Firefox search update
blog.mozilla.orgSeems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road.
Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?
I constantly see this take and I'm afraid I don't agree with it. Firefox is continuing to lose market share, and I think it's less anything they're doing and due simply to the fact that Google is a household name while Mozilla is not. When the user is already using a Google phone, email, search, maps, drive, and document editor, it follows to also use their browser. Simply being a solid browser isn't enough to motivate people to switch away. So I think they should try out some new interesting ideas in the hope that some of them take off. Now, I don't think this is the feature to do that, but I won't criticize them for trying.
I agree with this take.
It's not like the power users who currently use Firefox and yet dislike this stuff are going to switch away from Firefox, since there's nothing to switch to other than Chrome, which is clearly worse.
Personal anecdote, I didn't like Pocket being added to Firefox, but eventually I did start using it - only because it came from Mozilla. And I currently pay Mozilla money for Relay (along with VPN), which are examples of them expanding outside of their core browser features.
> not like the power users who currently use Firefox and yet dislike this stuff are going to switch away from Firefox
Not a Firefox power user, but also not a fan of having to learn through HN that I need to disable some random opt-in to not have my browsing leaked by my browser. Was genuinely on the fence about deleting it and simplifying to Safari.
IMO this holds Firefox to an impossible standard; it is vanishingly unlikely that Safari doesn’t perform this same type of user research and data collection, for search utilization wrt their relationship with Google and for other features of the browser. Your point about being surprised by this is certainly valid, if this is indeed opt-out/in by default.
I am a happy user of LibreWolf: they do the opt out for me. On android I use mull. I have to say that I am quite happy and really do not understand everyone moving to chromium based browsers.
> It's not like the power users who currently use Firefox and yet dislike this stuff are going to switch away from Firefox
Sure they do. I know a lot that have, anyway. I'm one of a tiny percentage of my tech circle who uses it anymore.
I will switch away from Firefox to Ladybird as soon as Ladybird is half as good as Firefox.
> When the user is already using a Google phone, email, search, maps, drive, and document editor, it follows to also use their browser.
I think it's more that everyone used Google for search (because it at least was legitimately the best by a good margin) and then Google used that position to push Chrome. The other stuff may have helped, but I think search was 90% of it.
Well, when Chrome first came out, it was definitely way faster than the other browsers for websites that had heavy JavaScript usage a la GMail. I imagine the gap has closed quite a bit, but I would suspect that it's probably still there, since they can coordinate development of both their web apps and the browser to work well together.
More recently, there was that whole thing where YouTube was "accidentally" adding delays to non-Chrome browsers.
Actually I still use Firefox. But with stuff like that, it puts me rather off of it. Firefox isn’t better than chrome anymore and Mozilla acting as a Media Company and adding sponsored links and sponsors in their products is just not cool for a so called privacy focused company, pocket was already a strange thing and now that.
What I think I am waiting for from Mozilla is instead of this enrich the suggest experience just go full Yahoo like Microsoft did with Microsoft start. Make an organic 'good' home page, and let people who want to not use it switch it out and capture interest that way. Make links people can share so you can convince them to try Mozilla. You have to FIND Mozilla nowadays, and in comparison I look at what Opera has been doing lately in actively helping people find them. I am at least seeing a path for Opera to grow more than Firefox right now.
Firefox being solid is what got people to move off ie6 to ff1.5
And tabs. That was a cool idea.
At this point, most of the people still using Firefox desperately want a private browser. It would be nice for Mozilla to come up with innovative new features as they did in their heyday, but everything they have attempted for the last several years has broken beloved features and betrayed the privacy of users.
I just feel like they should be concentrating their time into adding features to Firefox which Google either will not or doesn't care to add to Chrome, not trying to compete with Google's entire business suite: that's a losing uphill battle and the pitch "we're slightly more private" is a hard one that they aren't even doing well... if they want to make a commitment to 0 data storage with no suggestions or analytics, that would be one thing, but they refuse to do that and so can't hold this narrative.
Right now, Firefox's strategy seems to be focused on trying to follow in Google's footsteps and do everything they can to implement something almost as good as Chrome just without some--but not all!--of the extra things we hate about Google. The result of this strategy is there are simply way too few answers to the question "why should I use Firefox instead of Chrome?" that aren't "because someone has to lest we lose the war, and it may as well be you (as I guess you drew the short straw today)" :(.
I want to be clear: these unique selling propositions can be really small. If you are using Linux on a computer with a touch screen, Firefox implemented good multi-touch with kinetic scrolling support for X11... it puts Chromium to shame, and so if you are using such a computer you are likely to use Firefox even if it is less performant or doesn't work with a few websites you like. The goal isn't to only target the majority by chasing analytics: it is to win a thousand 0.01% minorities that add up to 10%.
The only other UI thing--and I'm using Firefox right now, and have been using Firefox as my primary browser for months now--that I can think of are container tabs. This one is interesting because, frankly, it doesn't buy me that much over Chrome's support for multiple profiles, and yet I do slightly prefer the feature, and clearly a bunch of other people do if you look around: implementing this feature won Firefox a bunch of users who now consider this part of their workflow and can overlook other faults.
Firefox used to be really good at this: they owned the space of web developers due to Firebug--which was also a critical market as it meant websites tended to work in Firefox--but Chrome saw that and took it from them. If I were in charge of Firefox, my hail marys wouldn't be allocated to end user acquisition: it would be focused on what I can offer developers to get them back to using Firefox as their primary browser. But like, it isn't even clear to me Firefox right now cares about developers anymore :/.
I mean... not only did they lay off the entire MDN writing team back in 2020--which to me was putting Firefox at the forefront of developers' minds (in the same way you mention users knowing about Google)--but, as far as I understand, they also laid off a lot of the dev tools team. Their website showing the features of Firefox for developers sounds strong, but I feel like Chrome also now has all of this stuff. I am excited to see that Firefox claims to have better support for CSS Grid debugging, I guess?
I also say that, because another place Firefox used to have a unique selling proposition is that it was "the hacker's browser": you could easily alter any part of the interface due to its crazy XUL layer, and I knew a ton of developers and users alike who would sell you on Firefox due to the crazy Firefox-specific extensions you could install. But as Chrome added extension support, Firefox not only wanted to be compatible with Chrome's extensions... they dropped (almost) everything that was unique about Firefox.
As it stands, they at least do retain some functionality that isn't just the same as what Chrome offers: support for synchronous fetch hooks (which I might be describing poorly) that is used by the more advanced ad blockers. This is a great USP because, of course, Google isn't going to support those... but Firefox stops there. I contend that it wouldn't be a big lift for them to add some extra Firefox-specific extension API surface and get, for example, the Tridactyl user community back to 100% on Firefox.
And there is frankly a ton of uncharted territory on being able to make powerful web extensions. I used to be in charge of the iPhone native code extension community, and I seriously feel more crippled trying to easily modify a web page than I ever did with a native Objective-C app, and that's insane: I myself constantly run into roadblocks due to being unable to dig into the private data of JavaScript objects or closures, and I see other developers complain about being locked out of styling web components.
Firefox should lean into "it is easier to hack the web with Firefox" as we know Google is going in the opposite direction. Despite the insane complexities of jailbreaking your iPhone, we had around a consistent ~10% marketshare; and no: that wasn't piracy! Not only did the US Copyright Office investigate and say we weren't the problem, we had a thriving ecosystem of paid native app extensions! (Though, frankly, if Firefox managed to hold ~10% marketshare entirely on the back of piracy, I'd be OK with that!)
Otherwise, as it stands, Firefox seems to be removing unique selling propositions as they focus on narrowly re-implementing exactly the set of things offered by Chrome. They have decided that the only market worth targeting is the mass market, and so they are making the same analytics-driven decisions Google makes with respect to safety, streamlining, and prioritization that forsake developers and power users as part of a losing battle with Google for 90% of the web when they used to own the other 10%.
> the pitch "we're slightly more private" is a hard one that they aren't even doing well... if they want to make a commitment to 0 data storage with no suggestions or analytics, that would be one thing, but they refuse to do that and so can't hold this narrative.
Or... they can, because they are still more private and respectful than Chrome and Edge, at least.
And yet, every time this comes up people come out to bash Firefox for not going far enough on privacy. The top comments on this HN post are all in that category, as the people who care about privacy actually care about privacy and Firefox's half-assed attempts to walk the line are falling flat for that audience. Meanwhile, as can be seen in these very comments, people seem to have found alternatives: any of the now many forks of Chromium that entirely remove these anti-privacy features they don't want without incurring any other functionality tradeoffs. Firefox could take these users back, but they don't want to: their strategy of throwing away the minority markets so they can be Google-lite in the hope of guilting enough of the majority market into using Firefox is reliant on analytics and they seemingly can't help themselves with the attempts to upsell people on data harvesting services.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d presume Firefox is waiting for Google to get in real bad trouble with the FTC so it has to sign a deal to promote other browsers or something. I would not hold my breath.
This is a great comment.
Firefox used to _stand_ for things that internet savvy folks cared about, and at least some of that would trickle down to make even the non-savvy user's browsing experience better.
> and I think it's less anything they're doing and due simply to the fact that Google is a household name while Mozilla is not.
Of course, changing the UI, using Google safebrowsing as default and other anti-user practices have nothing to do with it. /s
> Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment
They can do that for as long as Google is willing to pay. Without additional revenue stream, the day Google decides to cut cost and stop sponsoring Mozilla, that's the day Firefox will run into big trouble. Any additional revenue stream is going to help.
I am no CEO but that seems very clear to me.
It's not a sponsorship, it's a sale.It's also made such deals with Yandex, Baidu, and Yahoo before. The sale is for eyeballs on your search (ad) service. Firefox is getting in a precarious situation with it though as the number of users on Firefox has been decreasing (in absolute terms) despite the number of web users increasing.
It's also a part of their anti-trust defense strategy. Firefox staying alive as a marginal but existent alternative to chromium based browsers is currently good for google.
If you ever figure out a bulletproof solution to "just taking the money and building a good product/company without any technical debt and organizational cruft", please do share your results – this would be somewhat valuable for humanity!
I dunno, the CEO getting a 400% pay rise in the same time period the browser lost 85% of its market share might be a good place to start.
You want them to be Google's vassal state and wait for death instead of trying to become self-sustainable? Defeatist mentality if I've ever seen one.
That's what they are and have been for like 8 years. It's fine. It would be more productive to put it to good use on the browser. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have tried but... they did for almost a decade and they aren't remotely close to being able to sustain themselves without google. It's not defeatist to say that making up for the 600m$/year might be a bit of an unreachable goal at this point.
Chasing ghosts isn't more sustainable than the money from google. Yes it's a business relationship. but I'm not sure how they aren't completely "vassalized", to use your term, at this point already. It's not a potential problem, if google stops paying they would shutdown in a matter of months.
It's not a bad thing, Firefox as we know it wouldn't exist by now otherwise
I want them to not replicate google. I use Firefox to fight ads, not to get ads in my searchbar.
Ironic that ads are what Google uses to pay Mozilla so you(we) can use Firefox.
You assume that Firefox can't exist without Mozilla. Thunderbird got a lot better after divorcing from Mozilla.
A) Firefox is vastly bigger and more complicated than Thunderbird
B) Email protocols aren't a moving target to the degree that the web is
C) Thunderbird has the benefit of being able to freeload off the base platform development that Firefox continues to do, although of course it's a lot of work even to adapt to those changes.
> You want them to be Google's vassal state and wait for death instead of trying to become self-sustainable?
There's no shortage of privacy respecting open source software that somehow doesn't have to choose between depending on Google and selling out their users. Firefox knows that most people won't opt out. They're choosing to take Google's money and screw over their users at the same time.
If they just turn into another Google then what was the point?
> addressing ... organizational issues
Obviously not. It's very difficult to make people understand something when their jobs depend on them not understanding it.
Antitrust actions in the US and EU may force Google to cut off those payments (to Mozilla and Apple), and if that happens, Firefox needs to survive somehow.
Somehow open source browsers still get made without a $600 million “rich uncle.” Mozilla is pretty bloated. This can buy like 1200 good engineers. People make browsers with a couple people sometimes.
Most open source browsers are a reskin of actual open source browser development. E.g. Brave and Vivaldi are skins on top of the actual Chromium project, librewolf and others on Firefox's components, and Orion and others on Safari's components. Only a rare few browsers e.g. Dillo or Ladybird are actually independent and it shows in that those browsers are nearly unusably slow, compatibility limited, and insecure (that's not a diss on them, they are still awesome projects for their own reasons).
It’s possible to repackage Chromium with a couple people. It’s not possible to build a browser from the ground up with a couple people.
Using existing code is fine, that's how most software is built anyhow. Only masochists build from complete scratch.
EDIT: I've been getting a lot of down votes for this stance, surprisingly. Why not share your position if you don't agree? There must be a bunch of hardcore people on here who are writing directly on the metal in machine code. Short of that, you are in fact using someone else's code in all your projects.
This seems to conflate two entirely different ways of "using existing code". Using tools written by others is technically "using existing code", but that's an entirely different thing than incorporating existing code into your projects.
I think that when most devs hear "using existing code", they're thinking of the latter, not the former.
How is calling a library and using a function someone else wrote not the same thing as using a function someone else wrote in any other way? Cite your sources by all means but still the difference is a semantical one.
I don't understand your question.
What I'm saying is that calling a library/crate/whatever is an entirely different thing from using a tool like a compiler/IDE/etc. In the former, you're incorporating external code into your project. In the latter, you're not.
I think most people wouldn't say that you're "using someone else's code" in your project just by using a tool written by someone else because the tool's code is not being included in your project.
Perhaps I misunderstood you, though. Your statement "There must be a bunch of hardcore people on here who are writing directly on the metal in machine code" heavily implies that you believe that using an assembler or compiler counts as "using existing code". In this context, I don't think it does.
By the way, I do, in fact, sometimes write code directly in machine language. Not large amounts of it, of course, but some.
It's the classic "building on Chrome cedes control of what the web can do to Google". But I think most people aren't interested in rehashing that discussion here - a search for "independent browser engine" should turn up plenty of arguments if you're interested in other positions.
Why not? Ladybird seems like it is coming along very well.
Ladybird is frickin awesome but give it 10 more years and it still won't be an equivalent to 2024 Safari/Firefox/Chrome without a lot more funding than it's already getting (~100-200k/year in sponsorships).
Sorry - was looking at an older version of the page and didn’t realize there were already a bunch of the same comment. My bad.
———
Will they though? Maybe some toy ones but the distribution of other browsers are largely built on chromium with a few on Firefox and one or two on WebKit.
Beyond that, there’s Arc that’s made a splash with the HN crowd but IIRC, it’s VC funded so a whole different set of concerns.
There will be other browsers but almost the entire browser market is essentially funded by Google.
Sadly Firefox already shows sponsored spammy & clickbaity "articles" on the default new tab page which always makes me cringe whenever I see it on other pcs.
Capitalist organizations, even nonprofits, incentive moving money to the top. Mozilla has the same kind of cancer that Wikimedia has documented. Firefox is open-source, but Mozilla is not.
> Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links.
Browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox, suggestions from sponsors. Each of those can be individually turned off and on.
Why do you think Firefox Suggest using browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox isn't building the best browser "for the user"? Or were you just ignorant of what Firefox Suggest did and didn't bother to take a moment to look it up in Firefox?
They don't need my data to show me suggestions from my own browsing history, bookmarks etc. They only need it for "suggestions from sponsors", which is ad spam.
I would respect the announcement more if they just came out and said it - "we need cash to keep running and Google is offering to pay us a bajillion dollars for some anonymized search data. Sorry folks."
I don't know why they didn't say it in this article, but in https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/126.0/releasenotes/ they said:
> This data will not be associated with specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP addresses as potentially identifying metadata. No profiling will be performed, and no data will be shared with third parties.
So it seems they aren't selling it directly. But I wouldn't be surprised if aggregated numbers could be used for sales deals. (Hi Bing, we have 137M "travel" searches a month, I'm sure that you could put some big juicy ads next to those if you purchase the default search engine status)
Good catch
Is that actually what's happening?
Why would Google need this information? Don't they already get all of that and more in the queries themselves?
Or is this about supplying Google with a user profile that persists beyond incognito tabs, cleared cookies/history etc.?
I read it more as "we, Mozilla, want to know what Firefox users use their browsers for" rather than "we want to hand this data to Google on a per-query level". That said, it is incredibly vaguely worded.
I'm sorry, but "Support Firefox with occasional sponsored suggestions." isn't good enough?
More importantly: "Google is offering to pay us a bajillion dollars for some anonymized search data"
Citation needed here. Your head isn't good enough.
Stuff like this makes me wonder why I still cling to Firefox instead of switching to one of the actually privacy-focused Chromium forks.
I've been using Arkenfox to turn off all the telemetry/etc but it increasingly feels like a game of whackamole.
I still use Firefox because I'd like there to be more than one web browser in the world, but boy oh boy they're trying as hard as they can to get me to quit.
It's also much easier to compile, and thus hack upon since it doesn't require a datacenter-scale distcc setup for all the <s>CVE-generation code</s> C++
For me, it's the support for ad-blockers that actually work, plus greasemonkey. But it's been awhile, and maybe I need to look again.
Firefox is still the most secure browser you can get once you've beaten it into submission through hundreds of about:config changes. Last I checked you couldn't even fully disable service workers or WebRTC in chrome.
Do you have a recommended list of the about:config changes to get optimal security and privacy?
Not for most people. I deal with compromised/malware infested websites so my team has a document with over 600 entries that locks down as much as possible. Arkenfox is included in that and that should cover what most people need in terms of privacy. Firefox on my work PC has things disabled that most people would probably want like SVG, Wasm, JS, auto/form fill, saved passwords, searching from the address bar, reader view, mathml, browser.fixup, remote fonts, PDF viewer, etc.
This might interest you... (if you know how to set it up):
"Firefox privacy, security and anti-tracking: a comprehensive user.js template for configuration and hardening "
Surely playing whackamole with Google is harder than Mozilla?
I use both Chrome and Firefox. Either it will reaffirm me that my preferred browser is indeed better, or I will find out what I have been missing out.
I might not have been running multiple browsers daily if any one browser is perfect, but currently some websites seemed optimized for Firefox while others seemed optimized for Chrome. (And a small handful of websites are actually better with Lynx).
Really? Arkenfox user too and it seems to have stabilized the last couple of years. The moles have been whacked.
I didn't mean to imply Arkenfox is unstable, it's great. I meant the Arkenfox maintainer is playing whackamole with FF. Every so often FF adds a spying feature (like this one), then Arkenfox has to react and turn it off and cut a release, then everyone has to run the updater script. My system auto updates Firefox, but not Arkenfox. So if I don't want any windows of vulnerability I'm stuck having to pay attention to updates and make sure I run the updater script at just the right time.
Just a shortcut for anybody trying to find it.
"Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox. Here’s a step-by-step guide [0] on how to adjust your settings."
---
1. Click the [hamburger menu button] and select Settings.
2. Select the Privacy & Security panel.
3. Scroll down to the Firefox Data Collection and Use section.
4. Check or uncheck the box next to Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla.
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-data-mozilla-help...
That still doesn't disable all telemetry from being sent. There's a whole slue of settings that you need to change in about:config and then there's still no guarantee.
Even if you follow those steps you listed there and uncheck all those boxes you're shown in the standard settings pages, then Firefox will just continue to send out 'pings' when you interact with certain elements in the browser interface. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Mozilla is like one of those politicians that just won't stop yapping about traditional conservative family values, who is later found to have several extramarital children and numerous affairs with same-sex partners themselves.
Could you tell us what other settings you need to change please?
It's a bit deceptive to claim you have a Privacy First policy when it's opt out. True privacy is not opt out, but opt in.
Anonymization isn't opt out.
Anonymization is also weak sauce.
I wonder if you'll have to remember to do this after each update, like you have to do for most of Chrome's unwanted and unwelcomed features.
Probably not. These settings have been around for a long time already anyway, and they never get overwritten once set, at least in my experience.
When you haven't used Firefox for a while it shows a prompt that tricks you into resetting your profile.
They already did this way back with their other telemetry stuff. You had to disable it through about:config and then Mozilla introduced new flags/renamed them and even added a flag if you have disabled telemetry that you had to disable again manually.
It might be possible to disable this feature through a policy file [1] just like other features can be disabled, e.g. here's how to disable auto-update:
Create a text file named policies.json in a directory named distribution inside the Firefox installation directory. In my case that ends up looking like this:{ "policies": { "DisableAppUpdate": true } }
The browser sees this file and abides by its contents. Open about:policies#documentation in Firefox to see which policies can be configured this way./opt/APPfirefox (package root) /opt/APPfirefox/firefox (currrent nightly) /opt/APPfirefox/bin/firefox-127.0a1 -> /opt/APPfirefox/firefox/firefox-127.0a1 /opt/APPfirefox/distribution/policies.json[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...
Apparently not, at least for this update.
I had the settings disabled, then updated to the latest version ("126.0 (64-bit)") and settings were kept disabled.
So at least for now it looks like it respects your current settings.
Only time will tell, but I don't think I've ever had that issue with Firefox so far.
thanks for sharing - just found out you have to do this for each firefox profile if you have more than one.
Note says it takes 30 days for them to remove your data history.
I wonder if pihole or similar could just block the dns for this crap.
How could they remove your data if it's anonymized? That implies they're using pseudonymization instead.
> Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla [...] Rest assured, the way we gather these insights will always put user privacy first [...] Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox
Wouldn't actually putting "user privacy first" lead to the conclusion that gathering insights like this shouldn't be done on a opt-out basis and instead be opt-in, at the very least?
Personally, I'd see "privacy first" as not needing to sell any user data at all, in the first place, but we're clearly beyond that already.
Privacy first is just not collecting the data. Everything else is just a compromise and an excuse.
I don't have a problem if the server side is tracking metrics on what queries are being made. When it becomes a problem is trying to associate the queries based on a single user regardless on anonymization attempts. Of course there's no money in that.
Wasn't like 15? years ago with the AOL search data anonymized release that people found multiple ways to connect dots to whittle it down to just one person or a small subset of people?
Wasn't this also shown with anonymized taxi-cab data (released in NY?) many moons ago?
Would it not be possible with knowing that you are tracking this data to funnel people into doing searches in a way that would reveal things?
Directions to the out of state reproductive health clinic, combined with card data would be all it takes to do serious things to people in some states.
Defaults matter. A lot.
Anonymized data is not always anonymous, collected server side or otherwise.
Yes, this is a process called (fittingly) data re-identification.
There are many papers on the topic. One of the more popular examples is "Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets" using the Netflix Prize Dataset.
>We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in the dataset. Using the Internet Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf
This paper speaks about AOL in 2006, which I think you are referring to: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
However, it should be noted that the AOL dataset had a bunch of stuff that was identifiable by its nature (e.g. people searching for their full names or address), and the dataset wasn't scrubbed of those searches. So the controversy wasn't just re-identification of data, but also just a bunch of already-identifiable data.
>Anonymized data is not always anonymous
More importantly, in my opinion, is that data that is anonymous now is just one other dataset away from not being anonymous anymore.
> Anonymized data is not always anonymous, collected server side or otherwise
If anything, I think it's both safer and more accurate to start from the assumption "anonymized" data can be de-anonymized and and require evidence to refute that rather than starting from a place of assumption that anonymization works and then trying to find a way to attack it. In practice, there's just not a good track record of this being done effectively, and I think people should generally be skeptical of whether this is even possible in many cases.
There is only one way that data can really be "anonymized": if the individual data points are aggregated and the original collected data is deleted. Short of that, anonymization is basically illusory.
The trouble is that we'd still have to take the word of the entity doing the data collection that they've done this properly, and it's clear that we can't take anyone's word for that.
Anonymization is effectively not achievable. Limited anonymoty may be possible within the scope of a particular dataset, but all it yakes is one enrichment pipeline to strip that all away. If you don't think that's what places like insurers do on a regular basis, you're a fool.
Do you believe there is no utility in knowledge? Do you believe absolutism is the only philosophy for privacy?
I think telemetry and the data software collects can help with usability, design, and product enhancement and that it's very likely this can be done to some extent without harming privacy.
> I think telemetry and the data software collects can help with usability, design, and product enhancement
It can, but that's too often little more than a justification to take as much data as possible much of which is misused. In this case, what a person searches for on the internet isn't helping one bit with "usability, design, and product enhancement"
You know what? That's fine and good. Ask users to opt-in, and respect the wishes of those who opt-out.
Anything short of that is you ignoring the concept of consent entirely, and doing whatever mental gymnastics you can to feel fine with doing so.
This has nothing to do with mental gymnastics. Consent isn't a meaningful concept when it comes to each individual setting of a piece of software. You'd have to make 500 decisions every minute if you had to actively consent to everything your software does.
In fact cookie banners show this. People hate them because they force meaningless choices on them. If you make a website with tracking as an opt-out option, almost everyone clicks "accept all". If you make a website with tracking as opt-in, almost every one clicks accept all. That shows that opt-in/out or consent does literally nothing ot reflect people's preferences, the act of making a choice completely dominates the actual decision.
That means that if you want to respect user preferences you don't actually get around making default choices for them, and it's why consent is pretty much meaningless.
> In fact cookie banners show this. People hate them because they force meaningless choices on them. If you make a website with tracking as an opt-out option, almost everyone clicks "accept all". If you make a website with tracking as opt-in, almost every one clicks accept all. That shows that opt-in/out or consent does literally nothing ot reflect people's preferences, the act of making a choice completely dominates the actual decision.
I disagree with this interpretation - the banners force themselves in front of the user before accessing the content. And then the choice is almost always "Accept all" and "complete a checklist mini-game of things you don't want cookies for". It's not a shock that people when confronted with this will click the easy button, and that doesn't mean it reflects their actual interests. It's just fatigue. If the "accept our cookies" button was off to the side of the page, and defaulted to "none" unless the user did something otherwise, I wonder what the "accept all" numbers would look like then. Actually, I don't.
> It's not a shock that people when confronted with this will click the easy button, and that doesn't mean it reflects their actual interests.
Yes, but that was my actual point. If one simple UI design trick is enough to completely flip the choices of users, then consent forms aren't a robust way to collect preferences at all. In fact if you wanted to genuinely and in good faith provide access to granular preferences, giving a more complicated set of choices would be the only way to go about it, and that fatigue is still real even if the design has a legitimate purpose.
What you're saying is true, the only way for the choice to be representative would be to have like a binary yes/no choice because that's simple, but that's not even necessarily what the user wants either. You're going to get a significantly more accurate view of people's real preferences by collecting data, like what Firefox is doing here, and then setting defaults accordingly.
That does not justify collecting such data without their explicit consent.
> Personally, I'd see "privacy first" as not needing to sell any user data at all, in the first place, but we're clearly beyond that already.
That requires users paying, something often suggested, but I have not heard of working commercially for anything where a competitor can supply a user as the product alternate. Privacy just isn't that valuable.
> That requires users paying
That's clearly not a solution either since expensive products and services with subscriptions still routinely collect every scrap of data they can get their hands on. Companies will always make more money by violating your privacy while also charging you as much as they possibly can so that's exactly what they do.
I think a small fee subscription can be very attractive. Less than $5 a month. I already pay $5/month for better search experience. Sometimes Kagi finds things neither DDG nor Brave can.
> Wouldn't actually putting "user privacy first" lead to the conclusion that gathering insights like this shouldn't be done on a opt-out basis and instead be opt-in, at the very least?
At the very least collection of non-anonymized data should be opt-in at most. So where is the problem?
I’d rather they make Firefox subscription based. I’d rather pay $5 a month and have no ads or tracking of any kind. They can even run a separate fork of Firefox or something for this purpose. If Firefox goes down Google will lock internet behind a DRM and we gonna need another rms or Torvalds to deliver us from this hell.
Can you imagine a world without Linux, with Windows and Mac pretty much the only mainstream alternative? I’d rather pay a small fee not to have that.
Paid web browsers have been tried... Opera and OmniWeb probably the most notable examples, and it just doesn't seem like there's a workable market there.
Things have changed. We have paid search engines now, and they don't seem to be having a problem finding customers.
Yeah, but I don’t think we had Google trying to lock internet behind a DRM at the time.
>Windows and Mac pretty much the only mainstream alternative
That's not the world we live in today?
We have Linux to choose from. Imaging we didn’t have that option.
> I’d rather they make Firefox subscription based.
Software subscriptions are a hard "no" for me. Even if I loved literally everything else about Firefox, if they did this I'd have to stop using it.
No subscription for me tyvm.
I do donate on average €2/month for various projects, though.
Yes, I understand.
The browser is, at this point, like a public utility. You can't get by without one. How is it okay to bake in privacy compromises?
Don't ask Mozilla that. Ask the others.
Mozilla is a browser vendor; the question is appropriate for them. It may also be a good question for every other browser vendor, but it's still valid for Mozilla.
Anyone who uses Firefox with the belief that it offers "privacy" should really read the Firefox Privacy Notice:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
Quite a few company and organization names are referenced. These include well-known ones like "Google" and "Microsoft", but also others that (at least to me) are far more obscure, such as "our third-party ad platform Kevel" and "AdMarketplace (a third-party referral platform)".
Questionable words like "send", "sends", "sending", "share", "shares", and "sharing" also appear quite a few times.
More broadly, the notice is quite long. A software product that truly respects its users' privacy should have a short privacy policy, mainly because it isn't collecting data to begin with, it isn't sending data to third parties, and so forth.
I know some people will claim that the data collection and sending that Firefox does is somehow acceptable because some of it can be disabled, or because it might be less than what other browsers do. I don't buy into those arguments. A privacy-respecting browser would have users opt in to enable any functionality that might transmit user data, or just not even include such functionality at all by default (it would have to be voluntarily added via an extension, for example).
Reading just the blog post... these feel like useless metrics. Why do you care what percentage of your users are searching about animals. What do you possibly have to gain from this? Are they planning to introduce animal-based features?
And if it's not for their own metrics, but to sell... who's going to buy? Facebook tracking pixels and other statistics cookies are so much more valuable that this kind of data
I suspect it is mostly for selling things like default search engine and ads via Firefox Suggest. Some search categories are far more valuable than others for ads.
Wow. Another write-up on how Firefox is planning on monetizing.
How about a write-up on how Firefox plans to stay competitive and integrate/innovate on some of the best features from competing browsers?
I have all Firefox/Mozilla URLs blocked at network level. I get Firefox install/updates from a Linux repo. Firefox is constantly pounding my network attempting to dial home. Thank you maintainers for giving me privacy.
I was a chrome user for over a decade and just last year switched to Firefox when googles decision to just flat share my data with ad brokers and call it a security feature finally pushed me over the edge and I switched to Firefox.
I still think chrome is the better browser both in functionality and performance, but at least Firefox was 90-95% of the way there, and respected my desire to not sell my data.
While this in of itself isn’t super egregious and has an easy opt out, what alternatives are there? I know there’s a bunch of chrome clones, but at that point why not just use raw chromium?
I don't even want my browser to support searching from the browser UI. If I want to send information to Google I'll visit their web page directly. I don't want to do it by a misclick.
It's surprisingly difficult to disable searching from the browser UI in Firefox. Firefox insists you have at least one search engine enabled at all times. The best option I know of is to set the undocumented setting "browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh" to "true" in about:config, which enables an "Add" button in the Search preferences for adding custom search engines. You can then add a fake search engine on localhost that will always fail, and set this to be the only enabled search engine.
I achieved this by turning off a handful of config options for the address bar's suggestions; setting the search input to be separate from the address bar, and hiding it via Customize Toolbar.
I think these were the most important:
keyword.enabled browser.fixup.alternate.enabled browser.urlbar.suggest.searchesFor many versions now, removing the separate search bar via Customize Toolbar reverts to combined URL bar and search bar. It also leaves the search option in the right-click menu.
Oooh! That explains why I haven't been able to disable that stuff from the omnibar. I hate the omnibar -- I just want text entered there to be interpreted as a URL and nothing else -- but at some point, I wasn't able to configure it to be that anymore.
If this is why, you've just made Firefox better for me! Thank you!
That may be the case, but typing into my address bar does not trigger or suggest searches. Good point about the right click.
>You can then add a fake search engine on localhost that will always fail, and set this to be the only enabled search engine.
YES! My friend, you have found my holy grail, thank you
There are a bunch of about:config changes you can make to prevent searching from the address bar. I follow that up by going through and just deleting nearly every string with a URL in it.
FWIW in Vivaldi you can completely disable search from address field in settings and then remove the search field from the toolbar.
Are you talking about the address bar search? Just disable keywords in about:config then.
I miss when Firefox was this forward thinking project to make a better browser with a better UI. It’s similar to what happened to Canonical with Ubuntu. Both projects are extremely solid, and are easy to recommend, but neither has been pushing the envelope in a long time.
Is Firefox being sabotaged from within?
Sure feels like that. For years now actually.
Highly paid executives paid by… [checks notes]…Google. Surely not!
nobody knows how to read a room like the Mozilla folks. They know quite a few Firefox users hate telemetry with passion yet they always go back at it like it does not matter.
They've reached peak power users usage.
Oblivious HTTP is such a joke. The idea that an "independent organization" is your "partner" is a non-starter for me. How can you put those words in the same sentence? And then base the entire security of the whole feature on this premise?
I'm unclear about what search data they're collecting. Are they only talking about searches done through the omnibar, or are they including searches done by navigating to a search engine website and using that?
> Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox
Why isn’t this opt-in? Seems to give away the plot.
"list of categories we’re using: animals, arts, autos, business, career, education, fashion, finance, food, government, health, hobbies, home, inconclusive, news, real estate, society, sports, tech and travel."
"This helps us [...] providing a browsing experience that is more tailored to your needs"
How would my browsing experience be different in any of the categories? Unless it's about showing me ads yet again.
Right.
If the categories were things like "using search as the most convenient way to find a well-known website", "entering a term that's likely to appear in a news headline", and "asking a fully-formed question", I'd find the claim that this is about ways to make a better "browser experience" more convincing.
It's about showing you ads.
Yeah, this is the rub of it. I don’t want my browser to know about me. It’s not necessary. What are they gonna do, release a gaming-aesthetic browser like Opera did? Can’t this data be gleaned some most definitely not identifiable way like download number for particular platforms (“hey, we’re getting a lot of use on Steam Deck”) or something?
Mozilla is supposed to be better than this. I don’t really see anywhere else to go though if you want a web experience that works out of the box (non-free codecs and the like).
> I don’t want my browser to know about me. It’s not necessary.
This. It's not necessary, and I consider it dangerous. Even if the browser maker is 100% on the same privacy page as I am, browsers are too complex to trust with personal data.
One thing that annoys me more than data collection is corporations pretending they do it for my benefit while "respecting my privacy." Stop with the gaslighting, it's absolutely insufferable.
Not to mention, the way the text is written makes me think it's ai generated and that makes it somehow even worse.
This. I invite everyone to go and look at the amount settings that must be turned OFF in Windows 10/11, Firefox, Chrome, whatever app from companies that claim to respect user privacy. For Windows it is literally dozens of toggles, and unsoliticed apps. Then there are the so called security features like malware scanning of URLs/file downloads, etc. Then the DNS replacements which, ya know, still see the URLs that you are asking for.
Every company that claims to respect your privacy is full of shit. There is too much money to made in not respecting it and this is the sole reason that they exist.
Welp, thanks for telling me what to turn off right now Mozilla.
Providing a link to their own comprehensive guide to turn everything off definitely earns style points in my book.
Turning off telemetry has always been easy in Firefox settings. If I'm reading it correctly, the same checkbox we've all be clicking off for years now also disables this too same as always.
Librewolf* seems to be the answer
Who's watching the watchers?...
Is there a white-label firefox that I can install that has sane defaults?
Arkenfox, Librewolf, Waterfox among others might be the best bet, plenty of trade offs like updater scripts at times.
Thank you Mozilla for categorising me for my own good, really appreciate the effort I need to put in to try and shut it down.
'By the way, these values have come out in other contexts. I remember in an earlier war General Westmoreland saying “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”. But it was not an irony. He meant it. I mean, so did the early Christian communities that settled into this country mean it. That for a witches own good one had to dunk her repeatedly in water. Now we have come a long way since then haven’t we[?]'
<https://rickroderick.org/106-nietzsche-knowledge-and-belief-...>
How can Mozilla guarantee some privacy? Well, they would be using separation of content and the source. The content is "broad categories" of search queries. They take your query, match it to a category (this is important, because it has to be local matching to make sense), encrypt it with the public key and send it to a broker. The broker knows where it is coming from, but not what it says. The broker then forward to Mozilla, which decrypts it with their private key.
I don't see a problem as long as there's not enough bytes of information that can infer a person. Aggregating the data in the client would allow this, so I see some kind of time shifting to protect the activity patterns.
I still can't get search in my own bookmarks most of the time, because they pushed bookmark tags hard, then have not implemented them on mobile after a decade. But at least they have a state-of-the-art snooping mechanism...
You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain...
Historically it was always interesting and quite challenging legal work, reconciling some things a bit like this with privacy, lawful intercept and anti-remote-exploitation-tool (anti-trojan) laws, especially in Europe (think: the cookie rule, which goes beyond cookies and PII). Then again, more recently mobile apps and operating systems (on all platforms, e.g. desktop OSs) seem to be doing quite a lot of it, so maybe those legal concerns were overblown.
> Then again, more recently mobile apps and operating systems (on all platforms, e.g. desktop OSs) seem to be doing quite a lot of it, so maybe those legal concerns were overblown.
I think its possible that the laws are still being violated, but good luck suing companies like MS or Google as an individual. Governments won't go after them because their spy agencies love the constant stream of data they can collect from it.
There's a saying that web developers I know have been repeating for years: "Friends don't let friends use Firefox"
That says more about the web developers that you know than it does about Firefox.
Its anecdotal I know, but would have to say that I know more web devs who use Firefox as their daily driver (or use more than one browser), than those who use just Safari or Chrome only. The better web developers (better able to solve bugs, and write less error prone code) are the ones who don't use Chrome for everything.
Come on, Mozilla. I just want a browser. I type in an address, the browser shows me the page. You need money? Let me donate to Firefox so I don't have to continuously opt out of crap like this.
Why is the web browser try to act like SNS web service? You are an user agent for SNS web service, not the SNS itself. Now be a good boy and fetch a SNS web page like a good little dog.
So, there is MS servers ip lists to block, now where is Mozilla's ?
Maybe this is okay to help support it but only if there is a clear modal dialog asking users to consider donating or consider staying opted in. But a default opt in is deceptive.
So I guess they're building their own index, just like Brave, Perplexity, Exa, and others. A much smaller arms race that seems to be going under the radar of most folks.
"Mozilla Connect is a collaborative space for ideas, feedback, and discussions that will help shape future product releases. Whether you’re a longtime Mozilla fan or new to our products—welcome! This community is for you. Please use this space to share ideas, give constructive feedback, and participate in meaningful conversations so we can work together to build a better internet"
When you make a comment here, do a quick search beforehand to check the topic doesn't already exist, and do abide by the spirit of the guidelines.
Whoever is writing these press releases for Firefox needs to reconsider their style. By this point in the product cycle, the only people left using Firefox are sophisticated enough to read through this level of corporate bullshit. Either take "privacy first" seriously or take it out of the mission statement, but don't piss on our leg and call it rain.
Interesting to see this post has no author or signature...
It was written by Moe Zilla, obviously /s
As far as I can tell, this is about collecting aggregate data - they say at the country level - for example "U.S. users search a lot more for 'government' but less for 'education' than Mexican ones". This particular initiative doesn't seem to be about profiling individuals. And, of course, you can turn it off (even if you're not in a country covered by the GDPR).
If you want to do some kind of high-level data collection, this seems like a fairly ethical way of doing it? It's certainly better by miles than what all of chrome, android and edge have been pushing recently.
I have firefox suggest turned off on my machine (at least the one I have firefox as my main browser on), but that's just me.
The ethical way of doing this is opt in. It could be done like Debian's Popularity Contest[0], where you're offered a chance to install the data collection software, with the default being don't install. Firefox could do this with an extension.
Might be unrealistic, but I can't wait for the the day when Ladybird browser becomes a viable alternative. Librewolf it is till then.
Anyone know why this is only available in the US?
Because it's inherently anti-consumer (not something that anyone would voluntarily opt into) and the EU would have their balls in vices instantaneously?
I didn’t expect there to be a privacy side effect of mostly migrating to Apple products. I use Safari on everything now.
I installed firefox on my new computer and it reminded my of Microsoft Windows.
Lots of ads.
Its just a glimpse into the future of this company.
We are past the peak.
I wonder if they are planning to get ads, there is little reason to collect behaviour data for anything else.
Suggestion for a future 'Show HN': Send Mozilla an hourly (GDPR|CCPA) data request and notify you if there are any results.
I'd pay a monthly recurring EU$ 0(.|,)99 for that!
Maybe we should just go back to the 1990s where we just pay a one time fee to buy a piece software and own it forever? Without any data collection, without constant enshittification, without endless ads? Buy it, get a couple of yeard worth of security updates, and be done with it.
It's clear that libre browsers have failed. They are not sustainable. They are too big, too complex, and apparently only two organizations are really capable of keeping one going. One is an ad company, the other is a patsy for the ad company.
I don't see a way out of this that is at all sustainable.
The main reason I use Firefox is because it lets you deactivate search suggestions and the "awesome bar" will suggest only from history and bookmarks. Not having to go through a search engine for basic navigation is a killer feature, and better for the planet. Chrome does not let you do that for obvious reasons.
Now I am afraid of enshittification, that they will try to shove search suggestions one day and hide/remove the option to deactivate them.
Title feels a little bit misleading - they're not collecting 'categorised search data' so much as 'categorising searches and then collecting an aggregate of only the categories.'
I'm not entirely sure how to phrase it better while keeping it pithy but the current wording reads to me like they're collecting the searches as well as the categories, and they deliberately aren't doing that.
(I entirely understand that some people will reasonably have an issue with what they -are- doing, but it's at least worth understanding what that actually is before deciding whether you're one of them :)
What could go wrong?
Here we go again. This is why i use waterfox. I switched when they put ads in the address bar.
I don't want to be given a "browsing experience".
I don't want to be treated as a product, sold to data brokers without my knowledge.
My browsing experience is already tailored to me by my own actions.
I guess I'll be migrating to LibreWolf.
How does having a browsing experience imply being a product?
Is it possible to use Firefox without having a browsing experience? It is a web browser!
Seems like Mozilla really is fighting a losing battle: Whenever they as much as think about doing 1% of the monitoring that their competitors do (often for user research to guide and focus their development efforts; unclear if that's what's happening here though), they alienate a vocal part of their user base; when they don't, their software drifts further and further from what users actually want and need.
The base they alienate just wants a web browser. You don’t need to iterate forever on a good tool that does the job. Software can be feature complete. Anyone wishing for a complete overhaul update for something like cp? Absolutely not, people want tools that work the same for years.
But a browser is never "done", for better or worse, nor are user expectations static. Stopping to iterate on a web browser is like stopping to iterate on an operating system:
It'll go well for a while (and users even might love you for it for a year or two, since you can focus your effort on fixing bugs and not introduce new ones with new features), and then you'll slowly but steadily lose users to other browser that do adapt.
Losing users for a web browser, means losing search referral revenue in the short term (literally Mozilla's lifeblood), and losing web developers in the long term, which will break the experience even further.
Just one example that almost made me switch browsers: Web site translation. I was regularly using Chrome in parallel for that, but now Firefox fortunately supports it too (and in a privacy-preserving local way at that – a true innovation), so they keep me as a user.
All you have to do is keep up with web standards. Most people don't use 99% of the browsers features I'd guess. About all I need are tabs and bookmarks and a history and thats it, same stuff since netscape basically, my three features for a complete browser experience that would make me very happy. I'm sure other users feel the same.
Some things technically not part of the core feature set of a browser (at least not the one you've mentioned), yet even just one of them missing would make me immediately drop Firefox:
- End-to-end encrypted tab, history, and bookmark sync across devices
- Content translation, as mentioned above ideally in a privacy-preserving way
- Plugin support
- Cookie-jar-per-tab and proxy-per-tab support (Firefox allows doing both through Multi-Account Containers)
I'm sure some other users also feel the same.
And I don't want or use any of those things.
It's almost like a "one size fits all" browser can't actually exist. I'm hoping for a more minimal, but excellent, browser to come around to meet the needs of the sort of user I am.
I think this is one of the adverse effects of Firefox changing how extensions work. In the Good Old Days, Firefox was a reasonably minimal browser and you could pick and choose which advanced functionality you wanted by choosing which extensions to install. But since extensions have been largely neutered now, a whole lot of that advanced functionality has to be built into the browser proper. This is fine if you want that stuff, but it's really uncomfortable if you don't.
> About all I need are tabs and bookmarks and a history and thats it
I'm impressed you don't even need a HTML renderer component and all that comes with it.
As long as web standards keep evolving you can never stop iterating on browsers. And with Google Chrome pushing some of those web standards additions, Firefox has to keep up or die.
Also, it is possible to continue iteratively improving a complex piece of software like a browser, beyond just the web standards race. Security, privacy, performance, and reliability/bugs/code correctness are areas where new computer science is constantly coming down the pipe and worth integrating. And maybe other things like AI or features for AR/VR systems, though it's more debatable whether those belong in general purpose browsers.
Browsers aren't Unix utilities that should do one thing and just one thing and thus can theoretically reach a state of "done". But even there it's not always a certainty. For example, "sudo" being superseded by a simpler more secure "doas", and then more recently by SystemD "run0". Even simple utilities continue to evolve.
Firefox is doing a lot more than merely keeping up with web standards. Learning to abrogate a web standard is not an impossibility. They are standards for a reason: to show other engineers how to interface with them. I'd consider a browser finished if it has tabs, bookmarks, history, and print. Same as we had 25 years ago.
The users are telling them pretty loudly what they actually want and need.
The problem is that Mozilla then consistently does something else, and tells its users that it's for their own good.
That's just not feasible for the vast majority of people. Being constantly behind on security updates is a sound recipe for losing your personal data unless there's nothing you care about on the machine you're using.
I posted this on another story 6mo ago:
Every time I hear "anonymous data", I think of that time AOL published anonymized search logs (for academic research). The anonymization was negligent, and an NYT reporter de-anonymized and tracked down one of the users with the local & personal info present in the search queries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release
https://web.archive.org/web/20130404175032/http://www.nytime...
> We’re ramping up our efforts to enhance search experience by developing new features like Firefox Suggest, which provides recommended online content that corresponds to queries.
So, they need to collect data about my search habits so they can show me relevant ads in Firefox Suggest? At this point why do I even bother using Firefox? I seriously might as well just use Chromium.
> I seriously might as well just use Chromium
Before you leave please give LibreWolf a shot. It’s a modified Firefox with “spying/tracking/etc” disabled.
I've looked into it in the past, but I have no idea who's maintaining that software or what's included in it. I understand their claims, but I can't verify that's all they're doing due to my lack of time/interest.
It's more risk than I'm willing to take for a software I use or everything critically important to me - including banking access.
Quoting another HN user regarding librewolf:
> Binaries are unsigned, third party update service, Google safe browsing disabled unless you build from source, running unusual browser setups can actually make you more distinctive online, unencrypted DNS by default, speed of security patches is slower than base Firefox, etc.
will do
Depends what you want. Chromium also has hooks back to Google so if you are really data conscious you’ll need to look to something like ungoogled-chromium.
Only reason I still use Firefox is because of TreeStyleTabs/Sideberry, still nothing like it for Chrome so on Firefox I remain.
The Vivaldi browser has a similar feature (not open source unfortunately). I've used it for a while, I quite enjoy the tab and bookmark management sidebars.
Just took a look, and it seems like Vivaldi has vertical tabs, but the similarities end there, it doesn't seem like it does tree-style tabs? Just has groups + one level of tabs...
Try Arc. You won't be looking back.
I'd love to but it not being available on Linux and invite-only both makes it very difficult to even give it a try :)
FWIW, I just tried Arc on Windows, but it seems like it doesn't do tree-style tabs at all, unless I'm missing something obvious?
They don't have sync for most things.
Firefox is nice in that not only it has sync of basically everything, but you can run your own server for it.
Arc being such a generic term it'd be helpful to include a link or explanation what that is.
Just search for “arc browser”.
Why? It’s based on chromium anyways. Might as well use Vivaldi instead.
Remember when Firefox was the new hotness because it blocked ads?
Firefox mobile is still the hotness for that same reason.
You can trivially opt out of both the telemetry and the suggestions.
Containers?
I love containers when developing! Especially when working with or testing authentication related stuff. No need to open private tabs all the time.
This extension lets you open self-destructing containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/open-in-temp-container/ .
Isn't this exactly what Google does in Chrome?
No. Your queries aren't send to Mozilla, just the broad categories. Chrome is sending full queries to Google.
If you're using Google for searches, it also doesn't matter if you use Firefox or Chrome, obviously they have access to the full queries you do on their properties.
It does matter becauae you can use an anonimizer for seach on Firefox just fine, but if you use Chrome then Google can collect everything you enter in a form and see where it's sent. Not sure if they do, but they could. One element of security is comparmentalization: avoid using a client and server from the same adversary, if you can, to minimize correlations.
Also you can opt out of this, unlike (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) the Chrome telemetry.
DuckDuckGo for the win!
This has nothing to do with what search engine you're using. It collects data about what you type in the search/URL bar.
I guess it's time to stop searching from the url bar (sorry, "awesomebar") and create a local html file as the startup and new tab page, with search boxes for all your fav engines. Just like the good old days.
I did that for years, then it became difficult as browsers didn't want to let you set a local file as your default home page (for "security reasons").
I now just have "Blank Page" set for my Homepage, new windows, and new tabs.
I just tried setting a local file in Firefox and it seems to work again, so I may go back to that.
I was able to set a local file for new windows, but it looks like there's no built-in way to set a custom URL for new pages, not even in about:config (v125.0.3, Fedora). :/
I may have to simply use the URL bar with data collection opted-out, as I'd rather not bother with vetting and installing a custom open source extension to override the new tab behavior.
about:blank is the new tab nothing else loads faster!
You could even paste all your bookmarks into that page!