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Firefox Android Beta vs Nightly - new "Suggestions from the Web" and "Sponsored Suggestions"? (i.imgur.com)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by LWD@lemm.ee to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

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I recently downloaded Firefox Nightly and noticed some new settings that were enabled by default:

Suggestions from Firefox Nightly
Get suggestions from the web related to your search

Suggestions from sponsors
Support Firefox Nightly with occasional sponsored suggestions

Learn more about Firefox Suggest

The link in the UI doesn't mention sponsorships anywhere. But this page does:

Who are Mozilla’s partners for sponsored suggestions?

We partner with organizations to serve up some of these suggestion types... For sponsored results, we primarily work with adMarketplace, while also providing non-sponsored results from Wikipedia.

This page links to the adMarketplace Privacy Policy which makes it pretty clear this company is okay with collecting your IP address and passing it to further unnamed entities.

Elsewhere, they say Firefox sends them "the number of times Firefox suggests or displays specific content and your clicks on that content, as well as basic data about your interactions with Firefox Suggest", and then will share interaction information "in an aggregate manner with our partners".

Update: Switched the link from the Desktop to the Mobile version. Added more quotes from FF, and bolded info about their one named AdTech partner.

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[–] Dirk@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You can’t Betterfox your mobile Firefox, can you?

You basically can’t do anything with mobile Firefox at all.

Here’s an instruction, but never tried: https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/issues/240

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's interesting. I've been a Firefox Beta holdout, thinking about adopting Fennec as my daily driver, but I understand the value of sticking to the browser that receives the most timely security updates.

The biggest downside is, it looks like the modifications aren't intended for the mobile app, but they apparently partially work. But in a good way:

using the base user.js on Firefox Android only improves speed and battery life, which is great because telemetry can be very battery hungry.

[–] Dirk@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

I’ve been a Firefox Beta holdout, thinking about adopting Fennec as my daily driver

After a decade of not using Firefox I just started using it again a few weeks ago. While desktop is absolutely fine, using the Android version is just a bad experience. Coming from Vivaldi Mobile it feels like a massive downgrade from a polished modern mobile browser down to an early alpha hobbyist project.

If it weren't for seamless tabs and bookmarks synchronization (everything else seems not to be synchronized at all) I would keep Vivaldi on Android because its just so much better.