What actually changed
Firefox had a small quip in their FAQ about not selling your personal data:
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise.
This is now gone, and something else has been added to the FAQ:
Mozilla doesn't sell data about you (in the way that most people think about "selling data"), and we don't buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of "sale of data" is extremely broad in some places, we've had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
And another thing added to the Terms of use:
You Give Mozilla Certain Rights and Permissions
You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.
People are arguing that this is about how some states in the US have recently enacted stronger laws about what "selling your data" means, but it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. These kinds of legalese escape hatches are often used as a get out of jail card when the company inevitably is found out selling your data to advertising partners. It really does not help that initially the FAQ included this beautiful piece:
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
This is now removed, after the initial backlash on Github and Reddit.
The browser landscape in 2024
Stepping away from the privacy issues for a moment, let's take a look at how the browser landscape1 looked in 2024:
- Chrome - 66%
- Safari - 18%
- Edge - 5%
- Firefox - 2.6%
- Everything else - irrelevant
Google has reached critical mass, and has become the new, biggest standards body. It doesn't really matter what consensus the W3C reaches on standards, or what other browser vendors are suggesting, Google can just implement whatever they want in Chrome, and other vendors will be forced to follow, otherwise users are going to complain, and/or switch to Chrome if their websites don't work. This can already be seen in popular crapware like Teams where it straight up tells you to download Chrome if you want video chats. We went from the horrible era that was developing for Internet explorer 6, to developing for Chrome. I can't understate how bad this is.
Google's wet dream, the Web Integrity API
Google has been working on its nightmare "Web Integrity API" already, which has been openly canceled, but you can be sure that they are still going at it in private. In case you haven't heard of the Web Integrity API:
With the web environment integrity API, websites will be able to request a token that attests key facts about the environment their client code is running in. For example, this API will show that a user is operating a web client on a secure Android device. Tampering with the attestation will be prevented by signing the tokens cryptographically.
This will finally enable Google's wet dream of making the entire internet into a walled garden, just like Apple where you buy a $800 device with your own money, and you can't run your own applications, without going through a bunch of hoops, and/or paying Apple more for various certificates. Android is the same with its SafetyNet API, where Google can decide your phone is unsecure, and now a bunch of apps refuse to run. The Web Integrity API will finally bring this capability to the web, to make sure that those pesky users can't tamper with their own devices/browsers. Of course all this is done in the name of Security, and it will definitely not be used to make sure you are properly watching your ad quota for the day, and it will only cost $4.99 for a digital stamp at first (paid monthly of course). Also for some extra fun, take a look at the issues in the linked github repository, ho boy are people not happy.
So with Chrome being so high in the lead, you can be dead sure that when Google is done with their next iteration of this, it's going to land. Apple loves walled gardens and control, so they will be more than happy to implement it, and Microsoft would put ads on your turned off screens if they had the tech to do that, anything that helps them get more ads in front of people is a win for them.
This is why it's so sad to see that Mozilla has completely eroded its user's trust in their browser, and are now crumbling away. Mozilla was at least pro-privacy on paper, and they gained a lot of faith in my heart when they announced that they will keep ManifestV2 alive, after Google finally felt cocky enough to remove it in an attempt to kill uBlock. I don't understand why would they pull so much shit like paying their CEO 7 million USD2 (6 903 089$ to be precise), adding AI related crap into a web browser, installing random extensions3 into people's browsers related to TV shows, acquring an advertising company4 (becoming one?), and now changing their legalese to reflect that they are definitely not selling your data.
So this was the last deathrattle for me, I'm switching.
Switching to Waterfox
I looked at Firefox forks because I want something that has the highest chance of accepting all the contents of my old browser profile, and keeping all my addons. It seems Librewolf and Waterfox are the two most popular ones, so I ended up picking Waterfox because a friend is trying Librewolf already. So far I have no qualms about it, and I'll have a summary about it later, but for now, I encourage everyone to explore the browser landscape a bit. Switch to anything but Chrome.