Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data
-
Google funding allows them to be big and inefficient, which means a lot of tops paid well and thinking themselves fashionable FOSS leader people or something.
They can live without it. They'll have to cut most of the organization and return to being an open project developing a web browser.
That doesn't sound cool for people not doing useful work. Like me, I'll get to my shit instead of typing comments.
-
A big problem with such forks (same with packages made by Linux distributors) is that there is a delay between official FF release and the release of the corresponding update of the fork.
That's called a patched downstream, not a fork.
LibreOffice was a fork of OpenOffice. OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD.
-
Software makers did just fine without telemetry for decades
They actually did not, almost every software out there is mining your information. Software developers rely on and need data, you can't guess what people want. Whether it's from studies, testers, surveys, or telemetry, developers need information about what users like, what they don't, how they interact with the software... This is what makes data so valuable, and why businesses like Google can exist. Denying open source software telemetry is shooting yourself in the foot.
-
The magic of forking!
-
A FOSS browser has and never will require collecting user data.
This should not happen at all.
-
Certain features certainly could be considered as doing that, such as:
- Firefox sync
- crash reporting
- add-on store
I certainly want those. And then there are others that I don't want:
- telemetry
- studies
- AI
My understanding is that this change is primarily motivated by a recent/upcoming law change in California that has a pretty broad definition of "selling user data" and this is less likely to be a fundamental change in how Mozilla operates. However, let's see what they come back with.
-
I found something but it is for chrome. https://github.com/Xodarap/Paranoid-Browsing
-
Do you have a source for that? I can't seem to find anything on their website, though judging by the past few release notes you're absolutely right.
Edit: found this video. Kinda feel like this should be a big red banner on the front page though.
-
It lets developers target what to improve and fix instead of going in blind.
I'm sure they'll make do
-
. Software developers rely on and need data, you can't guess what people want.
Why would I want software developers (particularly we've browser) to guess what I want? I will tell them what I want, otherwise they have no business serving it to me.
-
How convenient for you.
-
Is it? It seems to be maintained by a user named relan based out of Russia. It's just a few scripts to build it for F-Droid and basically just removes some proprietary stuff. It's not a fork, just a build script.
-
I will tell them what I want
You might, but 99% of users will never take a step towards giving any feedback whatsoever.
-
Yes, which means they don't want anything from them. Rather than seeing those people as nothing more than potential profit, just move on.
-
Yeah, that video was what I was referencing
-
Yes, which means they don't want anything from them.
And yet they're using the application. Don't you want the applications that you use to work better? This is what telemetry enables, the ability to give feedback without jumping through 10 hoops, creating an account, responding to a survey, or whatever other method you're thinking of to give feedback.
