Coming from a company the preaches about privacy and rates privacy respecting businesses, while collecting telemetry and accepting 500M/ year to from google to promote their search engine… I’ll take this as the puff up piece that is is.
- The very little, basic telemetry Firefox collects can be easily disabled[1].
- What alternative do you suggest to Mozilla? Reject the $500M and blowup everything they’ve worked so hard for decades to build? I feel like users having to click, at most, a whole 5 times to change their search engine (if they want) isn’t that big of a sacrifice to have a major privacy-oriented, non-profit player in the tech sphere.
Its more so the principle. Many people that download Firefox are doing so to escape google, and if they are not born as cyber security experts they may download Firefox and continue with no real improvement to their privacy.
Secondly, the main thing you should look for is where a company gets its funding. If Mozilla gets almost 100% of its funding through google… How much do you really expect them to push back against the data collection of their userbase?
I rank Mozilla with the likes of ExpressVPN, NordVPN, etc. They preach privacy and security against surveillance… But its just theatre to make money in specific demographics.
Mozilla’s Firefox is essentially the only competitor to Google’s Chrome. So to say that Mozilla is pro-google is kind of weird. Almost every other browser uses Chrome’s engine, and thus is enforcing Google’s view of the internet. Firefox and Safari are the only significant holdouts. (And Safari is obviously backed by one of the largest companies in the world, with its own reasons.)
Many people that download Firefox are doing so to escape google, and if they are not born as cyber security experts they may download Firefox and continue with no real improvement to their privacy.
Uh, if they’re already downloading an entire browser for the purpose of escaping google, they can also do the extremely minimal research required to learn how to actually get decent privacy from doing so. In fact, whoever told them about Firefox being better in this regard probably already explained this stuff to them
It is extremely simple and easy to change your search engine and disable telemetry in Firefox. I would agree if Mozilla showed any favoritism towards Google, but they don’t. Maintaining and developing an entirely independent browser is not cheap.
I really hope you’re not about to suggest Brave as an alternative when 100% of their funds come from a dying crypto scam, is for-profit, and is owned by a far-right, anti-gay reactionary. Not to mention that Brave’s browser is entirely reliant on Chromium code from Google.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
