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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. "
}
},
Turns out when you gotta choose between going defunct and selling ad space, selling ad space wins.
Also turns out that drying up donations for privacy protecting browsers means there is less demand for it, and less money to fund it.
The majority cost of Firefox is engineering salaries.
Eventually something has to give, and this is it.
Also turns out that drying up donations for privacy protecting browsers means there is less demand for it
Or, hear me out, that former donors don't trust them anymore!
But also that a lot of people don't want to donate, basically when they could only donate an immeasurably small amount, to a company whose CEO gets an unimaginably huge pay, that could be used for significantly boosting development.
Personally that's a big reason I rather want to support smaller projects, or even that of size like Bitwarden.
Cough cough, that's true the biggest cost is salary 17,097,933. But 10 millions are paid to C-Suite and 4mil to contractors who do the job. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla-foundation-form-990-public-disclosure-ty23.pdf Just look into the books.
Yeah but the line between them and google is not there anymore in that case
The only acceptable privacy policy for a browser is "we won't fucking look into anything, take anything, nor send anything anywhere you didn't actually wish to send explicitly".
Firefox have an extension system. If mozilla wants to bloat it, they should do it via extension, so that they're not bloating the actually useful part. As it is, all they're doing is forcing more work on people to manage forks to remove all the shit every time they push a release.
Oh, that last paragraph doesn't give me hope at all. Fucking AI chatbots.
The actual addition to the terms is essentially this:
The way this article describes it as "cushy caveats" is completely misleading. It's quite literally just "If you use a feature that integrates with third party services, you're relying on and providing data to those services, also we want to know if the feature is actually being used and how much."
The problem is the inclusion of the feature to begin with. It should be an opt in add install.
Privacy policies should legally be called surveillance policies.
Or "Invasion of Privacy" Policy
I feel like everything is getting corroded, the capitalists are wearing down everything
ladybird can't come fast enough
Ladybird has a platinum sponsorship on their homepage from Shopify so not a good look already.
Building a browser from scratch is going to cost well over a million dollars in development costs. I don't think they'd be able to achieve it without sponsors.
Wtf is happening, why is now even Firefox going off the rails?
You missed the previous memo: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
Is this because some middle manager at Mozilla has to pretend to be productive?
No it’s because Firefox isn’t profitable and to try to survive in its current form they have to do something.
It might be more productive to die and live on as an open source effort. I personally doubt there’s enough open source engagement to keep Firefox current and competitive but it’s of course an alternative Mozilla in its current form is unable to consider.
Mozilla is a nonprofit (or it at least it should be, technically it's a for profit corporation that's wholly owned by a nonprofit foundation, shady asf).
They shouldn't be trying to make a profit, they should make enough money to pay their programmers to maintain the browser.
They should not be dumping money into more executive hires and AI bullshit like they are doing.
they have to dip something for sure. THEY HAVE TO REDUCE THE CEO PAY BY MEASLY 20% AND FUND DEVELOPMENT FROM THAT!!!
or by even more.
Damn we really can't have anything nice.
I moved on to Waterfox, is this a good move?
sometimes bound to give, if firefox isnt taking in money from having no ads, to having ads. they are going to need tons of ads, and the ability to sell your browser info for money, much like chrome is doing. surprised its taken this long to finally say "private donations isnt enough"
The great part of open source is forking.
And forking it will, Firefox will be forked with a version of a different name that doesn't have this shit, and then the name Firefox will fade into history as a once great product that formed the basis of a different grey product.
Fork you, Mozilla
I've been willingly enabling data collection features for Mozilla but I guess that time is revolute, they don't feel trustworthy anymore.