Mozilla is making it clear that they do not care about users any more.

Firefox is full of ads, with ads being in the homepage shortcuts, the news feed and the omnibox dropdown, as well as various ads for Mozilla services throughout the UI. Their ad network is also marketed to companies as allowing them to reach adblocker users.

Mozilla’s 210M+ global users are typically hard to reach. They're usually hidden behind ad blockers, nearly half avoid dominant social media, and most say no to default platforms. They’re selective, tech savvy, and paying attention. From: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/

Firefox is also full of tracking, with their mobile app sending data to the tracking company Adjust, and it having options for "personalised extension recommendations" and "Install and run studies". The latter allows them to install what they want into your browser without your consent out of the box.

Their tracking protection also mostly works only in private / incognito mode by default, with tracking scripts being allowed to run in standard windows with just isolated cookies protecting you, which is not a decision that a company who actually cares about privacy would make.

Mozilla is also partnering with Perplexity, an AI search engine who wants to collect as much data as possible even outside of their app to sell "hyper personalized" ads, which is exactly who you shouldn't work with if you claim to care about privacy. From: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/

I recommend switching to Librewolf as it takes Firefox and removes this bullshit. Some other alternatives like Brave are just as bad.

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[–] 69 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Boycott Firefox and do what?

Ladybird is 5 years away from replacing your browser. Any other Firefox fork is maintained by five or eight people who take Firefox and apply their parches. Everything else is Chrome.

Boycott Firefox, make it economically inviable, bankrupt Mozilla. Now what? Librewolf can patch a working browser to enable some flags by default and strip some features, can they maintain a JavaScript engine? Can they fund a bug bounty program? Can they support all platforms?

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    [–] 40 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Ok but you still need the Firefox project to succeed for librefox to exist. So how does that work?

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    I think what OP is getting at is that people "in the know" (i.e. in privacy circles) boycott Firefox and use LibreWolf (and others), and the masses still use Firefox. Except the masses mostly use Chrome. But I think I see where they're coming from.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 months ago

    Exactly. I have heard a teacher at my college say he's switched to Firefox to get away from Chrome, however he is clearly not in the know as he has Adblock Plus installed in Chrome on his work machine instead of uBlock Origin.

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  • [–] 33 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Unless you actively support Mozilla, they could not care less about your boycott.

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  • [–] 18 points 9 months ago

    Getting real tired of the “boycott Mozilla! They take money from Google!” And “boycott Mozilla! They try to make money from their users!” Merry-go-round.

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  • [–] 15 points 9 months ago (10 children)

    Using Librewolf isn't boycotting Firefox. Librewolf is a soft fork and is dependent on Mozilla for updates. You could switch to Ladybird or something more obscure, but I don't think you'll achieve much with that either.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    You could switch to Ladybird

    Servo already has releases and includes mobile as well.

    https://github.com/servo/servo/releases

    If anyone deserves support, it's Servo.

    They have a track record for being performance focused (from when it was part of Mozilla) and aren't right wing assholes.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago* (2 children)

    Unfortunately, there aren't many options in the 2025 internet browser market.

    Unless something has changed, the gecko engine Firefox uses is the only distinctly different engine from Chrome, and I don't think writing a browser engine from scratch is easy. So if the solution is to hard pivot away from Firefox entirely, I don't know how you don't end up using some Chrome based browser.

    At least Mozilla hasn't tried to kill adblockers like Google clearly is trying to.

    Forking the codebase and stripping out any AI code is much easier than trying to invent another wheel.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Forking the codebase and stripping out any AI code is much easier than trying to invent another wheel.

    I never said otherwise. I simply said that using Librewolf is not boycotting Firefox.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Using Librewolf deprives Firefox of sponsor money, so it's to some extent a boycott. The idea though that we need to switch to a new browser engine because we lost faith in Mozilla is a bit silly, the Gecko engine is open source so it can be stuck with even if Mozilla goes away. Just look at Pale Moon (not great security-wise, but it does exist).

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    the Gecko engine is open source so it can be stuck with even if Mozilla goes away

    Good luck finding people both capable and willing to maintain it if Mozilla abandons it.

    The idea though that we need to switch to a new browser engine because we lost faith in Mozilla is a bit silly

    I am saying the opposite. I explicitly said I don't think that would achieve anything. Just because something constitutes a boycott (i.e. using a different browser engine) doesn't mean that there's a point to it.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    We need to fork Firefox and fund enough developers to make it viable as a standalone project that’s not just a laggy, disenshittified version of Firefox. It has been done with LibreOffice and CoMaps, so theoretically it is possible.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    A browser is a while different beast. Firefox has half as many lines of code as the Linux kernel, just for comparison. Security must be topnotch since the that model is to treat the website as if it is already malicious. Even with all of Firefox's developers, it lags behind Chromium in sandboxing/isolation and exploit mitigations.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Ultimately any realistic Firefox fork needs to at least halve the size of the codebase so that it's maintainable. Or move the unmaintainable code into a "use at your own risk, only on trusted sites" box.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago

    Everyone yelled at me for Brave being dogshit. Go to Firefox they said.

    It seems we are stuck just accepting the least bad actors in this realm which just sucks.

    Just let browse the goddamn internet without being spied on how much is that to ask? (Actually its asking a ton bc of the multi billion dollar industries predicated on predatory data harvesting but ya know)

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    you're right. screw Firefox. let's all go to chrome. wait, no, edge, wait no, that one browser half the sites don't work on.

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  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)
  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago
    [–] 2 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    I'm using Mullvad, its been great for me. I know it's a fork, I don't care

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    I'd use Mullvad if it allowed my to install certain extensions and sync my bookmarks.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, but that's unlikely to ever happen as that seems to be pretty incompatible with what the mullvad browser is trying to achieve

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    I understand Mullvad as a middle-ground between the anonymity of Tor and the convenience of Firefox. I'm not entirely convinced either way as to whether it is compatible.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Mullvad tries to achieve anonimity by making your browser setup as un-unique as possible, making it hard for anything trying to track you to dinstinguish you from any other Mullvad browser user. Extensions can break that protection because now you CAN be distinguished from users not using those extensions.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago
    [+] 1 point 9 months ago
    [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Ladybird needs more testing. More people need to download it and provide feedback. Binaries aren't available, but you can easily build it.

    At least my personal websites are working as expected on Ladybird.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    Chrome is shit, so is anything that forks from it. Untill servo or ladybird are ready for the show. We're stuck with Firefox. I tried libre wolf but half of my workflow/activities had issues (images didn't download or sites working bad), I switched to Zen and I'm happy with it. It may not be as secure/private but it's not chrome and it doesn't have all the Firefox shenanigans.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    You can turn off resistFingerprinting in the settings then disable the URL tracking protection and URL shortener filter lists in uBlock Origin to fix it. I think Librewolf's default settings are too cautious as Mullvad Browser serves the maximum privacy niche.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago*

    I'm not trying to convince you to switch to anything, but, all that sounds like I'm installing librewolf to then transform it into zen browser. I'm pragmatic, it works for me, I don't get the "features" I don't want and I only need to install ublock, suscribe to webannoyance ultra list and install sponsorblock. Profit. But you do librewolf if that's what suits you.

    Edit: typos

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Because they trust us, they’ll trust you.

    Holy fuck, the advertising industry is literally nothing but sleazeballs.

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  • [+] 0 points 9 months ago