The whole “legal definitions are why we changed” is definitely what they’re rolling with, but I don’t think a lot of what you said is correct. Websites selling data is not the same as firefox selling data. If a site sells your data while you’re using firefox, that is in no way shape or form involved with firefox. That’s also not what they are claiming. They are strictly talking about the data that firefox directly collects and distributes. It would include search results if you searched via the address bar, I suppose. They have sold data for a while, but it’s anonymized (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy).

Firefox is free to use, but it costs a lot of money to develop. They need money, nobody here is denying that. Many users on this platform have tried to avoid any form of data collection as much as possible (myself included) so they would rather pay to fund it (though many don’t). However, most people would rather pay for the service with ads and data collection. Because to them, it’s basically free. Most users would never even consider moving to Firefox if it was paid. They could offer two options, one paid and one “free”, but they haven’t done that yet and it’s not clear if they plan to.

Most importantly, it’s really about being transparent. If they need money, they shouldn’t try to hide the fact they are selling anonymized data by saying “We never sell you data” or to be like “oh no, we are doing it because of legal definitions” when in reality they are selling data. I get it’s a PR movement, but most of the people intentionally using Firefox are tech savvy people wanting to get away from Google’s big brother approach. I get people defending Firefox, and I also get people hating on Mozilla, but we should also be clear about the reality. Firefox is, and has been selling your data (in some form), but now the laws are changing to make it more clear that what they’re doing is in fact selling data.

That’s chromium based. Having more firefox based browsers helps take away the dominate control Google has on browsers.

Which is chrome in a trench coat.

It was removed because Google did away with manifest v2 for browser extensions, and uBlock Origin worked almost entirely from a feature provided in manifest v2. So it was removed because it can no longer work on chromium devices, unless the browser manually adds back in support for it. Firefox has chosen to continue to support manifest v2, so the original uBlock origin is still available. uBlock lite is still available in the chrome store, and uses the new manifest v3. It is more limited in it’s capability, but should be able to get the most obtrusive stuff. The lite version is definitely not nearly as powerful as the original.

On a side note, it seems to me like the link still works for now. Idk how much longer that will last.