What's the purpose of gating "we don’t sell access to your data" by "if switch('firefox-tou')"?

        {% if switch('firefox-tou') %}
          <p>Firefox is independent and a part of the not-for-profit Mozilla, which fights for your online rights, keeps corporate powers in check and makes the internet accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe the internet is for people, not profit. You’re in control over who sees your search and browsing history. All that and exceptional performance too.</p>
        {% else %}
          <p>Firefox is independent and a part of the not-for-profit Mozilla, which fights for your online rights, keeps corporate powers in check and makes the internet accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe the internet is for people, not profit. Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data. You’re in control over who sees your search and browsing history. All that and exceptional performance too.</p>

They said in the commit comment that the new TOU will "roll out" to different people at different times.

Does that in multiple places. Maybe they wanted a way to quickly revert it? Or enable on countries where they think they can get away with it?

"No better place to leave for" seems an apt way to put it.

I think/fear that in the long run, there will be fewer and fewer ways to participate in activities and communities on the web on your own terms, as only a vetted, allowlisted set of client builds (that may be "open source" on the tin, but by that point it is effectively meaningless) will be able to pass CDN "anti-abuse" restrictions. It will not be a better web, but it sure will be more profitable for some.

> No better place to leave for

This is an amazingly common psychological trap. You wouldn't believe the number of people, men as well as women, who end up in the therapy chair, at the police station or at the hospital A&E, because they are "stuck" with a violent and abusive partner.

The modern tech landscape is all about abuse. People use fancy names for it like "enshitification" or "rot economy" - but at the end of the day it's about domination and abusive relations.

A very common position here is that the victim sees "no alternative".

And... surprise surprise, where they get that idea from is the partner, friends, group/organisation that is also toxic and colludes in gas-lighting and co-abusing the victim into a limited worldview.

Once the victim spends any amount of time outside that mental prison, they regain perspective and say... "Oh, so I actually do have choices!".

This is a poor analogy. There are thousands of people to meet and bond with, so you do have a choice. But there are less than a handful of fundamentally different browsers.

Derivative browsers don't really count here, as they depend on the upstream to not hurt them. For instance, if the parent project completely removes something essential for privacy, it it a lot of work to keep it in your code. The Manifest v2 removal is an example. Over time, when other changes are built on the removal, this creates an increasingly high burden. Eventually, the child project is starved. You simply do not want to be in this position.

> This is a poor analogy. There are thousands of people to meet and bond with, so you do have a choice. But there are less than a handful of fundamentally different browsers.

This is because users decided that they want a browser that spies on them.

At least in Germany in hacker and IT-affine circles, you will often be frowned upon if you voluntarily use Chrome or Edge (except if you have a really good reason).

> At least in Germany in hacker and IT-affine circles, you will often be frowned upon if you voluntarily use Chrome or Edge (except if you have a really good reason).

That's largely the same here, at least for anyone worth their salt. But how does that matter when Mozilla's pulling things like this?

For years now your only browser choices are "Google", and "funded by Google", and it shows.

I can't even give someone too hard of a time for using vanilla chromium or similar anymore; Not like it's any worse than literally every other browser offering nowadays, minus rare exceptions like librewolf or ungoogled chromium that also add a whole host of minor technical complications to use.

I don't think the analogy is weakened by bringing numbers/quantity into it. The dynamics work for any number of principals. Take a 3 player game, where Alice trusts Bob but is better off with Bill, however Bill is not visible to her because of chaff/disinfo/noise broadcast by Bob or Bob's confederates.

It's not what Mozilla does, it's about what Mozilla says/claims.

Mozilla is a deceptive/defective entity here.

The numbers matter because they affect whether there actually is a better option.

What happens when Alice is with Bill, but Bill is also abusive to a lesser extent? And "don't have a browser" is not an option.

You only need one better browser to switch to. I guess you're getting at a Hobson's choice [0], that there really is only one browser and all others are copies of the same harmful set of properties, so moving isn't worth the overhead (switch cost is a factor in this that we often ignore). To my mind, there must be at least one browser out there that is "less undesirable" than that case. Just iterate your way into your comfort zone.

So often arguments on this axis come down to how much convenience are you going to give up for the trust relation you desire. We get stuck if we mistake convenience for necessity thereby bringing absolutes into a continuous trade-off problem.

I wouldn't say there's only one, but there are two main clusters for anyone not on a mac, and a handful of teams large enough to do a solid job of running their own variant. There's precious little iteration to do.

I'm not a typical user [0] but am very mindful of the typical user. Maybe I'd not realised how much the browser space has shrunk and that the experience of "browsing", the abstract task, now breaks down into more specialised tasks.

I'm thinking lately the myth of the "browser" and "web" as coherent data spaces is something even Sir Tim gave up on, right? If the centre cannot hold constellations of specialised clients (which are already "apps" in a sense) look like enduring in the near future at the expense of interoperability and standards. The "best browser" will be the one that strikes the most deals with the parts of the network people want to connect to. It's just like the best "game console".

That seems really bleak for the Internet qua people's network.

No doubt http/s and the worlds of port 80/443 will endure eternal, but the "Universal" search and information space the pioneers and then proto-Google aspired to now seems so remote that the idea of a "browser" is itself a little ridiculous to beards like me. I think today the "browser" has become a clique of PKI suites and CAs, at the behest of banking and retail, backed by broken but well meaning regulation, and unwittingly creating this monster we still call "The Browser". anyway, peace.

[0] I use w3m for 99% of my daily drive and a sandboxed degoogled chromium for any of the "messy stuff"

So, where is the better Bill of browsers that Mozilla is preventing me learning about?

Okay. So why don't you tell us what the better choice(s) are?

Yes, I’ll be leaving. I used to prefer Firefox but have long since moved to Safari for browsing and <insert Chromium based browser> for web dev. Every year I give switching to FF a try. I’ve been using it for everything since mid-December but it’s honestly a pretty bad user experience. This is the move that’s gonna make me stop for this year’s trial run and all future ones. It’s simply not worth my time if their ideals don’t align with mine anymore. Safari and Chromium have their issues but I know what benefits I’m trading off for. Without ideals, FF has no standout features compared to the alternatives (for me).

I'll look for somewhere else. Web browsers aren't as special as they used to be, there's a lot more choice now. Funny thing was, I was paying for Firefox through some of their services (VPN) that I had no intent to use.

I quit the original l"Firefox" a long time ago, I've been using librewolf since its release and now zen (also a firefox fork) and I keep ungoogled chromium in case a site is broken on firefox.

> To HN: Will you be quitting firefox over this change, or is there simply no better place to leave for?

It doesn't really concern me yet. I'll wait for the controversy to die down and examine it then.

I'll stay for the time being because there is no better alternative.

Yeah, I've been a Firefox user and Mozilla supporter for approaching two decades now, even used to donate monthly to the foundation. I'm furious over this. I installed LibreWolf on my personal machines last night and expect to uninstall Firefox after work today.

I'm a happy LibreWolf for years. The transition from FF to LibreWolf is seamless. And you won't be surprised anymore nor annoyed when Mozilla does moves like that.

It's seamless-ish.

Sometimes the more aggressive privacy settings stop some sites from rendering properly unless you add canvas exceptions, for example Openstreetmap and UK National Rail.

I'm happy to make the effort.

/Librewolf on desktop, Waterfox on mobile.

I probably will, actually. It was good to have an ally with their stature and history.

> To HN: Will you be quitting firefox over this change, or is there simply no better place to leave for?

Not to be overly whataboutistic, but we tolerate sooo much more from other players. It's annoying how we hold some to a higher standard, but ignore others doing worse. I get people are disappointed in Mozilla and wants them to do better, but it's a bit like the "we live in a society meme", where those doing good must be perfect or else..

I use Firefox, and advocate for people to use Firefox, because I believe it's the one browser that is not evil. It's the entire reason for the existence of Firefox.

Saying, well, why aren't you upset that Chrome is evil is such a confusion of ideas I barely know how to respond. Yes, I know Chrome is evil, I've been telling people that for many years, and I don't use it.

> It's annoying how we hold some to a higher standard, but ignore others doing worse.

People use FF, _because_ they can hold it to a higher standard. That's the entire point.

Those perceived to be doing good are often used to lessen the blow of those perceived to be doing bad. Like how it's not so bad if your train sinks of faeces if there's a bus you can take instead. Losing the safe alternative makes the original sin worse.

> Not to be overly whataboutistic, but we tolerate sooo much more from other players. It's annoying how we hold some to a higher standard, but ignore others doing worse.

Who is "we"? It certainly doesn't include me.

Someone who tries to gain your trust only to betray it gets a stronger reaction than a known bad actor doing what they are known for? Color me surprised.

> I get people are disappointed in Mozilla and wants them to do better, but it's a bit like the "we live in a society meme", where those doing good must be perfect or else

You are talking like mozilla made a mistake. Yet their response was not to apologize but to claim people are just confused.

How much shit can Mozilla pull before people are allowed to say enough is enough?

What other tools are you using instead of Firefox and/or a browser?

How does discovery work with tools like yt-dlp?

I have long left the sinking ship and switched to enshitified and actually private https://librewolf.net/

Which will go under within a few years of FF dying. (Yes, the current code may still work, but the web will move on without it.)

I am very aware but that does not change that currently its a superior alternative.

i don't think that matters. we are looking for firefox based alternatives to get away from stupid policy changes, not to find a browser that has a better chance of survival.

any alternatives will be good as long as firefox is alive. if firefox itself dies, then that's an entirely different matter.

> if firefox itself dies

Switching to forks makes it a matter of when, not if.

All the forks are dependent on FF's current funding for their own long-term viability.

All the forks are currently dependent on Mozilla. That doesn't mean no one else will step up when their drawn out suicide concludes. Mozilla goign under is not an existential threat for Firefox - quite the contrary, it is likely the only thing that can save it.

i admire your optimism. i wish i could share it. i do not believe that firefox can be be saved by a group of unpaid volunteers. it is to big and to complex for that. volunteers can keep it on lifesupport, but in order to save it it will take some substantial funding.

Why do you think unpaid volunteers are the only possibility. There are plenty of organizations that have a vested interest in an open internet and new ones can be formed by interested individuals. That Mozilla is unwilling to try other funding methods besides getting paid by what should be their main adversary doesn't mean that no one else can.

there are plenty of organizations that could lend support, but not one that could do so single-handedly. the consequence is that these organizations will have to pool their resources and also take away resources from other projects in order to do this.

accomplishing this is going to be a major feat. again. i admire your optimism. my pessimism tells me that there are a lot of ways this can go wrong.

the big risk is that mozilla won't go out with a bang. they will stick around and even without funding try to hold the reigns. that will make it hard for other organizations to step in. while many have a vested interest in keeping firefox alive they may want to get a seat at the table.

(i am just making this up as i go, so don't take it to serious, but i just had a thought of what ideally might happen:)

when mozilla loses its funding from google they realize that in order to continue there needs to be an organization that is comprised of all the above organizations that want to support an open internet. they get together to form some kind of super organization like a consortium where they all are a member of and all contribute to the continued funding of firefox.

Will FF die though or will it be released from mismanagement when Mozilla finally goes under.