STOCKHOLM, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Vienna-based advocacy group NOYB on Wednesday said it has filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority against Mozilla accusing the Firefox browser maker of tracking user behaviour on websites without consent.
NOYB (None Of Your Business), the digital rights group founded by privacy activist Max Schrems, said Mozilla has enabled a so-called “privacy preserving attribution” feature that turned the browser into a tracking tool for websites without directly telling its users.
Mozilla had defended the feature, saying it wanted to help websites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering what it called a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, it hoped to significantly reduce collecting individual information.
Hopefully this makes some of the Firefox shills finally realize it’s time to change our recommendations.
I’ve heard so much shit lately about Firefox, it has become a sinking ship and I’m eager to see who picks up the shards and runs with it.
There’s still nothing better, you just have to be careful to block all their moneymaking bullshit attempts like save-your-shit-into-our-pocket and virginity-preserving assfucking. I use Fennec on android, though.
LibreWolf is better, includes ublock and no tracking by default.
There are good chromium based browsers too, I’m not aware of Vivaldi having any major controversies or shady business decisions in recent years, it has a built in adblock thats independent of chromium’s upstream.
If you disqualify every browser due to its upstream having issues then you should probably revert to using CURL or something convoluted like what richard stallman does. Every browser that exists today is a fork of some browser that previously was good but started to suck.
The problem is that Librewolf’s continued existence depends on Firefox continuing to exist. And while I like Vivaldi (but not its closed-sourceness), if all browsers end up being Chromium-based, Google still has an effective monopoly on web standards.
If the only reason google doesn’t have a monopoly on web standards is because firefox “exists”, then I think Google does in fact have a monopoly on web standards. Other browsers exists besides chrome and firefox ones, some like Konqeror even work pretty well for how old they are, but I think firefox is eventually going to see the same fate as netscape slowly becoming more and more irrelevant, and unlike netscape they can’t exactly sue Google for anti-trust (at least not without losing 90% of their funding)
I don’t think chromium should ever be encouraged. That is the one browser family trying and mostly succeeding at swallowing up the Internet. Google already has way too much power over the Internet, and it will only get worse if people don’t start leaving their ecosystem
There are forks, like libre wolf (desktop) and mull (Android) that don’t ship with some of the bullshit, Firefox ships.
Yeah, and using those is pretty good, but they don’t really do anything you can’t do just by changing settings in Firefox, and if Firefox doesn’t have any users those die right along with it.
You’re talking about the wrong thing. The Mozilla Foundation is and has been acting a fool in recent years. Firefox, the open source program, is doing mostly OK. Obviously the two are closely connected, but they’re definitely not the same thing, and this matters when discussing policy.
And what else should be recommended?
The choice is basically between Firefox or skinned Chromium.
Do you really want to experience first-hand just why Internet Explorer was this hated?
Here’s a hint: de facto monopoly on browser market that allowed them to control the web standards back then and their ideas were not good.
I don’t think you have any idea how much work it takes to create a new browser.
Labybird is a completely new upcoming open source browser, complete with its own from scratch engine
Theres also Servo an open source engine led by the Linux Foundation
Ah yes, let’s recommend the browser that is “targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.”
I think there’s kind of a 3rd choice, WebKit.
Chrome was great, till it wasn’t. IE always was bad. Edge is chromium.
Firefox has stayed closer to “don’t be evil” than many companies. Is say far more than the other options.
WebKit is really only available on Apple devices in any meaningful way.
Completely agree. I understood WebKit to be a different browse engine than chromium or Firefox.
While chromium and Firefox have wider platform options, there’s “kind of” a 3rd runner even though locked to apple.
I agree Linux and open source is king.
That’s where Chromium came from originally, so not really 3rd.
I was thinking WebKit was closer to Netscape in origin.
You made me go look it up. 😉 and I think we’re both wrong….
Below from Wikipedia:
WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS software libraries from KDE.
On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome
No they won’t. They’ll double down by saying “UH YEAH BUT UH, NOT AS BAD AS GOOGLE!” like that is going to make it sound better.