Goodbye Firefox hello LibreWolf

I've been using Firefox as a web browser for over a decade at this point in time.

For a long time I liked that Firefox was an alternative browser engine to Chrome. I liked that the project was open source. I also liked that Firefox seemed to care about privacy.

However all this seems to have changed lately and the privacy of Firefox has greatly diminished. As a result of recent changed to Firefox that are anti-privacy I have now decided to change to use LibreWolf as my web Browser. This is a fork of Firefox that doesn't have the spyware and Telemetry crap in it.

Here's one of the recent changes to the Firefox legal terms:

"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."

For example if I wrote this blog post in Firefox they'd claim I was granting them rights to it because I entered in the information in that browser. This is so wild. But the bigger issue is that computer security and privacy implications to this are absolutely out of control. More about this absurd situation in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4litc5DxoHQ

Part of the issue is how Mozilla is funded, Firefox receives an enormous amount of money each year from advertising giant Google in return for Google being the default search engine in Firefox. The irony here is that Alphabet, the corporation that owns Google, also are the developers of the Chrome browser which is a direct competitor to Firefox. Part of this is that in return for all the money they receive there's probably some pressure on Mozilla to change Firefox in ways that destroy the privacy of the users of the browser. This messy situation has been going on for quite some time now. What has changed in the interim is Firefox's market share which has plummeted. Another thing that has changed is the operations of Mozilla, the organization that's responsible for Firefox.

Mozilla gets a lot of money from Google to keep Google as the default search engine in Firefox and sends this money to Mozilla. However Mozilla most definitely doesn't spend all this money on the development of Firefox. In recent times the amount of money Mozilla has been spending on "other things" has gone up steadily.

Former Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker had a high salary, $3M (2020), $5M (2021), $7M (2022-2024) and then 2024 lays off 30% of staff. Now Mozilla nas a new CEO that's a MBA who's ex-McKinsey. Unsurprisingly this has led to a pivot towards advertising and turning the users into the product.

Since LibreWolf is a fork of Firefox and the recent changes to Firefox are likely to alienate many of the developers who actually make Firefox good I'll be keenly looking for alternative browsers that are not just forks of other projects that have gone down the surveillance capitalism enshittification route. I'll be keeping a very close eye on how the LadyBird web browser develops but that is too early to adopt at this point in time (March 2025) as a daily driver for web browsing. I do like that there's a project that is building a browser from a completely clean start, I'll financially support that project and I suggest you consider doing so too.

On the 3rd of March 2023 the last tab I had open on firefox was about the Mbepa effect:

I might write more about that in another blog post. For now though I think it's fitting that I say goodbye to Firefox with the last tab being a video about a huge misconception. It appears I was under a misconception about the direction of Firefox until recently, its going in a direction I simply can't approve of.