Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.
This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:
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.
Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.
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.
Overhyped AI is going to fail, and it can’t happen soon enough. The Mozilla leadership really needs to pay attention to that reality.
Mozilla leadership needs to be removed
100%. I can’t decide whether I think the organization being dissolved completely is a good idea or not, but I’m at least open to it.
It’s not going to disappear, it has its place, but its not going to be shoehorned into every single thing.
Sorry, I realized I’m using my personal jargon in public again. When I said “AI,” I meant this overhyped put-it-in-your-mouse garbage. When I’m talking about the actually useful stuff, I usually call it “ML.”
Of course you have no reason to know that or care. My apologies.
Is this because some middle manager at Mozilla has to pretend to be productive?
Guys Mullvad browser and Librewolf exist.
Do they support ubo?
they’re firefox forks and ubo comes automatically installed with them.
LibreWolf is annoying in that it doesn’t work on my Mac with VPN split tunneling, a seemingly known issue they haven’t fixed.
Damn we really can’t have anything nice.
Yeesh. So what’s an alternative?
As I understand it, these changes don’t affect browsers that use FF as a base, so Zen Browser might not be affected.
I’ve been trying it out this week, and it’s good. And can still use all the FF extensions.
This comment under the article gave me a chuckle.
Man all this makes me want to just use Links2 for everything and being a luddite. Complete with cabin in the woods. So frustrating.
Where’s the gofundme for the firefox fork project?
Was this from google turning off the funding tap?
does this affect forks?
Is Waterfox a good alternative?
Waterfox’s creator, while not being HOSTILE to privacy, has said in the past that making the most private browser in the world is not the goal of the project. The goal is a more customizable browser for power users
Looking forward to seeing the cope from the Mozilla fanboys for that one.
I feel like everything is getting corroded, the capitalists are wearing down everything
