https://www.osnews.com/story/141825/mozilla-deletes-promise-...
Changes are recorded, then applied to the latest upstream version (Firefox) then packaged and sent as an update (LibreWolf)
Promissory estoppel maybe? Stronger case for it if you ever paid them for anything after this promise.
> For years I’ve been warning about this inevitable outcome, and for just as many years people told me I was overreacting, that it wouldn’t happen, that I was crazy.
The removal of that language is important but this person is trying to make it about themselves.
Orion is a WebKit web browser from the folks at Kagi that supports both Firefox and Chromium extensions (including on iPhones and iPads) and has zero telemetry, and I have the Firefox version of uBlock Origin installed.
Firefox is not the only option for people that want alternatives to Chrome that support uBlock Origin.
Quoting from a reply in a discussion on the Orion Feedback site from a few months ago (November 2024):
> " uBO is not supported on iOS due to Apple limitations."
[1]: https://orionfeedback.org/d/9145-ublock-origin-not-existent-...
The problem with support on iOS is that each browser is forced to be a skin for Safari and Safari only supports Safari Web Extensions, which are MV3-like, hence the platform limitation. The EU law may allow a browser to release in that region but Apple placed such heavy requirements and restrictions to do so none have actually been approved. I haven't seen a clear answer if less limited extension access itself would result in not being approved by Apple.
I use brave browser and nextdns to block ads on ios now.
I did compare against other adblock systems on ios and found it to be the best option, as other adblocks either gave broken webpages or just didn't work at all.
First, consider NextDNS to DNS adblock all your apps.
For in the browser, for those who do use Safari, consider 1Blocker, otherwise consider AdGuard Pro.
I removed it right away. I just want a browser, not whatever that was.
Now I just use Safari because all I do really is read stuff.
I looked into it, but couldn't get over the pretentiousness. They seem to make plenty of money from either investors or customers because they're not bankrupt yet, so I guess there must be a demographic that likes being treated like that.
There's something funny about a browser pretending it's the best thing since sliced bread telling me to drag the downloaded application to the macOS dock after downloading the Windows setup file.
Pretentious or not, Arc is pre-enshittification. Chrome, Edge and FF are not, which is what matters.
It was fast. At some point it had its own install of Adobe Flash so you could get rid of your regular Flash install and run two browsers: one without Flash as your main, and use Chrome for those few websites that require Flash effectively isolating them from your regular web experience, until this eventually became moot, it was another WebKit browser, albeit with V8 instead of JavaScriptCore, and pioneered per tab process isolation so rather than your whole browser crashing, just that one tab would. Prior to Chrome, whole browser crashes were not uncommon, oftentimes because of Flash (giving another reason to want to isolate it, although plug-ins I think were also isolated).
What Chrome subsequently became is the very definition of enshittification, and you can pinpoint it to around the time Google started trying to force people to link their Chrome profiles to their Google Accounts.
Obviously Google has many income streams. Mozilla does not.
It always comes down to the question: do you want to pay money for a browser? And the answer for 99% of the users is "hell no".
I strongly suspect they're gonna drop support as soon as the first bigger merge issue happens along with a heartfelt blog that "they did they everything to support it, but it was just too much for the resources available to them"
I doubt it's gonna take more then 1-2 years (December 2027) for this to happen, but we will see.
I expect Brave to easily support it until then and then drop it very quickly as you described.
So even when they have to say farewell to Manifest v2 it really doesn't matter, at least in case of privacy (and for some medical) protection.
At some point the issues will become too difficult to fix, but none of these companies need to be doing it alone. Adding a separate upstream with some "fuck off Google" fixes for them to base their proprietary browser on seems like a smart thing to do.
Maybe it's time
It may be an okay-ish browser, but the company behind it _repeatedly_ does shady things (installs VPN without asking, overriding links to insert referral codes, collecting donations for YouTubers without YouTubers even knowing about it, etc, etc), I am honestly not sure why people are OK with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
If you don't want the Web3 crap you can turn it off -- as I have done for years now. But someone please help me understand how a browser that takes in half a billion dollars from Google annually to function as controlled opposition in case of an antitrust case is somehow OK to recommend, but a browser that is independent is somehow bad because of bad business decisions made years ago.
But it doesn't belong in a conversation about browser diversification away from Chromium. I am so bewildered why it keeps getting referenced in "let's get away from Google Chrome" threads
At the end of the day, it’s not Google Chrome. I’ve mentioned in other comments that Brave isn’t my top 1, 2 or 3 choice, so I won’t rehash that here, but I think it absolutely belongs in a conversation as an alternative for people that want to get away from Google Chrome. The basic skeleton that composes Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers mostly isn’t the issue, because Chrome is and always has been technically excellent. It’s all the other crap Google started grafting on top of it that is, on top of their stance (backed up by many many web developers here) that the standards and web technologies that Google supports should be the standards and web technologies that all browsers support and prioritize.
If Brave works for you, go for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
Firefox is still my primary work browser because all the anti-tracking stuff Orion does actually breaks some sites I depend on (well, makes them harder to use anyway), but Orion has become my main and I have lost confidence in Mozilla.
If you want to continue using Firefox as a kind of service to the world or weird self-imposed civic duty, that’s on you. I can pay for Orion and know that there is a company with an actual business model behind it and also not worry about misaligned incentives, or fixing all the tracking and telemetry defaults (only to watch my hard work crumble like when a random Firefox update hosed my settings on my personal machine a couple years ago) because there is no telemetry.
Orion is not a Chromium derivative.
Further, nobody here said Firefox was incapable as a browser. Use it if you like it, but having used Firefox off and on since 2005, I’ve written it off on my personal machines.
And now Firefox has shad the bed so badly with their "we will actually sell your data now" that I don't even care. It can burn in hell.
FF’s legalese may have burned through their last bit of good will, and if that’s the last nail in their coffin let it be a lesson in terminal enshitification and not understanding or caring about your users.
It's more than that. It prevents monopolization of the web by a single company. This isn't like picking a different version of Ms. Dash from the grocery store.
They can push technologies that benefit their ads business (e.g. manifest 3 breaking ublock origin). And the notion "embrace extend extinguish" was practically invented for circumstances like this, of engaging the development community in a particular field of software, dominating it, and achieving leverage to change the way the web works.
>that having a lot of stakeholders prevents Google from unilaterally applying unpopular changes
Google controls commits to Chromium, and it does that with an invite only developer pool almost entirely of people associated with Google. The stakeholders don't have a proportionate hand in the destiny of Chromium. I think you're right that it's maybe better, in the sense that we could imagine something even worse, but that's loo low a benchmark to offer comfort that Chromium is having a net-positive impact on balance of power in terms of who can help you access the web.
Zen browser would be an almost drop-in replacement for those that like Arc but it uses FF under the hood instead.
Although, if kagi fails, it probably won't matter.
No idea what they plan to do about syncing though since right now they just use iCloud syncing, but it’s a start.
Another browser option is Brave, but you have to disable the altcoins stuff :/
I don't think that's an unreasonable stance, and they're still explicitly saying "We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be". This is reiterated in the linked Privacy FAQ on their official site: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
It sounds more like 'we sell your data, but we do it in a legally protracted way so we could claim up to now that we don't'.
Given this relates to Firefox's central selling proposition, they surely have an essay detailing exactly what data they're selling?
Mozilla gets money, and as a result of the deal, the searches (data) of anyone who didn't change the default go to the company running the default search engine.
I assume probably data that's anonymized (in some sense) and/or aggregated (in some sense). But there's so much grey area there that it's a lot less reassuring than a straight up blanket statement that they used to be able to make.
> 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)."
How is sharing data with partners in order to make Firefox commercially viable (i.e. getting money in exchange) not "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated data is still data, and it's quite disingenuous of them to try to weasel it in by changing the definition.
> We are as close to not selling data as it is legally possible to be.
Normally when you say "as close to X as legally possible", that means you want to do X fully, but you can't because the law forbids you to. X in this case is "not selling data". But "not selling data" is not illegal at all. What are they even trying to say here?
(Also I don't find that sentence on their FAQ page)
They're certainly attempting to articulate that as a conceptual distinction, but I don't think that division is as real as would be implied by trying to separate the one thing into two different words. Aggregated data is "about you" too, in many of the senses that matter in the context of privacy, and I would reject attempts at conceptualizing this into two things to imply otherwise.
But that said, these reassurances run into a "who ordered that" problem. No advocate for privacy was ever advocating on behalf of anonymized data any more than personally identifying data. Anonymous averaging over interests of groups still involves privacy compromises; and metrics, fingerprints and learning algorithms can mix and match that in ways that still cross the line. Abstracted profiling still works, and digs deeper than you might suspect (I recall the netflix data that could predict interests across different categories, like people watching House of Cards also liking It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Preferences can hang together in a measurable way, which is exactly why ad companies want them.
It's also just part of the long slow, death by one thousand cuts transformation into a company that doesn't have categorical commitments to privacy.
This situation isn't perfect, but I disagree that this is particularly weasely or disingenuous. It's not black & white and there are meaningful differences here.
I think the assumption of 'selling data' and primary concern from most users is the sale of their identifiable personal data - i.e. telling advertisers "this user is interested in X", using their privileged position as a browser to track and collect that information. This is absolutely what Facebook is doing when they sell your data, for example.
The description here is suggesting that Firefox are still committed to never doing that or anything similar. That is the main thing I'd want to know, so that's great.
However, it sounds like they may be selling generic anonymous data in some way - for example telling Pocket what percentage of people use the Pocket extension, or telling Google what percentage of people change their search engine away from Google. Both of those are cases where you can imagine they might receive significant extra income from partners given that data, and they feel this is reasonable but means they can technically no longer say the 'never sell your data'.
You could consider that level of data sharing problematic of course. That said, there is spectrum of problems here, and personally (and I think for most people) I am much more concerned about the tracking & distribution of actual personal identifiable data than I am about generic metrics like those, if that is what's happening (unfortunately, they haven't explained much further so this is still somewhat speculation - I fully agree more precise language would be very helpful).
This runs into what I'm calling the "who ordered that" problem, because this represents a retreat from a stronger commitment to privacy, and is not a conception of privacy that anyone was asking for, or that satisfies anyone who is concerned about privacy.
I don't want my interest in sci-fi to be made to conflict with my preference from buying locally, and influence campaigns urging me buy books through Preferred LArge Retailer and pushing me toward that clash are a problem whether the data powering them is personal or fed into an abstracted anonymized group.
And depersonalized profiling that "knows" I can be sorted into a specific "type of guy" bucket may involve learning things about me that I don't want to be inputs into marketing. They can still, for instance, make inroads into judgements about things like self esteem (e.g. colognes and beauty products), financial precarity, and can work to socialize groups into consumerist self-conceptions. They probably can be used to make inroads into classic forms of privacy violations like "looking to buy a home" or "trying to get pregnant" or other such aspects of identity that I don't want marketing to touch.
See this submission from earlier this month: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads (26 days ago, 1957 points) – https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=42909921
It's actually super simple and needs no obfuscation or verbal esoterica. Don't engage in a contract where data Firefox has collected from users is transferred to a third party.
Done. Easy as.
The sister comment on search engine data transfer is FUD -- the browser can of course send queries to a default search engine without needing to pipe any information to Firefox. Firefox would need no usage monitoring whatsoever, just do a firm fixed price contract and the details are settled.
BAT is also different from adblocking, because it monetizes other people's content. It's about as close to stealing as you can get in the ad business, aside from the Honey affiliate highjacking.
-- Some prominent ad company which happens to run a search engine as a side business and build a web browser to make ad-targeting better for their customers.
I think we may be advancing to another step in that cycle with software development. Strong, principled software companies created good times in the late 2000s and 2010s, now good times have created software company leaders who are less principled, and the hard times are beginning. And eventually, after the hard times have gone on for long enough, principled leaders will hopefully emerge and create good times again.
That being said:
- I really admire the thinking and moral aptitude that resulted in the Oxide Principles page[0]. Oxide and 37signals[1] are two examples of very principled companies that are keeping good times rolling in their respective fields, and both of them do a ton to support open source software.
- And, there is nothing like ad revenue to accelerate corruption of good principles in software companies that handle user data -- to the extent that I wonder if it's in the same moral category as government officials accepting bribes.
If you are a power-user you may well benefit from using Firefox where uBlock Origin has always claimed to work best.
By switching you will also be removing power from an ad-funded near-monopoly that feels (correctly) that they can do whatever they want even if it is universally despised by users because the other choices are quickly going away. Every using using another browser weakens that grip, every user using a Chromium derivative allows them to keep trying to wedge new features that no other browser wants to implement for user privacy reasons and creates website incompatibility.
On other TVs like my Roku i do pay for a few streaming services with ads and get bombarded with ads on that tv. But its a group tv that many use.
Edit: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-out-firefox-p...
Working title: Copilot for Tracking.
Stand up against the browser hegemony*, choose WebKit with support for UBlock Origin:
---
* Tongue in cheek, of course. Long live Firefox.
- integrated screen shot, which includes a “full webpage” option that handles scrolling for you
- Split View, which lets you open two webpages side by side within a single tab
I use both of these daily and get a decent productivity boost from them.
Never used it since because of data privacy concerns. But in the context of working for that company where the assumption was that I would have zero privacy it was fine
https://github.com/pl4nty/msedge/commit/96aa52634072b12fa175...
Too bad a lot of websites just don't work with Firefox. It seems web devs are not testing with Firefox anymore.
I see people complaining, I don't see concrete examples, only panic
The size of blacklists has gone from unlimited to a limited size. The blocking ability has been limited. And the worst of all, blocklists have to be bundled in extension updates and not downloaded. While they have increased the limited blocklist size for V3 overtime, I don't know if they ever changed the other limits.
Just three days ago, Mozilla reiterated [1] that Firefox would continue to support Manifest V2 alongside Manifest V3. So if you want a better web experience with uBlock Origin, Firefox is your only choice (or use Firefox forks that support it). While you're at it, note that "uBlock Origin works best on Firefox". [2]
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-manifes...
[2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...