Mozilla is making it clear that they do not care about users any more.

Firefox is full of ads, with ads being in the homepage shortcuts, the news feed and the omnibox dropdown, as well as various ads for Mozilla services throughout the UI. Their ad network is also marketed to companies as allowing them to reach adblocker users.

Mozilla’s 210M+ global users are typically hard to reach. They’re usually hidden behind ad blockers, nearly half avoid dominant social media, and most say no to default platforms. They’re selective, tech savvy, and paying attention. From: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/

Firefox is also full of tracking, with their mobile app sending data to the tracking company Adjust, and it having options for “personalised extension recommendations” and “Install and run studies”. The latter allows them to install what they want into your browser without your consent out of the box.

Their tracking protection also mostly works only in private / incognito mode by default, with tracking scripts being allowed to run in standard windows with just isolated cookies protecting you, which is not a decision that a company who actually cares about privacy would make.

Mozilla is also partnering with Perplexity, an AI search engine who wants to collect as much data as possible even outside of their app to sell “hyper personalized” ads, which is exactly who you shouldn’t work with if you claim to care about privacy. From: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/

I recommend switching to Librewolf as it takes Firefox and removes this bullshit. Some other alternatives like Brave are just as bad.

  • aesviation@lemmings.world
    1·
    17 hours ago

    Because they trust us, they’ll trust you.

    Holy fuck, the advertising industry is literally nothing but sleazeballs.

  • kadu@scribe.disroot.org
    3·
    6 days ago

    Boycott Firefox and do what?

    Ladybird is 5 years away from replacing your browser. Any other Firefox fork is maintained by five or eight people who take Firefox and apply their parches. Everything else is Chrome.

    Boycott Firefox, make it economically inviable, bankrupt Mozilla. Now what? Librewolf can patch a working browser to enable some flags by default and strip some features, can they maintain a JavaScript engine? Can they fund a bug bounty program? Can they support all platforms?

    • FG_3479@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      6 days ago

      I agree, but for now, Librewolf is the best option we have.

      Ladybird isn’t very usable yet, and Librewolf removes the features that produce profit for Mozilla so you are not directly supporting them.

      The alternative is Chromium based browsers, and Helium is a good Chromium equivalent to Librewolf if you prefer the Chrome engine, but it uses a greedy company’s engine just like Librewolf, so the indirect support is identical.

  • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    Ok but you still need the Firefox project to succeed for librefox to exist. So how does that work?

  • Scratch@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    Getting real tired of the “boycott Mozilla! They take money from Google!” And “boycott Mozilla! They try to make money from their users!” Merry-go-round.

  • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
    0·
    6 days ago

    We need to fork Firefox and fund enough developers to make it viable as a standalone project that’s not just a laggy, disenshittified version of Firefox. It has been done with LibreOffice and CoMaps, so theoretically it is possible.

    • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      A browser is a while different beast. Firefox has half as many lines of code as the Linux kernel, just for comparison. Security must be topnotch since the that model is to treat the website as if it is already malicious. Even with all of Firefox’s developers, it lags behind Chromium in sandboxing/isolation and exploit mitigations.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 days ago

    Using Librewolf isn’t boycotting Firefox. Librewolf is a soft fork and is dependent on Mozilla for updates. You could switch to Ladybird or something more obscure, but I don’t think you’ll achieve much with that either.

    • BluescreenOfDeath@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      Unfortunately, there aren’t many options in the 2025 internet browser market.

      Unless something has changed, the gecko engine Firefox uses is the only distinctly different engine from Chrome, and I don’t think writing a browser engine from scratch is easy. So if the solution is to hard pivot away from Firefox entirely, I don’t know how you don’t end up using some Chrome based browser.

      At least Mozilla hasn’t tried to kill adblockers like Google clearly is trying to.

      Forking the codebase and stripping out any AI code is much easier than trying to invent another wheel.

    • 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      You could switch to Ladybird

      Servo already has releases and includes mobile as well.

      https://github.com/servo/servo/releases

      If anyone deserves support, it’s Servo.

      They have a track record for being performance focused (from when it was part of Mozilla) and aren’t right wing assholes.