Those who care very deeply about very tight privacy have enough niche options.

But I want there to be browser that has enough privacy to be sustainable so there’s a reliable option for me to recommend to family members etc which is holds enough market share for websites to test against.

If Firefox’s market share dips any lower website makers won’t support it - testing only against the homogeneity of chrome/edge/safari and then it will become a death spiral and humanity will have taken a step backwards.

It’s a case of use it lose it.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...

The actual content:

> [Given that the definition of "selling" in legal terms can be slippery, we must be aware of not falling in cases like the following:] In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our Privacy Notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP)

They are not clear where/how the data is being used. For example, why are "Unique identifiers" and "Interaction data" part of "To provide you with the Firefox browser"?

From "Interaction data": "This is data about how you engage with our services, such as how many tabs you have open or what you’ve clicked on." -- Why is it necessary to track how many tabs I have open in order to provide the browser to me? -- That isn't something they need to send via HTTP to make websites function. If it is for telemetry and improving the browser, that should be a separate section.

Despite all the justified doubts and concerns, it's also worth noting that Mozilla runs one of the few independent browser engines left, with limited ways to actually fund it.

When they're not here anymore, there aren't many parties left to argue about web standards in favor of a free web.

So I'd keep watching them as always, without painting them as evil just because of some misstep...

Even now, Firefox still doesn't consider what they do "selling data", and they are forced to change the wording only because the laws are weird.

Frankly, I just don't see how sharing data to partners to make yourself commercially viable can be construed as not selling data. In their own words, what Firefox does is:

> In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar.

We could argue about whether the laws are slippery or over-reaching, or how responsible or not Firefox has been handling user data. We could argue about how much anonymization and aggregation of data reduce privacy concerns.

But to argue that the above action is not "selling data" is in my view not a reasonable position.

In objective reality it's a bit of much ado about nothing, but in today's world it's optics and perception that rules. It's subjective.

As another comment says it takes forever to gain trust and a moment to lose it all. Trust is subjective.

It's insane to think Firefox would ever have gone this route? How disconnected is management? The move would be suicide! A major reason people use Firefox is because of privacy. The other major reason is because a user's privacy conscious child or grandchild installed it for them. That's your whole fucking userbase!

It's a shame too because they had the opportunity to double down on privacy. What with Apple caving to governments.

I was a fanboy who's been with you for nearly two decades You can check my comment history. I defended you through tough times, I've donated, and for what? A slap in the face.

You had it going with the rust rewrite and just floundered on every opportunity. You made Thunderbird pretty good and gave many hope, then floundered. You have some great devs, let them make great software

So where do we go now? What browser that isn't just a different color of chrome? Safari? No. Ladybird? Sea Monkey?

...yeah? That's pretty straightforward.

I've been deeply studying "trust" for the past year, as part of a project around "Zero Trust". It's a core pillar in cybersecurity. Trust is very complex. Extremely hard won, easy to lose, practically impossible to rebuild.

Mozilla have blown it and there's no going back for that company. This is what happens when you let morally defective people take the reigns. My advice would be, dissolve it and use whatever money is left to start new projects for free-software browsers.

Mozilla's core major malfunction is that they are deceptive, as an organisational culture. No amount of hard work, careful words, money spent on PR will hide that odour, and whatever goodwill they show now will naturally be undone as they return to business as usual.

This looks like a deja-vu of Apple CSAM scanning.

"We didn't mean it".

If they acquired Tailscale, I'd stop using it.

If they endorsed ChaCha20, I'd question if it is backdoored.