Firefox now has Terms of Use! This'll go over like a lead balloon.
> You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you **upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information** to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
**Update:** See below in the thread for their clarification.
The privacy notice document lists how each data type is used. It includes in-browser ads on the new tab page, AI chatbots, and “to market our services”.
Also because Blink is the best and most advanced engine. The problem of Chromium is only that it need to gut out the Google APIs before it is a valid base for an browser. Vivaldi does it, also degoogled Chromium and even EDGE (but in change filling it with a ton of M$ tracking APIs). The only alternative (Linux only) is the Konqueror Browser with the Grandfather of Blink, KHTML by KDE (German company).
The problem of using blink is that then you give more power to google. They are the ones developing it, so they can decide what goes in it… cough jpegxl cough…
Yes, Google can decide what goes in it, but because it’s FOSS, any other can decide what to delete from it. The power of Google isn’t Chromium, but the Chrome Store, it’s services, and all Websites which use Google APIs. Vivaldi has less relations with Google than Mozilla/Firefox, it don’t have third party investors or sponsors, like Mozilla, which depends on Google ads and money and recently also from another advertising company, loosing it’s independence with it.
I wasn’t talking about putting stuff in, I was talking about removing it. You say it’s open source, but google decides what contributions are added to the main repo. Even if you fork it, if it’s not in upstream, it won’t be used.
Jpegxl is a really cool image format that google hates for some reason. Every major company wanted chrome to support it, amazon, facebook, etc. but google said no, and guess what, no one can do anything about it. If you use blink you’re a slave to google.
If you use Gecko too, because Google rules mainly the web standarts, not the engines. Yes, Google put the rules also in the Store, but not the inbuild features in the browser, in Vivaldi most of the extensions from the store are redundant. It has an own customizable ad/tracker blocker, tab, management, screenshot tool, translator hosted by Vivaldi, clock and pomodoro timer, Markdown notes, UI customizations better than any extension or in any other browser… you can use Chrome extensions, but you don’t really need it. Apart permits to install user scripts (eg. from Greasyfork or OpenuserJS) direct as extensions, without the need of an user script manager, if you need functions which are banned from the Chrome Store because Mv3.
The more people who use blink, the greater Google’s control over the standards. Web standards are voted on and controlled by the W3C, a group google is a part of. Google doesn’t have ultimate power over this group, but it does have the largest web browser. It can use this to chose what technology is used by consumers, and having a lot of people using a technology gives it a much better chance of being elevated.
When it comes to extensions, relying on adblocking from your browser completely removes the community aspects of ublock, you are giving all that power to a single entity. And using user scripts instead of well established, and vetted, extensions sounds like a security nightmare.
Tastes like “I’m sorry you feel that way”
The privacy notice document lists how each data type is used. It includes in-browser ads on the new tab page, AI chatbots, and “to market our services”.
I’m glad I use a fork, even if it much more unstable. Kind of want servo to become stable and someone to make a browser based on that.
Maybe that’s why Mozilla quit contributing to it.
Igalia is currently working hard on making it easy to use Servo as an embeddable browser engine similar to how Chromium can be used.
The problems of doing that with Gecko, the browser engine that powers Firefox, is main reason why there are so few alternative browsers based on it.
Also because Blink is the best and most advanced engine. The problem of Chromium is only that it need to gut out the Google APIs before it is a valid base for an browser. Vivaldi does it, also degoogled Chromium and even EDGE (but in change filling it with a ton of M$ tracking APIs). The only alternative (Linux only) is the Konqueror Browser with the Grandfather of Blink, KHTML by KDE (German company).
Gnome web is also decent but not great for power users. It’s based on Webkit.
The problem of using blink is that then you give more power to google. They are the ones developing it, so they can decide what goes in it… cough jpegxl cough…
Yes, Google can decide what goes in it, but because it’s FOSS, any other can decide what to delete from it. The power of Google isn’t Chromium, but the Chrome Store, it’s services, and all Websites which use Google APIs. Vivaldi has less relations with Google than Mozilla/Firefox, it don’t have third party investors or sponsors, like Mozilla, which depends on Google ads and money and recently also from another advertising company, loosing it’s independence with it.
I wasn’t talking about putting stuff in, I was talking about removing it. You say it’s open source, but google decides what contributions are added to the main repo. Even if you fork it, if it’s not in upstream, it won’t be used.
Jpegxl is a really cool image format that google hates for some reason. Every major company wanted chrome to support it, amazon, facebook, etc. but google said no, and guess what, no one can do anything about it. If you use blink you’re a slave to google.
If you use Gecko too, because Google rules mainly the web standarts, not the engines. Yes, Google put the rules also in the Store, but not the inbuild features in the browser, in Vivaldi most of the extensions from the store are redundant. It has an own customizable ad/tracker blocker, tab, management, screenshot tool, translator hosted by Vivaldi, clock and pomodoro timer, Markdown notes, UI customizations better than any extension or in any other browser… you can use Chrome extensions, but you don’t really need it. Apart permits to install user scripts (eg. from Greasyfork or OpenuserJS) direct as extensions, without the need of an user script manager, if you need functions which are banned from the Chrome Store because Mv3.
The more people who use blink, the greater Google’s control over the standards. Web standards are voted on and controlled by the W3C, a group google is a part of. Google doesn’t have ultimate power over this group, but it does have the largest web browser. It can use this to chose what technology is used by consumers, and having a lot of people using a technology gives it a much better chance of being elevated.
When it comes to extensions, relying on adblocking from your browser completely removes the community aspects of ublock, you are giving all that power to a single entity. And using user scripts instead of well established, and vetted, extensions sounds like a security nightmare.