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Mozilla has been making a lot of decisions that is receiving quite the backlash from their users and the Firefox community for a while now. One of the most notable ones was them breaking their promise. The sentences that included the word “sell” in Firefox’ FAQ page was taken out. [1][2] And the question, “Does Firefox sell your personal data?” was completely removed from the page. [1][2] They have also updated the terms of use of Firefox [3], which included a lot of controversial terms that left people confused, even after they updated it because of the backlash they have received. If you’d like to read more specifically about these changes, you can check my archived blog. Even though no changes has been made to the source code of Firefox that decreased the privacy of users about Mozilla handling user data, this change still gathered a lot of negative attention. Mozilla has claimed these changes were made because of legal clarity reasons [4], but some people including me remain skeptical about it. They could’ve just define the word “sell” in their FAQ page, or explain the sentences in a better way without removing them completely.
This incident was not the start of the ruination of Mozilla though. Mozilla has already been drifting away from their initial focus. They are trying to get into the advertisement business [5], and if you visit the Wikipedia page of Mozilla, you will see “Online advertising” stated in their “Industry” section. [6] These paths that Mozilla is deciding to to take keeps showing the direction they’re heading, and it doesn’t seem to be the right one. I cannot know what the reason behind these decisions are, but they might be because they’re influenced by the Big Tech that provide the majority of Mozilla’s revenue [7]. While it is true that Firefox itself is an independent browser [7], Mozilla’s dependency is something to consider. They have also added built-in AI features to Firefox, both local and from external proprietary providers. [8] Firefox contains options to use “AI chatbots” in the sidebar and the context menu, which are not running locally and almost all of them are proprietary [8], which is bad for user privacy (something that Mozilla claims to have your back on) [9] regardless of anyone’s view on AI.
So what can you do as a Firefox user that doesn’t want to switch to Chromium-based or Webkit-based browsers, but is tired of Mozilla’s bullshit? Well you have two main options, either configure Firefox yourself with configurations like arkenfox [10] and disable features manually, or use a fork. If you decide to configure it yourself, you should keep in mind that your browser will still be under Mozilla’s terms of use when you use the official binaries provided by Mozilla themselves, if that is something that bothers you. If you decide to use a fork, I do have some recommendations for different use cases. LibreWolf [11] is a community maintained project and is a great option if you seek for a hardened Firefox configuration, as it gets rid of most of the bullshit that is in mainstream Firefox and adds additional strict privacy protections. Very similar to LibreWolf there is also Mullvad Browser, which is developed by Mullvad and the Tor Project. [12] Configuration-wise, it is very similar to LibreWolf, with some minor changes like enabling letterboxing by default. It is meant to be like the Tor Browser but used with a VPN instead of the Tor network. [13] If you do not seek for a hardened Firefox configuration, Floorp [14] is another good option, as it disables some features like Mozilla’s telemetry by default. [15]