This is sad 😢
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#Mozilla has lost their ground and is now in a free fall into a sinkhole. I doubt they'll ever get out if this again unless they do a 180-turn within the coming days. Mozilla has lost a lot of trust and credibility over the last couple of years. This accelerates that distrust even more.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
It looks promising, until you hit the last paragraph (my highlight)
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our privacy notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
In my book, that's indirectly selling data.
Goodbye, #Firefox.
Update (2026-02-26): So this change happened exactly 1 year ago. I saw the date and missed the year. And since Mozilla is still doing the privacy whitewashing, there is no reason to trust Mozilla more today than a year ago. Leaving Firefox is unavoidable. The current Mozilla leadership does not deserver much trust from the community.
@dazo it’s like they don’t understand that people moved away from Chrome for a reason. By actively making themselves more like Google they are removing the incentive to move from Chrome to Firefox. And incentivizing moving away from Firefox to literally anything else. Their user base consists almost entirely of people who are willing to change browsers. Not understanding that will cost them. Probably not as much as it should.
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#Mozilla has lost their ground and is now in a free fall into a sinkhole. I doubt they'll ever get out if this again unless they do a 180-turn within the coming days. Mozilla has lost a lot of trust and credibility over the last couple of years. This accelerates that distrust even more.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
It looks promising, until you hit the last paragraph (my highlight)
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our privacy notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
In my book, that's indirectly selling data.
Goodbye, #Firefox.
Update (2026-02-26): So this change happened exactly 1 year ago. I saw the date and missed the year. And since Mozilla is still doing the privacy whitewashing, there is no reason to trust Mozilla more today than a year ago. Leaving Firefox is unavoidable. The current Mozilla leadership does not deserver much trust from the community.
@dazo Sure MozGoogle may fall but forks will live on.
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@theorangetheme @dazo The question is what to use other than Firefox forks. Waterfox and Librewolf work fine, on Android I use Fennec and Waterfox. Chromium based browsers aren't much better and I don't trust Brave either.
@graves501 @theorangetheme @dazo
I went all-in on @zenbrowser and am really loving it. Waterfox on my phone for now.
Anything using Chromium is a non-option to me. Sure, let's just further cement Google's control of web standards. :-P
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#Mozilla has lost their ground and is now in a free fall into a sinkhole. I doubt they'll ever get out if this again unless they do a 180-turn within the coming days. Mozilla has lost a lot of trust and credibility over the last couple of years. This accelerates that distrust even more.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
It looks promising, until you hit the last paragraph (my highlight)
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our privacy notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
In my book, that's indirectly selling data.
Goodbye, #Firefox.
Update (2026-02-26): So this change happened exactly 1 year ago. I saw the date and missed the year. And since Mozilla is still doing the privacy whitewashing, there is no reason to trust Mozilla more today than a year ago. Leaving Firefox is unavoidable. The current Mozilla leadership does not deserver much trust from the community.
@dazo They aren't doing themselves any favors when they have an employee chime into the discussion claiming that giving themselves "a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use" the information you upload or input through the browser is necessary for things like internet searches to work.
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@theorangetheme @dazo The question is what to use other than Firefox forks. Waterfox and Librewolf work fine, on Android I use Fennec and Waterfox. Chromium based browsers aren't much better and I don't trust Brave either.
@graves501 @dazo I'm okay with Firefox forks if they're not run by sociopaths. Realistically, that's probably the best we can do for now.
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@graves501 @theorangetheme @dazo
I went all-in on @zenbrowser and am really loving it. Waterfox on my phone for now.
Anything using Chromium is a non-option to me. Sure, let's just further cement Google's control of web standards. :-P
@EdCates @graves501 @theorangetheme
Agreed! We don't need to repeat the Internet Explorer fiasco.
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@EdCates @graves501 @theorangetheme
Agreed! We don't need to repeat the Internet Explorer fiasco.
@dazo @graves501 @theorangetheme
Exactly! It's why Vivaldi fans give me a headache.
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#Mozilla has lost their ground and is now in a free fall into a sinkhole. I doubt they'll ever get out if this again unless they do a 180-turn within the coming days. Mozilla has lost a lot of trust and credibility over the last couple of years. This accelerates that distrust even more.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
It looks promising, until you hit the last paragraph (my highlight)
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our privacy notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
In my book, that's indirectly selling data.
Goodbye, #Firefox.
Update (2026-02-26): So this change happened exactly 1 year ago. I saw the date and missed the year. And since Mozilla is still doing the privacy whitewashing, there is no reason to trust Mozilla more today than a year ago. Leaving Firefox is unavoidable. The current Mozilla leadership does not deserver much trust from the community.
@dazo Once profit becomes the goal, principles go out the window. Even Google started off with "Don't be evil."
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#Mozilla has lost their ground and is now in a free fall into a sinkhole. I doubt they'll ever get out if this again unless they do a 180-turn within the coming days. Mozilla has lost a lot of trust and credibility over the last couple of years. This accelerates that distrust even more.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
It looks promising, until you hit the last paragraph (my highlight)
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our privacy notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
In my book, that's indirectly selling data.
Goodbye, #Firefox.
Update (2026-02-26): So this change happened exactly 1 year ago. I saw the date and missed the year. And since Mozilla is still doing the privacy whitewashing, there is no reason to trust Mozilla more today than a year ago. Leaving Firefox is unavoidable. The current Mozilla leadership does not deserver much trust from the community.
@dazo so a depressing game to play is watching network traffic when Firefox starts. It pings a dozen servers unnecessarily. Luckily forks are OK and firejail & open snitch are very useful
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#Mozilla has lost their ground and is now in a free fall into a sinkhole. I doubt they'll ever get out if this again unless they do a 180-turn within the coming days. Mozilla has lost a lot of trust and credibility over the last couple of years. This accelerates that distrust even more.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
It looks promising, until you hit the last paragraph (my highlight)
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our privacy notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
In my book, that's indirectly selling data.
Goodbye, #Firefox.
Update (2026-02-26): So this change happened exactly 1 year ago. I saw the date and missed the year. And since Mozilla is still doing the privacy whitewashing, there is no reason to trust Mozilla more today than a year ago. Leaving Firefox is unavoidable. The current Mozilla leadership does not deserver much trust from the community.
@dazo Don't walk, Run from FireFox!
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#Mozilla has lost their ground and is now in a free fall into a sinkhole. I doubt they'll ever get out if this again unless they do a 180-turn within the coming days. Mozilla has lost a lot of trust and credibility over the last couple of years. This accelerates that distrust even more.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
It looks promising, until you hit the last paragraph (my highlight)
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our privacy notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
In my book, that's indirectly selling data.
Goodbye, #Firefox.
Update (2026-02-26): So this change happened exactly 1 year ago. I saw the date and missed the year. And since Mozilla is still doing the privacy whitewashing, there is no reason to trust Mozilla more today than a year ago. Leaving Firefox is unavoidable. The current Mozilla leadership does not deserver much trust from the community.
@dazo Getting paid so much to put out that crap is so outrageous.
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#Mozilla has lost their ground and is now in a free fall into a sinkhole. I doubt they'll ever get out if this again unless they do a 180-turn within the coming days. Mozilla has lost a lot of trust and credibility over the last couple of years. This accelerates that distrust even more.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
It looks promising, until you hit the last paragraph (my highlight)
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our privacy notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
In my book, that's indirectly selling data.
Goodbye, #Firefox.
Update (2026-02-26): So this change happened exactly 1 year ago. I saw the date and missed the year. And since Mozilla is still doing the privacy whitewashing, there is no reason to trust Mozilla more today than a year ago. Leaving Firefox is unavoidable. The current Mozilla leadership does not deserver much trust from the community.
@dazo for the record, that was a year ago.
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@dazo Why look at a change from Feb 25, 2025 (exactly a year ago)? Have you looked at the current page? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
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@dazo not a good sign
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#Mozilla has lost their ground and is now in a free fall into a sinkhole. I doubt they'll ever get out if this again unless they do a 180-turn within the coming days. Mozilla has lost a lot of trust and credibility over the last couple of years. This accelerates that distrust even more.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
It looks promising, until you hit the last paragraph (my highlight)
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our privacy notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
In my book, that's indirectly selling data.
Goodbye, #Firefox.
Update (2026-02-26): So this change happened exactly 1 year ago. I saw the date and missed the year. And since Mozilla is still doing the privacy whitewashing, there is no reason to trust Mozilla more today than a year ago. Leaving Firefox is unavoidable. The current Mozilla leadership does not deserver much trust from the community.
@dazo It's been almost a year since i first saw this meme, and sadly this still holds true today.
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@dazo for the record, that was a year ago.
@swordgeek Hah! I'm clearly forgetting we're in 2026 ... But then it's even clearer that Mozilla deserves no trust at all.
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@dazo @graves501 @theorangetheme
Exactly! It's why Vivaldi fans give me a headache.
@EdCates @dazo @graves501 @theorangetheme not everyone has ensuring a balance in html-engines as one of their top priorities when choosing their browser.
Not sure why this is giving you headaches.
Especially in today's world where there only are 2 usable browser engines and both are connected and depending on companies that are not exactly trustworthy.
Firefox and chromium might be open source, but let's be honest, there isn't a community that could maintain them independent from Mozilla and Google.
Would I prefer if there was a Opera 12/Vivaldi like browser with a third engine? Sure! For all the issues it caused for me I loved presto and I hope one day someone builds something of that type around servo.
But also keep in mind: Mozilla killed Gecko as a standalone product, there is a reason why we only have lightly patched Firefox variants and not a single truly different web browser using Gecko nowadays. -
@dazo it’s like they don’t understand that people moved away from Chrome for a reason. By actively making themselves more like Google they are removing the incentive to move from Chrome to Firefox. And incentivizing moving away from Firefox to literally anything else. Their user base consists almost entirely of people who are willing to change browsers. Not understanding that will cost them. Probably not as much as it should.
@hotsoup @dazo look at the browser usage graphs.
Statistically nobody moved to Firefox from Chrome.
People moved from Netscape and Internet Explorer to Firefox. Against Chrome Firefox was mostly on a slow decline for the past decade.
Firefox never had convincing arguments that would have made a significant amount of people switch from chrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers -
#Mozilla has lost their ground and is now in a free fall into a sinkhole. I doubt they'll ever get out if this again unless they do a 180-turn within the coming days. Mozilla has lost a lot of trust and credibility over the last couple of years. This accelerates that distrust even more.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
It looks promising, until you hit the last paragraph (my highlight)
In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our privacy notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
In my book, that's indirectly selling data.
Goodbye, #Firefox.
Update (2026-02-26): So this change happened exactly 1 year ago. I saw the date and missed the year. And since Mozilla is still doing the privacy whitewashing, there is no reason to trust Mozilla more today than a year ago. Leaving Firefox is unavoidable. The current Mozilla leadership does not deserver much trust from the community.
@dazo Unfortunately, there is no alternative (only worse - Google). We are waiting and hoping for the #ladybirdbrowser
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@EdCates @dazo @graves501 @theorangetheme not everyone has ensuring a balance in html-engines as one of their top priorities when choosing their browser.
Not sure why this is giving you headaches.
Especially in today's world where there only are 2 usable browser engines and both are connected and depending on companies that are not exactly trustworthy.
Firefox and chromium might be open source, but let's be honest, there isn't a community that could maintain them independent from Mozilla and Google.
Would I prefer if there was a Opera 12/Vivaldi like browser with a third engine? Sure! For all the issues it caused for me I loved presto and I hope one day someone builds something of that type around servo.
But also keep in mind: Mozilla killed Gecko as a standalone product, there is a reason why we only have lightly patched Firefox variants and not a single truly different web browser using Gecko nowadays.@mxk @EdCates @graves501 @theorangetheme
What "gives me headaches" when a browser render engine gets a monopoly, we easily end up with the complete chaos we had with Internet Explorer roughly 20 years ago. Web sites had to account for IE3, IE4-5 and IE 6 version plus the "minority others". A web page would end up behaving completely different across all these aspects. The Opera browser was at that time one of the engines which was close to most compliant to the web standards.
Microsoft extended IE without caring about standards and since it was the dominating browser at that time, they didn't care much about the standards. They had their own standards. But they also didn't care about compliance between their own versions even.
Web developers at that time focused on getting the IE experience as best as they could and then came the minority browsers.
This can easily happen again if Chromium ends up without real competition. Then Google can do whatever they want with Chrome, drop caring about standards since it "owns" the browser scope. And by doing that, websites starts to adopt to make sure web sites renders best on Chrome, resulting in people being locked in with Chrome. And somewhere along this path, Google can ditch the open source Chromium - just as they try to squeeze out the third-party Android apps these days.
By not having a real competition in any market space, we users/consumers ends up as the losing part sooner than later.