Welp, it was a good run
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Fucking shitpiles at mozilla
Switched to Waterfox right away. There are other forks i'll consider if waterfox also tries to pull the AI uno card as well. Chromium crap is out of question because of manifest 3
Do you think Librewolf is a valid alternative? I'd like to keep using it but obviously I wouldn't want to if it doesn't live up to it's name.
Yeah it is fine
Waterfox migrator here too. I'm considering a monthly $ membership to Waterfox because it's getting harder to find a browser that doesn't want to cloud capitalise my usage.
February 19, 2025.
As I have said many times over the last few years, Mozilla is entering a new chapter—one where we need to both defend what is good about the web and steer the technology and business models of the AI era in a better direction.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
Apparently there is new era.
i guess its finally it.
I feel for Ashley here. She likely had no say in the matter and is being tasked to defend this change.
There is only one way to fix this short term which is to roll back the TOS.
Long term would be to guarantee to keep the MPL as the governing license for both the source code and executable.
Acceptable solution would be severely limit the license users would have to give to Mozilla, both time bound and use bound.
you hereby grant us a ~~nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide~~ limited, royalty-free license, used for the duration explicitly necessary to allow Firefox ~~to use that information to help you~~ navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate ~~with your use of Firefox~~, not to exceed execution duration of the browser, or one day, whichever is shorter.
But again, absolutely no license should be necessary. The browser is not a legal entity and I should not need to give Mozilla a license for my data.
The ToS hasn't gone into effect yet, so it would be postponing rather than rolling back. One thing that hasn't been answered yet, though, is why this change is needed now - possibly, there's a legal reason why postponing isn't an option?
I feel for all the dollars that will get wet with her tears as she wipes her eyes with them.
We. Don't. Want. AI.
Great, what other good Gecko Engine Browsers are there?
Waterfox is the safe bet, it's basically just regular Firefox repacked with better defaults and telemetry turned off, but it isn't harden or has add-ons included.
LibreWolf is what I switched to over a year ago, The team behind it have been pretty thorough in scraping out spyware and it comes pre-hardened out the box (but that can break more invasive websites).
They're opt-in by default, it's not like they're forcing AI on you.
Even the mere existence of AI which usage is opt-in is a so called slippery slope.
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... yet
idk why people are downvoting, it's exactly what has happened with literally every bad policy online anywhere. They beta test it to gauge how bad backlash would be, then if it's acceptable go ahead with it, if too much backlash just use the "oh it was just a beta! we would never do that 🥺" excuse then in 6 months try again
Edit: the Lemmy hive mind has reversed their decision. It was at +4 | -4 when I replied
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So, how painless is the transition from heavily customized and extended Firefox Developer Edition to Waterfox? Do I lose CSS support for multi-row tabs or compatibility with any extensions attained from the Mozilla store?
I already don't maintain a Mozilla account or use any form of syncing, so "losing" that won't matter.
Waterfox has mozilla sync
Ah, does it also have Pocket and Mozilla VPN and all the stuff I have to go into about:config to remove from Firefox too?
No, don't think so
"It does NOT give us ownership of your data"
Then why did it say that it does?
"When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
If we insist on having terms at all, then GOOD and user-respecting terms are ones which list clearly, precisely and exhaustively exactly what data will be used for what purpose under what circumstance.
BAD and corporate-favouring terms are ones which make broad, sweeping statements which can be interpreted any way the company likes in their favour - and where changes to how and what data is shared and transmitted can be made any time without updating the terms, because the terms are so broad they cover just about anything.
Pretty clear which one of those things the new terms are.
This is exactly why I don't believe a single word they say about this new TOS.
Their MPL2 was perfectly fine. Moving their executable to a proprietary license with less freedoms was not going to go well.
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K. In that case, explicitly guarantee it in your terms and conditions.
It’s clear now that they don’t care, and they will use whatever we type to train their AI.
That’s the end of Firefox for me, it’s disgusting that they don’t care about privacy anymore.
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