It's mostly overblown. You can watch here or read here. The internet is overreacting again, but Mozilla has done fuck all to grasp why just yoinking understandable language and expecting people to understand legalese and draw lines to their Privacy Policy is making people upset or confused.

Imo, people jumping ship is justified, because a company that makes $37M just on investments should do better about being vocal and prescient champions of privacy. Even if their actual privacy policy is the same as it was a year ago, their failure to communicate with their supporters in a way they can understand should have consequences.

I still recommend it with a little asterisk:

Disable a bunch of shit in it or download a privacy focused fork of it (like Librewolf)

and predictions saying Firefox is going downhill fast and that their forks won’t be maintained for much longer.

Possibly true, but abandoning ship is only bringing us closer to that timeline. People seem to be completely ignorant/delusional about how much work these forks will require to maintain if Mozilla's full time employees stop working on Firefox. If you have a practical reason to use another fork (like maybe a feature Firefox doesn't have) then I totally understand using that instead, but if you are simply making some kind of ethical protest change like all the new LibreWolf users who are so loudly virtue signalling at the moment then you need to think seriously about whether this course of action will ultimately end up hurting your ideals. Mozilla definitely has a big communication problem and I understand the desire to distance oneself from an organisation that repeatedly disrespects its supporters and never learns from its mistakes, as it is very fatiguing to endure their constant failures and the massive fall-outs from them, but ultimately I feel like switching away from Firefox is still an emotional decision rather than a rational one.

I switched to https://librewolf.net/ on Desktop and https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox on Android.

I like LibreWolf, it's a privacy and security focused fork of Firefox.

But I'm really looking forward to Servo, hopefully it becomes usable one day.

The whole firefox controversy was overblown. Hardened firefox is still the way to go.

well Firefox may enshittify, it's still the best option imo, certainly better than chrome or anything chrome based. even better if you use a privacy focused fork like librewolf.

there are other options out there, you can look into qt browsers, those were the basis for webkit browsers. hopefully soon things like servo/verso become more useable.

I mean yeah. I'm not a fan of the changes but there's no way in hell anything Chromium based will fare any better... do they even have uBlock still???

Probably turn off the telemetry, try a fork like LibreWolf or maybe the Arkenfox user.js if you'd rather stay close to upstream.

i wasn't as plussed as everyone else over it, though i am concerned. i still donate to mozilla as, ultimately, i believe they're still good for those who champion an ethical, open, and not for profit internet.

i have switched to librefox, though, just because i like their developers and the fact that they've embraced mastodon and the fediverse. i also have firefox and nightly (though i use fennec on android because it comes through f droid)

I'm not interested in anything based off Chromium, and I don't really like the idea of going with a Firefox fork much either. You're not only trusting them to actually care about your privacy and security, and you're not even just trusting them to actually catch and fix all of Mozilla's shenanigans as well. You are also trusting them to constantly stay on top of all the latest security patches. There aren't really any Firefox forks I trust with all 3 of those things at once. Even if there was, there are certainly no forks of Firefox that have anything even remotely close to the capacity necessary to maintain a web engine on their own, so you're still trusting Mozilla to keep Firefox updated and secure for your fork of choice to even have a chance.

Until a new browser with a new engine comes along that actually lets me use the full uBlock Origin there's not really any other option besides Firefox that makes sense. At least to me.

I would say no. With the recent debacle the writing is on the wall. Mozilla is not taking our privacy seriously. So, I have switched away from vanilla Firefox.

I would recommend using a fork instead: LibreWolf, or Floorp, or Zen; and Ironfox on Android. Mullvad Browser is another option.

Links2 is obviously the best browser. #links2gang

But librewolf is pretty neat.

Firefox with like 10 different settings checkboxes unticked through its settings to disable phoning home, prevent sponsored suggestions, prevent recommendations, etc. + ublock origin extension installed, obviously.

It used to be just an install and go ordeal. Now you have to have all these caveats. I used to send technical and interaction to Mozilla but given their terms changes I can’t be confident in them with even that much information anymore.

Final thought is I don’t see what Mozilla’s endgame is. It costs a lot of money to develop a competitive and impactful web browser, I understand that much. Where are they supposed to get their money from? Well. I don’t get paid millions a year to solve this problem, but it seems pretty obvious the current leadership have made their minds up to make Firefox yet another advertisement browser.

The browser project dedicated to open web standards steered by a compromised non-profit or the browser project dedicated to undermining the traditional web browsing experience steered by the largest advertising company on Earth ... Let me think ...

Nope. LibreWolf & Waterfox are top-tier, Zen and Mullvad Browsers aren't bad at all

I still recommend it. I'm not fully happy with the situation but for now I consider it my best option.

1. I consider Chromium-based browsers out of the question as they give too much power to Google. This is already showing to be a problem with new APIs and "features" that Google is pushing into the web platform and the bigger the market share gets the more control they have.
2. Web browsers are the biggest attack surface that most people have. Displaying untrusted webpages and running untrusted code is incredibly difficult and vulnerabilities are regularly discovered. I don't yet know a Firefox fork that I trust enough to reliably respond to security vulnerabilities quickly and correctly.

So for now I am staying with raw Firefox. Not to mention that as a disto-built Firefox I have some insulation from Mozilla's ToS. But I am very much considering some of the forks, especially the ones that are very light with patches and are mostly configuration tweaks.

Yea sticking with firefox , but with arkenfox hardening.. bugfixes are more important than fear of some wordings , at least for now. Vanadium in GOS on the phone.

I am sticking with Firefox but looking at hardening with https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox

I switched to Floorp about a month ago.

https://floorp.app/en

It seems the alternatives are worse but I'm definitely trying out one of the Firefox forks

Just switched to Floorp. Loving it.

I’ll put my vote in for LibreWolf. Happy to help anyone with a ‘i can’t get librewolf to…’ or ‘this site is broken on librewolf’, etc to help you tweak it.

But i keep both installed. Libre for my daily driver. FF if there’s a site that i absolutely need to be identifiable for.