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Time to switch browsers... again

A couple of months ago, I talked about the last step in my move away from Opera browser. Now, I'm moving once more.

Despite Firefox's many shortfalls as a browser (as covered by Theo - t3.gg), when I started using it, a significant part of my reasoning was support of their mission: An alternative, open-source, privacy-respecting browser. As a lover of free and open-source software myself, and someone who values their privacy, their alleged mission really resonated with me.

Since I made the move to firefox, they've gone downhill. They laid off around 60 employees in February 2024, as well as a further 30% in November of the same year, when they also closed their advocacy division.

Now, a recent announcement by Mozilla states that they're updating their privacy notice. In looking into this, I've noticed that many articles are claiming that it doesn't seem like there's anything to worry about, and many individuals are providing limited context, so here's what I've seen:

According to the firefox privacy notice, subsection "Lawful Bases": "To provide Review Checker, including serving sponsored content [...] we process [...] Unique identifiers [...and...] Browsing data". In other words, Mozilla stores and uses uses your activity, which can be uniquely traced to you, in an attempt to serve more relevant ads. Additionally, they say that they may collect "all datatypes [...] To comply with applicable laws, and ifentify and prevent harmful, anauthorized or illegal activity".

My issue with this is twofold. Firstly, it really shows that "if the product is free, you are the product". Despite the fact that I very rarely see ads, Mozilla wants to use my browsing activity to make a profit, which is understandable as a company but contrary to their historical mission of privacy. Secondly, storing such information makes it more vulnerable. If the cops come knocking on Mozilla's door, Mozilla won't be fighting to protect your browsing activity.

Thanks to cryptography and privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis on Mastodon for their coverage of the recent changes, which respectably linked to and directly quoted the new privacy policy.

So, where to? It's still up in the air.

GNU IceCat (.onion) is a consideration. According to IceCat, "It is not possible to completely remove telemetry from firefox by changing preferences, because telemetry is built-in or hardcoded in the binary installer and executables provided by Mozilla. The ONLY way around is recompiling the source code after removing or altering some parts. This is the main reason why Icecat exists." In other words, IceCat is a fork of Firefox with telemetry removed. IceCat came with some packaged extensions which I found frankly insufferable, redirecting me away from key sites, and LibreJS, which blocked javascript that was essential to the function of many sites. After disabling these extensions, IceCat worked almost identically to Firefox, though even after changing my preferred colour scheme from "system" to explicitly "dark", sites still didn't notice. Additionally, there's no option to import settings from Firefox, but I think it may share a settings file with Firefox. Overall, it feels enough like Firefox, and I can appreciate that it uses a non-chromium engine.

If, for whatever reason, IceCat doesn't work out, Brave (.onion) is probably going to be where I end up. It comes highly recommended by a friend (ok, actually, fuck you for pointing out my earlier typo /j). It's based on chromium, so should be great for compatibility, and though I had to change a lot of settings to get rid of crypto wallets, web3, and AI (on top of a few other personal UI/UX preferences), I'm overall impressed with its default privacy settings. I'll miss the picture-in-picture button, though the feature can still be used by right-clicking a video, and the "block autoplay" feature, but there's a chromium extension for that. Additionally, there are a few redundant UI buttons I can't get rid of, but I can live with them.