The answer to “what is Firefox?” on Mozilla’s FAQ page about its browser used to read:
The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.
Now it just says:
The Firefox Browser, the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit, helps you protect your personal information.
In other words, Mozilla is no longer willing to commit to not selling your personal data to advertisers.
A related change was also highlighted by mozilla.org commenter jkaelin, who linked direct to the source code for that FAQ page. To answer the question, “is Firefox free?” Moz used to say:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data.
Now it simply reads:
Yep! The Firefox Browser is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.
Again, a pledge to not sell people’s data has disappeared. Varma insisted this is the result of the fluid definition of “sell” in the context of data sharing and privacy.
Soon the only private option left will be to curl the website, read the html and picture it in my head.
stallman was right
In Firefox, type about:config in address bar, search for “sponsored” and “telemetry” and set all the paremeters you see from TRUE to FALSE. Done.
We shouldn’t have to do workarounds like that in the first place. It’s getting to be like the Stockholm syndrome people have about Windows abuses. I didn’t put up that shit, and I’m not gonna put up with this either.
I’m running Linux and neither Waterfox or LibreWolf are present in repository of one of the most popular distros. Come on?!
You aren’t using the Flatpak?
Soo… where do we go now? What open source alternative exists that is on the side of its users?
Ladybird looks promising.
Depends on where you stand on misogyny and transphobia.
I feel out of the loop on this one. Is there a particular individual on the project that this is about, or is this a company policy issue?
Essentially, someone submitted a PR on GitHub changing a “he” in the build instructions to a gender-neutral “they”, to which the main dev of Ladybird (Andreas Kling) replied:
This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.
This next part’s just my opinion; that’s an insane response to someone suggesting neutral language. As a non-binary person, I wouldn’t feel comfortable around this person after such a reply, and I certainly wouldn’t donate to Ladybird or anything of the sort.
That being said, we all likely use tons of software developed by people way worse than Kling. As long as it’s FOSS and is privacy-respecting, I’ll run code that’s been written by bigots. However I definitely won’t support them by recommending their software to others, or by donating time or money to the project.
I don’t think that’s just opinion anymore, it’s a fairly accurate analysis. Countless serious projects use pronouns and “they,” and that’s fine, but for these few specific groups they’re somehow political and a bad thing.
I’ve heard Andreas’ twitter likes were telling, before those went private, but that information’s out of reach now. That said, I’ve seen the people who frequently interact with him there, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable around them either. He seems to really like it, though. Make of that what you will.
Still, good point on the reality of “moral software use.” For all its issues, I do hope Ladybird succeeds as a new browser engine because the internet needs more of those. I’m just not touching it unless they get their shit sorted.
There is a link on another FF post to GitHub where someone changed “he” to “they” in the documentation. All references to a user being able to do anything in the documentation only uses “He”.
The main dev told them to “keep their politics to themselves” and refused the fix.
I think that’s a pretty cheap PR. Ideally it should be rewritten to not to use pronouns. The PR is low effort and feels like it was deliberately done for attention.
In which context? If it was referring to a man I get why he’d say that answer
Just keep using Firefox. Nothing in the code has changed, and if it does you can switch to forks. You all are evangelizing about how important FOSS is to prevent this exact scenario and yet you keep switching browsers for no need at all.
Note: I love Foss, I just think this is an overreaction
Oh sure, but browsers are an entirely different beast.
Eventually, they’ll take it closed source, now I know what you’re thinking “Then one of the forks will just become the dominant one!”
But here’s the thing, the browser engine is very complicated just to keep up with. The W3C spec that all engines must follow is thousands of pages long. So all those forks will wither and die once the engine has been cut off from upstream updates.
None of those forks touch the engine as-is
Do tell how something like Zen or Ladybird has a better chance at doing so. It would be better if instead of this fragmentation the Zen and Ladybird would work in a Firefox fork.
Ladybird has some serious backing and employed developers working on their engine and has been worked on for years (Ladybird started life as the SerenityOS browser)
And even after all that time and money, it’s still not even ready for general use. Their roadmap has them having a public release ready in 2028 iirc
And fragmentation? Really? LMAO there needs to be some competition in browser engines, if there was we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.
There are only 2 modern, open source and fully working engines. Chromium and FF, that’s not fragmentation, that’s a duopoly
That’s like calling Linux on the server a monopoly. It’s open source, with many distros (forks). Anyone can fork the engine.
Anyone can fork the engine.
Even the Linux kernel is not as much of a beast that a browser engine is, I’ve seen estimates that a dedicated small team could build a new modern Linux kernel from scratch and generally usable in about 2-3 years
A browser engine takes years more, again, ladybird’s engine is built from scratch, and it’s currently in year 3 targeting an alpha release in 2026 or Year 4. With it projected to be generally usable in 2028 a full 6 years later.
And there are actually a couple different independent kernels, so no it’s not a monopoly
FUTO could develop a browser engine much quicker by simply forking Firefox.
Even the Linux kernel is not as much of a beast that a browser engine is
A browser engine takes years more [than a kernel]
That’s cool, I didn’t know that. !til@lemmy.world
Orion is much better. Vote with your computing power.
