
  • account42 2y ago
    If that's the case they should stop doing that no give them selves the legal right to do it.
• skeledrew 2y ago
  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.
  • afastow 2y ago
    "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.
• MangoCoffee 2y ago
  i switched to Firefox because of Google's Chrome's nonsense on ublock origin. turn out Mozilla's firefox also have its own nonsense.
• apalerwuss 2y ago
  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.
  • thorw93040494 2y ago
    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.
  • rectang 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • nindalf 2y ago
      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.
      • steveklabnik 2y ago
• ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
  https://xcancel.com/LundukeJournal/status/1895249805338886591 https://xcancel.com/LundukeJournal/status/189524980533888659...
• qwertox 2y ago
  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.
  • amiga386 2y ago
    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.
• wodenokoto 2y ago
  How does corporate promises work? Like, I used Firefox when they promised never to sell my data. So I should be grandfathered, right?
  • MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    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.
    • wodenokoto 2y ago
      There’s also agreements and tos
• lightandlight 2y ago
  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 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.
• palata 2y ago
  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.
• Aeolun 2y ago
  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.
  • immibis 2y ago
    Yes. Even biological cells do this. It is called cancer.
• hsuduebc2 2y ago
  That's all! Thanks for watching folks.
• nonelog 2y ago
  What does that mean for the Tor browser [0] which is based on Firefox? [0] https://www.torproject.org/ https://www.torproject.org/
  • 1cecreamface 2y ago
    It means that the state got a two-for-one deal.
  • TingPing 2y ago
    Nothing. The ToS is not part of the license to the code.
• bArray 2y ago
  It's times like these I look forward to the likes of the Ladybird browser [1] making progress. [1] https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/
• 1cecreamface 2y ago
  [flagged]
• zihotki 2y ago
  Mozilla became an ads company after acquiring ads tech startup Anonym. These changes follow that direction.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• blitzar 2y ago
  I promise, I will never die.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
  I kept getting flagged for calling out Firefox/Mozilla, for years Now you get what you deserve, folks
• hofrogs 2y ago
  I'm sure there is a better source than that culture warrior twitter account.. Like the commit on github itself, for instance.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• thedanbob 2y ago
  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.
  • SJC_Hacker 2y ago
    > I hope my reading HN and watching inane Youtube videos is worth something to you. Oh it is. It definitely is
    • bluGill 2y ago
      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.
      • SJC_Hacker 2y ago
        The ad blocking might work however 1) Their customers (i.e. advertisers) don't necessarily know that, and they only care about aggregate 2) They still have your data which can be sold off to others who have other ways of pushing ads to you
• Sontho 2y ago
  Mozilla too?
  • dzamo_norton 2y ago
    Et tu, Mozilla?
• KingOfCoders 2y ago
  "Never" always means "Until we decide otherwise".
• pestaa 2y ago
  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.
• metalman 2y ago
  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 **
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• KingOfCoders 2y ago
  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
  • einr 2y ago
    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.
    • Batman8675309 2y ago
      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.
      • einr 2y ago
        Thorium is regularly 3 months behind on updates Unfortunate, I suppose, but this is the kind of tradeoff that is to be expected when switching to something maintained by one guy in their bedroom instead of a megacorp.
    • KingOfCoders 2y ago
      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?
      • einr 2y ago
        I mean I guess that depends on what you mean by fork? Most of the above projects follow upstream Firefox/Chromium (Pale Moon, for example, doesn't -- but that also means less support for recent web standards) but they are forks in the sense that they maintain the codebase/patchset themselves. How much they actually diverge from upstream varies by project. So you're right that they are dependent on Mozilla for now. With Mozilla circling the drain lately, maybe that could change. But right now, for the purposes of removing privacy-unfriendly antifeatures, I find them sufficiently independent for my purposes. Most Firefox code isn't evil. If you want something like Firefox but you're adamant that Mozilla can exercise no control over it, Pale Moon is probably the one you want to look at.
• kristjank 2y ago
  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.
• margorczynski 2y ago
  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?
• braiamp 2y ago
  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.
• netdevphoenix 2y ago
  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?
  • Apocryphon 2y ago
    Maybe business necessity finally caught up with them
• mseepgood 2y ago
  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.
• leyoDeLionKin 2y ago
  Sell out
• g8oz 2y ago
  The Vivaldi browser takes donations FYI. https://login.vivaldi.net/profile/donations https://login.vivaldi.net/profile/donations
• layer8 2y ago
  [dupe]
• layer8 2y ago
  Relevant discussion: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/information-about-the-new-terms-of-use-and-updated-privacy/td-p/87735 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/information-about...
• buyucu 2y ago
  Mozilla lost its missing a long time ago. The previous CEO was a disaster, and it looks like this one is too.
  • AlgebraFox 2y ago
    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.
• casenmgreen 2y ago
  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?
  • Apocryphon 2y ago
    They just use Gecko, right? Is telemetry actually built into the rendering engine
  • AyyEye 2y ago
    https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/ https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/ Librewolf has less spyware than waterfox.
• gfkclzhzo 2y ago
  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.
  • sjs382 2y ago
    The more unique your habits, the easier to fingerprint. That said, with those habits, you may be a less attractive audience.
• numinix 2y ago
  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.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• Dowwie 2y ago
  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.
• mushufasa 2y ago
  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!
  • AyyEye 2y ago
    Google pays them south of a $billion/year. Your money means nothing.
    • mushufasa 2y ago
      > Google pays them south of a $billion/year Until it doesn't.
• righthand 2y ago
  Just installed Librewolf last night and will gladly support the end of Mozilla.
• daitangio 2y ago
  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.
• gortok 2y ago
  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.
• karaterobot 2y ago
  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.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  HN title: "Mozilla owns "information you input through Firefox" https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/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.
  • dang 2y ago
    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=43185909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185909 Earlier thread (in this case) was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065, which had that title.
• pluto_modadic 2y ago
  Mozilla really keeps making missteps.
• freediver 2y ago
  What would complete the irony would be Google declaring they are abandoning ads in the age of AI :)
• jacksnipe 2y ago
  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.
• j45 2y ago
  This seems poorly worded, intentionally or not. Doesn't feel like the Mozilla I've known.
• anti-soyboy 2y ago
  [flagged]
• jayelbe 2y ago
  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.
• mikevin 2y ago
  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.
• nonelog 2y ago
  > 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.
• dietr1ch 2y ago
  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.
• kaiengert 2y ago
  Please see this helpful clarification post: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...
  • AlgebraFox 2y ago
    If anything, it just confirms Mozilla is selling data.
• Riverheart 2y ago
  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-of-use/ 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.
• dang 2y ago
  Related ongoing thread: An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612 - Feb 2025 (119 comments)
• osigurdson 2y ago
  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.