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Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

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Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mozilla as an org is a husk of it's former self. They're constantly playing catch up with Firefox, almost abandonwared thunderbird, and have little actual usable innovation. What part of Firefox is "open source" when you can't integrate in your own projects? What's the point when the tech is non portable? Chromium is the clear OS winner, so open and modular you can just make your own browsers.

> What part of Firefox is "open source" when you can't integrate in your own projects?

AFAIK, all of it; there are even full independent forks running around. Just because you can't bend the code to your particular use doesn't make it not FOSS.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lynx is the only one I trust, but it's quite limited. Everything else has my suspicion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

What's the lynx-but-graphical alternative? I just want a minimal web view and input a URL. Why doesn't this exist

> What's the lynx-but-graphical alternative?

Dillo or elinks

> I just want a minimal web view and input a URL.

Surf (suckless project)

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#304

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…

> After the Firefox 4 nightmare I would love to hear more about this

Firefox 4 was supposed to be our response to Google Chrome. We were feature driven. "Firefox 4 will be released with features A, B and C". And it took us a stupid amount of time to get there. Firefox 4 was supposed to be great. But no devtools, no multiprocess … compared to Chrome it was bad.

So much work and stress went into this release, it took us a loooong time, people were exhausted, and the result was mediocre. Electrolysis was hard. Hardware acceleration challenging. And all these new HTML5 features… gosh.

But we had to get much much better, because the Google's engineer were killing it. The race was hard. And we also needed a Firefox-on-mobile plan. With less engineers, and a much smaller budget.

Important people left after Firefox 4. John Lilly left. And Mozilla hired product managers and such. More marketing etc etc. Things changed. We moved to a new version of Firefox every 6 weeks (that was a good move though).

We basically went from the "savior of the internet" to "google chrome followers".

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Brave - no regrets

I'm almost certain Brave would have something like this too as advertising is their business model, right?

It does: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lynx is the only one I trust, but it's quite limited. Everything else has my suspicion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

What's the lynx-but-graphical alternative? I just want a minimal web view and input a URL. Why doesn't this exist

It does exist, it's called netsurf[0].

[0]: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was this principle violated in this case?

It gives Mozilla the opportunity to connect my IP address with my browser with my Mozilla account. Mozilla needs to bow down to the US govt and supply them with this information should they have stored it, if the govt feels they need it.

Could this be considered a GDPR violation? If other posters are correct there is no way to opt out until after the installation and just running the installer already reports back to Mozilla.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#308
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know I let a lot of important things in Firefox slide (like the poor Webspeech API support, bad text-to-speech, some missing extensions and a lot of other things) but I still make it a habit to use it over Chrome (and recommend it to everybody) as somewhere in my mind it feels like a small revolt against the giant evil Google corp. But stuff like this and other shenanigans in the past (like Mr.robot, misuse of fu…

I switched to Brave - no regrets

People complain about firefox doing shady stuff and then use Brave lmao. Just leaving these here: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/19125#issuecom...

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/16611#issuecom...

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#309

From the linked bugzilla https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1677497#c0 >One note, in case it's not already clear: The download token will be available in the telemetry environment, but all web session data that it is linked to will NOT ever be included in telemetry, it is being deliberately kept in a separate data set, and we will be limiting access to the ability to join these data sets to a small set of p…

> Small set of people?

The entirety of the US government most likely, any hacker that manages to get onto Mozillas servers, every spy agency worth its money, if its choice of research partners has something to say everyone at Meta. So in total maybe a bit bellow a million people. So really just a handful of trusted people.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#310

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/

Why is this being downvoted?

Because librefox is unmaintained. Use librewolf instead.
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