Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
That promise is removed from the current version. There’s also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.”
The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define “sale” in a very broad way:
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).
Mozilla didn’t say which legal jurisdictions have these broad definitions.
I see it said agian and agian. because its true. Firefox is one of, if not the best of the mainstream browsers. (Not included its many forks) but Mozilla is a horrible caretaker of it. Mozilla does not focus on firefox and they dont care/believe in it nearly as much as its users or devs who fork it.
The motivations of a company are extremely important, and has Mozilla does not care for a lightweight, good, privacy centric browser, the enshitification will and has corrupt firefox.
It’s only a matter of time until it is as bad as chromium or flat out joins it.
Considering how critical a browser is these days.
I’m surprised there isn’t a very popular Open-Source one that everyone is using.
It’s because it’s hard to maintain a browser. There’s lots of protocols and engines and other moving pieces; I remember when web pages would render in Netscape but not Internet Explorer, for example.
We take for granted how seamless and ubiquitous the internet is, but there were lots of headaches as internet devs decided to adopt or include different users (or not).
And now, it would take a lot of effort and market upset to convince the capitalist overlords to include something new in their dev stack. The barrier to entry is monumentally high, so most people don’t bother to try inventing something better.
Some people are trying: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
Wasn’t there some stuff about the ladybird devs not too long ago?
I just hope that project doesn’t end up being the Voat or Parler of browsers.
It’s a browser, not a platform. Having a bunch of groypers use it doesn’t ruin the experience for everyone else so long as it retains good privacy features.
While I agree with this sentiment on the surface, using a privacy focused application that was built by folks who yield to cops as part of their identity doesn’t inspire long term viability in that space.
It’s the same reason I moved away from Proton when their CEO told us all where his values lie. It’s not outright backtracking on privacy promises but with so many comparable alternatives in this space, why chance it with the bootlickers?
Chromium is bad only in your head. It’s a fucking rendering engine with different incarnations. How can this be bad? And no, FF is not “the best”, otherwise it wouldn’t have the shitty market share it actually has.
Ah silly us.
We spent a decade hating on IE, it’s slowness, poor support for any standards, plugins that fuck your shit up, etc.
But it was obviously the best because it had that huge market share.
It’s even worse. You spent several years worshipping a misguided Corp. making a mediocre browser fir laughable reasons and you have been f*cked in the end.
Found the t3.gg enjoyer
I don’t know what is that.
Mozilla needs to understand that I don’t want it to have my data to sell or not in the first place.
That’s the thing that bothers me about all these companies now. My data is my data, not theirs. They shouldn’t even be allowed to collect it, let alone sell it or give it to anyone who wants it.
Nahhh, trust them, bro. People working on other things with the same product name as their company name were great people. That should be endorsement enough.
Wait. They have this ‘open source’ flag. If they wave it about - oooh, pretty - does that help?
Google really needs to be broken up. They’ve become the Ma Bell of the internet.
deleted by creator
There’s also Servo by the Linux Foundation and Ladybird.
These are actual different browsers and engines all together compared to FF spin-offs.
I’m still super waiting for Lady Bird. I cannot wait to give it a try, but it’s gonna be like 2026 before they start rolling out builds for general use.
I’m giving Waterfox a test drive and like it so far. No issues.
I’m considering adding it to the alternatives list I posted. Can anybody else validate their privacy policy? Seemd ok but I’m a bit iffy regarding their use of telemetry. Maybe I’m overthinking it
No telemetry, allegedly.
Edit: There does still appear to be some, although it’s less than FF and it’s anonymized. I ended up going with Fennec just in case.
https://thehackernews.com/2025/03/mozilla-updates-firefox-terms-again.html?m=1
Apparently they changed it due to backlash.
Glad they clarified. To me the “selling data being defined broadly” argument made sense in the context of Google paying them to be included as a search provider. Because there is an argument that Google paying Firefox, and then the user entering a search and that being sent to Google’s servers could be legally seen as Mozilla selling data to Google.
They should clarify that then. Explain any and all situations that could be considered “selling user data” and explain what data that consists of. Then explain how to avoid it.
That shouldn’t be hard.
Ok so I don’t have to change browsers?
There are no alternative browsers out there. Our situation has came down to choose one of the least evil out there.
I don’t know about you but I fulfill all my e-commerce needs with Offpunk.
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)
So in other words we sell your data and get paid for it, and some countries won’t let us lie about it.
They’re cash strapped and cash strapped companies are the worst when it comes to being trustworthy. That’s all the calculus that needs to be done.
Son of a removed I just got back into Firefox.
Get in loser, we’re going to librewolf apparently. Fuck me I’ve reached the age of seeing all the things I like die. I don’t even remember a time I didn’t use Firefox. God damn it
Try LibreWolf then
Is there any android port?
Not at the moment, but the Librewolf folks recommend Ironfox.
Interesting. How’s water fox?
Switched yesterday, feeling right at home so far.
Me too. Practically 0 difference, works for me!
promises don’t count if you delete them. everyone knows that
“If I put my wedding ring in my pocket, it’s not cheating…”
This kind of thinking shouldn’t be acceptable from a legal standpoint. Yet the courts do nothing…
In the US at least, the courts are seemingly bought out.
Sad it’s even acceptable.
Am I the only one here who’s pretty much okay with this? I do wish they’d clarify exactly what they mean by “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about ‘selling data’),” but having my anonymized data sold so that Mozilla can continue to operate (combined with Firefox being the best browser I’ve used in terms of both performance and flexibility - ability to install add-ons from sources outside of the Mozilla store, for example) - seems like a worthy tradeoff to me.
They also have an option to opt-out of data collection, which I do wish was opt-in instead, but with the way every other mainstream browser operates I’m just happy the option is there at all. Let me know if there’s something I’m missing here though.
To generalise, just as Reddit is the neolib centrist hivemind and Facebook is the conservative boomer hivemind, Lemmy is some overlap of privacy/techy/ultrapolitical groups - so whenever you get this kind of news that is ultimately pretty mild and uncontroversial to most you get lots of Lemmings buttons pushed and what seems like an oversized reaction in the comments.
Is Firefox perfect? No. Is it still the best available mainstream browser option? Yes. And if the small groups that presently use it walk away and its tiny market share (~5%) declines to a point where Firefox becomes insolvent - well then browsers will be just a two-horse race between Google (Chromium) and Apple (WebKit). Every web spec and page will be beholden to the desires of those companies - I’m sure the same Lemmings will be complaining about that too, and by then it will be too late to realize what they’ve lost.
If Firefox is losing its footing as a privacy focused browser then where do we go? If your on Mac maybe Safari?
Perhaps Ladybird once it’s released?
we should all support ladybird project in hope for accelerated development. alpha in 2026, beta in 2027, stable in 2028. thats a long waiting time
zen, ladybird, waterfox are some that i’ve heard of before. zen is out now. idk about the others. one of my friends uses zen and it’s pretty neat.
zen is still unstable. random errors and bugs show up very often
Gahhhh this is horrible
I spent some time switching to Librewolf this morning but at the end of the day, it having Firefox as the upstream means it’s all fragile and tenuous anyway
Switched to librewolf the other day, and it’s great
Been using it all day now and yeah, it’s very smooth sailing. The tweaks I made basically involved removing fingerprinting protection, which I saw people online deride as “defeating the entire purpose of Librewolf”. Well, not true anymore.
I just want manifest v2 and to not have to consent to ToS agreements implicitly allowing some suspicious organisation to harvest and sell literally any keypress I enter into the browser, which has become the de facto cross platform way to do almost everything.
How do the fingerprinting protection things defeat the purpose of librewolf? Seems like an unambiguously good thing for privacy… Or does it conflict with another feature?
Oh, sorry for the confusion. The posts online I’ve found about the subject of disabling fingerprinting protection in Librewolf are full of people who state that doing so “defeats the purpose of Librewolf”. Which probably WAS true before Mozilla’s recent changes, since the sole reason Librewolf had to exist was to be a hardened version of Firefox.
That’s no longer the case since Librewolf has a new purpose (now that Mozilla thinks they own the right to sell all your data): a Firefox fork without Mozilla.
I disabled a lot of that stuff because it’s kind of annoying for usability, e.g. browser won’t render anything at more than 60fps. I know this is a trade off and I’m cool with that. I have other tools and strategies in place to protect my privacy.
I use brave and librewolf, anybody know if those are still safe from this dort of thing? (Probably not I guess, so what browsers are left?)
Someone earlier said that brave was based on chrome and when google blocked ublock origin on Chrome, it would stop working on brave too.
People don’t like Brave because they believe it’s a crypto scam, and the CEO is a douchebag. But Brave has said they’ll continue to support extensions regardless of Google’s change.
