this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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Firefox

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[–] LWD@lemm.ee 26 points 3 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Mozilla FakeSpot sells your private data (profile, location, browsing and search history) to advertising companies.

https://lemm.ee/comment/11216210

And when Mozilla released the Orbit AI assistant, they linked to FakeSpot for some reason...


Edit 2

The official Deepfake Detector privacy policy is missing from the FakeSpot website. This is the one Mozilla links from their extension policy.


Edit

Firefox may be bad in many ways, but the biggest alternatives are generally worse. There are some reasonably good forks like Zen and LibreWolf, but if you have the wherewithal to patch Firefox's user.js on a desktop, you'll probably be better off with a patched Firefox.

https://lemmy.world/post/4064988

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-09-24-harden-firefox-with-arkenfox.html

[–] Xuderis@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, they’re definitely doing targeted advertising. I don’t like that one bit. I’m disappointed in Mozilla.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 days ago
[–] j4yt33@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Is there an alternative to Firefox that works as reliably across devices, i.e. syncing login details and open tabs? I know there's librewolf but idk if that works smoothly

[–] Xuderis@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

There is the Brave chromium browser, but it lacks Mozilla’s previous track record. This is enshitification at its finest.

You could host Mozilla’s sync software yourself and integrate it with LibreWolf.

From an online post:

"DisableFirefoxAccounts": false, in the policies.json

lockPref("identity.sync.tokenserver.uri", "https://token.services.mozilla.com/1.0/sync/1.5"); in the librewolf.overrides.cfg

You need the 2nd one to enable LibreWolf to look for the sync-server. Otherwise every sync query ends nowhere.

Someone else online in the same thread said:

Seems it changed

defaultPref("identity.fxaccounts.enabled", true); // sync and firefox account

in the /usr/lib/librewolf/librewolf.overrides.cfg

I haven’t done this myself, so I can’t say for sure that this process works. But hopefully my findings are helpful.

On another note, I personally avoid chromium based browsers because the major players are all involved in its development and have incentives that do not favor the user’s best interests. Firefox, with all of Mozilla’s flaws, is still the best option for supporting the open web. But instead of being the force for good it was, it became the least evil.