OVER THE FULLERENESHIFT

1/3/2025 - The Issues With Modern Firefox and Why I'm Switching

Firefox is far from perfect - but it used to have some good qualities. It doesn't really, anymore. There isn't any point in using Firefox over any Chromium based alternative, or worst case, Firefox fork. I was hoping to release this post in February to finally get more than one post in a month, but I forgot to write this at all.

What's the Problem?

Firefox was good, mostly, for not being Chrome - that, and privacy concerns. Literally the first text you see going on the Firefox website is "Get the browser that puts your privacy first — and always has." Except, not anymore. Although I would imagine anyone reading this is already aware, a few days before writing this, Firefox updated their Terms of Use.

"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 bizarre, to say the least. My best guess is they want to train AI on user data - that, or some other company wants to train AI off of user data. For a browser centered around privacy, this isn't very private. Does that mean that if I upload my art to a website, through Firefox, Mozilla now has rights over my art? Under this Terms of Use, that seems to be the case. But what if I'm uploading someone else's art, that I do not own myself? This clause is completely absurd and impossible to implement or enforce in a legal way.

This isn't all - Mozilla's Acceptable Use Policy for "Mozilla's services," previously did not include Firefox. And it makes sense; in what way is Firefox a "service" if it's just a program anyone can download? If Mozilla shut down today, Firefox would stop recieving updates, but all existing instances of Firefox would not need any maintenance to continue running. However, in the update to the Firefox Terms of Use, they also added this statement:

"Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations"

The Acceptable Use Policy, among other things, would ban viewing gore and porn - aside from being completely impossible to enforce, it's also absurd to ban this.

Why Does This Matter?

The backlash was huge - and somewhat unsurprisingly, Mozilla updated the Firefox Terms of Use again, removing the reference to the Acceptable Use Policy and changing the claim of ownership over uploaded content to be more specific.

"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"

Not really that much better. Mozilla also responded with this article.

"TL;DR 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. We changed our language because some jurisdictions define "sell" more broadly than most people would usually understand that word. Firefox has built-in privacy and security features, plus options that let you fine-tune your data settings."

Ok, they're definitely selling user data. No matter how "some jurisdictions" define selling data, you shouldn't have to worry about that unless you are accepting payment in exchange for user data.

Most other browsers aren't much better than this - my issue here is the loss of trust between Mozilla and it's userbase. If Mozilla is willing to go back on promises like not selling user data, what else are they willing to do?

What Alternatives Are There?

As I'm writing this, I'm still on Firefox - but as said in the title, I'm going to be switching browsers - most likely to Ungoogled Chromium.

I'm not switching to a Firefox based browser because, for a long time now, Firefox has been falling behind on modern web standards. Not only that, Firefox has been choosing to not implement some standards they don't like. That, along with things like gradients rendering wrong; Firefox is full of many minor bugs, and Chromium simply doesn't suffer from as many of these issues.

Of course, there are Firefox forks like LibreWolf, but unlike projects like Ungoogled Chromium, which were based around filtering out privacy-violating features, I highly doubt the LibreWolf team has enough experience to trust them with removing any bad code Mozilla adds to go along with the Terms of Use update.

If you are currently using Firefox, I recommend switching to a Chrome based alternative too - preferably not Brave, as a lot of people are suggesting. The creator, Brendan Eich, is openly homophobic and has donated to trying to ban gay marriage.

Thank you for reading!