Firefox or not
On February 26, 2025 Firefox announced that they have updated their privacy notice for Firefox1.
A few hours later all hell broke loose, because the once known privacy respecting browser has fallen or is on its way down. Where on its terms of service Mozilla states that by uploading or inputting information through Firefox, they gain nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information.
Assuming you are well aware of what is going on i don’t want to bother repeating the same thing over.
In the last few years, we have come to understand and have established the idea that your web browser is your digital home anything you do and want to do happens through your browser, most of our daily tasks could be at work or home don’t deviate much from using a browser. We have gotten better at sharing information online with faster internet and better web technologies (stuffing Js everywhere..).
In the sea of online publications, magazines, videos and all that jazz the battle for the better browser and better internet remains still, every browser comes feature packed with its own set of tools and design implementation could be horizontal tabs, better split screens, tab management and what not. Underneath every web browser is the web engine which the primary function is to turn all that code into a visual representation on the user’s device, the web engine handles tasks such as layout, rendering, and implementing the Document Object Model (DOM) for scripts. There are a lot of different web engines out there2 from those the popular ones are Webkit (safari), Blink (chrome and chromium based browsers), Gecko (Mozilla Firefox). While most browsers are just a fork of chromium using blink, Mozilla had done a really great job through the years with gecko and Firefox in doing so built quite the name for itself.
For the average layman the choice of a web browser and the technicalities that come along side with it does not matter, people would use anything that comes pre-installed with their system because after all what matters is that they reach their desired site. So what does the updated terms of service signify, absolutely nothing most percentage of the people would just go on and continue their daily lives without even budging.
While online privacy is becoming a myth every second of the day, there remains a group of people (including me) who had put their hopes in Firefox for a bit of salvation and dignity, while we know that we can’t be offline anymore, Firefox offered us a light at the end of the tunnel maybe if we kept on tweaking our preferences and doing this and that we might to some extent get far out the reach of all harvesting and surveillance.
but then
Mozilla has been making a lot of changes which has been causing tons of backlash from the community time to time and while i don’t think this is the final nail in the coffin. I think this is a beam showing us to the future we are heading, while countries race for the best AI model out there our data remains crucial and anyone can see that Mozilla is trying to capitalize on that and keep food on the table.
So what next .. do we still keep using Firefox fighting the bad guys while selling our data or chrome selling our data and fighting who ..? . The beauty in all that is we still have choices even tho we might leak pieces of our personal data here and there we still get to choose what to choose, while there are plenty of reason to keep on using Firefox i think that choice remains to the user.
Personally its been quite a while since i left Firefox been using Vivaldi which is a chromium based browser using blink, i really love the encrypted sync and no bs reading list (unlike pocket ) i would certainly recommend it to anyone and since you won’t be having compatibility issues with some sites, I totally can assure you its feature packed while respecting your privacy3.
as usual hope you enjoyed this one an my plug for vivaldi which i wish was sponsored but isn’t. i am trying to once again get into the habbit of writing consistently so bare with me
Sources
Articles and blogs
- Firefox: About Your Rights — Mozilla
- Firefox Privacy Notice — Mozilla
- An update on our Terms of Use
Videos
- The Worst Firefox Update Ever - YouTube
- You Should Stop Using Firefox… - YouTube
- Mozilla is NOT SELLING your DATA! (But they did mess up…) - YouTube
- Chat, Is Mozilla Firefox Cooked - YouTube