A Comment on Mozilla's Policy Changes
107 comments
·February 28, 2025rererereferred
> Browsers without formal governance may offer appealing features or privacy claims, but users have little recourse if those promises are broken. There’s no entity to hold accountable, no legal framework within which to address grievances, and often no transparency about decision-making processes.
Do we get any of those with Mozilla? They can change their ToC whenever they want and keep adding things that users don't want. I don't think they are much better than a random developer building their own fork.
terom
Wait, Mozilla is banning the use of their Firefox browser for porn? That's going to hurt adoption.
What's with the mixup of their browser and services policies?
[1] Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
[2] You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to:
* Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence,
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/#you... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/acceptable-use/
ziddoap
That, or some variant of that, has been there for ages.
2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20181223004526/http://www.mozill...
Wording was slightly different earlier than that, e.g. 2015:
"Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that:
[...]
Is inappropriate such as obscene or pornographic materials, graphic depictions of sexuality or violence, or images that exploit or harm children"
https://web.archive.org/web/20150331013034/https://www.mozil...
terom
Yeah, and that makes sense in the context of an acceptable use policy for Mozilla services that are not your use of the Firefox browser.
But the same AUP for the services is now explicitly referenced in the TOS for the browser. How are you supposed to read it - the AUP only applies to your use of the browser to access the services? Isn't that already implicit if you're using the services? Surely it can't be attempting to apply the services AUP to any non-service use of the browser?
Very confusing, it seems badly written to me.
Same thing with the "Some Services in Firefox Require a Mozilla Account" and then the "Termination" with a notification to the (optional) account. Somewhat disconcerting.
[1] Mozilla can suspend or end anyone’s access to Firefox at any time for any reason, including if Mozilla decides not to offer Firefox anymore. If we decide to suspend or end your access, we will try to notify you at the email address associated with your account or the next time you attempt to access your account.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/#moz...
ziddoap
>Mozilla services that are not your use of the Firefox browser.
The 2015 policy I quoted applied to "Mozilla’s services and products". The 2018 version just references "services", leaving out the "products" part.
I don't know. They've muddied the water and I'm disappointed with recent changes.
thorw93040494
[flagged]
transcriptase
Someone needs to write a book on the how and why Mozilla became whatever the hell it is now, and why they would drop the ball so hard on Firefox while jumping from one unsustainable idea nobody wants to another. Why is there no adult in the room to say no to the nonsense and direct resources towards the one thing people actually do want?
AyyEye
Not so much a 'why' but it does have a good history of the user-hostile moves Mozilla has made. https://digdeeper.club/articles/mozilla.xhtml
s_dev
Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight. Yes he supported Prop 8 and people didn't like his political views but given the current US climate that seems all very tame in comparison and I'm not sure exactly how that conflicts with running a Web Browser development agency.
st3fan
Under Eich Mozilla mostly abandoned Firefox development to focus on his big bet that failed: Firefox OS. It took Mozilla many years to recover from that technically after it finally killed FirefoxOS.
It was a good bet. But it did not work out. No leader is infallible.
saidinesh5
Didn't Firefox OS actually bring various new APIs to Firefox browser itself?
That's what I understood from their postmortem post:
"Engineering — Have a clear separation between “chrome” and web content rather than try to force the web to do things it isn’t suited to. Create device APIs using REST & WebSockets on the server side of the web stack rather than privileged JavaScript DOM APIs on the client side. Create a community curated directory of web apps on the web rather than an app store of submitted packaged apps."
https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-story-of-firefox-os-cb5bf79...
ewzimm
While the FirefoxOS brand didn't survive, the technology itself took off as KaiOS and is more popular that iOS in many markets. It just took a Chinese company with some TCL money to manage distribution successfully.
n4r9
It's always a difficult situation. Employees want leaders that represent their values and are halfway competent at being data-driven. I don't know much about his political views or whether internally there was anything other than the Prop 8 stuff going around. However some of his later comments regarding COVID suggest biases in basic interpretation of data.
vasachi
So current employees want a leader that basically only thinks about said leader's salary, I guess? That is a shared value among many, can't argue with that.
saidinesh5
I think that's a symptom and not the cause of the current situation.
Without getting into the politics of Eich's firing, It simply looked like people there just didn't care about the browser there anymore.
If they did, the people who were vocal enough to get a CEO fired would obviously have raised a voice against the dropping marketshare (aka their own bottomline), money squandered on various non browser projects (pocket), all these PR nightmares (mr robot, recent layoffs ) etc ...
Needless to say when i say people, i mean at least the vocal ones in power and obviously not everyone.
spacebanana7
Lots of companies have political silliness going on inside them but are still able to produce good products. For example - the CCP stuff at Bytedance, the Cheobol stuff at Samsung and the various stuff at Google.
kibwen
Those companies aren't propped up by substantial quantities of volunteer labor. The volunteers rebelled against Eich when he made it clear he would not apologize for trying to take away the human rights of the people volunteering to support the project. It was a complete failure of leadership on his part.
edent
[flagged]
Macha
I do wonder how much of it was really in their control.
Firefox had its rise when Microsoft had basically slowed IE development to a crawl, which allowed them to build a lead of how much better they were than IE that no browser developer would be dumb enough to allow to reoccur. Tabs, Adblock, Firebug, performance for youtube and google maps that wasn't appalling at a time when these apps were themselves new and exciting.
Like you could show a normal person who was using IE6 tabs and adblock, and that's a clear use case to switch browsers. The only feature anywhere near that compelling in the recent or not-so-recent past is sync, which is why every browser manufacturer has their own version of it. And sync still isn't tabs or adblock.
And they had a clear revenue model with Google (and not yet irrelevant competitors) paying for search and not yet starting to squeeze them. I'm sure that revenue model was partly undermined when they moved to yahoo in the US and everyone just went and switched back to Google, which caused Google to question how valuable that really was.
At the same time, Google developed Chrome because it let them push features that were useful for their revenue generating products. And google pushed hard. Some of its early market share was to wooing us with performance and tab isolation, for sure. But a lot of it was bundling with new laptops, flash player, anti-virus programs etc. to automatically set it as the default for non-tech users who may not recognise what a browser is really.
And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop.
One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android. They couldn't have Firefox on iOS, and it took ages for government regulation to meaningfully change that, but they could have been on Android much sooner, and used some of their desktop network effects and sync to build market share, but instead they left it so late and missed the mobile market such that their poor mobile market share turned browser sync into something that harmed their desktop market share, as people wanted a desktop browser to sync their mobile Chrome tabs etc.
Firefox's headcount (and the pace of web platform development) had ballooned over this period, and this was fine when the Google money was still a given, but now that's looked to be decreasing or entirely at risk, Mozilla has needed to make Firefox pay for Firefox (unlike Chrome, which doesn't really need to pay for Chrome as long as it's a channel for Google's revenue generating products). This has put them in pretty direct conflict with their users, as ways to monetise the browser goes against a lot of why their remaining users are their users to begin with.
thewebguyd
> And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop.
The tech influencer effect also switched to pushing Chrome at the time, especially outside of Linux/FLOSS communities.
Chrome was released back when Google was still viewed favorably. People were high on gmail, google docs, and they still had "don't be evil." It took pretty much no time at all to start seeing Chrome everywhere Firefox used to be.
So yeah, I agree with you - no doubt some of it is Mozilla's doing, but I think more or less it was out of their control and I think "we" (the tech crowd) are just as much at fault for Chrome's dominance and the downfall of Firefox. It only took 5 years from release for Chrome to surpass Firefox, and the tech crowd were very much the early adopters and drivers of that.
a_imho
At this point I find it very hard to chalk it up to mere incompetence.
null
pixxel
[dead]
st3fan
Angry crowd: “Mozilla should do things to diverse revenue!”
Also angry crowd: “No! No! Not that thing! How dare you explore alternative revenue streams! You are Mozilla, just pick and the execute a successful 100 million dollar idea!”
meindnoch
Angry crowd: focus on your browser!
Mozilla: what? acquire a bookmarking service?
Angry crowd: no! develop your browser!
Mozilla: ok, got it! I'll make a VPN service!
Angry crowd: WORK ON YOUR FUCKING BROWSER
Mozilla: AI? Did I hear AI from someone over there?
parasti
Nobody in the crowd ever said the first thing.
LeoWattenberg
I sure have. Mozillas main and perhaps only real mistake was that they didn't meaningfully attempt to become independent from Google the second Google started building Chrome (with Mozillas help, no less!). A truly independent Mozilla would not have needed to implement DRM, and would be shipping with adblock by default - which incidentally is exactly what made people switch from IE to FF in the first place, popup ads.
Now the ship has beached itself and the crew is frantically trying something - anything - to plug the leaks, prevent her from capsizing and trying to get her back afloat. I don't know if they'll manage, or if ladybird is the alternative to the new IE that is Chrome
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B
Angry crowd all over my tech bubble: "Mozilla should make a subscription that directly funds the development of Firefox, and not the salary of the CEO that does nothing."
Also angry crowd: "No, not ads or AI, it's stupid."
What was your point anyway?
kennysoona
Man, Waterfox huh. I used to use that, but knowing it's owned by a marketing company and seeing development kind of lack behind Librewolf, there didn't seem to be much reason to use it anymore. However, being able to open a new private or tor tab in the same window as a normal tab is pretty nice.
MrAlex94
Waterfox is independent again. Also some comments on System1: https://phanpy.social/#/mastodon.social/s/114080867102764721
kennysoona
> Waterfox is independent again.
Oh, nice! I might check it out again at some point.
Also, are you the author per chance? If so, really nice work!
bloopernova
Can anyone comment on the difference between Waterfox and Librewolf?
weikju
I was going to comment that one of them (WaterFox) has a shady sponsor (System1, an advertising company) but it seems WaterFox has been an independent project again since 2023 [0]
MrAlex94
While branding System1 an adtech company is correct, its bread and butter [at the time] was search aggregation and in effect contextual advertising (System1 didn't want to deal with PII). The ownership made a lot of sense, and of course having a view inside the company, I could see how everything worked.
It was impossible to get that point across, especially as S1 wanted to have the final say on what was said. A lot of heartache all across the board could've been saved by just being able to say things as a matter of fact.
But unfortunately people jump to conclusions, don't have good faith discussions and loved just get involved in internet drama.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B
I never used Waterfox but Librewolf seems to have more stricts settings, whereas people describe Waterfox as being closer to Firefox.
Librewolf has sensible but annoying default settings that you have to change. For example, cookies are deleted when quitting, or you can't have night mode out of the box since it could be a privacy issue. IMHO it's a cleaner Firefox and I enjoy it so far.
replete
I contributed UX for a 'save cookies for this site' dropdown feature in the navbar, a poc was made which looked good, but it got lost in other work and eventually didn't land in a release that I'm aware of. Shame because that one feature would make it practical to use the recommended clear cookies behavior by default except for particular sites and overall boost everyone's privacy and security because I'm pretty sure most people turn it off after getting sick of logging in. After a couple of months I went back to Firefox and hardened it making it basically the same as LF but not being a month behind in updates. I guess I'll revisit the project now
thorw93040494
》This situation reveals a recurring issue in how Mozilla communicates with its user base
Mozilla is very clear at its communication! They even got new leadership and rebranded recently! Their updated Privacy Policy is also very clear! Maybe they had not implement everything yet, but they are heading in clear direction. And real hammer will come in a few months, if they lose deal with Google!
At this point Mozilla is a toxic organization when it comes to privacy, something like Google with Chrome. Dismissing it as a "communication issue" is not sufficient! Waterfox needs clear separation from Mozilla!
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B
Their last message says it all:
> We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses
The text is confusing on purpose and mixes Firefox, the Mozilla Services (Sync maybe? That's it?), AI, and their new AD-platform (without mentioning the last two). And why are they talking about a license when it's a ToS? Everything is confusing about it, even their answers.
> to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible
The very same thing they did for more than 20 year without such a ToS? Why now? I think it's about AI and ads but I'm sure they are smarter than me and will explain everything in precise details to clear up such a "big confusion."
> we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches
That's a fucking lie of course. They did that last year without any issue. You can get the text from the search box (like mSearchBox->getText() in C++, wow I'm a Mozilla engineer), and put that in the URL of my favorite search engine as part of the query.
> or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice
I don't care about the ownership, I want to know why, why now, and I want them to explain all the details that definitely do NOT appear in their Privacy Notice.
My conclusion is that they are moving away from Firefox for some reason, they pretended to fire the last CEO which keeps on working on the AI, and they want a lot of information like everyone else which is difficult when you're supposed to be the open-source knight of privacy.
But I'm only typing that because I am bitter and have already moved on. They fucked with us too many times, I don't care anymore even if the only alternative left was Links.
bee_rider
I hate it when companies say “there’s been some confusion about…”
There hasn’t been confusion. There’s almost never confusion. Making an announcement requires clear communication. If reasonable people are interpreting their communication in a way they didn’t intend, it isn’t confusion, they just miscommunicated at best.
debacle
Mozilla acts like a corporation and not a non-profit. There is no humility or grace in their communication.
CrossVR
I think it goes further than just bad communication though. This policy is the typical cover-your-ass method of giving yourself as broad of a license to user data as legally possible.
An organization like Mozilla should take a stance and do the opposite by making their policy as narrow as possible.
This costs more in legal costs, but for an organization that defines itself as a champion of user privacy and control this should be the natural choice.
kibwen
Mozilla is both a non-profit foundation and also a corporation. You aren't legally allowed to use charitable donations to fund web browser development, so the corporation has to handle that.
CrossVR
A non-profit foundation is allowed to earn revenue from a product. It just can't transfer that revenue to the owners of the foundation or spend it on dividends.
inetknght
> You aren't legally allowed to use charitable donations to fund web browser development, so the corporation has to handle that.
If the charity is a non-profit specifically for development of a non-profit web browser, what's the problem?
kibwen
That's not how charities work as a legal construct.
The point of incorporating as a charity is that it makes you exempt from taxes. Obviously the government that collects taxes wants to make sure that every corporation doesn't incorporate as a charity solely to avoid taxes, so it places strict limits on what you're allowed to do with charitable donations.
The Mozilla Foundation (as distinct from the Mozilla Corporation) is specifically a 501(c)(3) charity under US law. That means it can use its funds for the following:
"The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency."
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
Notably, developing a free web browser is not one of the charitable activities that the IRS recognizes.
triceratops
> You aren't legally allowed to use charitable donations to fund web browser development
Why not?
lamename
Whats the best casual (non Tor) browser these days? Brave? Opera?
kome
Firefox, Vivaldi
kennysoona
Librewolf or Ungoogled Chromium with uBlock.
PrayagS
Ungoogled Chromium removes those pesky manifestv3 changes as well? The ones which make uBlock basically non-functional.
kennysoona
I don't think so, but in practice when running uBlock on Chrome I still don't see ads. It's less efficient under the surface but the user experience hasn't change significantly.
amazingamazing
You can blame cancel culture for the current state of affairs. Why would Eich be shamed out when the thing he was shamed for had nothing to do with running Mozilla? If Eich was directly being hostile to employees that's one thing. It's another thing to bring up some donation he made to a questionable group about questionable things years prior. (keep in mind the thing he donated for actually was passed, meaning his view was hardly fringe).
The same thing can happen to any organization, including Waterfox.
wat10000
Why do we always have to blame the people who want to make things better? Why can’t we blame Eich for it based on his political activism trying to hurt his employees and users? Or the church for teaching Eich that their sexual hangups are more important than being good to people?
amazingamazing
No one can pass silly purity tests. There are people who unironically believe that if you believe in money you are a bad person and are oppressing them.
Just like it would be silly for someone to blame you for being on this website founded by someone who has some questionable views, if you go looking. Or, for using this very much American website, an America that's becoming increasingly hostile. Is your participation here an implicit agreement with the current administration?
Perhaps not before, but now that you've read this comment one could argue your continued participation makes you complicit.
You show me someone's views and associations and I can make them a devil.
wat10000
Thinking that you should treat people well regardless of which genitals they prefer is not a “silly purity test,” it’s basic decency, at least in this millennium.
ForHackernews
Honestly, one man's "silly purity test" is another's non-negotiable moral principle. Would you work for someone who publicly endorsed racism, cannibalism, slavery, <insert your personal red-line here>?
IMHO the issue is the collapse of any broadly-shared moral and ethical framework. I don't know how you resolve that, except perhaps by trying to peacefully partition society.
myrmidon
> Why do we always have to blame the people who want to make things better?
Because they are not necessarily making things better, they are making things worse (and "good intentions" are no excuse here).
In my view, discriminating against someone professionally (and publicly dragging their convictions through the mud) because of privately held political/religious opinions is not acceptable behavior, full stop.
I would have some understanding if Eich had been nasty with coworkers, or if his convictions had affected his work. But there were no accusations of this.
Lets just flip the thing a bit to make my point clearer:
If Eich had been discovered to be (secretly) a stout, godless atheist (sponsoring anti-religious campaigns)-- do you think the same kind of smear campaign/discrimination/career-killing would have been adequate?
wat10000
And why don't we blame Eich for making things worse with his "good intentions"?
Why don't we consider trying to pass laws that hurt your coworkers to qualify as "being nasty with coworkers"?
grandempire
> on his political activism
Are you referring to the private one time donation of a thousand dollars as activism?
The bill also won the popular election. So it wasn’t a fringe view.
Meanwhile work chats in big tech in 2014 were open season for literal political organizing and activism.
wat10000
How much do you think someone has to support “a decent fraction of my employees and users should be legally considered lesser” before it counts?
taco_emoji
> Are you referring to the private one time donation of a thousand dollars as activism?
Uh, yes? If activism does not include political donations, then nothing is activism.
card_zero
"Did you know, the Catholic church is to blame for Firefox getting ready to sell user data?"
The theory has a certain chaotic pizzazz but I'm not sure I could convince anyone.
wat10000
And yet there’s just as much connection to them as to the people who pushed to get Eich removed.
s_dev
I see you're one of those people where 'compromise' is a dirty word.
The key is tolerance. Eich's views while distasteful and probably wrong could be tolerated.
wat10000
And why is it always on us to be tolerant, never people like Eich?
immibis
They can be tolerated if the alternative is worse. Having a good browser captained by a homophobe can be better than not having the browser. That doesn't mean the homophobia is good.
At the time, no one thought that getting rid of the homophobe would mean there wouldn't be a browser at all. We (the world) got rid of the homophobe, because homophobes are rightfully quite bad, and we didn't think that would stop there from also being a browser.
lamename
This is flame war now, but there are > 1 person who can run a company successfully. No Eich != bad company. Blame current leadership not lack of specific leadership.
amazingamazing
It's not about bad company, it's that Eich was the status quo. Obviously his removal represents a departure.
null
safety1st
Cancel culture was assuredly the weapon used to silence Eich, but we should not be fooled into thinking that cancel culture was "at fault."
Remember, canceling is a tool. People who want to conceal their real goals use this tool to slander and eliminate their enemies, and that's why we need to end it. But these people don't actually care about whatever values cancel culture purports to uphold - they are just savvy sociopaths. Ultimately these sociopaths all try to do the same thing, which is promote some kind of deception, fraud or graft.
I think Eich was one of the last guys at Mozilla who was dedicated to building a compelling rival to Chrome and preserving a free and open web. And I think these things have not been the mission of Mozilla for a long time. I think that Mozilla is an arm of Google, to know that, all you need to do is follow the money.
Mozilla has been marching to the beat of Google's drum for many years, and when it made sense for Google to claim it wasn't a monopoly, they ordered Mozilla to behave a certain way. Now that President Trump has sued Google, President Biden has won the case, and it's back on Trump to determine the sentencing as Pichai kisses the ring, there is too much power arrayed against Google and they have stopped trying to maintain the lie that they are innocent.
So now Google is deploying new orders to their bootlickers. We will see a variety of changes at Mozilla now that the mask is off.
We should not forget that the prime evil here is the convicted criminal enterprise that is Google.
While waterfax highlights a problematic section of Mozilla's change:
> UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice. (Emphasis mine)
And they mention that we need to see the context behind this change -- but what they don't to -- is point out that the update clarification makes the whole situation even more problematic than it was previously.
The private notice indicates they use data to:
1. To provide and improve search functionality 2. To serve relevant content and advertising on Firefox New Tab 3. To provide Mozilla accounts 4. To provide AI Chatbots 5. To provide Review Checker, including serving sponsored content 6. To provide and enable add-ons (addons.mozilla.org) 7. To maintain and improve features, performance and stability 8. To improve security 9. To understand usage of Firefox 10. To market our services 11. To pseudonymize, de-identify, aggregate or anonymize data 12. To communicate with you 13. To comply with applicable laws, and identify and prevent harmful, unauthorized or illegal activity
1,2,4,5,10 are problematic. We don't want those things. Mozilla wants those things. The problem isn't the lack of context behind the changes, the problem is Mozilla wants to be able to use our 'input' data for whatever they want, and I don't want them to.
They said they're the privacy focused browser; and they're not. That's a lie. I moved from Chrome to Firefox precisely because I couldn't trust Google. Now I can't trust Firefox.