The answer to “what is Firefox?” on Mozilla’s FAQ page about its browser used to read:
The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.
Now it just says:
The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.
In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.
A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, “is Firefox free?” Moz used to say:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.
Now it simply reads:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.
Again, a pledge to not sell people’s data has disappeared. Varma insisted this is the result of the fluid definition of “sell” in the context of data sharing and privacy.
In Firefox, type about:config in address bar, search for “sponsored” and “telemetry” and set all the paremeters you see from TRUE to FALSE. Done.
How can ome do this on mobile? Doesn’t run search on the terms or load a config page.
Or use Waterfox which does most of this by default
I like waterfox but the dev of waterfox made a deal with an advertising corp, eventually it fell apart but there was a solid few years where users left waterfox.
oh cheers for the heads up. Hadn’t heard that!
No worries. I jumped back on once I heard that the company backed out but I am cautious as the dev said some stuff “waterfox was never a privacy browser” and other shameful arguments to counter the unhappy community that his browser had fostered. Either way keep an ear to the ground.
You misspelled LibreWolf.
hahah both are good
We shouldn’t have to do workarounds like that in the first place. It’s getting to be like the Stockholm syndrome people have about Windows abuses. I didn’t put up that shit, and I’m not gonna put up with this either.
I’m running Linux and neither Waterfox or LibreWolf are present in repository of one of the most popular distros. Come on?!
If you are using a debian flavor, you can likely add extrepo that searches a central repo of repositories and can add them as needed.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install extrepo -y sudo extrepo enable librewolf sudo apt update && sudo apt install librewolf -yWhy always this Terminal bullshit? Why can’t I just find it and click Install like a normal user and not like a fucking caveman?
Thats what flatpaks, appimages, .deb files and snaps are for.
Which distro?
huh? what linux distribution are you even using? also librewolf is available in the flathub repository
put it innare
I’d be more worried about how long that flag is going to work. And how long is it going to take us to realize the flag isn’t working.
Seems like a much simpler solution is to just use LibreWolf where all these things are removed from the program already for you. That’s the point of the fork.
I would still suggest folks to at least go through Librewolf’s FAQ and Docs. For example, Librewolf disables DNS over HTTPS by default. See https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#doh-whats-the-stance-on-doh
If anyone reading this is not configuring their DNS on their routers or on their Linux machines using systemd-resolved or something similar, I suppose they should probably at least configure their browser to use DNS over HTTPS. It should be better than using the default DNS resolver provided by your ISP.
As far as I’m aware, Librewolf’s team isn’t making significant changes to Firefox’s code or “patching out” some spooky telemetry. Librewolf is essentially pre-configuring a bunch of “privacy” and “security” related settings in Firefox for their users. But alternatively any user can configure these things themeselves and make their own choices. Even pre-installing extensions and add-ons on fresh Firefox profiles can be easily done by any user using Firefox policies (which is what Librewolf uses to pre-install Ublock Origin.) But let’s say you also want another extension like Bitwarden to be pre-installed on every fresh Firefox profile. Or you don’t trust DuckDuckGo and instead want to configure Firefox to use a self-hosted SearXNG instance as your default search engine. Then maintaining your own Firefox policies can help you do all this.
I understand it is far simpler and far more desirable to have “privacy and security” out-of-box without having to configure anything at all. But it is probably not a bad idea to take the time to see what configurations you can make to Firefox yourself, even if you decide to use LibreWolf. You may end up wanting your own configurations in addition to what Librewolf’s team decides for you.
That comes with its own problems and slow releases trailing behind Firefoxes. One of things I absolutely hate about forks.
It doesn’t seem that slow. A few days normally.
Do you know any trustworthy browsers for android?
Ironfox, it’s a privacy focused Fork of the Android version of Firefox browser. So far I’ve had no incompatibility problems or issues with my add-ons pretty much the only difference from Firefox nightly that I was using is that the icon is different
Fennec is a pretty clean build of firefox mobile
Don’t forget to harden
You could take a look at Fennec or Iceraven (https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser)
But it erases history. I use history all the time. Very annoying.
You can change this setting, not a big deal.
Is the same checkbox in the settings that Firefox has, it’s just on by default. Have you considered just turning it off?
I haven’t used it in a long time! It didn’t occur to me maybe it’s changed in the meantime.
I’ll give it a shot.
Seems insane that even after disabling all related options in the main settings GUI, there are still like two dozen things enabled in about:config.
some are subcomponents of the main disabled feature. i checked this on my browser which was only modified by GUI, and nothing i saw ‘enabled’ was actually enabled, but instead a subfeature of what I had disabled.
How about, on your favorite operating system, go to “Firefox” and “Uninstall” because these folks aren’t going to get any better going forward.
Or, just switch to the iron fox fork.
“just”? That sounds like way more work than taking 10 seconds to change the setting.
(I don’t disagree with your suggestion, I’m just baffled at the use of “just”)
Maybe we use our web browsers differently? I only use a couple extensions, never bookmark much (but I didn’t delete Firefox, so I can always go back to look at them) and I don’t leave the m9zilla or google cloud in control of my names and passwords, so no auto fill.
It took me literally 1 minute to switch to using iron fox.
Yeah, so longer than changing a setting, even in your ideal scenario.
But yes, we clearly do. I would spend the first 10 minutes figuring out how to export/import my 80 open browser tabs from one browser to another. And the next 10 copy pasting the URLs one by one manually after deeming it impossible.
Or switch to librewolf (Ironfox on android).
I wouldn’t use Ironfox on Android since they have decided to promote a F-droid alternative that encourages proprietary software.
How about on mobile?
Mobile sells your data by default, you don’t need a browser to do it for you.
Yes, yes, there are the 0.0000002% of you who bought an expensive as hell Android phone and replaced its OS with a Free one. Good on you. Phone still triangulates your location from the cell signal and that data is collected on you, as well as whatever the firmware that you can’t change does.
Phones are bad news. Period.
You could take a look at Fennec or Iceraven (https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser)