This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The screw-ups keep mounting like they want to be Google.
They (and we)'ve got to admit, the solution is not going to come from within their (managerial) ranks.
At this point I'd be happy to offer my services as a BDFL for Mozilla, at but a small fraction of the wages of any of their C-suites.
They're cash strapped and cash strapped companies are the worst when it comes to being trustworthy. That's all the calculus that needs to be done.
They're not that cash strapped though. Their blog post says that they need the revenue to 'grow', and they go on to talk about the new people they've added to the board. So it isn't really about getting enough money to survive. It's about getting money to support a top-heavy company structure.
How about asking for money? I'd gladly pay if they stripped out a bunch of the nonsense they do and focus on making a better browser. Or keep that crap and let me donate directly to Firefox development.
I'd gladly pay if they stripped out a bunch of the nonsense
I donate to FOSS often, but I dont have a ton of money. Most will donate nothing, and that is fine part of this is altruistic, but I think its easy to forget that donations only go so far. A web browser is also a very big project and will need a lot more funds too.
It does not help that Mozilla is in a odd situation on what they can do to raise funds and not move away from their core mission.
Google really needs to be broken up. They've become the Ma Bell of the internet.
https://thehackernews.com/2025/03/mozilla-updates-firefox-terms-again.html?m=1
Apparently they changed it due to backlash.
Hm. Reading further in the article and since its not the first no-no.. I have doubts.
Glad they clarified. To me the "selling data being defined broadly" argument made sense in the context of Google paying them to be included as a search provider. Because there is an argument that Google paying Firefox, and then the user entering a search and that being sent to Google's servers could be legally seen as Mozilla selling data to Google.
They should clarify that then. Explain any and all situations that could be considered "selling user data" and explain what data that consists of. Then explain how to avoid it.
That shouldn't be hard.
Across every country they operate in, and if anyone in those countries disagrees they might sue?
Not saying Im supporting FF here but it's not as easy as you might think if their stated reason is honest
They wouldn't have to do every country. A single example would be helpful, for context and clarity.
If so much of what they do could be considered "selling user data," then are they really committed to protecting your data?
This sounds like FUD to me. If they were fine with the old language for years, why change it now? Were there lawsuits or actual risks of lawsuits? Or are they inching closer to what countries consider "selling user data"?
It feels like they're hiding something. It's not hard to have changes specific to a region (e.g. my VPS host, Hetzner, has additional EULA terms for the US), so they could have a separate TOS for regions they haven't vetted.
I don't like this but it's gonna take more for me to switch. I am very happy with Firefox for my use-case and workflow it works really well. However I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by starting to take away some of the most crucial advantages with Firefox compared to Chrome. I mean if both are awful for privacy then why use Firefox?
Mind you, this is just step one and other steps WILL follow. Mozilla looked at other enshittified products from large companies that make a lot of money and thought "we could have that too!"
It's a pattern I keep seeing, over and over. This is the end of Firefox as we knew it. I'm sure a good fork, run by a non profit foundation will sprout soon enough, but the name for a privacy browser won't be Firefox no more
Maybe. I'll certainly check out alternatives, but I'm not panicking just yet. It's not hard to switch browsers, so I'll just test out options while seeing how things shake out.
I haven't been presented with any Ts and C's. Do they apply if I already installed Firefox before this?
I wonder how much this affects things if you’ve already gone through Firefox’s settings to max out privacy and turn off all telemetry.
I resisted switching to Librewolf because Firefox works great (including M365 in Linux at work) and seemed to have the options you’d want for privacy and security.
This doesn’t feel like an emergency, especially in a chrome/edge dominated world. But it’s back on the list of things to investigate transitioning away from.
Yep. It stinks. We'll see if it was just a fart and it'll go away or if they crapped and we'll have to jump ship.
Maybe we should all throw some kind of support behind https://ladybird.org/ with an eye to the future.
That project isn’t problematic for some reason I haven’t heard about, is it?
(Problematic other than web browsers being gigantic pieces of software, and ladybrid itself not even being in alpha yet)
Anyone still using Firefox after this probably hasn't been keeping up with Mozilla's many controversies. If this is your first time here, I can see why you'd decide to overlook it. I did for a long time, but this is the final straw for me. Luckily, instead of building anything useful over the past decades, Mozilla leadership has been instead focused on enriching themselves. That means deleting my Mozilla account right now was easy.
I've now moved to LibreWolf, because I don't want to support Chromium's dominance, but if that project dies out I'll jump ship. It'll be a real shame if the world gets stuck with Chromium as the only viable browser, but it won't be my fault. It will be Mozilla leadership's fault.
Jump ship to what? It seems like going to Tor browser full time might be the answer?
I'm just not sure what the steps are from Librewolf to More private.
It makes me sad because I'm a donator and supporter to Mozilla - and have been for years. I truly believe the web should be open, free, and not for profit and there are great people at Mozilla which is why I hate seeing the leadership do things like this. I wish there was an active group that shared the same ideals, were ethical, and not full of transphobes and cryptobros that could take up the mantle and fund another fork like Librewolf.
Preferably would love that any group be a collective not a corporation.
Mozilla posted an update:
Update at 10:20 pm ET: Mozilla has since announced a change to the license language to address user complaints. It now says, "You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content."
I moved to LibreWolf a couple of months ago. I'll move further away if I need to.
We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate,
Fuck off Mozilla. Maybe don't pay CEOs millions and don't force things like Pocket and LLMs on users if you want to be commercially viable, I'd gladly pay for Firefox that doesn't make me dodge new features and services. But it would be a donation towards development of a browser that is commons, since you have no product to sell, only GPL'd code that's mine as much as yours.
You have NO fucking leverage, Firefox is better than Chrome, but there's projects that will gladly repackage your code with no telemetry whatsoever for any platform while you're brainstorming just the right amount of monetization to prevent the frog from jumping.
It's kind of sad I don't use Chrome and therefore never think of it, while I like and use Firefox and am therefore constantly at odds with Mozilla.
current acting CEO of Mozilla is Laura Chambers. An Australian native and has quite...interesting work history.
It's weird isn't it? how these same names keep coming up again and again...
Ebay, Paypal, Airbnb.
she would have likely worked with Thiel and Musk during her time there. I wonder if there's any lingering commitment there?
I don't get how something is allowed to be labeled "free" when the terms of usage make you barter your data.
