Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
That promise is removed from the current version. There’s also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.”
The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define “sale” in a very broad way:
Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Mozilla didn’t say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.
I see it said agian and agian. because its true. Firefox is one of, if not the best of the mainstream browsers. (Not included its many forks) but Mozilla is a horrible caretaker of it. Mozilla does not focus on firefox and they dont care/believe in it nearly as much as its users or devs who fork it.
The motivations of a company are extremely important, and has Mozilla does not care for a lightweight, good, privacy centric browser, the enshitification will and has corrupt firefox.
It’s only a matter of time until it is as bad as chromium or flat out joins it.
I don’t believe Mozilla doesn’t have the best interests of the browser at heart, I believe that they do think their browser is the their number one product.
But that’s the problem. It’s free software, going up against a juggernaut whose browser is just another side project to drive engagement with their core product.
A juggernaut who just so happens to be one of Mozilla’s primary source of income. All it will take is a little bit of legislation somewhere in the world to make that deal less attractive and Mozilla could be dead in the water. And it will take all of those forks with it, paving the way for Google to become the true web Hegemony.
Mozilla needs to diversify to ensure they can continue to provide stewardship to the browser.
But trying to make money in 2025 just seems to summon the enshittification brigade.
Free software is not free. Someone has to make it.
Have they considered just asking for money? Also getting rid of the giant holes that they keep pouring their money into?
A lot of people love Firefox, and would happily donate. They could also trim a lot of fat at Mozilla quite easily.
Considering how critical a browser is these days.
I’m surprised there isn’t a very popular Open-Source one that everyone is using.
It’s because it’s hard to maintain a browser. There’s lots of protocols and engines and other moving pieces; I remember when web pages would render in Netscape but not Internet Explorer, for example.
We take for granted how seamless and ubiquitous the internet is, but there were lots of headaches as internet devs decided to adopt or include different users (or not).
And now, it would take a lot of effort and market upset to convince the capitalist overlords to include something new in their dev stack. The barrier to entry is monumentally high, so most people don’t bother to try inventing something better.
Some people are trying: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
Wasn’t there some stuff about the ladybird devs not too long ago?
I just hope that project doesn’t end up being the Voat or Parler of browsers.
It’s a browser, not a platform. Having a bunch of groypers use it doesn’t ruin the experience for everyone else so long as it retains good privacy features.
While I agree with this sentiment on the surface, using a privacy focused application that was built by folks who yield to cops as part of their identity doesn’t inspire long term viability in that space.
It’s the same reason I moved away from Proton when their CEO told us all where his values lie. It’s not outright backtracking on privacy promises but with so many comparable alternatives in this space, why chance it with the bootlickers?
It looks as if it’s hard to maintain a browser by design by making overly complicated HTML/CSS/Javascript/etc standards.
It makes me want to spend more time using the Gemini protocol.
Yeah, the standards of the internet are just piled on top of each other. Rendering code and whatnot is the easy part. Keeping up with the standards is the hard part (or so I have read).
Chromium is bad only in your head. It’s a fucking rendering engine with different incarnations. How can this be bad? And no, FF is not “the best”, otherwise it wouldn’t have the shitty market share it actually has.
Ah silly us.
We spent a decade hating on IE, it’s slowness, poor support for any standards, plugins that fuck your shit up, etc.
But it was obviously the best because it had that huge market share.
It’s even worse. You spent several years worshipping a misguided Corp. making a mediocre browser fir laughable reasons and you have been f*cked in the end.
“Worshipping”? What online spaces have you been frequenting??
Found the t3.gg enjoyer
I don’t know what is that.
Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable)
So in other words we sell your data and get paid for it, and some countries won’t let us lie about it.
Yeah, I think it would be very fucking easy to say “we don’t sell your data” by any definition… Literally all you need to do is not fucking sell people’s data
Mozilla needs to understand that I don’t want it to have my data to sell or not in the first place.
That’s the thing that bothers me about all these companies now. My data is my data, not theirs. They shouldn’t even be allowed to collect it, let alone sell it or give it to anyone who wants it.
Nahhh, trust them, bro. People working on other things with the same product name as their company name were great people. That should be endorsement enough.
Wait. They have this ‘open source’ flag. If they wave it about - oooh, pretty - does that help?
They’re cash strapped and cash strapped companies are the worst when it comes to being trustworthy. That’s all the calculus that needs to be done.
How about asking for money? I’d gladly pay if they stripped out a bunch of the nonsense they do and focus on making a better browser. Or keep that crap and let me donate directly to Firefox development.
There’s also Servo by the Linux Foundation and Ladybird.
These are actual different browsers and engines all together compared to FF spin-offs.
I’m still super waiting for Lady Bird. I cannot wait to give it a try, but it’s gonna be like 2026 before they start rolling out builds for general use.
We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate,
Fuck off Mozilla. Maybe don’t pay CEOs millions and don’t force things like Pocket and LLMs on users if you want to be commercially viable, I’d gladly pay for Firefox that doesn’t make me dodge new features and services. But it would be a donation towards development of a browser that is commons, since you have no product to sell, only GPL’d code that’s mine as much as yours.
You have NO fucking leverage, Firefox is better than Chrome, but there’s projects that will gladly repackage your code with no telemetry whatsoever for any platform while you’re brainstorming just the right amount of monetization to prevent the frog from jumping.
It’s kind of sad I don’t use Chrome and therefore never think of it, while I like and use Firefox and am therefore constantly at odds with Mozilla.
The screw-ups keep mounting like they want to be Google.
They (and we)'ve got to admit, the solution is not going to come from within their (managerial) ranks.
At this point I’d be happy to offer my services as a BDFL for Mozilla, at but a small fraction of the wages of any of their C-suites.
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As an Australian.Do not trust us when it comes to privacy, security especially in tech or the digital space.
We are not a nation descendant of ‘convicts’ but of prison guards and other colonial boot lickers.
We are US lite or US 10years ago or maybe their tearing ground. Can’t figure it out.
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This is why I am an advocate for publicly-funded Internet, like how people fund NPR and BBC.
I don’t blame Firefox because at the end of the day, they are still a business and need to cover the operating cost. I blame the system that we’re in and the elites will tell you there is no other alternative.
Gahhhh this is horrible
I spent some time switching to Librewolf this morning but at the end of the day, it having Firefox as the upstream means it’s all fragile and tenuous anyway
Switched to librewolf the other day, and it’s great
Been using it all day now and yeah, it’s very smooth sailing. The tweaks I made basically involved removing fingerprinting protection, which I saw people online deride as “defeating the entire purpose of Librewolf”. Well, not true anymore.
I just want manifest v2 and to not have to consent to ToS agreements implicitly allowing some suspicious organisation to harvest and sell literally any keypress I enter into the browser, which has become the de facto cross platform way to do almost everything.
How do the fingerprinting protection things defeat the purpose of librewolf? Seems like an unambiguously good thing for privacy… Or does it conflict with another feature?
Oh, sorry for the confusion. The posts online I’ve found about the subject of disabling fingerprinting protection in Librewolf are full of people who state that doing so “defeats the purpose of Librewolf”. Which probably WAS true before Mozilla’s recent changes, since the sole reason Librewolf had to exist was to be a hardened version of Firefox.
That’s no longer the case since Librewolf has a new purpose (now that Mozilla thinks they own the right to sell all your data): a Firefox fork without Mozilla.
I disabled a lot of that stuff because it’s kind of annoying for usability, e.g. browser won’t render anything at more than 60fps. I know this is a trade off and I’m cool with that. I have other tools and strategies in place to protect my privacy.
I don’t like this but it’s gonna take more for me to switch. I am very happy with Firefox for my use-case and workflow it works really well. However I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by starting to take away some of the most crucial advantages with Firefox compared to Chrome. I mean if both are awful for privacy then why use Firefox?
If you’re going to a Chromium browser, at least go to Vivaldi since it’s a) based on Chromium not Chrome and b) not based in the US.
The only bad thing it has going for it is that it uses the Chrome web store for extensions.
Am I the only one here who’s pretty much okay with this? I do wish they’d clarify exactly what they mean by “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about ‘selling data’),” but having my anonymized data sold so that Mozilla can continue to operate (combined with Firefox being the best browser I’ve used in terms of both performance and flexibility - ability to install add-ons from sources outside of the Mozilla store, for example) - seems like a worthy tradeoff to me.
They also have an option to opt-out of data collection, which I do wish was opt-in instead, but with the way every other mainstream browser operates I’m just happy the option is there at all. Let me know if there’s something I’m missing here though.
To generalise, just as Reddit is the neolib centrist hivemind and Facebook is the conservative boomer hivemind, Lemmy is some overlap of privacy/techy/ultrapolitical groups - so whenever you get this kind of news that is ultimately pretty mild and uncontroversial to most you get lots of Lemmings buttons pushed and what seems like an oversized reaction in the comments.
Is Firefox perfect? No. Is it still the best available mainstream browser option? Yes. And if the small groups that presently use it walk away and its tiny market share (~5%) declines to a point where Firefox becomes insolvent - well then browsers will be just a two-horse race between Google (Chromium) and Apple (WebKit). Every web spec and page will be beholden to the desires of those companies - I’m sure the same Lemmings will be complaining about that too, and by then it will be too late to realize what they’ve lost.
It was a neolib site, but it’s starting to lean right wing, and soon will.be with the ranks of Facebook soon enough. The reason, they have been aggressively banning accounts as of late, and alot of its based around trump posts. They allow heavy astroturfing from the right, either from troll farms or conservative comments, you report them you will get banned. Many people criticized the site for pushing so many trump sanewashing posts in the front page, the conservative sub have been consistently in the front page for a while, before you almost never hear a peep from them, unless it’s being talked about in other subs
Son of a bitch I just got back into Firefox.
Get in loser, we’re going to librewolf apparently. Fuck me I’ve reached the age of seeing all the things I like die. I don’t even remember a time I didn’t use Firefox. God damn it
