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Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

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Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#291
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mistake is at step 1 when you downloaded Firefox instead of Tor Browser.

Tor is banned in countries where you are most likely to get in trouble for your online activities like China, or more recently, Russia.

Tor supports many kinds of bridges to serve as unlisted "inproxies" to enter the Tor network in an environment that blocks Tor.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#292

I don't understand why this is news? Spyware watchdog posted about this years ago. It's been in there at least since 2016, and every time you open Firefox (not start!) it will happily broadcast its geo position information to their geolocation backend. The same goes for the WebRTC related STUN servers, which are always connected to when Firefox starts. I mean, come on folks. Never trust any software blindly. Use MITM…

> I am still busy forking webkit into retrokit and it's a shitload of work to remove these tracking features. Why not fork Firefox? Or just disable the tracking?

> Why not fork Firefox?

> Why not fork Electron/Chromium/nwjs?

Tried it and gave up. It's impossible. Repotools, manifests and submodule fatigue and other things make it close to impossible to host all the code yourself and build it, because many parts of the build toolchain and codebase contain includes via git/https URLs these days.

That's why I went with WebKit, because there I clone a single repo, install the dependencies/libraries, build it and have a running Browser. Without having to have internet all the time, without dozens of repos that are out of my control.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#293
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Brave - no regrets

I did, too. All I can tell you is that when I have Brave running on an M1 with four tabs open, it's consistently using 240MB of memory. When I fire up Firefox Developer Edition with the same tabs open, it starts at 660MB and quickly balloons up to 1.05GB of memory usage.

How are the devtools in Brave?

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you prefer Firefox to chrome, then the best alternative is librefox. Librefox is Firefox without all of the tracking: https://github.com/intika/Librefox/

Librefox is unmaintained: https://github.com/intika/Librefox/issues/141 . https://librewolf.net/ is a fork of that.

Minor detail: Note that librefox/librewolf are not forks, but a patchset (similar to ungoogled chromium). So the base of the source code is still upstream firefox. [1]

[1] https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/browser/source/-/tree...

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe the apologists commenting on this. Firefox put a lot of effort into tracking download to install behavior. Maybe this is the only violation you know about. There's no reason to continue to believe in Mozilla's good faith. They've been captured, and are 90% dependent on Google revenue. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28954390 Firefox is dead. It's time to move past denial. It does…

I can. I'd still rather use Firefox than Chrome or Edge when it comes to privacy. "Firefox is dead ... Time to bury the putrid, rotting corpse" is ridiculously dramatic.

What about Vivaldi or Brave?

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe the apologists commenting on this. Firefox put a lot of effort into tracking download to install behavior. Maybe this is the only violation you know about. There's no reason to continue to believe in Mozilla's good faith. They've been captured, and are 90% dependent on Google revenue. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28954390 Firefox is dead. It's time to move past denial. It does…

What're the alternatives to Firefox? The only ones that come to mind are Opera and Brave, and Brave had some controversy too.

Careful, Opera is owned by a Chinese company that is controlled by the CCP.

What you want is Vivaldi.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#298
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Brave - no regrets

I did, too. All I can tell you is that when I have Brave running on an M1 with four tabs open, it's consistently using 240MB of memory. When I fire up Firefox Developer Edition with the same tabs open, it starts at 660MB and quickly balloons up to 1.05GB of memory usage.

Because Brave (and chrome, edge, opera) runs on Blink, and Firefox runs on Gecko

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#299

I'm posting anonymously for obvious reasons. I've been working at Mozilla since its inception. And eventually left the company 2 years ago. And I'm so mad. Mozilla is not the Mozilla that was created almost 20 years ago. It's not the same people there. After the Firefox 4 nightmare, they started hiring product managers from big corp. We started seeing some ex-twitter, ex-microsoft, ex-amazon joining the company. Peop…

Don't you think Mitchell is a big part of the problem? She controls both MoCo and MoFo. She is a good motivational speaker but a terrible operational exec.

Hi Fabrice :) Yeah… of course. The whole thing was a mess…

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the "attack" is easy to avoid. But you first have to know about it. Mozilla should not be planting such landmines.

Now let's think about how much users can trust Firefox's VPN service. Multipurpose telemetry being utilized there too?

Good point. Isn’t their VPN just a rebranded Mullvad VPN with a higher price?
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