Ask Lemmy

Small suggestion: if you’re over 21 stop blindly doing what others do. Start questioning things and do what you think is best.

Firefox used to have a "we're a browser that won't sell user data" promise. Then they changed their TOS and removed the promise, adding:

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."

When people reacted to their TOS they said it was an accident, it's just boilerplate, don't take it seriously.

Or in other words: an entity with a team of lawyers claimed ownership of all your data, and then downplayed it, and then has acted good since.

Personally I stick my head way into the alligators mouth and still use Firefox.

That was overblown drama. They didn't change anything in practice. They clarified things by writing it down. You disable some defaults and have no issue. Even if you don't, it's not nearly as bad as other popular platforms.

I never stopped using Firefox.

If you want I can look for a comment I made quoting the relevant terms a while back. Or you can look for it yourself.

Simple forks still depend on upstream. I'd rather support Mozilla than not, given no better sustainable alternative. They do some good stuff like Firefox, Thunderbird, and mdn.

The world in general switched from Firefox to Chrome several years ago because at that time (when just released) Chrome was new, shiny, and fast (much faster than Firefox). And at that time everyone loved Google (they still had their infamous "be no evil" motto). And Google also promoted their browser, and, given their web resources are immensely popular, that helped tremendously.

That switch had nothing to do with recent concerns about privacy in Mozilla products.

You guys stopped? :: looks around nervously::

wait people stopped using Firefox? I've been rocking it since like 2006/2007

I just use Librewolf

"We" didn't stop using Firefox. Open source boycotts are complicated because the software is separate from the developers. You can keep using the software even if you disagree with the development organisation.

Mozilla organisation is getting problematic for a whole lot of reasons. My issue with them is that they seem to be in the "more money than they know what to do with it" phase. They're flush with cash, but it's not reflecting to the product. If they buy an ad company and plan AI stuff, maybe things aren't going well.

Problem is, there's no viable competing organisation. Protest forks of software don't really work that well unless you can actually guarantee the development support. Compare this to what happened when OpenOfficeOrg successfully moved to LibreOffice - developers saw the old organisation didn't work, so they made a new one that did.

Don't you mean Netscape Navigator?

I still recommend floorp, I love the sidebar.

i think when they killed weave. such a dick move. one of many. may the CEO get most out of the bribe they get from google for selling out its users. i muria even the free and open things are shit.

We did?

Who is this "we" you talk of?

Who is this "we"? I still use it, never stopped.

The thing is, I never have. Chrome is absolute hot garbage and spyware, all the Chromium forks are all flawed and bugged and still feed into Google's dominance because of engine and stupid Manifest bullshit. Firefox, despite all the stupid things Mozilla did and still does just works the best and is not Chromium.

When? There have been a few times people stopped using Firefox in large numbers.

One of them was when Chrome first came out. Firefox (and every other browser) at the time ran every site in one process. As sites became more reliant on Javascript, which was usually poorly written, that meant any one tab having a problem made other sites and even the browser's own UI unresponsive, or sometimes crashed the whole browser. Chrome's multiprocess model was a revelation. Firefox didn't get its own implementation until 2016.

Recently, there's been some movement away from Firefox due to Mozilla making decisions people don't feel align with open source, the open web, and privacy. The one that has me looking at forks is the planned addition of terms of use to the browser. Terms of use are for an ongoing relationship between a service operator and a user; Firefox is local software I'm operating myself on a computer I own. Its fine for optional online services like Sync to have terms of use, but the browser should work without those.

I stopped using Firefox for four core reasons:

Their investment into AI How they submit and work with their Google overlords to some degree Their browser putting in more and more unnecessary and unasked features (like Firefox account for one) Their Terms of Service

I stopped using it and went to chrome bc my adblock stopped working and i waited for a fix but it didn't come. It worked fine on chrome.

I went back to firefox bc my adblock stopped working but it worked fine on firefox.

these two events are several years apart if that wasn't clear

I never fully did, but I did end up using Chromium more than I wanted to:

1. Some poorly written sites refuse to work with FF. My water company, for example. They eventually fixed it after I complained multiple times. Now they display a warning that it's "Optimized for Chrome" but no longer flat out prevent FF from logging in (you know, to pay bills and such).
2. FF Desktop still doesn't support PWAs, and their recent update says they're working on it, but they're half-assing it (installed web apps will still have the menu bars, address, bar etc). I self-host a lot of web applications and want them to appear like native apps. Hence, Chromium.
3. There was some recent ToS / Privacy Policy change, and everyone was knee-jerking "time to abandon Firefox" as if there's anywhere better to go. (This is probably what you're thinking of)
4. A good while back, Chrom(ium) was just flat-out faster. That's been a while, and I think when FF's "Quantum" update (or whatever it was called) came out in like 2016 or 2017, it put it back on par.

Still using it here

I believe you're thinking of a ToS change where the wording was incredibly vague, leading to some outlets to claim they were selling browsing data to 3rd parties and AI modelers. They changed it right after to specify that the data they were using wasn't browsing data, and the data they did gather wouldn't be used for AI. They are not as invasive as google, but you're subject to Google on Firefox because of the ubiquity of their telemetry and search optimizations across websites. Firefox with an add-on such as noscript is much better than Chrome still, in my opinion. At the very least, it's nice to have a browser that doesn't work to undermine its own add-on functionalities.

Misinformation

I never stopped using it. There are privacy issues with all browsers. I like how Firefox works, but I regularly end up using Firefox, chrome, and edge all at the same time. I use them for some compartmentalization of my tasks and work lol

Firefox is better than most but still smugly makes anti-user changes which are complete dog shit.

Remember when they turned off your ability to choose to load extensions that weren’t signed, because fuck you?

Fuck Pepperidge farm, I remember that shit.

Or how about DNS over https, because fuck you, user, why should you have any say over name resolution when you might use that power to block ads and malware?

The recent main one seemed to be no longer promising to not sell user data, but it's been a culmination of little things.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-firefox-i-loved-is-gone-how-to-protect-your-privacy-on-it-now/

Personally I've been kind of miffed since they decided to use the experiments feature to be paid to shill for the Mr. Robot tv show, including in their enterprise release, making people think they got hacked. But that was years ago and forgotten.

Firefox is essential for its various forks even if you have gripes with it

Changing to opt-out telemetry from opt-in is the one I remember people fussing over

Because Librewolf exists and Mozilla became an adware vendor.

I use IronFox because firefox decided to support bad practices. Kinda like google removing "don't be evil".