Today, when I navigated to amazon.com on Firefox for Android, I received a jarring message that I could “try” a new service, Fakespot, on the app.
What’s Fakespot? A review-checking, scammer-spotting service Fakespot for Firefox."
Among other things, FakeSpot/Mozilla was forced to admit:
“We sell and share your personal information”
Fakespot’s privacy policy allows them to collect and sell:
- Your email address
- Your IP address
- Account IDs
- A list of things you purchased and considered purchasing
- Your precise location (which will be sent to advertising partners)
- Data about you publicly available on the web
- Your curated profile (which will also be sent to advertising providers)
Right before Mozilla acquired them, Fakespot updated their privacy policy to allow transfer of private data to any company that acquired them. (Previous Privacy Policy here. Search “merge” in both.)
Who asked for this? Who demanded integration into Firefox, since it was already a (relatively unpopular) browser extension people could have used instead?
Librewolf
LibreWolf is a perfect recommendation for people in a privacy community like this one. I use it, and I love it. But…
- It’s a tougher sell for the average computer boomer, with both letterboxing and potential site-breaking features
- LibreWolf is built atop Firefox, so this change will increase their workload
- I just wish Mozilla lived up to their promises and built a good, successful browser
Maybe I want the impossible, but ideally we could have two good browsers that respect user privacy instead of just one.
I prefer the new Midori, I think the best Gecko browser ever.
FYI, the new midori looks like a shameless clone of floorp. The only differences I can find are the default bookmarks and that floorp updates faster.
Maybem anywy I use it only for tests. I like to have browsers with different engines to test in a webpage issue if it is because Blink or is general for others too. Because of this I have also the Otter browser (the fastest browser of all I had tested, it has a own adblocker and good privacy, but there are no extensions for it)
I didn’t know about otter, I was just starting to look for more since I miss the days of uzbl and all its inspirations. As far as I can tell, qute is the only one that survived
Otter is a nice and blazing fast browser (by far way more than any other), but even it blocks some ads, there sadly isn’t any extensions store for it. Well, you can ad funcionalities with scripts.
Midori Browser’s motto is total privacy, because we don’t spy on you, we don’t sell invasive advertising, we don’t generate profiles of you, because we provide you with tools like a VPN.
No thanks.
The privacy is the same as in FF, but it has some more features. The problem of all Gecko forks is Mozilla, since it is sponsored mainly by Google, even sending data to Alphabet.Inc. That means that FF and forks are only private, if you use other sync provider than Mozilla.
So jarring that you couldn’t just… Press no?
I don’t want to bury my head in the sand over this new change in Mozilla Firefox.
Mozilla says:
The things we create prioritize people and their privacy over profits.
Shouldn’t we, in the privacy community, hold them responsible for that?
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Librewolf is good for now. However I think its time we get a new web browser with a separate web engine
Easier said than done, it’d take a large engineering team and a decade just to catch up with existing implementations. And in doing so you’ll probably stumble through all the same issues Mozilla has and end up as a large morally compromised nonprofit on the other end.
Or a glorified clone of Lynx.
Which, frankly, I would prefer. Gemini is nice, although it’s not even the web.
Maybe Gnome Web? (Just kidding, probably not)
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The real problem nowadays is, even though there are around 100 browsers to choose from, there are not much alternatives when you want to avoid big brother browsers, there are only Firefox or some forks (with some excepcions, mostly crappy and outdated), some indies, like Vivaldi and UR from small EU companies, Otter, SSuite Netsurf if you have Windows, and not much more, some text only browsers apart.
Urr durr Brave bad Firefox perfect and always good.
/s
Brave also constantly bloats up their browser with privacy-invasive crap and ads for paid products (both theirs and third parties’), right out of the box. That’s why Brave sucks.
Also isn’t fully FOSS as it claims, see TOS
…Portions, features and/or functionality of Brave’s products may be protected under Brave patent applications or patents…
Never said they didn’t, but Firefox does as well and the duality of criteria is astonishing.
I think you’re tilting at windmills here. The reception of my post seems to illustrate people are okay with criticism of Firefox too
