Is Mozilla Firefox Getting Sketchy?

Yeah, Firefox has been going down the tubes for a while, suffering under inept management and a bloated organisation, whittling Mozilla’s endowment away on vanity projects while the browser is languishing.

And when they recently saw the need to tighten the belts, they fired the people working on core parts of the browser (Servo) as well as those working on the crucial browser documentation on MDN.

Adding spyware and ads to the browser is just the rotten cherry on top of the excrement sundae they expect us to eat.

After using Firefox since it first came out, I recently switched to Vivaldi. It’s Chromium-based these days, but with much of the same configurability and flexibility that I loved about Firefox, and the people behind it at least appear to have their hearts in the right place.

TAForObvReasons• 5 years ago

This goes back many years, long before "the need to tighten the belts":

The first "user-enhancing" in-browser ads ("sponsored tiles") were introduced in 2014 https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504

Pocket imposition was 2015 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126

Mr Robot stunt was 2017 https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-back...

Cliqz tracking was 2017 https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...

booking.com ads was 2018 https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/31/mozilla-ad-on-firefoxs-ne...

It's easy to look at the actions of the last few years as if they are the exception, but this has been going on for a long time and Mozilla was given a slide for "reasons"

cinquemb3• 5 years ago

I consider all of this a consequence of the Post Eich regime at Mozilla…

Tepix• 5 years ago

I consider the fact that Firefox hid the "block 3rd party cookies" setting deep in their preferences to be part of this. Acting against user interests in favor of their sugar daddy Google.

atatatat• 5 years ago

Mozilla wasn't paid for the "Mr. Robot" tie-in, Kaykas-Wolff said. "We've enjoyed a growing partnership with the show and the show's audience," he said.

TBB looks like Firefox, is that why? Kali makes appearances, too (albeit as an everyday desktop OS).

soundnote• 5 years ago

Pocket itself is a good thing, I think. As this post ( http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht... ) explains, a browser pretty much needs an external footprint on the Internet and standalone revenue to have good odds of living. Pocket is a step in that direction, if only a small one, and it fits with an overall thing about making it nicer to use the Internet.

That's a hard thing for a lot of Firefox's userbase to swallow, their dream being a pristine FOSS project essentially run as donationware. Nonfree things, monetization etc. just really don't sit well with that lot. I know, I was one of the people whining about Pocket when it was integrated into the browser and didn't see the point of it. Now? If Firefox is to live, more things like Pocket need to happen.

Opt-out keylogging in a privacy browser isn't that, though.

inter_netuser2• 5 years ago

Why not Brave?

dhedberg2• 5 years ago

they fired the people working on core parts of the browser (Servo)

Just to clarify, Servo was never a part of Firefox. Maybe that's not what you meant, but I've seen it confused with Gecko before which is the actual browser engine used by Firefox.

And as much as I am puzzled by some of the design choices lately - for the android version of Firefox especially - I think that it would be a loss in more ways than one to lose the last (?) real alternative to the Chromium-based family of browsers.

mikl3• 5 years ago

I might be mistaken, but I thought Stylo (the CSS part of Servo) was shipped as part of Firefox in 2017.

fzzzy• 5 years ago

Several modules from servo have been inserted into firefox proper.

rvz• 5 years ago

It is what is it is.

Mozilla already admitted it ever since being >80% funded by Google. The fact that they could not help staying with Google over the years and thought that they could do without them tell us that they were compromised on their 'mission' on 'a privacy-focused browser' anyway.

Hence that, Mozilla is finished.

tailspin2019• 5 years ago

This is a real shame. As a long time Safari user (and Chrome user only for web dev) I was about to move over to Firefox this week.

This was driven by wanting to get away from Chrome (Google in general) and the appalling UI decisions in the latest Safari, which were so terrible I’m lost for words.

Having installed Firefox, I sadly was not impressed with its UI either - coming from Safari 14 which is much more elegant in my opinion.

And now I’ve been reading this steady trickle of worrying articles over the last week which are just totally putting me off.

This is a really sorry state of affairs for web browsers. How do we collectively fix this mess….?

bleachedsleet• 5 years ago

https://browser.kagi.com

Not affiliated, but perhaps give them a try? There’s some immensely interesting projects in the space coming out these days.

frazbin• 5 years ago

Mozilla is still a hell of a lot better aligned with my interests than Apple or Google. And do we not value browser diversity anymore? I understand the irrational fury directed at non profits when they're less than perfect but it's kinda embarrassingly self defeating when applied to software. The environment we are coding in in today was built by companies like Mozilla.

jeffgreco2• 5 years ago

Why do you consider the criticism of these advertising features irrational?

mikl3• 5 years ago

It’s exactly because I do care, that I’m so frustrated. Mozilla was our best chance to have a truly independent browser. And they blew it. And they’re still blowing it, destroying their remaining good-will with one tin-eared, alienating move after another.

This is not “less than perfect”. This is gross incompetence. Firefox has been in steep decline for over a decade, yet the same people who are responsible for this monumental failure are still in charge, still running it (into the ground).

If they do not get some more capable people in charge, Firefox will continue its decline into irrelevancy, and we’ll all be worse off, when Google, Apple and Microsoft are the only browser vendors left standing.

otabdeveloper4• 5 years ago

Mozilla is funded by Google. They need a foil to boil this frog very slowly for antitrust reasons.

cinquemb3• 5 years ago

I don't need Mozilla, I have been compiling garbage out of it for nearly 6+ years while adding stuff of my own. I would rather, at this point, they dissolve. Which will create a vacuum and allow for space for a fork to evolve without all the garbage coming in constantly from upstream and compete for resources for (for those who have no interest in pursuing alternatives with a chromium dependency and do not care that the latest and greatest™ google features aren't in servo).

nacs• 5 years ago

After upgrading Firefox, it appears it's on by default on my Ubuntu install. Pretty disappointing move from Mozilla.

To turn it off: Goto "Settings" > "Privacy & Security" > "Address bar" > "Include occasional sponsored suggestions".

Also this setting is ON by default even though I have things like the "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" checkbox off.

jml7c5• 5 years ago

The second impact of Firefox Suggest is that the web browser will now collect your keystrokes and send them back to Mozilla

This appears to be incorrect.[0] The suggestions are offline, based on a list downloaded beforehand. There will be online ads in the future, but it will be opt-in and gated behind a dialog.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/q4f92r/remain_calm...

jeffgreco2• 5 years ago

Bizarre that the nonprofit’s browser has more advertising built in than the advertising company’s browser.

ElectricalUnion• 5 years ago

The advertising company doesn't need the built-in browser ads to get revenue; it just needs to make bad or impossible to get a working adblocker on it's browser.

unicornporn• 5 years ago

Or simply track people signed in to their ad account (Google account) in the browser itself. The ads can later be viewed on web pages. Very handy.

makecheck• 5 years ago

Their latest changes aren’t great but they can be disabled. In general there are work-arounds for all their quirks. We should not overreact.

Firefox remains the only way I can get full uBlock Origin and uMatrix on the desktop, and I simply refuse to browse the mind-bogglingly frustrating “modern web” without those.

Also, browser diversity is crucial. We should support the main competition as long as possible.

akkartik• 5 years ago

I hope someone who understands Firefox internals and release process is ready to step in with uBlock Origin if/when they finally jump the shark.

user3939382• 5 years ago

Firefox phones home to Mozilla all the time due to behavior that’s hard coded with no controls. If you proxy it you’ll see all the traffic. This is just the latest behavior of that type which is visible to users so it’s gotten a lot of attention.

vfclists• 5 years ago

Mozilla has always been sketchy.

An organization committed to obtaining most of its income from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo is sketchy, no matter what they say.

propogandist2• 5 years ago

I noticed calls out to some Firefox URL with "normandy" (in pihole) which seems to be tied to FF experiments [1]

After going into about:config and searching Normandy, I learned I was opted into FF experiments without my consent and I had zero options to opt-out in the regular UI.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Normandy/PreferenceRollout

kingofpandora• 5 years ago

That seems like fairly innocuous A-B testing.

propogandist2• 5 years ago

A/B testing is blocked on websites and apps on my machine, there's no reason why the browser vendor should be allowed to run experiments on my machine without my knowledge and consent.

gilrain3• 5 years ago

Mozilla has previously used it for a cross-promotion with TV show Mr Robot. They also used it to push an emergency update to everyone once.

That said, officially it is guaranteed to only ever be used for properly vetted academic experiments.

So it should be fine! /s

mastrsushi• 5 years ago

WebKit is under LGPL, why do we even care about Firefox anymore?

imagetic• 5 years ago

We could always pay for it...

gilrain3• 5 years ago

Actually, we literally can’t.

Is Mozilla Firefox Getting Sketchy?

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