back to article Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Mozilla this week asked Firefox users to abide by new Terms of Use, and updated its Privacy Notice as well as an FAQ – only to quickly issue a clarification that it isn’t actually claiming ownership of user data. Mind you, the language of the Terms of Use document initially suggested as much: When you upload or input …

  1. dmesg

    Extremely disappointing, Firefox. But then, what did you expect, hiring people from greed-head, privacy-invading corporations? Back-pedaling, but only part of the way, really doesn't look good on you.

    I'll be looking for alternatives for myself, friends, family, and the odd client or two (thanks for the pointers, El Reg).

    It was good while it lasted.

    1. Terry 6 Silver badge

      what did you expect, hiring people from greed-head, privacy-invading corporations?

      One assumes that this is a feature and not a bug.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Thankfully, there is choice.

        Brave Browser.

        Brave is considered a decent browser due to its strong privacy features and fast performance. It blocks ads and trackers by default, enhancing user privacy and security while browsing the web.

        This ad-blocking feature not only makes the web a safer place but also speeds up page loading times and saves battery life on mobile devices.

        Brave is built on the Chromium browser engine, which means it has a similar look and functionality to other Chromium-based browsers like Chrome and Edge. However, Brave adds dozens of privacy protections and custom features that Chrome lacks.

        For example, Brave offers built-in protection against fingerprinting, cookie consent notices, and bad cookies.

        https://brave.com/

        1. ABugNamedJune

          Re: Thankfully, there is choice.

          Brave? You mean Google Chrome in a trench coat?

        2. imanidiot Silver badge

          Re: Thankfully, there is choice.

          Brave is built on Chromium, and Chromium will switch to Manifest V3 (specifically designed to make ad-blocking and other privacy protecting add-ins/plugins as difficult as possible) very soon and anything Chromium based will always still follow the edicts of Google/Alphabet. Chrome and Chromium based browsers can get bent as far as I'm concerned. I'm forced to use Chrome at work and it's an inferior browser imho.

    2. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

      Well, seeing as they couldn't pay their hosting bill due to lack of income, I'm not surprised they had to switch course. Idealism doesn't pay the bills.

      1. heyrick Silver badge

        Don't they get paid hundreds of millions a year to have Google be the default search provider?

        1. nobody who matters Silver badge

          Yes, they have been, but Google losing an antitrust lawsuit in the US last summer has put the continuation of that arrangement in doubt. It accounted for the bulk of the annual income for Mozilla. Without that, it is doubtful if Mozilla could survive without developing some other source of financial support.

          However, the main selling point of their primary product is the privacy aspect and the fact that they had always promised they would never track or harvest any of the users personal data or web habits, and would never pass any of this type of information on or sell it to third parties. This is the principal reason why the majority of us still using FireFox continue using it.

          When FFs market share is down to a couple of percent and still falling, removing that promise and moving to a model which will monetise users personal web habits and data (and therefore take away the main reason why the 2% still use it) seems a particularly dumb move.

          1. Meph

            >When FFs market share is down to a couple of percent and still falling

            Desperate people often do ill-advised things to stay afloat, so it would be consistent with human nature, if nothing else.

            1. nobody who matters Silver badge

              It is certainly consistent with the outright treachery that is emanating from other entities in the USA at present :(

    3. DS999 Silver badge

      Perfect timing too

      Just when Google is finally dropping the old extension framework so adblockers will no longer work very well and people using Chrome and other Chrome based browsers will be looking for alternatives.

      If you were Google you couldn't have planned it better to have this sort of negative publicity come out now so that if anyone says something about "seeing a lot more ads" in their browser over the next few months and you recommend Firefox they'll say "no way I heard that they're selling your data".

      What an own goal.

      1. news.bot.5543
        Black Helicopters

        Re: Perfect timing too

        Who's to say it wasn't planned? #tinfoilhatmoment

    4. eric79xxl

      I can't find a browser that works on Windows and Linux that is not either gecko or chromium based. Pretty depressing. If anyone says 'webkit', forget about it. That's just gross.

      1. kmorwath

        That's how FOSS promote competion. Everybody just jump on the same wagon to minimize investments. Just like today you have basically only two operating systems to choose from - and only because Microsft can still keep Windows afloat. Nobody today is going to invest the large sums requried to develop a new operating system or a new browser engine - and after all even Chormium wasn't developed from scratch.

        1. imanidiot Silver badge

          "The Orange Man" is doing his very best to push the rest of the world into dropping anything US based though... Maybe we'll see an EU-centric OS or at least a Linux fork at some point.

      2. FraK
        Trollface

        ....there is one

        Lynx runs on both Windows and Linux. It's minimalist and text-only. Perhaps if more people used it, websites wouldn't be full of distracting shite, but that doesn't make share prices go up, does it?

        https://etc.usf.edu/techease/4all/web-accessibility/the-lynx-text-web-browser/

      3. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        > I can't find a browser that works on Windows and Linux that is not either gecko or chromium based.

        Dillo.

        Netsurf.

        Midori.

        > If anyone says 'webkit', forget about it.

        What's wrong with it?

        1. cant
          Boffin

          Webkit is the source of the Pegasus backdoors. It hijacks a vintage xerox scanner compression function that is natively included in webkit and basically opens the door for RCE. It's well documented and a good read.

      4. cant
        Boffin

        the most secure windows browser

        appears to be mullvad browser, I have been using it and if you compare it against other types of insecure browsing, there are some good sites that explain the difference, it very well may be the most secure windows browser.

  2. JustAnotherDistro

    The language they use is terrible

    Mozilla's language here is deliberately obfuscatory; the denials are condescending rationalizations. Ultimately, one is left to suspect that far worse things are afoot than is even likely the case. That said, the light has been going out for a long time now at Mozilla, and the opt-out "privacy preserving" surveillance was the second to last straw for me. This was the last straw.

    Inconvenient as it is (in that it does not use a password manager), I have gone on to Mullvad, and am mulling Librewolf, if I can get over installing it with --no-quarantine. I know, I know, that shouldn't bother me--I'd happily draw it from a Linux repo without a second thought--but I'm just balking at it for my Mac.

    1. Rich 2 Silver badge

      Re: The language they use is terrible

      I’ve used FF for as long as I can remember but, like you, I think this is the end of the road. A great shame.

      The only problem now is finding an alternative that has support for The plugins I use (yea - I know! A tall order)

      1. karlkarl Silver badge

        Re: The language they use is terrible

        Or an alternative full stop.

        Every browser capable of the mainstream web are criminal.

      2. Victor Ludorum

        Re: The language they use is terrible

        I've been using Firefox ever since I can remember. Occasionally have to use Chrome for the odd website that won't render properly. Both have uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger plugins.

        I have recently started using ungoogled-chromium, which appears to still support Manifest v2 and uBlock (after a little configuration).

        V.

    2. OhForF' Silver badge
      Mushroom

      "selling data" as most people think about it

      Quoting the updated https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq

      <quote>Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. 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, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).</quote>

      So they do admit they want to share our data with their "partners" for commercial reasons but somehow that is not what most people think about "selling data"?

      Icon for the CEO's at Mozilla --->

      1. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: "selling data" as most people think about it

        "So they do admit they want to share our data with their "partners" for commercial reasons but somehow that is not what most people think about "selling data"?"

        The new definitions used in contracts:

        Share = Sell

        Partner = Customer

        Better service our users = Milk them for all they're worth

        User = The product for sale to "partners"

      2. Spazturtle Silver badge

        Re: "selling data" as most people think about it

        "So they do admit they want to share our data with their "partners" for commercial reasons but somehow that is not what most people think about "selling data"?"

        Google pay them to be default search, so Google is a partner. When you type a search into the top bar they send that to Google and take you to the results page, so they are sharing data with a partner.

        1. OhForF' Silver badge

          Re: "selling data" as most people think about it

          >Google pay them to be default search, so Google is a partner<

          I am aware of that and while it is not ideal i do not consider that to be a big problem. I even concurr that most people would expect Google to be the default search engine.

          >When you type a search into the top bar they send that to Google and take you to the results page, so they are sharing data with a partner.<

          I am although aware of that and consider it a much bigger problem. Never should have been the default behaviour; GDPR mandates that Mozilla asks for informed consent before sending the keystrokes to Google but a lot of users do probably not even realize this is happening.

          I still fail to understand how sharing our data with partners for commercial reasons is different from selling data as most people would understand it.

          My current take is that Mozilla's C Suite is well aware that what they want to do will be considered selling user data and users will object but decided to go ahead regardless.

          I wonder if they have a plan how to deal with GDPR yet?

    3. JLV Silver badge

      Re: The language they use is terrible

      Oh, while the language might be vague, diffing the before and after content of those clauses, as done here, is clarity itself.

  3. CorwinX Bronze badge

    I couldn't give a monkeys

    I use uBlock in Firefox.

    Plus I have an IP filter list on top of that.

    If I saw an advert on any site, anywhere, I'd be utterly gobsmacked. That's both images and inline videos.

    Sorry guys that does include El Reg. I don't know how to exclude you from the filters.

    I genuinely can't remember how many years it's been since I've been subjected to an online advert - no joke.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

      When it's not the website returning content to the web-trackers

      but rather your web browser itself returning content to ????

      Do you have an IP monitor, and regularly examine each IP address? How do you tell the difference between IPs that don't resolve to anything and are used on an online shopping site (serving javascript from a CDN?) and IPs that don't resolve to anything and are used by the web browser to report to an anonymized telemetry service?

      What if the browser uses the same telemetry service as common websites, which won't load without the telemetry service? (Newrelic, Datadog, sentry.io, etc etc have web-app logging and monitoring - and they could also be used to report aggregate browser telemetry. In the end they just ingest messages and store them.)

      1. HereIAmJH Silver badge

        Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

        When it's not the website returning content to the web-trackers

        but rather your web browser itself returning content to ????

        It's long past time for us to get better tools for home networks. We need to be able to log outbound connections so we can identify what data is being exfiltrated without our knowledge. Hardware phoning home. Printer drivers sending info to manufacturers. And all the software that is sending out 'performance' information under the guise of making products better.

        First we need logging of all outbound connections. Then we need to be able to enable logging of the packets being sent to specific URLs or domains. And finally we need to be able to blacklist those URLs and domains.

        1. Graham Cobb

          Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

          I run all my own routers and networks, including a few different VPNs for different purposes. I do log all outbound connections but I admit that looking at those logs gets very tedious.

          At the moment, my compromise is that I run 3 separate main WANs.: one is for visitors - it can't access anything locally but also doesn't block much stuff from the outside world; the second is for gear (like printers) - it can't access the outside world but can communicate with other devices on its own network and on the third network; the third is for our own devices - they can access the second and third networks and the outside world, with some filtering set up. All the rules are enforced in my routers (running OpenWRT with my own configuration).

          It's not perfect - and I have had to open a few tunnels I would prefer not to - but it generally works well and it blocks a LOT of access. No devices (printers for example) send any data to their manufacturers, for a start. I also watch the logs to see what sites things like PCs are accessing and block many of them.

          1. HereIAmJH Silver badge

            Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

            At the moment, my compromise is that I run 3 separate main WANs.: one is for visitors - ...

            I do something similar. 3 vlans. One all my normal machines. One DMZ/Guest. And one for my hardwired cameras that I turn on/off Internet access depending on whether I'm travelling. I have been lax on setting up a new syslog server for outbound connections. But still wouldn't have any idea of the payload when I see something questionable.

        2. cosmodrome

          Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

          Squid has been doing that (and lots of other useful things) since forever. If you don't mind setting up and using Loonix and a proxy on a Raspberry Pie or similar hardware you can log, block, filter, trap and report any HTTP(S) request and response for, to and against anything you can think of.

        3. jake Silver badge

          Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

          "We need to be able to log outbound connections so we can identify what data is being exfiltrated without our knowledge."

          One of the very first things I sold Linux for, 30-odd years ago. People were worried about "the bad guys" snooping on their SOHO network from the Internet. Setting up a 386 as a stateful firewall with two Ethernet cards, one each for the Internet facing equipment and for their own 'net, allowed 'em to see EXACTLY what the traffic looked like. Some systems used dial-up instead of a second ethernet card.

          Filtering is a cinch on such a setup.

          I haven't been without one ever since, although now I use a variation on BSD instead of Linux (Linux was ready for prime-time before BSD-on-386). Linux will still work just fine.

    2. Sandtitz Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

      "I use uBlock in Firefox."

      Excellent.

      "Plus I have an IP filter list on top of that."

      Which filter is that? IP filter sounds somewhat pointless on a browser where DNS based addresses are used ~100%.

      "Sorry guys that does include El Reg. I don't know how to exclude you from the filters."

      And you have wandered on a tech forum - do you happen to have pointy hair?

      Click the uBlock icon and press the big power button. That's it. The mouseover tooltip literally says the uBlock will stop functioning only on the site you're currently on, not elsewhere.

    3. JoeCool Silver badge

      Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

      I am suspicous that this post is intentionally obtuse, but I'll spell it out ...

      Blocking DELIVERY of content (on the platform that is Firefox)

      is not related at all to

      Preventing the COLLECTION, Aggregation and Monitoring of personal data (intrinsically by the platform that is Firefox).

    4. CorwinX Bronze badge

      Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

      I'm genuinely a little bewildered here as to why I got a torrent of downvotes on this post.

      I thought I was clear that I'll let El Reg advertise at me when I can but - given I generally have multiple sites open at the same time, on a server, laptop, and a phone, the filtering on my devices and router can be a bit tricky.

      Is that really so controversial?

  4. NapTime ForTruth

    Are we the baddies?

    The problem here is everyone:

    Users inevitably want everything to be free, both in the gratis (no payment) sense and in the libre (no rules, restrictions, or limits) sense, and from the beginning the Internet tried - and later pretended - to offer exactly that.

    Makers inevitably want those things, too, but also want to be able to live indoors and have access to comforts like clean water, survivable food, safe shelter, and reliable medical support - which, oddly are also things that users want.

    Corporations, in the generic business structure sense, want to be both continuously successful, which falls under the survival sense, and to be free in the libre sense. This is unsurprising because corporations, like Soylent Green, are people.

    It all goes horribly wrong when one or more of the above groups start thinking that they should have more power and authority than the other group(s), and, perhaps inexplicably, the other groups tacitly or explicitly agree. This is where corporations shine - for some values of "shine": they already exist and operate at (relative) scale and are equally already hierarchically structured while users and makers tend to be more like loosely affiliated autonomous collectives.

    All the corporations need do is make something interesting, offer it at little or no cost (e.g. "no worries, the first taste is free"), and, once the clientele are hooked, start raising prices and adding rules about what the users - and the corporations - are allowed to do.

    The astonishing part is that it works every time. Nearly every user rebellion is quelled, if they start at all, and quickly; torches and pitchforks cast aside and users begrudgingly give up literally anything to get back on the pipe's sweet, sweet oblivivion.

    So, are we the baddies? Too often, yes, whether by direct action or passive acceptance.

    [weeping_angel_icon_goes_here]

    (or just a bowl of tears)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Are we the baddies?

      The "Corporations".

      They make their money from sales. Movies, physical items, subscriptions, memberships -- sales. Everything else is advertising, even if it's useful to you.

      Remember the days before corporations invaded the internet? and tried to make it like cable TV? (with advertisements everywhere?) People made things, and would pay for their internet connection, and host sites from their personal, home computers.

      Other, larger things - would be advertisements. Encyclopedia Brittanica put their encyclopedia online, or excerpts of it, for free.

      Other entities had non-profit funding and volunteer donations - wikipedia.

      Remember when the internet wasn't entirely about exploiting *people* for financial gain? It seems like now it's becoming hard to find an *internet* connection -- as opposed to a corporate-hose advertising feed. Signal, Telegram, the "dark web" try to get content to users without the corporate BS, and luckily they have tunnels to/from the public corporate-web. With more and more ISP's creating "fast-lanes" that will, with time, put everything that's not "fast" into "Internet Accessible*, in the evenings and on weekends, up-to 25MB/mo. Terms and conditions may apply." I really think there will be a comeback of BBS's, but probably not hosted over phone lines (which are voip now -- so effectively limited to 33.6baud), but maybe Ham radio links or Chinese/European satellite internet links.

      1. NATTtrash
        Coffee/keyboard

        Re: Are we the baddies?

        For me you hit the nail on the head there. In the end it is pretty simple I think. If you tell world+dog, as they did in the original version:

        Does Firefox sell your personal data?

        Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise.

        Notice that in a lot of the quotes that are now all over the webz, in many that last sentence is omitted. Here, I noticed, Liam and Thomas do too. But maybe that is what it is all about. IMHO, it is pretty irrelevant what you promise. It is more that you did. You gave your word. And if you then show your word isn't worth... anything, what does that make you? Then again, probably too old fashioned for the current world...

        Curious what will happen to spin offs now that use its base, like e.g.Tbird and Zotero...

        1. DrkShadow

          Re: Are we the baddies?

          The part that gets me about what they promised:

          > Nope. Never have, never will.

          Oh. Really. I wonder if there's a license or contractual violation here. It was in the EULA, and for a class action lawsuit, any damages would be at least equal to any income they make from such sales.

          Anyway, I'll never actually consider any such "promise" true unless they put into the EULA that they will pay the user $x if their data is ever shared from this version of the software, or any future version of the software, without regard to the license. At least then, for people of the older versions of the software, they have monetary recourse -- and the corporation has tangible incentive to not do this. Lacking that, we have the current Corporation.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Are we the baddies?

          That's a lot of words to describe Enshittification in action. Plain and simple, unlike most terms and conditions.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Are we the baddies?

        33.6 kbps, not 33.6 baud. Baud is signaling rate, not data rate, and you were off by 3 magnitudes. Phone lines manage about 1200 or 2400 baud on the audio band, with multiples achieved by encoding multiple bits per signal.

        Yes, mixing baud and bits per second is a pet peeve.

        1. HereIAmJH Silver badge
          Joke

          Re: Are we the baddies?

          33.6 kbps, not 33.6 baud.

          You're showing your age, Gray Beard.

          That's my USR Courier in my pocket, thank you very much.

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: Are we the baddies?

            Not age. Knowledge.

    2. navarac Silver badge

      Re: Are we the baddies?

      I don't mind paying for stuff, as in you give me a price, and I may or not buy it with money. I certainly don't want to subscribe to software, and I bloody well don't want to be given something free, only to have my privacy and data purloined, and to be flooded with fucking adverts at the same time to the extent it covers the page.

      NO. I do NOT consider myself a baddie.

      1. MatthewSt Silver badge

        Re: Are we the baddies?

        What about upgrades? If you buy a copy of Firefox then will you pay for an upgrade next month when the next release comes out? Or maybe a purchase price gets you a year of upgrades.

        Either way, not accepting the subscription model means not accepting the benefits of continuous improvements

        1. OhForF' Silver badge

          Benefit of continuous improvments?

          >not accepting the subscription model means not accepting the benefits of continuous improvements<

          It is quite possible to sell a software version for a fixed price and tell your users they'll get security fixes for free (product liability) but if they want the "improved new version" they have to pay again. Software providers used to do that for decades and it worked fine and gave consumers the power to only pay for an "improvement" that they actually wanted.

          Subscription models allowed software providers to avoid feedback from the customers voting on their new features and improvement with their wallests - end result summed up as "enshittification".

          1. Chet Mannly

            Re: Benefit of continuous improvments?

            The problem with that for browsers is that they have always been free, and there are no new features to add for a browser.

            It's the same problem Adobe faced when they inflicted subscriptions on the world - Photoshop had gotten to the point where it did everything people wanted it to do and didn't want to pay for new versions (heck I'm still on CS6 and frankly there's still no new features I'd pay for...) so from a corporate perspective their revenue dried up. S***y deal for users though...

        2. Alumoi Silver badge

          Re: Are we the baddies?

          What continuous imprevements: the chromification of the UI, the increased telemetry, pocket, automatic translation, disabling of about:config on mobile and all that crap?

        3. MrRtd

          Re: Are we the baddies?

          "Either way, not accepting the subscription model means not accepting the benefits of continuous improvements"

          Sometimes those "improvements" are not improvements at all. Software companies love shoving new UI and other changes that nobody ask for and don't really improve work flows or anything.

          1. ecofeco Silver badge

            Re: Are we the baddies?

            Sometimes?!

        4. MachDiamond Silver badge

          Re: Are we the baddies?

          " If you buy a copy of Firefox then will you pay for an upgrade next month when the next release comes out?"

          Maybe, what's been upgraded? If it's just a tweak so it works better with some off-standard coding that Disney wants to employ on their subscription portal, no.

          The notion of "continuous improvements" would have to be substantiated. Most stuff gets changed for the sake of making changes.

          Way back when, my eBay selling backend let me glance down the page and see what's been paid, what's been shipped, if I or they have given feedback. With all of the changes, it's a slog and lots of clicking to see those things. The pages also take up far more room on the screen which nice columns and rows don't need. They've also made it a process to check a seller's feedback. There's so many poor sellers from other countries that just use drop shipping firms that I'm sending more things back for being not as advertised and they all use Pony Express to save money on shipping so they can include it in the price. That's not acceptable when it's a part for my car that I need sharpishly.

        5. Someone Else Silver badge

          Re: Are we the baddies?

          [...] not accepting the subscription model means not accepting the benefits of continuous improvements

          Oh, STFU about "continuous improvements". You sound like an addled Micors~1 marketdroid trying to justify your existence as you continually enshittify your (ostensible) product, when in reality, world + dog know that your "improved" product is measurably inferior to the previous incarnation you "improved".

          Those folks who are comfortably (and doggedly) still running Windows 2000 clearly know something you don't.

      2. heyrick Silver badge
        Unhappy

        Re: Are we the baddies?

        I often do mind paying for stuff (not that there's much choice), because like Prime and Netflix and Windows and apps with the inserted advertising, all too often the product does a bait and switch. This is because companies no longer want a business model where they make a good product and sell it. They want to deliver mediocrity with promises to keep the user hooked and continually paying, keeping the customer coming back to get shafted over and over again, that's where the money is these days.

    3. Bebu sa Ware
      Windows

      Re: Are we the baddies?

      You are of course entirely right.

      The old adage about "free lunches" is probably older than lunches but relevant all the same.

      "To be able to live indoors and have access to comforts like clean water, survivable food, safe shelter, and reliable medical support."

      Not living in the US would appear to be a good place to start in these confused times.

      1. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: Are we the baddies?

        "Not living in the US would appear to be a good place to start in these confused times."

        Sure, just as it would be better to stay the hell out of the UK since being in Croydon, Lewisham, and Newham is not wise. With the politicians retaking direct control of NHS, better start purchasing individual insurance and finding a GP that accepts cash to be seen when you need them and not months later.

    4. steviebuk Silver badge

      Re: Are we the baddies?

      You can still have free but also get paid and have privacy. Look at FUTOs model. They are making open source apps, such as grayjay yet, if you can, request you pay. If you can't, you still get to use full features for free.

      They are clearly good as I'm as tight as anything yet I've paid for FUTOs software. Both grayjay and the keyboard for Android.

      1. Maximus Decimus Meridius

        Re: Are we the baddies?

        Interestingly (or not) I had to remove the FUTO keyboard as one of my banking apps (sorry - forget which one) refused to work with it installed.

        It wasn't very good at error correction, so I wasn't too unhappy to remove it.

    5. Wang Cores

      The only way we're the baddies is for letting this continue.

      The corporate propaganda of "muh entitled users" is bullshit. What this is is a bunch of business types looking to squeeze more rents out of the customers. And yes "customers," because the Big 3 US automakers are busy trying to jam advertising/data theft into purchased vehicles to get a few more dollars out of suckers.

      Stellantis just started pushing in-cabin ads for an extended warranty program for Jeeps: https://www.carscoops.com/2025/02/jeep-owners-complain-about-pop-up-ads-on-their-screens/

      GM pinky-swore to stop selling owner info onto insurance company after getting tickled with a feather duster: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-takes-action-against-general-motors-sharing-drivers-precise-location-driving-behavior-data

      Ford has a patent on a wiretap (sorry, a dynamic advertising system) that will broadcast only when your attention on the car: https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/ford-in-car-ad-patent.html

    6. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Are we the baddies?

      Nobody forced the corporations to build website. If they can't figure out how to make it pay, it's not our damn problem.

      If half of the websites on earth disappeared tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost.

      Screw 'em.

  5. Falmari Silver badge
    WTF?

    Necessary boilerplate

    "But Mozilla subsequently removed those terms, and insisted it was just necessary boilerplate."

    But it wasn't necessary boilerplate, because they bloody removed it.

  6. Jamesit

    "Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it."

    If you sell my data, I'm paying to use it.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh data just wanna have fun

    If you truly love your data, set it free……

    - Pollyanna

  8. navarac Silver badge

    Bankrolled by Google

    Firefox is bankrolled by Google. I deleted all instances of Firefox long ago, and use Brave.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Bankrolled by Google

      This makes as much sense those as people who said they left Firefox and went to Chrome because of the UI changes.

      Brave has crypto coins, blockchain, and an advertising network. It's difficult to think of a worse browser which you could choose.

    2. Terry 6 Silver badge

      Re: Bankrolled by Google

      Chrome ? As in Google's Chrome? Data slurping, biggest advertsing agency on the planet Google?

    3. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Bankrolled by Google

      > use Brave.

      https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

  9. Dinanziame Silver badge

    Losing the Google money

    As I recall, this is their principal source of revenue.

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: Losing the Google money

      "As I recall, this is their principal source of revenue."

      Google's principal source of income is selling PII in various forms. The least offensive is targeting ads for their partners using collected data and for a larger invoice, may sell the data they have to those partners to use as they see fit. The ad revenue is useful as well, but it's not number one as many believe.

  10. nematoad Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Grrr.

    I am forced, much against my will, to use Firefox. My e-mail client will not accept Palemoon. The client claims that Palemoon is out of date and "recommends" that I switch to Chrome.

    No thank you very much.

    I will now have to scratch around to see if I can find another non-Google based browser. I will not use anything contaminated with Google so if anyone has any suggestions that would be great.

    Note to self: Must investigate adding a pi-hole to my network.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Grrr.

      Unless you're running into Javascript errors (report on the forum), try setting a user-agent override:

      about:config -> general.useragent.override.<domain-name> = "Mozilla/5.0..."

      You can get decent user agents by running a search for "The Latest and Most Common User Agents List". Give it a try, see if it works.

      1. nematoad Silver badge

        Re: Grrr.

        "Give it a try, see if it works."

        I did, and it works!

        Thanks.

    2. kmorwath

      " My e-mail client will not accept Palemoon"

      Email works outside a browser, as long as it is IMAP/POP/SMTP compliant. If it is something like the "new Outlook", well, better to stay far, far away.

  11. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

    Signature behavior

    This seems to be a signature behavior of many commercial companies these days: try to see with how much you can get away with and if the user base revolts pull back a little bit whilst silently chuckling knowing you already got more than you wanted.

    I've been using Firefox for more than 20 years, but I'm now on the lookout for another browser. Luckily LadyBird is racking up to becoming a very competitive browser in the next year or so.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Signature behavior

      All falls under "enshittification".

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Signature behavior

        I would like to make a nomination for Most Over-Used Word of the Year

        1. Terry 6 Silver badge

          Re: Signature behavior

          To be fair it's an overused strategy.

        2. heyrick Silver badge

          Re: Signature behavior

          Is it overused, or are you seeing it a lot because it is happening a lot?

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Signature behavior

            In my opinion, it is overused, but it is possibly correctly used here. This does seem to meet the definition: changes intended on getting more money from the users, in this case by selling their data, by making the thing they use worse. Where it is overused in my opinion is when people use it for any change they don't like even when the change is subjective or just unrelated to funding, for example when some designer changes the interface again. That doesn't qualify because that wasn't done to get money out of you or something else; the designer just disagrees with the users about whether that change was a good thing.

            1. veti Silver badge

              Re: Signature behavior

              Enshittification isn't about getting money out of you, it's just about... getting money via some kind of business model of which you are a possibly unwitting component.

              Phase 1: build a large user base by making a great product and serving your users. Phase 2: switch focus from serving users to serving third parties (such as advertisers) who want access to said users. Phase 3: milk both parties until the whole model falls apart.

          2. Terry 6 Silver badge

            Re: Signature behavior

            The strategy is over used. As in - there's a lot of it about.

            You can always expect a certain amount of that sort of thing- in various forms it's always existed. The difference is that now it's the rule rather than he exception.

        3. ecofeco Silver badge

          Re: Signature behavior

          Overused? Irritated with it? Grinds you gears?

          That's the whole damn point. We're all sick of the enshitification of everything.

        4. Mimsey Borogove

          Re: Signature behavior

          I'd agree, except that the number of places it's applicable keep increasing, so we have to keep using it. Unless someone comes up with another word that perfectly describes what's happening, we're stuck with it.

  12. Rich 2 Silver badge

    Bollox

    See title.

    I really hate this business sometimes

  13. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Fucks sake Mozilla

    Just be a non-profit and write a reference implementation of what a browser should be instead of destroying the browser to fund a C-suite which shouldn't be there anyway.

    By all means make ways of contributing (built-in tip jar payments to developers which takes a small % for mozilla, online services, start page donation request, etc...), but stuff like blockchain, advertising, selling data, etc... can get in the bin.

    1. Terry 6 Silver badge

      Re: Fucks sake Mozilla

      This is not,specifically, money making to fund the C-Suite. The C-Suite were obviously appointed purposefully to make the money.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Fucks sake Mozilla

      "Just be a non-profit and write a reference implementation of what a browser should be instead of destroying the browser to fund a C-suite which shouldn't be there anyway."

      I won't worry about the semantics of whether Mozilla are or are not a "non-profit", because it doesn't really matter: the important thing is that keeping a browser up to date and secure costs a lot of money, and hosting mounts up too. Somebody has to pay those bills, so who do you think that should be, and how do you think they should pay?

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Fucks sake Mozilla

        Perhaps it should be an organisation structured more like LibreOffice's instead of a top-heavy management structure which is paid handsomely for flogging the same old horses (crypto a while ago, advertising...)?

    3. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

      Re: Fucks sake Mozilla

      They spend literally hundreds of millions not on improving their browser but on all sorts of frivolities like a mobile operating system and VPN service. All because of their fixation of not wanting to be dependent on Google whilst at the same time WANTING to be Google. They've even gone so far as to jump on the A.I. hype bandwagon like most clueless IT companies nowadays.

      If they'd just focused on making the best free and open-source web browser they could've cornered the market by now. But their clueless CEO's were only interested in lining their pockets, like most CEO's, and little else.

  14. O'Reg Inalsin

    Waterfox - Setting / Privacy & Security / Certificates / Query OCSP - stuck "off"

    Thanks for the tip about Waterfox. Very easy to install it on on debian12 using flatpack - within only minutes of reading this very sad news. There's a problem though - the setting

    - Privacy & Security / Certificates / Query OCSP responder servers to confirm the current validity of certificates

    doesn't stick. Set it to "on", close settings and reopen, and it is "off" again.

    I wonder if this is deliberate. Let's Encrypt has a message "Ending OCSP Support in 2025". A line in the notice says - "OCSP and CRLs are both mechanisms by which CAs can communicate certificate revocation information, but CRLs have significant advantages over OCSP."

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Waterfox - Setting / Privacy & Security / Certificates / Query OCSP - stuck "off"

      LetsEncrypt is stopping the expiration warning emails. This is part of the email I received from them

      As a Let’s Encrypt Subscriber, you benefit from access to free, automated TLS certificates. One way we have supported Subscribers is by sending expiration notification emails when it’s time to renew a certificate.

      We’re writing to inform you that we intend to discontinue sending expiration notification emails. You can learn more in this blog post. You will receive this reminder email again in the coming months:

      https://letsencrypt.org/2025/01/22/Ending-Expiration-Emails

      It goes on to suggest signing up for a free notification service.

      The thing is, if you have your system setup properly, the expiry date for your key is there for you to see in the response to a renew request. That is very simple to do via a cron job and certbot.

    2. Anna Nymous Bronze badge
      Boffin

      Re: Waterfox - Setting / Privacy & Security / Certificates / Query OCSP - stuck "off"

      Turning that setting to on leaves a massive trail from you behind. Every cert your encounter will be checked against OCSP, which means whichever server or set thereof you designated to be used for that now sees every single domain you visit and when you visit it.

      Why do you even think you need OCSP?

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Waterfox - Setting / Privacy & Security / Certificates / Query OCSP - stuck "off"

        The original reason for moving from CRLs to OCSP years back was due to ever-larger CRLs which caused delays in setting up TLS sessions and CRLs being out of date whereas OCSP gave real-time validation. Have CRLs been improved in the meantime? (Not sure.)

        1. Anna Nymous Bronze badge

          Re: Waterfox - Setting / Privacy & Security / Certificates / Query OCSP - stuck "off"

          Let me rephrase:

          Why do you think you need OCSP or CRLs in the first place? What does this actually do for you that's meaningful?

  15. amolbk
    Facepalm

    No more USAID

    Well, they need to make up for the lost income somehow!

    1. amolbk

      Re: No more USAID

      Got a subscription email from Mozilla with the subject: "Critical appeal: Help Mozilla’s programs counter U.S. government funding cuts with a $10 USD donation"

      "$3.55 million USD: That’s the amount of Mozilla’s funding we believe is in jeopardy over the next three years, due to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s interference with U.S. government science and technology grants."*

      * The Associated Press: Trump and Musk’s dismantling of government is shaking the foundations of US democracy. 5 February 2025. (https://links.mozilla.org/t/y-l-cikhjjy-dktlgullh-k/)

  16. RuffianXion

    Further info

    This is covered in detail, including the reason for the change, by Louis Rossman on Youtube

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8bTquKjzos

    1. Graham Dawson

      Re: Further info

      Does Mr Clinton put in his two cents, or will we only get the blackberry repurrt?

  17. steviebuk Silver badge

    Will be moving

    To Librewolf now. They missed a massive trick. With Chrome trying more and more to break and block adblockers, Firefox could of gained a ton of users but doing an ad campaign about their adblocking ability.

    Oh well, was nice while it lasted.

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: Will be moving

      I was hoping Librewolf had an Android version, but Servo is available directly from the website (no playstore). I'm going to see how well that works on my car's Android infotainment system (aftermarket). FF is dismal, but I find most mobile apps to be sucky to start with.

  18. TaabuTheCat

    Want choice? Support alternatives like Servo

    https://servo.org

    We can talk all day about wanting independence from Corporate browsers. Make it happen faster by actually supporting projects like Servo! I have. (And no, I have no affiliation with this project. I just want more choices than we have today.)

  19. dmvjjvmd

    Truly the most clueless.

    All they needed to do was *pay attention* and they would’ve heard their users screaming about focusing on damned Firefox and not the million other distractions and side quests they pursued. And they *still* don’t get it. They bring in even more executives and add even more layers to their truly nutty bureaucratic cake. They’re just another company now. There is absolutely nothing special or unique about Mozilla except what it used to be.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why couldn't Mozilla have been honest with us and be like hey the deal with Google is ending so we need revenue so we're going to look for ways to have a steady cash flow to do development and other stuff I mean we were thinking about selling your data but then we realized we would never going to get the amount from Google but 450 million so I don't know what to do well we don't know what to do so we're going to sell part of our software we're going to change our license from mpl to non-commercial oh heck even just have it under a asymmetrical license like the original Netscape public license

    1. Marcelo Rodrigues
      Unhappy

      "Why couldn't Mozilla have been honest with us and be like hey the deal with Google is ending so we need revenue..."

      Excellent question. Had I received some communication to the tone of "we need the monies to keep going, please donate..." I would probably donate (happily!) to keep them afloat.

      Now, after this, I will move the heavens to keep away from them. Ah, well...

    2. Sven Coenye
      Unhappy

      Mozilla, the non-profit Foundation "owns" the for-profit Corporation. Guess which part is wagging the dog? This is not specific to FOSS or even IT. With a structure like that, the need of the for-profit to make money ends up being the controlling factor. All ideals and principles be damned.

  21. Ididntbringacoat

    Bravo! I discoverd Brave

    Thanks! Caused me to go searching and I discovered "Btave" browser.

    Half expecting to see i't a "false front" for the ultimate in Data Slurpper's and backdoor planters.

    But, it does seem fast.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Bravo! I discoverd Brave

      > I discovered "Btave" browser.

      https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

  22. MachDiamond Silver badge

    It costs real money

    Blood sucking lawyers cost lots of money so anything in a contract is there for a reason. There really isn't anything that is truly "boilerplate". There are templates for many contracts that get modified for the situation, but anything that isn't useful will be excised as it can cause problems to leave it in. Even the use of punctuation is precise, so what for that.

    Anything that's convenient is probably a security weakness or an attack surface. Mozilla would love for you to put all of your bookmarks, password files and auto form fill data in their "cloud". It's at that point where you will really bind yourself to their ToS and give them permission to invade all of your privacy that you show to them. Of course, they're just as bad as everybody else (maybe a bit less bad than google) so you have to make it a policy to share nothing with them that you can avoid. There goes Little Snitch telling me that Google wants to update their API's on my Mac. "No" button engaged.

    Throughout the day I will shut down my browsers and let Cookie delete cookies I have not approved and delouse me of tracking bugs as well. I do most of my searches on TOR with DDG. There's no telling what search terms might trigger The Man. I don't have an InstaPintaTwitFace account. My mobe is just a phone and I keep Data/WiFi/BT off most of the time unless I'm using them. That does marvels for battery life. I pay for many things with cash that don't have a built in paper trial. There's no point to paying the electric bill with cash since that's data that isn't hard to get. Petrol, take-away and other things get purchased with cash. I do fill up about once a month with the debit card to muddy the waters. Anybody looking at my petrol spending will be left assuming I don't travel around very much. Train tickets will be cash except for long distance trains where they want a verifiable name on the ticket.

  23. captain veg Silver badge

    paying for it

    There used to be a browser that wasn't in hock to Google and had its own self-developed codebase. You could pay for it with money, or by having adverts inserted into a special frame separate from the main viewport. It was called Opera.

    I paid 40 US dollars for the version without embedded ads. Twice, for both Windows and Linux. Which I was happy to do since it was, in my opinion, the best browser by far at the time. But even without that judgment it was important for implementing HTML and the other Web platform technologies independently of (and better than) Trident and Gecko.

    Trident is no more. I would never have believed that its place would be taken by a development of Konqueror, but there you go. And Opera is just a Blink reskin, along with almost all the "alternatives" such as Vivaldi and Brave. Safari? Slightly closer to Konqueror than Chrome, but clearly of that family.

    If I were in charge then whoever currently owns the IP to Presto and Trident would be forced to open source them. And should anyone be able to develop either, both, or something completely new, into a browser that does nothing more than render web pages without trying to extract further profit, I would be ready to pay for it.

    -A.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Now brave is the default browser

    I don't need more browsers that openly sell my data. I had 4 browsers installed.

    1) My new default today is BRAVE browser. This seems robust enough to become the new default. This is the broser I use 96% of the time.

    2) I also have a privacy backup of DUCKDUCKGO browser (which does not block some trackers).

    3) I already had the unremovable EDGE which I only use if I run into a problematic web site.

    4) Will uninstall FIREFOX since I only need one nonprivacy oriented browser

    1. Chet Mannly

      Re: Now brave is the default browser

      Brave has their own advertising network and at one point were using people's browsers for crypto - you SURE that's a better option than Firefox?

    2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Now brave is the default browser

      > My new default today is BRAVE browser.

      https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

      1. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: Now brave is the default browser

        Yikes!

        (But I'd already dumped Brave a few minutes before reading this).

  25. GKLR

    A Brave decision as Sir Humphrey would say….

    i’ve been using Firefox for years, but no more. Mozilla can clarify their language all they like. I no longer care. I’ve switched to the Brave browser.

  26. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    Stop

    Lots of Astroturf in this thread

    There's a surprisingly large number is people claiming to have switched to Brave with very similar verbiage. As others have pointed out, Brave is still based on Chromium, and the makers have gotten up to their own shenanigans.

    Anyone up for building a Firefox extension which blocks data exfiltration and sharing?

    1. LaoTsu

      Re: Lots of Astroturf in this thread

      I switched to LibreWolf on desktop / laptop and IronWolf on mobile last night after reading this, after decades of using Firefox. Sad times.

      1. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Lots of Astroturf in this thread

        I just fired up LibreWolf and am testing it out. Seems cool so far. The main disadvantage I can see is that it's downstream from Firefox so is still dependent on Mozilla.org continuing their development.

    2. Mockup1974

      Re: Lots of Astroturf in this thread

      sir please install the BRAVE browser and earn the BAT token for free while doing your needful browsing!

    3. Czrly

      Re: Lots of Astroturf in this thread

      This is par for the course wherever browsers are discussed. Indeed, the ubiquity and indomitability of the Brave astro-turf gang is alarmingly high – that, alone, would be enough to raise red flags, in my mind, even if I didn't know the sordid history of the Brave browser and how it has been associated with an awful number of "web 3" debacles, continues to push crypto-currency, tried to pull the affiliate-abuse trick that Honey would later (rightly) be lambasted for, and generally behaves appallingly in numerous ways – and there are archived links (wayback machine et al.) to prove it, whatever the gang spouts.

      Brave earned their place in the untouchable-software-purveyor box and there's nothing they can or could do to redeem themselves in my opinion, just like Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Unity, Adobe and some others. All of these corpos earned their untouchability through numerous acts of bad-faith that were *not* mistakes – not single incidents but a history of scummy behaviour.

      I feel like Mozilla have joined them in that box, now, and although this is a hot news headline, today, Mozilla were teetering on the brink of the abyss for a very long time, already.

      1. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: Lots of Astroturf in this thread

        Just dumped Brave off my PC ( not that it was ever used, but it was on there just in case). But this bunch of red flags made me reluctant to keep it.

    4. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Lots of Astroturf in this thread

      Ublock?

      NoScript?

      Adguard?

      Ghostery?

      Cleaning up your cookie cache every once in a while?

      Like those?

  27. tonytins

    The deep cuts to the foundation, recent changes to the TOS, and hiring people from who used to work at Meta, of all places, seem to suggest they're trying to pull an OpenAI.

  28. blu3b3rry
    Unhappy

    A shame but time to move

    Started off in the early 2000s with Netscape Navigator, then moved to Firefox in 2005 or so. I've stuck with it ever since but stuff like this is a sign to jump before it ends up getting worse.

    Been giving Waterfox a whirl at work today (and now at home) and so far I like it - it reminds me of an older Firefox UI and seems to perform well enough.

    Vertical tab bar is rather nice too.

    1. Philo T Farnsworth Silver badge

      Re: A shame but time to move

      Just swapped over from Firefox Nightly to Waterfox with no issues other than the fact that it didn't want to import my settings, extensions, including a couple of private ones that I've never gotten "blessed", and sundry other cruft from Firefox. It only recognizes Chrome and Zen, which I also have installed on my system for development/testing purposes.

      What I ended up doing was deleting the .waterfox subdirectory in my home directory, copied the contents of ~/.mozilla/firefox to ~/.waterfox and then fired up Waterfox.

      It created a new profile, so I closed Waterfox and then edited ~/.waterfox/profiles.ini to point to my old Firefox profile. Now everything looks, feels, tastes, and smells identical to my old Firefox setup. I know you can switch profiles but this works better for me.

      This happy camper is pitching his tent in Waterfox-land tfn.

  29. simpfeld

    syncserver

    About the only thing Firefox has for me us you can host your own sync server. Though its hard and badly documented.

    I don't know anyway to sync chromium browsers without using Google.

  30. quigley

    I have deleted firefox from all devices. Using waterfox on mint de, ironfox on android and falcon, librefox and tor on manjaro. Used to be a huge fan of opera till they screwed up. I still don't trust vivaldi or brave. Having problems getting proton pass working on tor even going through the onion site. I am not all that advanced a user but the internet used to be fun. Oh well.

  31. cd

    Little Snitch

    I want the equivalent of Little Snitch on my Android phone.

    But I also recognise that even uBO can see where I surf, in order to work.

    A new paradigm us needed all around, going beyond browsers, it can utilise fake user creds and be useless for data collection, yet display content.

    We need to make the web useless to big tech, to shut them out from real humanity, their C-suites included.

  32. nobody who matters Silver badge

    All these people saying thay have ditched Firefox and now using Brave!

    Frying pan vs Fire ???

  33. Matthew "The Worst Writer on the Internet" Saroff
    Trollface

    Where's Your Empathy?

    They have expenses, like the millions of dollars a year they pay senior executives while they fire the people who do the real work!

  34. Oh Homer
    Mushroom

    The End

    My 20 year use of Firefox ended 3 days ago.

    I've switched to LibreWolf for now (which is essentially just Firefox with all the sinister crap removed). Eventually I will switch to Ladybird. This seems to be the popular consensus among browser geeks.

    I'm not in the least surprised by this. Mozilla have been getting exponentially more egregious for years.

    For me, the 3 biggest issues are:

    1. The idea that a piece of supposedly free software, that I use entirely independently of the developer, presumes to compel me to use it only in accordance with their "terms", is absolutely outrageous. It's none of their damned business how I choose to use their browser. We're not talking about copyrights here, this is literally just my use of the software as a web browser. How dare they presume to tell me what I can do with it. Cheeky bastards. This would be like Ford telling me I can drive anywhere but Manchester. What the actual fcuk?

    2. They used to clearly state that they would never sell my data, but now they've removed that statement. Their excuse is that California has a weird definition of "sell". Excuse me, but what the fcuk does California have to do with me? If you actually cared about privacy rights, you'd tell California to go fcuk themselves, and just add a clause to the effect of "Due to California's moronic laws, sadly we can no longer license the use of Firefox in that State". Are you really going to screw the entire global population of Firefox users because of a single State in America? Sorry, I'm not buying it. I think you're just using that as an excuse for your foray into AI data harvesting.

    3. The "other people do it" excuse doesn't wash. Mozilla was created in the first place specifically to be the one who "doesn't do it". So regardless of the details, the fact is you've betrayed your own founding principles, and consequently betrayed your userbase, none of whom now have any reason to continue using your products, as they are now functionally indistinguishable from those of any other for-profit corporation.

    Yes I think the demise of Mozilla was inevitable, given how utterly tone deaf they've been over the years, and especially how they seemed to completely lack any moral compass (Mozilla really doesn't seem to understand the concept of "consent"). However, now we're actually at the end, it's still incredibly sad.

    Goodbye Mozilla.

    1. Terry 6 Silver badge

      Re: The End

      Am using Librewolf as of now. Still have FF for a transitional period* but Wolf is set to default.

      *Annoyingly, in Windows you don't seem to be able to use a custom icon for a url**. The workaround is to point the icon at the browser, with the url . As in "firefox.exe website.com". and so I'll have to replace/edit those.

      **I'm sure I used to be able to.

  35. Mimsey Borogove
    FAIL

    This is very sad news. I've used Firefox since it grew out of Mozilla, which I'd already used for years by that point. I hate to abandon such a long tradition of using what I've always considered the best browser, but it's their own fault!

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