The answer to “what is Firefox?” on Mozilla’s FAQ page about its browser used to read:
The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.
Now it just says:
The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.
In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.
A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, “is Firefox free?” Moz used to say:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.
Now it simply reads:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.
Again, a pledge to not sell people’s data has disappeared. Varma insisted this is the result of the fluid definition of “sell” in the context of data sharing and privacy.
A different fork from firefox like librewolf
Librewolf is just some patches added on top of Firefox.
Which happen to remove all telemetry, ads, reporting, etc. You know, the reason we don’t want to use vanilla Firefox.
Use Librewolf. Please don’t use any damned Chromium-based trash.
I’ll stop using Chromium-based trash once Firefox devs stop acting all holier than thou and implement WebUSB and WebSerial instead of some vague notion they are protecting me from myself by not implementing it.
WebUSB isn’t a web standard and there isn’t a spec for it. If it becomes a standard then they might. However, it is terrible for privacy and security.
https://wicg.github.io/webusb plenty of spec here and a draft to become web standard.
It’s up to me to decide what is sufficient secure and private for me, I don’t have the same threat model as others. It’s the same bullshit line Firefox throws around.
There is a reason why Firefox is constantly losing adoption. People want things to work.
They can easily add it behind a flag until it’s ready, but those that need it can use it in it’s current form. I need it for keyboards and mice to be configurable on Linux. Many hardware manufacturers are starting to use it to make cross platform tools for their prepherial hardware. I’m not gonna wait for Firefox overlords to deem it “safe enough” by their whims. They don’t even have a framework for how to qualify something is safe. It’s just at the personal preferences of Mozilla devs.
They have implemented plenty of things that were drafts, and posed just as many security or privacy issues.