Personally I find it far more important that it's not run by a company that will try its hardest to track your every movement on the web, but to each their own, I suppose.
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You never tried to listen for stock Firefox's traffic with Wireshark for sure.
People speak very good thing about Firefox but they like to hide and avoid the shady stuff. Let me give you the un-cesored version of what Firefox really is. Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances and they also do stuff like adding unique IDs to each installation.
Firefox does is a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings and config like the OP did.
I know other browsers do it as well, except for Ungoogled and because of that I’m sticking with it. I would like to avoid programs that need no snitch whenever I open them. ungoogled-chromium + ublock origin + decentraleyes + clearurls and a few others.
Now you’re free to go ahead and downvote this post as much as you would like. I’m sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox isn’t as good and private after all.
I think librewolf scrubs most of that stuff out. I'm basing that off of using burpsuite's proxy server though. On vanilla firefox it captures so much crap going out. I havent tried with wireshark though.
That's all true, but why take a modified chromium instead of a modified Firefox?
Also clearurls and decentraleyes would be pretty much useless with Firefox and uBlock Origin.
Chromium-based browsers have inherently weaker extensions due to Manifest v3 and many other targeted attacks on adblockers. If you want a browser that works far better and provides a much higher level of privacy, use Mullvad Browser (worked on in collaboration with the Tor Browser, just without Tor integration) or LibreWolf. Both are Firefox forks with Firefox telemetry removed and anti-fingerprinting measures. You don't need and absolutely should not install any extensions beyond the default installed in those 2 browsers (except perhaps a password manager), as that will dramatically damage the fingerprinting protection they provide. Both will have a much higher level of protection than you could ever realistically expect from any Chromium-based Browser.
Yes but no. Firefox does some creepy stuff, and I will need to verify this. But it also matters how much data websites get about you, and Ungoogled Chromium has no fingerprint protection
Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances
So I went ahead and read that article and goodness gracious, does anybody actually read these links??? Because that link is a complete nothingburger. It's a blog post from someone who never read a 990 before (standard nonprofit disclosure form) who thinks every other line of is proof of a scandal. But it's not, it's just a big word salad that is too long to read, so nobody will bother.
The most significant charge is (1) that the CEO makes too much and (2) the author doesn't like that they contract out work to consultants who think diversity is good. And everything after that is LESS significant.
Every point made, so far as I can tell:
- Have assets worth $1.1 billion as of 2021
- Mozilla spent less on "expenses" from 2021 relative to 2020
- Revenue went up over the same time
- A lot of revenue was from royalties (e.g. agreements for default search)
- They disagree with the wording on a donate form about whether Mozilla "relies" on individual donations
- The CEO made $5.6MM
- They pulled out one expense, which appears to have been training/education relating to social justice topics
- They pull out a few more individual expenses and weren't sure what they were.
This isn't secret documents being handed to Deep Throat in a dark parking lot. There's no smoking gun, no smoke, just a PDF with ordinary tables of expenses and revenue, and consultants who did diversity training. If that's shady then, get ready to be mad about every non-profit ever.
I will never understand how people expect software to gather no telemetry or metrics whatsoever.
We did fine without it for a very long time. We still do with a lot of software. It's called voluntarily submitting a bug report and/or core dump.
If you ask a user to show you a "core dump" they're more likely to shit on their floor and send you a photo than do what you actually mean.
Telemetry is absolutely crucial in determining what to focus on in development, to fix issues the users might not even realize exist. Especially for projects that aim at the general public. As long as it's communicated clearly, used truly only for development purposes and an opt-out is available there's nothing wrong about it.
Especially software with hundreds of millions of users, that constantly has to deal with bleeding edge attack vectors and compatibility.
Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances.
I'm not going to refute this because it seems to me that article are right in several points. Also, we have to be honest, Mozilla is kind of stupid sometimes.
But if you care about the default search engine or privacy settings, you really just need to do some hardening and tweaks to make it very private in general. Chromium doesn't have any of these settings, it even doesn't have RFP btw.
and they also do stuff like adding unique IDs to each installation.
Looks like you can download Firefox through the Mozilla's official HTTP/FTP repository that doesn't trigger this ID token generation. Also this article motivates people to download Firefox installer from Softonic's page:
Firefox users who prefer to download the browser without the unique identifier may do so in the following two ways:
- Download the Firefox installer from Mozilla's HTTPS repository (formerly the FTP repository).
- Download Firefox from third-party download sites that host the installer, e.g., from Softonic.
Softonic have a really nice and privacy respectful privacy policy (obviously that's not the case) in contrast with randomized pretty anonymous unique ID triggered by Firefox installer download. Mozilla's generated ID feels more like a download counter than a tracker indeed.
I'm not trying to justify the Mozilla's problems. They makes silly things sometimes, but being realistic, they do a better job taking care of their users privacy more than Google or even Brave.
LibreWolf FTW! 👍
When I was running it every other website would break, switched over to Mullvad Browser instead.
Except Firefox’s bookmark system on android is absolute crap and looks hideous.
Mobile browsers all suck.
What is your alternative? I want E2EE sync. Is vivaldi better? But honestly I wouldnt use their browser.
I actually started using Firefox in my early teens just because I liked the look of the Ui and themes better than Chrome.
I've also recently switched to Librewolf ;)
I started using it in my early 20s when it was still called "Firebird" because I was still salty that Netscape was dead and using IE sucked donkey balls (There was stuff like Konqueror and Lynx on Linux, but Konqueror and Lynx were...well they were Konqueror and Lynx). Mozilla 4 lyfe. "Technically" (with huge quotation marks) I've been more or less using the same browser since 1997.
Source: One person's opinion on their personal Fediverse account
... Not that I disagree, mind. I've been on FF since like. 2007? Which was the moment I figured out that other web browsers besides IE7 existed?
Never saw reason to hop to Chrome(ium) even before I knew/cared about datamining or enshittification or any of that stuff. Back then it just looked like "another browser, that does things a bit different but has no features that entice me that Firefox lacks". Then as I learned about the political side of things I was like "Huh, guess I'm glad for myself then!"
You know that famous The Dude meme? Applies here.
Not a chrome fan and I use Librewolf and I like how I've customised it. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
i love firefox but honestly right now i find edge to be much more aesthetically pleasing, especially with vertical tabs and grouping. if firefox can add these two items, i'd switch to firefox in a heartbeat (and they're already adding tab groups)
Somewhere in this thread is a userchrome.css file on how to remove the "tree style tabs" header bar.
Install that addon.
Place that file in ~/.mozilla/firefox/XXXX-default-release/chrome
as UserChrome.css
(create that folder).
Enable legacy customization in about:config