The whole firefox controversy was overblown. Hardened firefox is still the way to go.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
5 points (100.0% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
58590 readers
523 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):
🏴☠️ Other communities
Torrenting:
- !seedboxes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !trackers@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !qbittorrent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !libretorrent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Gaming:
- !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !newyuzupiracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !switchpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !3dspiracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !retropirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com
💰 Please help cover server costs.
 |
 |
|---|---|
| Ko-fi | Liberapay |
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's mostly overblown. You can watch here or read here. The internet is overreacting again, but Mozilla has done fuck all to grasp why just yoinking understandable language and expecting people to understand legalese and draw lines to their Privacy Policy is making people upset or confused.
Imo, people jumping ship is justified, because a company that makes $37M just on investments should do better about being vocal and prescient champions of privacy. Even if their actual privacy policy is the same as it was a year ago, their failure to communicate with their supporters in a way they can understand should have consequences.
It may be overblown but I am seriously tired of the way Mozilla is being run. The CEO has a $7 million salary. Big red flags always appear each time they increase the salary also. May be a bit hyperbolic but that’s why I’m just using another fork after 20 years
Yup. I’ve been using Firefox for 16 years and I just switched to LibreWolf the other day.
Yeah, and while I don't have any technical qualms about the direction of Mozilla with regard to Firefox, I'm personally switching for peace of mind and because of the aforementioned inability to communicate well. I don't like working with or supporting people that can't just say what they mean. I mean, how hard would it have been to have a human-readable version for stupid people like me and have a legalese version for the lawyers?
Regardless, as people make decisions, they deserve to be informed. It would be stupid to decide to leave Firefox if all you knew was the uninformed outrage of the internet.
Switched to Zen and Mullvad
I still recommend it with a little asterisk:
Disable a bunch of shit in it or download a privacy focused fork of it (like Librewolf)
That asterisk is a problem though, having to go through and make it secure is an issue. What if you miss a setting? What if you misunderstand a setting? None of it is particularly upfront and easy. It doesn't ask you when you first install it to set this stuff up, it encourages you to just get stuck in and start using it straight away.
It's not too complicated for a nerd whose hobby is computers or someone who has studied computers, but for the layperson it's too much.
That's why Librewolf is so good. It's secure by default, with all the settings toggled to privacy and you can ease that off if you wish, for convenience or whatever.
Firefox essentially can't seem to decide if they want to be FOSS or capitalist, that's an issue.
You're talking about security, but really, none of the privacy questions are about technical security of the product.
"What if you miss a setting?" Then they'll give you article recommendations or send your search query to the search engine you're targeting in the first place. They're really a long way from what you can call a security issue, or sharing personal data with random third parties or data brokers.
if they want to be FOSS or capitalist
I really don't see any basis for this take. It's not about picking one of two extremes, and the most extreme niches in those.
They create FOSS, and look for privacy respecting partnerships and investment so they can keep it going.
They added ToS because they're integrating services, like their synced/backed up browser data and other respectful integration.
That's all a long way from malice, or significant problematic behavior. And you still have more choice than on the other biggest alternatives.
I don't think it is the best we could have, I would like it a bit different too, but the way you make it out to be is way overblown if not wrong.
I've been using LW & Mull/IF before the outrage-TOU update and while they're great for me I wouldn't recommend them to everyone. I still keep FF as a backup and many ppl should continue to use FF for the time being as it was JUST A TOU update....for now.
The browser project dedicated to open web standards steered by a compromised non-profit or the browser project dedicated to undermining the traditional web browsing experience steered by the largest advertising company on Earth ... Let me think ...
It's incredible unfunny to read people here on Lemmy (or in the Fediverse in general) talk about dropping Firefox for Chrome or a Chromium browser. it's like complaining that your country is going wrong by voting Trump.
and predictions saying Firefox is going downhill fast and that their forks won’t be maintained for much longer.
Possibly true, but abandoning ship is only bringing us closer to that timeline. People seem to be completely ignorant/delusional about how much work these forks will require to maintain if Mozilla's full time employees stop working on Firefox. If you have a practical reason to use another fork (like maybe a feature Firefox doesn't have) then I totally understand using that instead, but if you are simply making some kind of ethical protest change like all the new LibreWolf users who are so loudly virtue signalling at the moment then you need to think seriously about whether this course of action will ultimately end up hurting your ideals. Mozilla definitely has a big communication problem and I understand the desire to distance oneself from an organisation that repeatedly disrespects its supporters and never learns from its mistakes, as it is very fatiguing to endure their constant failures and the massive fall-outs from them, but ultimately I feel like switching away from Firefox is still an emotional decision rather than a rational one.
What other problems has Firefox had? Everything I search sends me to this recent controversy
One of the more recent examples from last year was Mozilla's announcement of PPA (Privacy-Preserving Attribution). Essentially the organisation is trying to create a new system for click-based advertising where an advertiser can be notified that you clicked on their ad, helping them and the websites which host their ads, without compromising your personal privacy. The way it has historically worked is you click on an ad and give away a ton of your personal data, or you straight up block all these ads and their trackers which makes a lot of the web unsustainable (because it is funded by advertising). Anyway, like with this latest controversy a lot of people didn't bother to read any of Mozilla's statements and instead based their entire opinion off clickbait headlines like 'Firefox's New 'Privacy' Feature Actually Gives Your Data to Advertisers' which made PPA sound like a reduction of consumer privacy, which it isn't. And again, like this current controversy, you also had a lot of privacy activists who do not live in reality claiming that anything other than a 100$ rejection of all advertising online equaled 100% complicity and that Mozilla had sold out on one of its core principles.
Yea sticking with firefox , but with arkenfox hardening.. bugfixes are more important than fear of some wordings , at least for now. Vanadium in GOS on the phone.
as well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM
Do they just try to remove DRM from media as it comes down, or can you not watch any DRM media at all on it?
They disable it by default, because it requires the execution of proprietary code, but you can reenable it.
well Firefox may enshittify, it's still the best option imo, certainly better than chrome or anything chrome based. even better if you use a privacy focused fork like librewolf.
there are other options out there, you can look into qt browsers, those were the basis for webkit browsers. hopefully soon things like servo/verso become more useable.
The UX of Librewolf sucks ass though. Want to change this setting? Well you can't, too bad.
It doesn't suck, it's just not intended for casual users, which is why I chuckle when I see it recommended. That and Mullvad browser. I'd pretty much just recommend TOR over those, if you're really going for strict privacy.
For something that strikes a good balance, I use Zen.
How the UX of librewolf is different from the UX of Firefox?
A lot of options are disabled for “privacy reasons”. There is no halfway approach. It’s all or nothing with their strict privacy settings.
For some, that’s perfect. For others, who want a more tailored privacy experience, it’s not a really great option.
load more comments
(6 replies)
I mean yeah. I'm not a fan of the changes but there's no way in hell anything Chromium based will fare any better... do they even have uBlock still???
Probably turn off the telemetry, try a fork like LibreWolf or maybe the Arkenfox user.js if you'd rather stay close to upstream.
I switched to https://librewolf.net/ on Desktop and https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox on Android.
Same, I’m done with Firefox / Mozilla…
Librewolf, Waterfox, Floorp seem like viable options.
Let me add FireDragon, a Floorp fork with librewolf and other changes.
Using this as an opportunity to promote the LibreWolf community on Lemmy: !librewolf@lemmy.ml as well as their new Mastodon account: @librewolf@chaos.social
I'm not affiliated with them btw
Nope. LibreWolf & Waterfox are top-tier, Zen and Mullvad Browsers aren't bad at all
I will say as nice as Zen seems (I agree that it's not bad), I don't really like the whole "vertical tabs" shtick. I mean, I can see why some people would like that, but personally I never got into it. It just looks weird to me and I like seeing more of my tab names (weirdly enough that's exactly what a lot of pro-vertical users claim is good about them lol).
Also, from a privacy standpoint, not a huge fan personally of the fact that unlike LibreWolf, Zen Browser doesn't have ResistFingerprinting enabled by default (not sure if it's even in there tbh).
i agree with wanting see more of tab title. for people who regularly keep 50+ tabs open, that is a pipe dream.
if tabs are so many that their iconized anyway, making the tab bar vertical and iconized isn't much difference.
and if the bar would expand on hover (hopefully in near future), like in Brave (not sure if it's a Chrome feature), then it can be wide enough to see plenty of title without reducing the webpage size most of the time.
You know, I've been trying Zen and although I still prefer horizontal to vertical, I can see I was actually somewhat wrong about what I said.
The sidebar is actually expandable (they don't make that clear) and if you do expand it beyond its default, you can actually see more of each tab's titles. It actually helps a lot if you have a shitload of tabs.
If you are like me however and typically try to have only a smaller number of tabs pinned (or consistently open), typically no more than like a third of your screen width at most, then there really is not much of a difference unless you're already used to vertical over horizontal tab bars.
I've been trying to keep less tabs open.
it's not easy while test-driving multiple search engines for every search lol
i wasn't as plussed as everyone else over it, though i am concerned. i still donate to mozilla as, ultimately, i believe they're still good for those who champion an ethical, open, and not for profit internet.
i have switched to librefox, though, just because i like their developers and the fact that they've embraced mastodon and the fediverse. i also have firefox and nightly (though i use fennec on android because it comes through f droid)
Is Fennec trustable? They had that one vulnerability incident I can't name and that's when I first heard about them.
Left them 4 years ago (after 20ish years), so...
Fuck Mozilla, is all I've got to say.
view more: next ›