The Mozilla lawyers say that CCPA and GDPR are not court-tested enough and they are making the ToU so broad such that the terms can prevent a lot of legal attacks. As someone who works for Mozilla, I have decided to trust them. But I can understand some people want to do their own reading…. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It must be stressful working for Mozilla and constantly being held to a higher standard.
Despite holding a pitchfork and having lost all faith in Mozilla’s leadership, I have nothing but respect for the people who have made Firefox a viable browser alternative for so long. Sorry you have to deal with this shit :/
Thank you. It would be a more realistic high standard if people contributed instead of complaining.
Filing bugs, finding duplicates, writing docs, everything counts. Not everyone has the necessary level of masochism to deal with a 20 year old C++/Rust/XHTML/CSS/JS codebase and that’s OK.
Heh, it’s not really masochistic if you just focus on an area that’s fairly isolated (for me it was platform stuff: kinetic scrolling for GTK, damage tracking for EGL, gamepad support with evdev, a couple little Wayland bugs, enabling stuff on FreeBSD…) – and what’s really amazing is the tooling, even just the fact that the build is literally just ./mach build and doesn’t take outrageous amounts of time nor memory (well, without LTO).
But I can understand some people want to do their own reading….
I mean, those terms are written for customers, who have to accept them, who are neither lawyers nor Mozilla employees. Legal writing for lawyers but for users to accept is malpractice.
It’s definitely a change in habit. I worked with Mozilla Legal around the GDPR compliance and documentation of crates.io and around the setup around the Foundation and they were very outside focused. Really loved it.
What I did find however is the classic that Mozilla is - curiously - very Californian, and not very international in their management and thinking. Peak of this was me observing someone trying to apply US case law to Germany, which doesn’t have case law.
All that said: I do trust Mozilla, but that’s because I have a privileged inside view through my work on Rust and in Tech Speakers and that can’t be what’s being asked of general users.
HOWEVER, I think it’s also the obligation of people criticizing to not spin the wildest legal theories. FOSS has a lot of armchair lawyers that can’t tell even tell personal information and copyrightable works apart.
I love how people be so vocal of Mozilla with pitchforks and flame and then switch to Chrome which is run by a company who actually mine and sell all your data and it not even transparent about it.
Yeah, I agree with the article, use Firefox. Not only it has features the other browsers don’t have, but Mozilla also even with all its bullshit and flaws, still a better player in that ecosystem than the other browser vendors. Also, thanks to the OP for the shout out in the article :-)
Of course there are people on all camps. People criticise Mozilla and switch to Chromium (which just empowers Google anyway) or other Chrome-based browser (also empowers Google) or Iceweasel / Librewolf which are just Firefox without Mozilla shortcoming but also without Mozilla care. Basically most Firefox Forks can’t survive without upstream, they don’t have the developers for it. The other browser vendors are either Chromium-based or WebKit, both from companies with worst practice than Mozilla…
Just note that I’m not happy with the terms either, but I don’t see them (specially the revised version) with the same level of horror and disgust that some vocal people here.
Switching to Librewolf or some other Firefox derivative would be a rational response as a way to introduce a degree of separation between us and Mozilla.
I don’t know enough about the structure of Chrome/Chromium/derivatives to say, but I’m not sure how something like ungoogled-chromium would empower Google. And if somebody is using Chromium believing that it’s already ungoogled, that’s hardly an indictment on their character.
Google wins when there is a monoculture of Chromium-engine. I never said using Chrome was a character flaw, I do find engine monocultures problematic though for the future of the web.
I guess I’ll be that guy, kinda. I’ve switched to LibreWolf on my Linux machines and think I’ll stay there a while, but there are several chromium-based browsers that I would find acceptable, ungoogled-chromium being the strongest FOSS version I’m aware of, and https://iridiumbrowser.de being another good option, especially for EU folks.
And in the WebKit/Appleverse, there’s Kagi’s Orion and probably a bunch more I’m less aware of. Not from Google, of course, but piggybacking on Safari in the same way that LibreWolf does Firefox. Not FOSS, but financially sustainable and better incentive alignment due to being a paid product. I’m fine with that, because I’ve stopped seeing Mozilla as “the good guys”, and become more pragmatic.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s somewhat likely that Google will be ordered to split Chromium into an independent organization when their first antitrust case appeals are all exhausted and the ruling on remedies comes down. Not holding my breath for that, but it would be an interesting development.
Come to think of it, this whole kerfuffle must have precipitated by Mozilla’s need to seek new revenue sources, anticipating that Google may be ordered to shut down their ad deal fairly soon. Why they’d decide to go into the invasive advertising business themselves… I dunno, but I lay that at the feet of their management. It’s important to me, as a FF user, to send Mozilla leadership a clear signal that this is an unacceptable choice to me.
license all content you transmit through Firefox to Mozilla (“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. -https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox)
allow Mozilla to both sell your private information
If you’re already using Firefox, I can confirm that porting your profile over to Librewolf (https://librewolf.net) is relatively painless, and the only issues you’ll encounter are around having the resist fingerprinting setting turned on by default (which you can choose to just disable if you don’t like the trade-offs). I resumed using Firefox in 2016 and just switched away upon this shift in policy, and I do so sadly and begrudgingly, but you’d be crazy to allow Mozilla to cross these lines without switching away.
If you’re a macOS + Littlesnitch user, I can also recommend setting Librewolf to not allow communication to any Mozilla domain other than addons.mozilla.org, just in case.
👋 I respect your opinion and LibreWolf is a fine choice; however, it shares the same problem that all “forks” have and that I thought I made clear in the article…
Developing Firefox costs half a billion per year. There’s overhead in there for sure, but you couldn’t bring that down to something more manageable, like 100 million per year, IMO, without making it completely uncompetitive to Chrome, whose estimate cost exceeds 1 billion per year. The harsh reality is that you’re still using Mozilla’s work and if Mozilla goes under, LibreWolf simply ceases to exist because it’s essentially Firefox + settings. So you’re not really sticking it to the man as much as you’d like.
There are 3 major browser engines left (minus the experiments still in development that nobody uses). All 3 browser engines are, in fact, funded by Google’s Ads and have been for almost the past 2 decades. And any of the forks would become unviable without Apple’s, Google’s or Mozilla’s hard work, which is the reality we are in.
Not complaining much, but I did mention the recent controversy you’re referring to and would’ve preferred comments on what I wrote, on my reasoning, not on the article’s title.
I do what I can and no more, which used to mean occasionally being a Firefox advocate when I could, giving Mozilla as much benefit of the doubt as I could muster, paying for an MDN subscription, and sending some money their way when possible. Now it means temporarily switching to Librewolf, fully acknowledging how unsustainable that is, and waiting for a more sustainable option to come along.
I don’t disagree with the economic realities you mentioned and I don’t think any argument you made is bad or wrong. I’m just coming to a different conclusion: If Firefox can’t take hundreds of millions of dollars from Google every year and turn that into a privacy respecting browser that doesn’t sell my data and doesn’t prohibit me from visiting whatever website I want, then what are we even doing here? I’m sick of this barely lesser of two evils shit. Burn it to the fucking ground.
I think “barely lesser of two evils” is just way off the scale, and I can’t help but feel that it is way over-dramatized.
Also, what about the consequences of having a chrome-only web? Many websites are already “Hyrum’s lawed” to being usable only in Chrome, developers only test for Chrome, the speed of development is basically impossible to follow as is.
Firefox is basically the only thing preventing the most universal platform from becoming a Google-product.
Well there’s one other: Apple. Their hesitance to allow non-Safari browsers on iOS is a bigger bulwark against a Chrome-only web than Firefox at this point IMO.
I’m a bit afraid that the EU is in the process of breaking that down though. If proper Chrome comes over to iOS and it becomes easy to install, I’m certain that Google will start their push to move iOS users over.
I know it’s not exactly the same but Safari is also in the WebKit family and Safari is nether open source nor cross platform nor anywhere close to Firefox in many technical aspects (such as by far having the most functional and sane developer tools of any browser it there).
Pretty much the same here: I used to use Firefox, I have influenced some people in the past to at least give Firefox a shot, some people ended up moving to it from Chrome based on my recommendations. But Mozilla insists on breaking trust roughly every year, so when the ToS came around, there was very little goodwill left and I have permanently switched to LibreWolf.
Using a fork significantly helps my personal short-term peace of mind: whenever Mozilla makes whatever changes they’re planning to make which requires them to have a license to any data I input into Firefox, I trust that I will hear about those changes before LibreWolf incorporates them, and there’s a decent chance that LibreWolf will rip them out and keep them out for a few releases as I assess the situation. If I’m using Firefox directly, there’s a decent probability that I’ll learn about those changes after Firefox updates itself to include them. Hell, for all I know, Firefox is already sending enough telemetry to Mozilla that someone there decided to make money off it and that’s why they removed the “Mozilla will doesn’t and will never sell your data” FAQ item; maybe LibreWolf ripping out telemetry is protecting me against Mozilla right now, I don’t know.
Long term, what I personally do doesn’t matter. The fact that Mozilla has lost so much good-will that long-term Firefox advocates are switching away should be terrifying to Mozilla and citizens of the Web broadly, but my personal actions here have close to 0 effect on that. I could turn into a disingenuous Mozilla shill but I don’t exactly think I’d be able to convince enough people to keep using Firefox to cancel out Mozilla’s efforts to sink their own brand.
If Firefox is just one of three browsers funded by Google which don’t respect user privacy, then what’s the point of it?
People want Firefox and Mozilla to be an alternative to Google’s crap. If they’re not going to be the alternative, instead choosing to copy every terrible idea Google has, then I don’t see why Mozilla is even needed.
Well to be fair to Mozilla, they’re pushing back against some web standard ideas Google has. They’ve come out against things like WebUSB and WebHID for example.
How the heck do they spend that much? At ~20M LoC, they’re spending 25K per line of code a year. While details are hard to find, I think that puts them way above the industry norms.
I’m pretty sure that’s off by 3 orders of magnitude; OP’s figure would be half a US billion, i.e. half a milliard. That means 500M / 20M = 25 $/LOC. Not 25K.
I see your point, but by that same logic, shouldn’t we all then switch to Librewolf? If Firefox’s funding comes from Google, instead of its user base, then even if a significant portion of Firefox’s users switch, it can keep on getting funded, and users who switched can get the privacy non-exploitation they need?
TL;DR 90% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from ad partnerships (Google) and Apple received ca. 19 Bn $ per annum to keep Google as the default search engine.
Where did you get those numbers? Are you referring to the whole effort, (legal, engineering, marketing, administration, etc) ot just development?
That’s an absolutely bonkers amount of money, and while i absolutely believe it, im also kind of curious what other software products are in a similar league
Yeah, that seems like legal butt-covering. If someone in a criminalizing jurisdiction accesses these materials and they try to sue to the browser, Mozilla can say the user violated TOS.
This is just a lie. It’s just a lie. Firefox is gratis, and it’s FLOSS. These stupid paragraphs about legalese are just corporate crap every business of a certain size has to start qualifying so they can’t get their wallet gaped by lawyers in the future. Your first bullet point sucks - you don’t agree to the Acceptable Use Policy to use Firefox, you agree to it when using Mozilla services, i.e. Pocket or whatever. Similarly, your second bulletpoint is completely false, that paragraph doesn’t even exist:
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.
The text was recently clarified because of the inane outrage over basic legalese. And Mozilla isn’t selling your information. That’s not something they can casually lie about and there’s no reason to lie about it unless they want to face lawsuits from zealous legal types in the future. Why constantly lie to attack Mozilla? Are you being paid to destroy Free Software?
Consciously lying should be against Lobsters rules.
Let’s really look at what’s written here, because either u/altano or u/WilhelmVonWeiner is correct, not both.
The question we want to answer: do we “agree to an acceptable use policy” when we use Firefox? Let’s look in the various terms of service agreements (Terms Of Use, Terms Of Service, Mozilla Accounts Privacy). We see that it has been changed. It originally said:
“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.”
Note that this makes no distinction between Firefox as a browser and services offered by Mozilla. The terms did make a distinction between Firefox as distributed by Mozilla and Firefox source code, but that’s another matter. People were outraged, and rightfully so, because you were agreeing to an acceptable use policy to use Firefox, the binary from Mozilla. Period.
That changed to:
“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.”
Are the legally equivalent, but they’re just using “nicer”, “more acceptable” language? No. The meaning is changed in important ways, and this is probably what you’re referring to when you say, “you don’t agree to the Acceptable Use Policy to use Firefox, you agree to it when using Mozilla services”
However, the current terms still say quite clearly that we agree to the AUP for Mozilla Services when we use Firefox whether or not we use Mozilla Services. The claim that “you don’t agree to the Acceptable Use Policy to use Firefox” is factually incorrect.
So is it OK for u/WilhelmVonWeiner to say that u/altano is lying, and call for censure? No. First, it’s disingenuous for u/WilhelmVonWeiner to pretend that the original wording didn’t exist. Also, the statement, “Similarly, your second bulletpoint is completely false, that paragraph doesn’t even exist:” is plainly false, because we can see that paragraph verbatim here:
So if u/WilhelmVonWeiner is calling someone out for lying, they really shouldn’t lie themselves, or they should afford others enough benefit of the doubt to distinguish between lying and being mistaken. After all, is u/WilhelmVonWeiner lying, or just mistaken here?
I’m all for people venting when someone is clearly in the wrong, but it seems that u/WilhelmVonWeiner is not only accusing others of lying, but is perhaps lying or at very least being incredibly disingenuous themselves.
Oh - and I take exception to this in particular:
“every business of a certain size has to start qualifying so they can’t get their wallet gaped by lawyers”
Being an apologist for large organizations that are behaving poorly is the kind of behavior we expect on Reddit or on the orange site, but not here. We do not want to or should we need to engage with people who do not make good faith arguments.
Consciously lying should be against Lobsters rules.
This is a pretty rude reply so I’m not going to respond to the specifics.
Mozilla has edited their acceptable use policy and terms of service to do damage control and so my exact quotes might not be up anymore, but yeah sure, assume that everyone quoting Mozilla is just a liar instead of that explanation if you want.
Sorry for being rude. It was unnecessary of me and I apologise, I was agitated. I strongly disagree with your assessment of what Mozilla is doing as “damage control” - they are doing what is necessary to legally protect the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation from legal threats by clarifying how they use user data. It is false they are selling your private information. It is false they have a nonexclusive … license to everything you do using Firefox. It is false that you have to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy to use Firefox. It’s misinformation, it’s FUD and it’s going to hurt one of the biggest FLOSS nonprofits and alternate web browsers.
It is false that you have to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy to use Firefox.
So people can judge for them selves, the relevant quote from the previous Terms of Use was:
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.
This is a pretty incendiary comment and I would expect any accusation of outright dishonesty to come with evidence that they know they’re wrong. I am not taking a position on who has the facts straight, but I don’t see how you could prove altano is lying. Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by…simply being incorrect.
FYI this is a change made in response to the recent outrage, the original version of the firefox terms included
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.
Your locale is forced to en-US, your timezone is UTC, your system is set to Windows. It will put canvas behind a prompt and randomizes some pixels such that fingerprinting based on rendering is a bit harder. It will also disable using SVG and fonts that you have installed on your systems
Btw, I don’t recommend anyone using resist fingerprinting. This is the “hard mode” that is known to break a lot of pages and has no site-specific settings. Only global on or off. A lot of people turn it on and then end up hating Firefox and switching browsers because their web experience sucks and they don’t know how to turn it off. This is why we now show a rather visible info bar in settings under privacy/security when you turn this on and that’s also why we are working on a new mode that can spoof only specific APIs and only on specific sites. More to come.
Yes, if everyone is running a custom set of spoofs you’d end up being unique again. The intent for the mechanism is for us to be able to experiment and test out a variety of sets before we know what works (in terms of webcompat). In the end, we want everyone to look as uniform as possible
It breaks automatic dark mode and sites don’t remember their zoom setting. Dates are also not always localized correctly. That’s what I’ve noticed so far at least.
As a long-time Firefox user, there’s so much that in equal parts infuriates and saddens me about Mozilla. If I had to pick the two most aggravating …
The first is Mozilla’s penchant for committing self sabotage and this is perhaps their best instance yet. Bluntly, what the hell were they thinking? That this stuff wouldn’t be incendiary to the community? That no-one would notice? I’m willing to grant this could be incompetence rather than malevolence, but in this case, I think they’re basically equally as bad. Even assuming incompetence, it shows a blatant disconnect with what used to be the moral foundation they were built on. It doesn’t matter which it is, it shows loss of vision and organisational rot.
What really aggravates me is why after all this time have they not tried to ethically make money off Firefox. The obvious way to do that would be a “Sponsor Firefox” type thing, and put it front and center. There shouldn’t be any special browser features you get from this, there’s zero difference in the software you run, the bits are identical, and it’s always optional. As far as I can tell, they’ve never tried to motivate and mobilise their loyal userbase to fund development instead of being in this unholy compact with Google advertising revenue?
I think about all the software I’m willing to pay for because I get so much value out of it, but equally, because I like knowing I’m doing some small part to help empower people to develop a project they’re passionate about. Would I “sponsor” a web browser that prioritised the user versus the advertiser? Yes, no question. And yes, I have donated repeatedly in the past to Mozilla, but that’s different, I’m a computer geek on Lobste.rs. I’m talking about educating and mobilising their userbase of regular users who aren’t following this sort of news.
Why would Mozilla not make it clear to their users that they are trying to build and fund a browser a “different way” which is divorced from the surveillance behaviours and incentives of their competitors? Surely if you explained it to users it wouldn’t be that hard a sell? I could be wrong, but have they even tried? No, they keep spending the resources on … Virtual Reality, or Firefox OS, or acquiring Pocket. And hey, I use Pocket, I like Pocket, but it’s insane that’s where they’re deploying their time and money.
You know what’s worse? They’re still the best option.By a wide margin.
Sure, use a fork, but as others have pointed out, that fork isn’t going to be developed independently of the upstream Firefox codebase. They’re wholly dependent upon Firefox’s continued development.
What does it say that this is the point we’ve reached for actually browsing the “open” web? Nothing good.
I think Mozilla taking money from Google is an ethical source of funding. Google wants to splash some cash to pretend like it’s not a monopoly? Neither Mozilla taking or not taking the cash is going to change what Google does anyway, so might as well.
What makes you think that there are no strings attached? Even if there isn’t explicit quid-pro-quo, I’d argue that the dependence itself has some pernicious effects.
Really sad to watch the video, I’m still using Firefox Focus on mobile and migrated to Zen couple weeks ago, recently found more Mozilla controversies like Excessive Executive Pay and Anonym acquisition.
In light of recent news I switched to F-Droid’s Fennec build on Android, but I haven’t yet decided what I want to switch to on desktop (I currently use the official Mozilla flatpak from Flathub). I’m leaning toward LibreWolf from what I’ve seen so far.
Thanks for that; I’ll take a look. I hadn’t seen it because it’s not in F-Droid yet, but I knew about their Fennec build after DivestOS went away leaving Mull users wondering what they should use (even though I wasn’t a DivestOS or Mull user at the time). I’m partial to things packaged by the F-Droid team, but of course I was getting Firefox from Mozilla so I’m not opposed to getting IronFox from their repo. I see IronFox is carrying on the Mull legacy, so that’s cool.
I do not like the author’s misrepresentations in this article. You can be technically not lying, but when you write things that most people who aren’t highly technical would believe to mean one thing, and that thing is clearly not the case, you don’t get points for technically not lying. You’re being disingenuous.
An example: I do not like Google, and I do not like Chrome, and I make no apologies for them, but when someone writes, “When you log into Chrome, it automatically logs you into your Google account on the web.”
Non- and less-technical people do not make a distinction between using a web browser and “log(ging) into Chrome” - if someone were to say, “log in to Chrome, please”, many, if not most people, would assume that what’s meant is for someone to simply launch Chrome. They wouldn’t think, “I’ll launch the browser, then go in to settings or whatever, then I’ll log in to my Google account inside of Chrome because I was asked to log in to Chrome”.
We (technical people) can tell others all we want that they should use another browser, but most people aren’t going to care and aren’t going to listen. But should people know that they can use Chrome and don’t need to be logged in to Google? Absolutely. Is the author implying by their choice of wording that this isn’t the case? Yes. This is deceptive, and it weakens the case the author is trying to make.
As we learned from South Park, we’re asked to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. We really don’t need to trick people to make the case that they suck.
Non- and less-technical people do not make a distinction between using a web browser and “log(ging) into Chrome”
That’s only because Google made it so, and less-technical people don’t understand the amount of data that Google collects on them, via searches, maps, or Google Analytics, or what damage that can do.
I am pretty sure that the linking happened because they noticed that many people don’t really want or need to log into a Google account, so they wanted more people to share more data. It is my opinion that less-technical people aren’t stupid, and get confused by the web when their mental model is deliberately flawed, more often than not.
I strongly disagree with the example given, only because I know that when I say to log in I always mean to enter identification information (like username and password). It wouldn’t have crossed my mind before reading your comment that someone would equate logging into an application with simply opening an application. Logging in should only mean that you’ve chosen to enter identifying information in order to gain access to something. They shouldn’t need to address whether you can use Chrome without logging in if all they’re talking about is the logged-in behavior. (We also shouldn’t ignore Google’s dark patterns that make it seem like you do need to log in to use it, though the article doesn’t go into that.)
You can’t really expect every piece of technical content to pander to people who don’t understand the difference between launching a program and logging in to an account. What makes you think that this post is directed at people who are 100% technologically illiterate to that degree?
It shouldn’t be targeted at people who are 100% technically illiterate, but just as much it shouldn’t be targeted at people who are 0% technically illiterate.
A good example is when technical people talk about computer viruses and conflate them with Trojans. If you don’t know any better, you learn only from usage like this and you have no real awareness of the difference between them (meaning we’re shirking our responsibility to teach correct things). But when technical people, who really should know better, refer to a Trojan as a virus, that can cause real confusion and miscommunication. Someone tasked with cleanup after an infection can easily end up with very different work by this misuse. Additionally, there’s no good reason for a technical person to not use the correct term.
So when I, a technical person, sees someone, also ostensibly a technical person, describing things to others, particularly to non-technical people, incorrectly or in ways that we know will be misunderstood, it’d really bugs me. There’s no good reason for it.
This is a bold assumption to make, and it’s not reasonable to expect an author to imagine every possible way a reader might be confused. Words have meaning, and it should be enough for an author of a more-technical-than-not article to use words accurately. Audience analysis matters, but I really don’t think this author expected their article to be read by someone with so little knowledge that they would confuse “log in” with “open application”. As I shared earlier I wouldn’t have even imagined that scenario until you presented it, so if I were to have written this same article I could say confidently that it was not written with the expectation of it being misunderstood.
“Think of Chrome. When you log into Chrome, it automatically logs you into your Google account on the web.”
How many non-technical people wouldn’t realize the difference between logging in to Google and simply using Chrome? How many technical people wouldn’t be certain that the author is referring specifically to logging in to Google, and would require context to be sure?
The term “log in” has been in use in computing since at least the ‘60s and in common home usage since at least the late ‘90s. Additionally, it is not unique to computing. If I told someone to log in or sign in at the bank, I would have no expectation that they would think I simply meant for them to walk into the bank. They’d be expected to sign a log book or check in with someone. If they don’t know what “log into” means, I expect them to ask the question, “What does that mean?” and look it up. I never expect my reader to simply a) make a misinformed assumption, and b) take what I said at face value without question. If what I said strikes them as odd, they should look it up. That is what we should expect of ourselves and each other. We can’t expect an author to imagine every possible way that a reader might be misinformed.
That’s what I’ve been talking about, yes. Who is this mythical “common person” and why do you feel the author needed to write with them in mind instead of another imagined audience? I have certainly known people who were that confused (not about that specifically), but I wouldn’t write a blog post aimed at catching every possible misunderstanding that type of person might have. I think it’s pretty clear that type of extra-confused user was not the audience this author had in mind, and I don’t think we can demand they reinagine their audience like that.
I want to plainly say that I don’t believe there was anything incorrect about what they said about logging into Chrome and I don’t believe that the absence of qualifying language for an unintended imagined audience means they’re being in any way disingenuous. Maybe you have another example from the article that makes your point, but I contend the example you gave does not.
It’s fully offline. The language models are a few megabytes. THAT’S AMAZING. Sure the translations are far from fluent, but I use it all the time to get the gist of articles in French, German, Spanish etc., and I don’t need them to be fluent, just understandable.
If you want online LLM stuff I mean they have you covered but again that’s online and LLM.
i get it, but please have a look at the screenshot. it’s not even just the translation that’s bad, it’s also (presumably) parsing the html incorrectly, doubling up the text in various parts (e.g. altano’s username and the flag button), and adding nonsensical text (e.g. “si tratta di un’azienda” == “it’s about a company”???). it’s so odd that the translation built into a major browser cannot parse html correctly
but of course, the main issue is that the translation is bad. the sentences sound weird, words have incorrect articles/endings (which are absolutely trivial to get right in that case). it even translated “gaslight” into “austriare” which is a completely made up word that makes zero sense
and this was english to italian, which shouldn’t be as hard as chinese to turkish or finnish to japanese
i’m sorry for complaining about someone’s hard work that they provided for free. it’s better than nothing, and it’s better than automatically translating things literally word for word, but it’s just… really not much better than that…
truth be told I’ve only been using it with English on the target end and it’s been fine when translating a stray site in French, German, Russian, Chinese, etc. I never translate text to my native language, before LLMs the translators all were terrible.
Came here to comment the same. The quality of the translations isn’t even the biggest issue though. The UX Chrome has is just way better. You can force translate and when the page updates dynamically it kinda “just works”. With Firefox it is impossible to do any real tasks on a government/bank website. The fact that there is no option in the context menu is also baffling to me.
Firefox is on its last few meters, it is dead, just does not know it yet.
Why?
Firefox on android is barely useable, try opening more than five private tabs while driving in a german train (=subpar mobile internet), then you know what I mean: the tabs do not even load at first trial. Chrome can do.
Feature wise FF on all platforms will slowly fall behind and end as a sorry excuse of a browser. For example date and time pickers.
They directed money into the C-level, DEI, and only then in the product and its documentation in the past.
Some bugs in the bug tracker are allowed to apply for a driver’s license agewise.
They include features nobody asked for (and often has to come up with effort for blocking/disabling) like this pocket thingie.
And now they want to sell your data like anybody else.
The situation now is like I anticipated back when W3C included copy protected video in the spec and thus killed the free and open web. The web as we knew it was dead, it only did not know it yet.
Now we know: the web as a free and open platform is dead.
Unskippable, unblockable mandatory ads are coming in every minute, and then I will do the same with the browser as I did with TV&Radio back in 2002: throw it out. It was good while it lasted.
I exclusively use Firefox on Android and it’s perfectly fine. Honestly can’t remember when it last didn’t work. So maybe my connection is usually better, but “barely usable” is ridiculous. I agree on your other points and I’m just as mad, but not because of this.
This sounds strange to me. I’m a desktop Chrome user but I switched to Firefox on Android a year ago. I haven’t had any issues with it, except for the few sites that aren’t compatible with Firefox (and which I avoid). I do use the browser on a train weekly, too.
The only issue I have with Firefox on Android on German trains is that the WiFi is a pretty terrible network connection. Between certain stations no internet connectivity works, let alone Firefox.[0]
[0]: Unfortunately, this also includes buying a beer with a Dutch card on intercity train.
Are there any actual lawyers here who could weigh in?
I’ve largely given up on techies correctly interpreting legalese.
The Mozilla lawyers say that CCPA and GDPR are not court-tested enough and they are making the ToU so broad such that the terms can prevent a lot of legal attacks. As someone who works for Mozilla, I have decided to trust them. But I can understand some people want to do their own reading….
¯\_(ツ)_/¯It must be stressful working for Mozilla and constantly being held to a higher standard.
Despite holding a pitchfork and having lost all faith in Mozilla’s leadership, I have nothing but respect for the people who have made Firefox a viable browser alternative for so long. Sorry you have to deal with this shit :/
Thank you. It would be a more realistic high standard if people contributed instead of complaining.
Filing bugs, finding duplicates, writing docs, everything counts. Not everyone has the necessary level of masochism to deal with a 20 year old C++/Rust/XHTML/CSS/JS codebase and that’s OK.
Heh, it’s not really masochistic if you just focus on an area that’s fairly isolated (for me it was platform stuff: kinetic scrolling for GTK, damage tracking for EGL, gamepad support with evdev, a couple little Wayland bugs, enabling stuff on FreeBSD…) – and what’s really amazing is the tooling, even just the fact that the build is literally just
./mach buildand doesn’t take outrageous amounts of time nor memory (well, without LTO).I mean, those terms are written for customers, who have to accept them, who are neither lawyers nor Mozilla employees. Legal writing for lawyers but for users to accept is malpractice.
It’s definitely a change in habit. I worked with Mozilla Legal around the GDPR compliance and documentation of crates.io and around the setup around the Foundation and they were very outside focused. Really loved it.
What I did find however is the classic that Mozilla is - curiously - very Californian, and not very international in their management and thinking. Peak of this was me observing someone trying to apply US case law to Germany, which doesn’t have case law.
All that said: I do trust Mozilla, but that’s because I have a privileged inside view through my work on Rust and in Tech Speakers and that can’t be what’s being asked of general users.
HOWEVER, I think it’s also the obligation of people criticizing to not spin the wildest legal theories. FOSS has a lot of armchair lawyers that can’t tell even tell personal information and copyrightable works apart.
Fair point. I can agree that this has been blundered in a variety of ways and I’m sorry that it appalled so, so many people.
I love how people be so vocal of Mozilla with pitchforks and flame and then switch to Chrome which is run by a company who actually mine and sell all your data and it not even transparent about it.
Yeah, I agree with the article, use Firefox. Not only it has features the other browsers don’t have, but Mozilla also even with all its bullshit and flaws, still a better player in that ecosystem than the other browser vendors. Also, thanks to the OP for the shout out in the article :-)
Are you sure the people criticising Mozilla’s privacy shortcomings are the same people switching to Google? I haven’t seen evidence of this…
Of course there are people on all camps. People criticise Mozilla and switch to Chromium (which just empowers Google anyway) or other Chrome-based browser (also empowers Google) or Iceweasel / Librewolf which are just Firefox without Mozilla shortcoming but also without Mozilla care. Basically most Firefox Forks can’t survive without upstream, they don’t have the developers for it. The other browser vendors are either Chromium-based or WebKit, both from companies with worst practice than Mozilla…
Just note that I’m not happy with the terms either, but I don’t see them (specially the revised version) with the same level of horror and disgust that some vocal people here.
Switching to Librewolf or some other Firefox derivative would be a rational response as a way to introduce a degree of separation between us and Mozilla.
I don’t know enough about the structure of Chrome/Chromium/derivatives to say, but I’m not sure how something like ungoogled-chromium would empower Google. And if somebody is using Chromium believing that it’s already ungoogled, that’s hardly an indictment on their character.
Google wins when there is a monoculture of Chromium-engine. I never said using Chrome was a character flaw, I do find engine monocultures problematic though for the future of the web.
I guess I’ll be that guy, kinda. I’ve switched to LibreWolf on my Linux machines and think I’ll stay there a while, but there are several chromium-based browsers that I would find acceptable, ungoogled-chromium being the strongest FOSS version I’m aware of, and https://iridiumbrowser.de being another good option, especially for EU folks.
And in the WebKit/Appleverse, there’s Kagi’s Orion and probably a bunch more I’m less aware of. Not from Google, of course, but piggybacking on Safari in the same way that LibreWolf does Firefox. Not FOSS, but financially sustainable and better incentive alignment due to being a paid product. I’m fine with that, because I’ve stopped seeing Mozilla as “the good guys”, and become more pragmatic.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s somewhat likely that Google will be ordered to split Chromium into an independent organization when their first antitrust case appeals are all exhausted and the ruling on remedies comes down. Not holding my breath for that, but it would be an interesting development.
Come to think of it, this whole kerfuffle must have precipitated by Mozilla’s need to seek new revenue sources, anticipating that Google may be ordered to shut down their ad deal fairly soon. Why they’d decide to go into the invasive advertising business themselves… I dunno, but I lay that at the feet of their management. It’s important to me, as a FF user, to send Mozilla leadership a clear signal that this is an unacceptable choice to me.
Use a fork.
The ideals of this post are dead. Firefox is neither private nor free. Do not use Firefox in 2025.
Mozilla has done an about face and now demands that Firefox users:
See https://lobste.rs/s/de2ab1/firefox_adds_terms_use for more discussion.
If you’re already using Firefox, I can confirm that porting your profile over to Librewolf (https://librewolf.net) is relatively painless, and the only issues you’ll encounter are around having the resist fingerprinting setting turned on by default (which you can choose to just disable if you don’t like the trade-offs). I resumed using Firefox in 2016 and just switched away upon this shift in policy, and I do so sadly and begrudgingly, but you’d be crazy to allow Mozilla to cross these lines without switching away.
If you’re a macOS + Littlesnitch user, I can also recommend setting Librewolf to not allow communication to any Mozilla domain other than addons.mozilla.org, just in case.
👋 I respect your opinion and LibreWolf is a fine choice; however, it shares the same problem that all “forks” have and that I thought I made clear in the article…
Developing Firefox costs half a billion per year. There’s overhead in there for sure, but you couldn’t bring that down to something more manageable, like 100 million per year, IMO, without making it completely uncompetitive to Chrome, whose estimate cost exceeds 1 billion per year. The harsh reality is that you’re still using Mozilla’s work and if Mozilla goes under, LibreWolf simply ceases to exist because it’s essentially Firefox + settings. So you’re not really sticking it to the man as much as you’d like.
There are 3 major browser engines left (minus the experiments still in development that nobody uses). All 3 browser engines are, in fact, funded by Google’s Ads and have been for almost the past 2 decades. And any of the forks would become unviable without Apple’s, Google’s or Mozilla’s hard work, which is the reality we are in.
Not complaining much, but I did mention the recent controversy you’re referring to and would’ve preferred comments on what I wrote, on my reasoning, not on the article’s title.
I do what I can and no more, which used to mean occasionally being a Firefox advocate when I could, giving Mozilla as much benefit of the doubt as I could muster, paying for an MDN subscription, and sending some money their way when possible. Now it means temporarily switching to Librewolf, fully acknowledging how unsustainable that is, and waiting for a more sustainable option to come along.
I don’t disagree with the economic realities you mentioned and I don’t think any argument you made is bad or wrong. I’m just coming to a different conclusion: If Firefox can’t take hundreds of millions of dollars from Google every year and turn that into a privacy respecting browser that doesn’t sell my data and doesn’t prohibit me from visiting whatever website I want, then what are we even doing here? I’m sick of this barely lesser of two evils shit. Burn it to the fucking ground.
I think “barely lesser of two evils” is just way off the scale, and I can’t help but feel that it is way over-dramatized.
Also, what about the consequences of having a chrome-only web? Many websites are already “Hyrum’s lawed” to being usable only in Chrome, developers only test for Chrome, the speed of development is basically impossible to follow as is.
Firefox is basically the only thing preventing the most universal platform from becoming a Google-product.
Well there’s one other: Apple. Their hesitance to allow non-Safari browsers on iOS is a bigger bulwark against a Chrome-only web than Firefox at this point IMO.
I’m a bit afraid that the EU is in the process of breaking that down though. If proper Chrome comes over to iOS and it becomes easy to install, I’m certain that Google will start their push to move iOS users over.
I know it’s not exactly the same but Safari is also in the WebKit family and Safari is nether open source nor cross platform nor anywhere close to Firefox in many technical aspects (such as by far having the most functional and sane developer tools of any browser it there).
Pretty much the same here: I used to use Firefox, I have influenced some people in the past to at least give Firefox a shot, some people ended up moving to it from Chrome based on my recommendations. But Mozilla insists on breaking trust roughly every year, so when the ToS came around, there was very little goodwill left and I have permanently switched to LibreWolf.
Using a fork significantly helps my personal short-term peace of mind: whenever Mozilla makes whatever changes they’re planning to make which requires them to have a license to any data I input into Firefox, I trust that I will hear about those changes before LibreWolf incorporates them, and there’s a decent chance that LibreWolf will rip them out and keep them out for a few releases as I assess the situation. If I’m using Firefox directly, there’s a decent probability that I’ll learn about those changes after Firefox updates itself to include them. Hell, for all I know, Firefox is already sending enough telemetry to Mozilla that someone there decided to make money off it and that’s why they removed the “Mozilla will doesn’t and will never sell your data” FAQ item; maybe LibreWolf ripping out telemetry is protecting me against Mozilla right now, I don’t know.
Long term, what I personally do doesn’t matter. The fact that Mozilla has lost so much good-will that long-term Firefox advocates are switching away should be terrifying to Mozilla and citizens of the Web broadly, but my personal actions here have close to 0 effect on that. I could turn into a disingenuous Mozilla shill but I don’t exactly think I’d be able to convince enough people to keep using Firefox to cancel out Mozilla’s efforts to sink their own brand.
If Firefox is just one of three browsers funded by Google which don’t respect user privacy, then what’s the point of it?
People want Firefox and Mozilla to be an alternative to Google’s crap. If they’re not going to be the alternative, instead choosing to copy every terrible idea Google has, then I don’t see why Mozilla is even needed.
Well to be fair to Mozilla, they’re pushing back against some web standard ideas Google has. They’ve come out against things like WebUSB and WebHID for example.
How the heck do they spend that much? At ~20M LoC, they’re spending 25K per line of code a year. While details are hard to find, I think that puts them way above the industry norms.
I’m pretty sure that’s off by 3 orders of magnitude; OP’s figure would be half a US billion, i.e. half a milliard. That means 500M / 20M = 25 $/LOC. Not 25K.
I see your point, but by that same logic, shouldn’t we all then switch to Librewolf? If Firefox’s funding comes from Google, instead of its user base, then even if a significant portion of Firefox’s users switch, it can keep on getting funded, and users who switched can get the privacy non-exploitation they need?
I gathered some numbers on that here: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume-consent/#h-dollar510000000
TL;DR 90% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from ad partnerships (Google) and Apple received ca. 19 Bn $ per annum to keep Google as the default search engine.
Where did you get those numbers? Are you referring to the whole effort, (legal, engineering, marketing, administration, etc) ot just development?
That’s an absolutely bonkers amount of money, and while i absolutely believe it, im also kind of curious what other software products are in a similar league
doesn’t seem like a particularly grave concern to me
That page says “Services”. Does it apply to Firefox or the VPN?
The sexuality and violence thing I suspect is so that they are covered for use in Saudi Arabia and Missouri.
Yeah, that seems like legal butt-covering. If someone in a criminalizing jurisdiction accesses these materials and they try to sue to the browser, Mozilla can say the user violated TOS.
i assume it applies mostly to Bugzilla / Mozilla Connect / Phabricator / etc
This is just a lie. It’s just a lie. Firefox is gratis, and it’s FLOSS. These stupid paragraphs about legalese are just corporate crap every business of a certain size has to start qualifying so they can’t get their wallet gaped by lawyers in the future. Your first bullet point sucks - you don’t agree to the Acceptable Use Policy to use Firefox, you agree to it when using Mozilla services, i.e. Pocket or whatever. Similarly, your second bulletpoint is completely false, that paragraph doesn’t even exist:
The text was recently clarified because of the inane outrage over basic legalese. And Mozilla isn’t selling your information. That’s not something they can casually lie about and there’s no reason to lie about it unless they want to face lawsuits from zealous legal types in the future. Why constantly lie to attack Mozilla? Are you being paid to destroy Free Software?
Consciously lying should be against Lobsters rules.
Let’s really look at what’s written here, because either u/altano or u/WilhelmVonWeiner is correct, not both.
The question we want to answer: do we “agree to an acceptable use policy” when we use Firefox? Let’s look in the various terms of service agreements (Terms Of Use, Terms Of Service, Mozilla Accounts Privacy). We see that it has been changed. It originally said:
“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.”
Note that this makes no distinction between Firefox as a browser and services offered by Mozilla. The terms did make a distinction between Firefox as distributed by Mozilla and Firefox source code, but that’s another matter. People were outraged, and rightfully so, because you were agreeing to an acceptable use policy to use Firefox, the binary from Mozilla. Period.
That changed to:
“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.”
Are the legally equivalent, but they’re just using “nicer”, “more acceptable” language? No. The meaning is changed in important ways, and this is probably what you’re referring to when you say, “you don’t agree to the Acceptable Use Policy to use Firefox, you agree to it when using Mozilla services”
However, the current terms still say quite clearly that we agree to the AUP for Mozilla Services when we use Firefox whether or not we use Mozilla Services. The claim that “you don’t agree to the Acceptable Use Policy to use Firefox” is factually incorrect.
So is it OK for u/WilhelmVonWeiner to say that u/altano is lying, and call for censure? No. First, it’s disingenuous for u/WilhelmVonWeiner to pretend that the original wording didn’t exist. Also, the statement, “Similarly, your second bulletpoint is completely false, that paragraph doesn’t even exist:” is plainly false, because we can see that paragraph verbatim here:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
So if u/WilhelmVonWeiner is calling someone out for lying, they really shouldn’t lie themselves, or they should afford others enough benefit of the doubt to distinguish between lying and being mistaken. After all, is u/WilhelmVonWeiner lying, or just mistaken here?
I’m all for people venting when someone is clearly in the wrong, but it seems that u/WilhelmVonWeiner is not only accusing others of lying, but is perhaps lying or at very least being incredibly disingenuous themselves.
Oh - and I take exception to this in particular:
“every business of a certain size has to start qualifying so they can’t get their wallet gaped by lawyers”
Being an apologist for large organizations that are behaving poorly is the kind of behavior we expect on Reddit or on the orange site, but not here. We do not want to or should we need to engage with people who do not make good faith arguments.
[Comment removed by author]
This is a pretty rude reply so I’m not going to respond to the specifics.
Mozilla has edited their acceptable use policy and terms of service to do damage control and so my exact quotes might not be up anymore, but yeah sure, assume that everyone quoting Mozilla is just a liar instead of that explanation if you want.
EDIT:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
Sorry for being rude. It was unnecessary of me and I apologise, I was agitated. I strongly disagree with your assessment of what Mozilla is doing as “damage control” - they are doing what is necessary to legally protect the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation from legal threats by clarifying how they use user data. It is false they are selling your private information. It is false they have a nonexclusive … license to everything you do using Firefox. It is false that you have to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy to use Firefox. It’s misinformation, it’s FUD and it’s going to hurt one of the biggest FLOSS nonprofits and alternate web browsers.
So people can judge for them selves, the relevant quote from the previous Terms of Use was:
Source: http://archive.today/btoQM
The updated terms make no mention of the Acceptable Use Policy.
This is a pretty incendiary comment and I would expect any accusation of outright dishonesty to come with evidence that they know they’re wrong. I am not taking a position on who has the facts straight, but I don’t see how you could prove altano is lying. Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by…simply being incorrect.
that’s not binding to firefox. that’s binding to mozilla services like websites and other services. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/mozilla/ links to the acceptable use page for instance. whereas the firefox one does not. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
firefox is fine. your other points are also largely incorrect.
FYI this is a change made in response to the recent outrage, the original version of the firefox terms included
Which has now been removed.
What are the trade-offs for resisting fingerprinting? Does it disable certain CSS features, or?
Your locale is forced to en-US, your timezone is UTC, your system is set to Windows. It will put canvas behind a prompt and randomizes some pixels such that fingerprinting based on rendering is a bit harder. It will also disable using SVG and fonts that you have installed on your systems
Btw, I don’t recommend anyone using resist fingerprinting. This is the “hard mode” that is known to break a lot of pages and has no site-specific settings. Only global on or off. A lot of people turn it on and then end up hating Firefox and switching browsers because their web experience sucks and they don’t know how to turn it off. This is why we now show a rather visible info bar in settings under privacy/security when you turn this on and that’s also why we are working on a new mode that can spoof only specific APIs and only on specific sites. More to come.
Now that I know about it, I’m really looking forward to the new feature!
I’m using CanvasBlocker but its performance and UX could use some love.
This is the kind of thing Mozilla still does that sets it very far appart from the rest. Thanks!
heh, I wonder how many bits of entropy will be there in roughly “which of the spoofs are enabled”? :D
Yes, if everyone is running a custom set of spoofs you’d end up being unique again. The intent for the mechanism is for us to be able to experiment and test out a variety of sets before we know what works (in terms of webcompat). In the end, we want everyone to look as uniform as possible
It breaks automatic dark mode and sites don’t remember their zoom setting. Dates are also not always localized correctly. That’s what I’ve noticed so far at least.
As a long-time Firefox user, there’s so much that in equal parts infuriates and saddens me about Mozilla. If I had to pick the two most aggravating …
The first is Mozilla’s penchant for committing self sabotage and this is perhaps their best instance yet. Bluntly, what the hell were they thinking? That this stuff wouldn’t be incendiary to the community? That no-one would notice? I’m willing to grant this could be incompetence rather than malevolence, but in this case, I think they’re basically equally as bad. Even assuming incompetence, it shows a blatant disconnect with what used to be the moral foundation they were built on. It doesn’t matter which it is, it shows loss of vision and organisational rot.
What really aggravates me is why after all this time have they not tried to ethically make money off Firefox. The obvious way to do that would be a “Sponsor Firefox” type thing, and put it front and center. There shouldn’t be any special browser features you get from this, there’s zero difference in the software you run, the bits are identical, and it’s always optional. As far as I can tell, they’ve never tried to motivate and mobilise their loyal userbase to fund development instead of being in this unholy compact with Google advertising revenue?
I think about all the software I’m willing to pay for because I get so much value out of it, but equally, because I like knowing I’m doing some small part to help empower people to develop a project they’re passionate about. Would I “sponsor” a web browser that prioritised the user versus the advertiser? Yes, no question. And yes, I have donated repeatedly in the past to Mozilla, but that’s different, I’m a computer geek on Lobste.rs. I’m talking about educating and mobilising their userbase of regular users who aren’t following this sort of news.
Why would Mozilla not make it clear to their users that they are trying to build and fund a browser a “different way” which is divorced from the surveillance behaviours and incentives of their competitors? Surely if you explained it to users it wouldn’t be that hard a sell? I could be wrong, but have they even tried? No, they keep spending the resources on … Virtual Reality, or Firefox OS, or acquiring Pocket. And hey, I use Pocket, I like Pocket, but it’s insane that’s where they’re deploying their time and money.
You know what’s worse? They’re still the best option. By a wide margin.
Sure, use a fork, but as others have pointed out, that fork isn’t going to be developed independently of the upstream Firefox codebase. They’re wholly dependent upon Firefox’s continued development.
What does it say that this is the point we’ve reached for actually browsing the “open” web? Nothing good.
I think Mozilla taking money from Google is an ethical source of funding. Google wants to splash some cash to pretend like it’s not a monopoly? Neither Mozilla taking or not taking the cash is going to change what Google does anyway, so might as well.
What makes you think that there are no strings attached? Even if there isn’t explicit quid-pro-quo, I’d argue that the dependence itself has some pernicious effects.
Ladybird - up and coming browser backed by a non profit.
I’m rooting for them, and will even throw money their way. But it’s not a solution for the here and now.
Really sad to watch the video, I’m still using Firefox Focus on mobile and migrated to Zen couple weeks ago, recently found more Mozilla controversies like Excessive Executive Pay and Anonym acquisition.
In light of recent news I switched to F-Droid’s Fennec build on Android, but I haven’t yet decided what I want to switch to on desktop (I currently use the official Mozilla flatpak from Flathub). I’m leaning toward LibreWolf from what I’ve seen so far.
Have you tried IronFox recommended by them? I’m considering migrate from iOS to LineageOS and use it or Fennec.
Thanks for that; I’ll take a look. I hadn’t seen it because it’s not in F-Droid yet, but I knew about their Fennec build after DivestOS went away leaving Mull users wondering what they should use (even though I wasn’t a DivestOS or Mull user at the time). I’m partial to things packaged by the F-Droid team, but of course I was getting Firefox from Mozilla so I’m not opposed to getting IronFox from their repo. I see IronFox is carrying on the Mull legacy, so that’s cool.
That article is misrepresenting Google compensation to a hilarious degree. Pichai regularly gets $200M+ bonuses.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/22/economy/alphabet-ceo-pay/index.html
I do not like the author’s misrepresentations in this article. You can be technically not lying, but when you write things that most people who aren’t highly technical would believe to mean one thing, and that thing is clearly not the case, you don’t get points for technically not lying. You’re being disingenuous.
An example: I do not like Google, and I do not like Chrome, and I make no apologies for them, but when someone writes, “When you log into Chrome, it automatically logs you into your Google account on the web.”
Non- and less-technical people do not make a distinction between using a web browser and “log(ging) into Chrome” - if someone were to say, “log in to Chrome, please”, many, if not most people, would assume that what’s meant is for someone to simply launch Chrome. They wouldn’t think, “I’ll launch the browser, then go in to settings or whatever, then I’ll log in to my Google account inside of Chrome because I was asked to log in to Chrome”.
We (technical people) can tell others all we want that they should use another browser, but most people aren’t going to care and aren’t going to listen. But should people know that they can use Chrome and don’t need to be logged in to Google? Absolutely. Is the author implying by their choice of wording that this isn’t the case? Yes. This is deceptive, and it weakens the case the author is trying to make.
As we learned from South Park, we’re asked to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. We really don’t need to trick people to make the case that they suck.
That’s only because Google made it so, and less-technical people don’t understand the amount of data that Google collects on them, via searches, maps, or Google Analytics, or what damage that can do.
I am pretty sure that the linking happened because they noticed that many people don’t really want or need to log into a Google account, so they wanted more people to share more data. It is my opinion that less-technical people aren’t stupid, and get confused by the web when their mental model is deliberately flawed, more often than not.
I strongly disagree with the example given, only because I know that when I say to log in I always mean to enter identification information (like username and password). It wouldn’t have crossed my mind before reading your comment that someone would equate logging into an application with simply opening an application. Logging in should only mean that you’ve chosen to enter identifying information in order to gain access to something. They shouldn’t need to address whether you can use Chrome without logging in if all they’re talking about is the logged-in behavior. (We also shouldn’t ignore Google’s dark patterns that make it seem like you do need to log in to use it, though the article doesn’t go into that.)
You can’t really expect every piece of technical content to pander to people who don’t understand the difference between launching a program and logging in to an account. What makes you think that this post is directed at people who are 100% technologically illiterate to that degree?
It shouldn’t be targeted at people who are 100% technically illiterate, but just as much it shouldn’t be targeted at people who are 0% technically illiterate.
A good example is when technical people talk about computer viruses and conflate them with Trojans. If you don’t know any better, you learn only from usage like this and you have no real awareness of the difference between them (meaning we’re shirking our responsibility to teach correct things). But when technical people, who really should know better, refer to a Trojan as a virus, that can cause real confusion and miscommunication. Someone tasked with cleanup after an infection can easily end up with very different work by this misuse. Additionally, there’s no good reason for a technical person to not use the correct term.
So when I, a technical person, sees someone, also ostensibly a technical person, describing things to others, particularly to non-technical people, incorrectly or in ways that we know will be misunderstood, it’d really bugs me. There’s no good reason for it.
This is a bold assumption to make, and it’s not reasonable to expect an author to imagine every possible way a reader might be confused. Words have meaning, and it should be enough for an author of a more-technical-than-not article to use words accurately. Audience analysis matters, but I really don’t think this author expected their article to be read by someone with so little knowledge that they would confuse “log in” with “open application”. As I shared earlier I wouldn’t have even imagined that scenario until you presented it, so if I were to have written this same article I could say confidently that it was not written with the expectation of it being misunderstood.
“Think of Chrome. When you log into Chrome, it automatically logs you into your Google account on the web.”
How many non-technical people wouldn’t realize the difference between logging in to Google and simply using Chrome? How many technical people wouldn’t be certain that the author is referring specifically to logging in to Google, and would require context to be sure?
The term “log in” has been in use in computing since at least the ‘60s and in common home usage since at least the late ‘90s. Additionally, it is not unique to computing. If I told someone to log in or sign in at the bank, I would have no expectation that they would think I simply meant for them to walk into the bank. They’d be expected to sign a log book or check in with someone. If they don’t know what “log into” means, I expect them to ask the question, “What does that mean?” and look it up. I never expect my reader to simply a) make a misinformed assumption, and b) take what I said at face value without question. If what I said strikes them as odd, they should look it up. That is what we should expect of ourselves and each other. We can’t expect an author to imagine every possible way that a reader might be misinformed.
But is this what we’re talking about? What would the common person do if someone asked them to “log in to Chrome”?
That’s what I’ve been talking about, yes. Who is this mythical “common person” and why do you feel the author needed to write with them in mind instead of another imagined audience? I have certainly known people who were that confused (not about that specifically), but I wouldn’t write a blog post aimed at catching every possible misunderstanding that type of person might have. I think it’s pretty clear that type of extra-confused user was not the audience this author had in mind, and I don’t think we can demand they reinagine their audience like that.
I want to plainly say that I don’t believe there was anything incorrect about what they said about logging into Chrome and I don’t believe that the absence of qualifying language for an unintended imagined audience means they’re being in any way disingenuous. Maybe you have another example from the article that makes your point, but I contend the example you gave does not.
for what it’s worth the translation feature in firefox is terrible https://i.ibb.co/spNhv92Q/translation.png
i don’t know why they’d ship something this bad
It’s fully offline. The language models are a few megabytes. THAT’S AMAZING. Sure the translations are far from fluent, but I use it all the time to get the gist of articles in French, German, Spanish etc., and I don’t need them to be fluent, just understandable.
If you want online LLM stuff I mean they have you covered but again that’s online and LLM.
i get it, but please have a look at the screenshot. it’s not even just the translation that’s bad, it’s also (presumably) parsing the html incorrectly, doubling up the text in various parts (e.g. altano’s username and the flag button), and adding nonsensical text (e.g. “si tratta di un’azienda” == “it’s about a company”???). it’s so odd that the translation built into a major browser cannot parse html correctly
but of course, the main issue is that the translation is bad. the sentences sound weird, words have incorrect articles/endings (which are absolutely trivial to get right in that case). it even translated “gaslight” into “austriare” which is a completely made up word that makes zero sense
and this was english to italian, which shouldn’t be as hard as chinese to turkish or finnish to japanese
i’m sorry for complaining about someone’s hard work that they provided for free. it’s better than nothing, and it’s better than automatically translating things literally word for word, but it’s just… really not much better than that…
truth be told I’ve only been using it with English on the target end and it’s been fine when translating a stray site in French, German, Russian, Chinese, etc. I never translate text to my native language, before LLMs the translators all were terrible.
Came here to comment the same. The quality of the translations isn’t even the biggest issue though. The UX Chrome has is just way better. You can force translate and when the page updates dynamically it kinda “just works”. With Firefox it is impossible to do any real tasks on a government/bank website. The fact that there is no option in the context menu is also baffling to me.
Brave still does, no?
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The departure of Brendan Eich started the downhill of Mozilla
Firefox is on its last few meters, it is dead, just does not know it yet. Why?
Firefox on android is barely useable, try opening more than five private tabs while driving in a german train (=subpar mobile internet), then you know what I mean: the tabs do not even load at first trial. Chrome can do.
Feature wise FF on all platforms will slowly fall behind and end as a sorry excuse of a browser. For example date and time pickers.
They directed money into the C-level, DEI, and only then in the product and its documentation in the past.
Some bugs in the bug tracker are allowed to apply for a driver’s license agewise.
They include features nobody asked for (and often has to come up with effort for blocking/disabling) like this pocket thingie.
And now they want to sell your data like anybody else.
The situation now is like I anticipated back when W3C included copy protected video in the spec and thus killed the free and open web. The web as we knew it was dead, it only did not know it yet.
Now we know: the web as a free and open platform is dead. Unskippable, unblockable mandatory ads are coming in every minute, and then I will do the same with the browser as I did with TV&Radio back in 2002: throw it out. It was good while it lasted.
I exclusively use Firefox on Android and it’s perfectly fine. Honestly can’t remember when it last didn’t work. So maybe my connection is usually better, but “barely usable” is ridiculous. I agree on your other points and I’m just as mad, but not because of this.
This sounds strange to me. I’m a desktop Chrome user but I switched to Firefox on Android a year ago. I haven’t had any issues with it, except for the few sites that aren’t compatible with Firefox (and which I avoid). I do use the browser on a train weekly, too.
The only issue I have with Firefox on Android on German trains is that the WiFi is a pretty terrible network connection. Between certain stations no internet connectivity works, let alone Firefox.[0]
[0]: Unfortunately, this also includes buying a beer with a Dutch card on intercity train.
How is that an issue with firefox or android?
It’s not. It’s pointing out that the network is super unreliable, not the browser like OP claimed.
And everything else is infinitely less usable due to lack of proper extension support.
Throwing hyperboles around is not helpful.
DEI? Something tells me you have an axe to grind. Probably held in the right hand.