I would have loved if they had released an anniversary icon for FF.

You might have seen it already, but is this close enough?

More like a vasectomy.

Some Bitwarden and Firefox Nightly users recently pressed Ctrl+Shift+L and discovered that instead of logging them into their various websites, Firefox enabled Firefox’s AI chatbot.

You posted a privately sent email that contradicts a publicly accessible privacy policy. In the four weeks it took them to send that to you, nothing has been changed, same as the prior year. And they couldn’t even bother to spell their own product name right.

Do you acknowledge that the privacy policy makes it extremely clear that they do sell private data, as outlined in the table that they made for people who struggle to read and mentally parse full paragraphs of text?

It’s interesting how damning that email was, so let’s look at some interesting points.

We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

They don’t say the TOS is out of date. They don’t say the TOS has things they haven’t done or won’t do. And they don’t say they will remove their promise to sell private data to advertisers.

At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws.

At this time? Pursuant to the law? If Mozilla is abiding by law and nothing more, that explains why they are legally forced to admit they sell private data to advertisers.

And the law is the lowest bar imaginable. Google operates under the law. Does Mozilla think they protect your privacy as well as Google?

… service providers who make Faksepot run…

And with all that legalese, they can’t even spell their own brand name right.

What an email to read. I find it particularly valuable for the things it does not say, but not at all encouraging.

We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

They don’t say the TOS is incorrect or too broad. And they don’t say they will remove their promise to sell private data to advertisers.

At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws.

At this time? Pursuant to the law? If Mozilla is abiding by law and nothing more, that explains why they are legally forced to admit they sell private data to advertisers.

And the law is the lowest bar imaginable. Google operates under the law. Is Mozilla not better than them?

… service providers who make Faksepot run…

…and they can’t spell their own name right.

I got a similar ban from that community after the moderator started spouting conspiracy theories at me and I didn’t agree with them. I noticed they removed most of my comments in that thread, but not all of them… Not sure if it was accidental, but the ones with non-negative karma were the ones that got removed.

This is also how I discovered a moderator that bans you from their community effectively prevents you from deleting any of your posts in it, which makes me feel… Uncertain about the ML mods having such control over the stuff its users post.

I thought some worked by flashing infrared LEDs to overwhelm the cameras’ sensors. AFAIK there are multiple varieties of camera repellant.

Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:

• It’s made by an ad company
• The same ad company runs multiple popular ad blockers (including AdBlock Plus)
• There are no standards on privacy invasion

uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.

The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla’s own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.

I’m still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.

It’s probably the nature of the change, too.

1. It’s easy to add a switch to disable the button.
2. It doesn’t cut into their bottom line.
3. It’s damn good PR.

Other stuff that people have been complaining about, like the massive backlash against baking in 3rd-party AI, won’t make the cut.

Relatively benign things like tab grouping are challenging, so despite being much more popular, the easier-to-implement AI features were given a fast pass to Release versions of Firefox.

Are there raw numbers on how many people use web browsers in general? Firefox releases a report, and it’s definitely been dipping, but that dip might be accounted for by a switch to other browsers (based on its percent of market share).

I’d be curious if you had any good sources for this, because my searches are mostly yielding crappy listicle blogs.

I’ve seen their reasoning, but I don’t agree with it. The biggest counterexample to their concerns are other browsers: Firefox is no trouble maintaining its IP, and Brave is fully open source yet has not been formed once AFAIK.

I’m very aware of its built-in bloat, but the ad blocking still seems to perform more like an MV2 ad blocker than an MV3 one (more is blocked even when using the same lists), and it allows you to natively select individual elements to block yourself.

In my personal experience, and with great regret, I must say that Brave does a better job with its built-in ad blocking than Vivaldi has. Even after I did my damnedest to tweak the ad blocker settings (adding more lists from more sources, removing the “allow some ads” list, etc).

Based on every browser statistic page I can find, about 2/3 of mobile traffic is through Google Chrome. There’s no ad blocker on that.

And mobile traffic is significant nowadays - it comprises around half of all traffic anywhere, despite requiring the viewer to be hunched over a phone or tablet.

No argument from me there. I didn’t mean to come across this argumentative, I just wanted to point it out here because of the context of this post (someone looking to move away from Firefox). And because, to me, ad telemetry still is a black box.

Mozilla is adopting a ton of the things that were wrong with Brave. Recently, Brave criticized Mozilla’s PPA data collection for being too centralized, which implies to me that otherwise, there’s a lot of overlap between the two allegedly “private” systems. I don’t trust Brave telemetry, but it seems not even they can come up with many ways to differentiate themselves from Mozilla.

If they’re different somehow, I would love to know how.

In a way other than accrued trust or distrust, that is. At this point, I don’t think Mozilla is owed any inherent trust.

Santander Bank user [solved by reducing ETP to Standard] (almost lost this user we’ve had since 2003!):

Give this employee a raise

How worried should people be if they are on the latest version of Fennec, which was last updated for 129.0.2 a couple months ago? (For anyone who isn’t keeping track: that’s not ESR (128 is), and it’s two major versions behind Firefox Release).

I wasn’t going to make a generic comment about how cryptocurrency is only worth money to people if they can convince other people to also purchase the cryptocurrency…

… But then I looked at your post history, and it’s like a week of pivoting conversations to be about Monero.

• New GPU released? Perfect for mining Monero.
• FBI made fake cryptocurrency? Monero isn’t fake.
• People shouldn’t store your information, so use Monero
• Taylor Swift donates for hurricane victims? Monero is worth more than her!

Edit: oh god it was worse than I thought

• All cryptocurrency is good… JK just Monero
• Good YouTube video? They should accept Monero.
• Good nudes? (NSFW) Take my Monero
  (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
  (probably more, but mods removed many)
• Their phone wallpaper? Anime girl Monero

It’s worse: I would say every group is malicious. Ad companies try to look like they are policing themselves, in the hopes that they don’t suffer external regulation. But back when AdBlock Plus started this nonsense, people made uBlock Origin in response. People wouldn’t just take the ad industry at its word.

Now… For some reason, people have changed their minds.

There’s actually a whole group called the Acceptable Ads Committee who decides on making advertisements distinct and unintrusive… But they don’t have any policies regarding privacy invasion.

They also partner with popular ad blocking software developers, such as AdBlock Plus.

They also have eight members, via their other name “eyeo”, on the W3C PATCG committee (alongside Mozilla, Facebook, Google, more ad companies).