@methuselah @Linux @BrodieOnLinux #Firefox Forks is a short term solution that works right now. We still have GNOME Web as an independent project (though depending on Apple's Webkit, but Apple is less powerful on the Web than Google) for medium term. And for longer term, hopefully in 2-3 years, I hope either #Verso or #Ladybird will mature. Ladybird has 7 people working full time and some funding.

So Firefox forks better right now, if Mozilla falls in a few months, switch to GNOME Web.

People who had willingly opted into sharing telemetry data by running Nightly or Beta builds of #Firefox to help Mozilla make a better product – those are the people who are blindsided by this change. We chose to opt in to share data with Mozilla, and the way that the data was used changed after we made our decision – and it wasn’t really clear that it was the case.

Instead, Mozilla had successfully enabled data collection in its largest user population (the release branch of #Firefox) and was now able to use that data for #advertising purposes. That wasn’t how it was reported, that isn’t how we saw it - but that seems to be what happened.

I looked on #reddit and the general tech press to see if the community had understood what is obvious today – enabling this setting by default allowed #Mozilla to further monetize the new tab page. I found afnan-khan’s sad submission of Mozilla’s privacy notice post. 13 net upvotes, 0 comments.

A massively consequential change with regards to data sharing in advertising, and the #Firefox community had nothing to say about it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/736o33/improving_the_firefox_privacy_notice/

It’s finally making sense. #Mozilla reduced granularity into the options for data collection in #Firefox, enabled additional data collection by default, and gave itself the ability to use this new data for advertising purposes. Users would have to opt out of this data collection for it not to be used for advertising purposes (a purpose that Mozilla in this iteration is not forthright about).

Take a look at the #Firefox Preferences UI that Mozilla is telling us to toggle if we don’t want our data being processed for ads. I don’t see anything here says that this setting is about sharing data with advertisers. I have to go to the Privacy Notice to understand that. That doesn’t feel very upfront to me.

Ever since this setting has existed, Mozilla contributors and employees have told people to enable it, in order to ensure that Mozilla developers have insight into how people use Firefox, to help make #Firefox better. While this post will prove my (naive) impression wrong, I had never seen anyone mention that this setting shared data with advertisers.

And yet, that is what Mozilla is telling us.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/28/mozilla-responds-to-backlash-over-new-terms-saying-its-not-using-peoples-data-for-ai/