Mozilla is making it clear that they do not care about users any more.
Firefox is full of ads, with ads being in the homepage shortcuts, the news feed and the omnibox dropdown, as well as various ads for Mozilla services throughout the UI. Their ad network is also marketed to companies as allowing them to reach adblocker users.
Mozilla’s 210M+ global users are typically hard to reach. They’re usually hidden behind ad blockers, nearly half avoid dominant social media, and most say no to default platforms. They’re selective, tech savvy, and paying attention. From: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/
Firefox is also full of tracking, with their mobile app sending data to the tracking company Adjust, and it having options for “personalised extension recommendations” and “Install and run studies”. The latter allows them to install what they want into your browser without your consent out of the box.
Their tracking protection also mostly works only in private / incognito mode by default, with tracking scripts being allowed to run in standard windows with just isolated cookies protecting you, which is not a decision that a company who actually cares about privacy would make.
Mozilla is also partnering with Perplexity, an AI search engine who wants to collect as much data as possible even outside of their app to sell “hyper personalized” ads, which is exactly who you shouldn’t work with if you claim to care about privacy. From: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/
I recommend switching to Librewolf as it takes Firefox and removes this bullshit. Some other alternatives like Brave are just as bad.
Chrome is shit, so is anything that forks from it. Untill servo or ladybird are ready for the show. We’re stuck with Firefox. I tried libre wolf but half of my workflow/activities had issues (images didn’t download or sites working bad), I switched to Zen and I’m happy with it. It may not be as secure/private but it’s not chrome and it doesn’t have all the Firefox shenanigans.
You can turn off resistFingerprinting in the settings then disable the URL tracking protection and URL shortener filter lists in uBlock Origin to fix it. I think Librewolf’s default settings are too cautious as Mullvad Browser serves the maximum privacy niche.
Boycott Firefox and do what?
Ladybird is 5 years away from replacing your browser. Any other Firefox fork is maintained by five or eight people who take Firefox and apply their parches. Everything else is Chrome.
Boycott Firefox, make it economically inviable, bankrupt Mozilla. Now what? Librewolf can patch a working browser to enable some flags by default and strip some features, can they maintain a JavaScript engine? Can they fund a bug bounty program? Can they support all platforms?
I agree, but for now, Librewolf is the best option we have.
Ladybird isn’t very usable yet, and Librewolf removes the features that produce profit for Mozilla so you are not directly supporting them.
The alternative is Chromium based browsers, and Helium is a good Chromium equivalent to Librewolf if you prefer the Chrome engine, but it uses a greedy company’s engine just like Librewolf, so the indirect support is identical.
I don’t understand the downvotes. In the current market of the Chromium and Firefox duopoly the only real options we have are forks that remove the greedy features. Ladybird is not ready yet.
You currently have no other choice but to use Librewolf, Helium, or one of the other Firefox or Chromium forks if you want to minimise support for Mozilla and Google.
If mozilla is the one good group, why are we punishing them by not supporting them?
Because they used to be a good group but they no longer are.
So then what do we do?
you’re right. screw Firefox. let’s all go to chrome. wait, no, edge, wait no, that one browser half the sites don’t work on.
Librefox might be what your looking for 😉
Ok but you still need the Firefox project to succeed for librefox to exist. So how does that work?
I think what OP is getting at is that people “in the know” (i.e. in privacy circles) boycott Firefox and use LibreWolf (and others), and the masses still use Firefox. Except the masses mostly use Chrome. But I think I see where they’re coming from.
Exactly. I have heard a teacher at my college say he’s switched to Firefox to get away from Chrome, however he is clearly not in the know as he has Adblock Plus installed in Chrome on his work machine instead of uBlock Origin.
But like you said the masses use chromium forks. Can you elaborate what you see? Thank you!
Unless you actively support Mozilla, they could not care less about your boycott.
They make money from non-tech savvy people who are recommended Firefox as the pro-consumer alternative but leave it on default settings which are just as bad as Chrome.
Getting real tired of the “boycott Mozilla! They take money from Google!” And “boycott Mozilla! They try to make money from their users!” Merry-go-round.
Using Librewolf isn’t boycotting Firefox. Librewolf is a soft fork and is dependent on Mozilla for updates. You could switch to Ladybird or something more obscure, but I don’t think you’ll achieve much with that either.
You could switch to Ladybird
Servo already has releases and includes mobile as well.
https://github.com/servo/servo/releases
If anyone deserves support, it’s Servo.
They have a track record for being performance focused (from when it was part of Mozilla) and aren’t right wing assholes.
Wait, what? How is Mozilla right wing? What did I miss?
Not Mozilla, Ladybird is.
Using Librewolf deprives Firefox of sponsor money, so it’s to some extent a boycott. The idea though that we need to switch to a new browser engine because we lost faith in Mozilla is a bit silly, the Gecko engine is open source so it can be stuck with even if Mozilla goes away. Just look at Pale Moon (not great security-wise, but it does exist).
the Gecko engine is open source so it can be stuck with even if Mozilla goes away
Good luck finding people both capable and willing to maintain it if Mozilla abandons it.
The idea though that we need to switch to a new browser engine because we lost faith in Mozilla is a bit silly
I am saying the opposite. I explicitly said I don’t think that would achieve anything. Just because something constitutes a boycott (i.e. using a different browser engine) doesn’t mean that there’s a point to it.
Unfortunately, they’re aren’t many options in the 2025 internet browser market.
Unless something has changed, the gecko engine Firefox uses is the only distinctly different engine from Chrome, and I don’t think writing a browser engine from scratch is easy. So if the solution is to hard pivot away from Firefox entirely, I don’t know how you don’t end up using some Chrome based browser.
At least Mozilla hasn’t tried to kill adblockers like Google clearly is trying to.
Forking the codebase and stripping out any AI code is much easier than trying to invent another wheel.
Forking the codebase and stripping out any AI code is much easier than trying to invent another wheel.
I never said otherwise. I simply said that using Librewolf is not boycotting Firefox.
You know, that’s a fair point. But I think it will still be a measurable shift if people start using privacy forks of their codebase.
We need to fork Firefox and fund enough developers to make it viable as a standalone project that’s not just a laggy, disenshittified version of Firefox. It has been done with LibreOffice and CoMaps, so theoretically it is possible.
A browser is a while different beast. Firefox has half as many lines of code as the Linux kernel, just for comparison. Security must be topnotch since the that model is to treat the website as if it is already malicious. Even with all of Firefox’s developers, it lags behind Chromium in sandboxing/isolation and exploit mitigations.
Ultimately any realistic Firefox fork needs to at least halve the size of the codebase so that it’s maintainable. Or move the unmaintainable code into a “use at your own risk, only on trusted sites” box.
Everyone yelled at me for Brave being dogshit. Go to Firefox they said.
It seems we are stuck just accepting the least bad actors in this realm which just sucks.
Just let browse the goddamn internet without being spied on how much is that to ask? (Actually its asking a ton bc of the multi billion dollar industries predicated on predatory data harvesting but ya know)
I’m using Mullvad, its been great for me. I know it’s a fork, I don’t care
I’d use Mullvad if it allowed my to install certain extensions and sync my bookmarks.
Librewolf is in-between Firefox and Mullvad so you should try that.
Yeah, but that’s unlikely to ever happen as that seems to be pretty incompatible with what the mullvad browser is trying to achieve
I understand Mullvad as a middle-ground between the anonymity of Tor and the convenience of Firefox. I’m not entirely convinced either way as to whether it is compatible.
Mullvad tries to achieve anonimity by making your browser setup as un-unique as possible, making it hard for anything trying to track you to dinstinguish you from any other Mullvad browser user. Extensions can break that protection because now you CAN be distinguished from users not using those extensions.
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Hey something went wrong. Your post appeared 4 times.
Thanks for letting me know, sorry for the spam. Something must have failed on Scribe.
5 times for me lol
Ladybird needs more testing. More people need to download it and provide feedback. Binaries aren’t available, but you can easily build it.
At least my personal websites are working as expected on Ladybird.
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