HACKER Q&A
📣 devilsdata

Firefox may be selling our data. Can you recommend an alternative?


Firefox just made a change their TOS copy that implies that they may begin selling our data [^1]. I'm a web developer– which means I need access to browser tools, and the 1Password extension. Are there privacy-focused forks of Firefox or an alternative browser you can recommend?

- [1] https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e#diff-a24e74e4595fa85440a2f4e7e5dcfe68aba6e1e593aef05a2d35581a91423847L60


  👤 ezekg Accepted Answer ✓
How does this statement [0] align with the claim in the title? Much less that Mozilla 'announced' such a thing.

> 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).

Maybe we can all take a step back before jumping to conclusions so quickly.

This feels more like legal posturing than a malicious change.

[0]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/


👤 zeropointsh
Ah, I recommend LibreWolf - A hardened fork of Firefox, stripped of telemetry, with privacy settings locked down by default.

👤 k310
I just downloaded and fired up Waterfox.

Import of settings was confusing, but these restarts are a great way to prune bookmarks and never-used extensions. Other than this, operation has been smooth sailing.

GhostText just connected to the editor that Firefox and Safari were using. And ublock-origin was my first extension loaded.

https://www.waterfox.net/


👤 helph67
The Duckduckgo browser seems to offer increased privacy compared to other browsers. In November 2024 Browsers page on link below showed: Significant protection scores out of 30 --> DuckDuckGo: 24 Brave: 19 Firefox: 4 Chrome: 2 Edge: 2 https://duckduckgo.com/compare-privacy

👤 Qem
Iceweasel? Probably at least the Firefox versions packed by many Linux distributions will remove any unreasonable telemetry added, just like they used to remove the trademarked branding.

👤 jll29
Stay tuned for Ladybird.