The Buzz around Mozilla's New Terms of Use

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As Zorin_OS ships with Firefox as the default browser, its users need to be up to date with changes that will affect them and how they use Firefox.

To say that when the first statement was released it caused furore in the online tech community, is a bit of an understatement. The use of terms like: "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."
See here for clarity: Firefox: About Your Rights — Mozilla

There is a lot of talk in Mozilla about making money, raising funds in new ways, and most disturbingly for me, they have removed the "we will not sell your data" statement. They intend user to become the product - just like every other big tech company out there already.

They also want to get into creating their own AI, so will need their users data to train it. Great!

I've been reading about the changes at Mozilla, the changes in the T o U, and watching some videos on the subject, and I'd really like to hear your views and opinions on alternatives. As already stated in other posts, I've been using ZEN browser, a fork of FF, and it's completely usable now. I use it with Swiss Cows (not great) and DuckDuckGo (better).

Unfortunately, I have to go to work now and I won't be back until much later. Here are a couple of links to some videos for more information and breakdowns.

Brodie Robertson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3Yvv4EaTfs

Switched to Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB61dwUIijE

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A lot of headlines state that there's been some confusion... but this is far from the truth. There is nothing to be confused about, their words are very clear, as are their intentions. I recommend reading through this thread:

As a long time user of Mozilla Firefox, I'm simply not comfortable with these new terms of use and therefore I must stop using it.

This highlights the importance of having an alternative ready to use, something I've mentioned many times in this forum in regards to how I use browsers. You never know when these tech companies, that glorify themselves with catchy slogans like "Don't be evil" or "Internet for people, not profit", are going to pull the rug on you.

My main browser for the time being is going to be Brave. But I'd hate to lose all the work I've put into cusotmizing Firefox, so I'll look for something that can benefit from that as much as possible, most likely LibreWolf.

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One thing that is often asked and that often leads to great debate is which browser is the "best" browser. Or at least, which browser to use. Or... trust.

And the answer to this really gets boiled down to: none.
Every available browser has serious shortcomings.

Browsers are particular because they are something that most end users consider a critical component. That monopolizes the presence of a browser on the system, thereby granting browser makers a lot of power over the end user.

I stopped using Firefox a long time ago. Zorin OS then defaulted to Flatpak Firefox. I voiced my opinion, but uninstalled both Flatpak and Firefox.
But that I stopped using FF does not mean I replaced it with a good choice. The alternatives are the bad, the badder and the ugly.
Even Good Browsers, like Pale Moon, are largely not viable since they cannot handle modern webpages.
And browsers like Brave that claim to be about the End User and Privacy - are in fact taking your data and are also stealing directly from Google.
In 2020, Brave was caught modifying URLs typed into the address bar to include its affiliate referral codes, particularly for sites like Binance and Coinbase. This happened without explicit user consent, raising concerns about trust and transparency.
Brave's BAT tokens have much controversy due to unfairness and lack of explanation.
Brave's BAT tokens were being attributed to content creators that never signed up for it and never received those donations from Brave; suggesting that Brave Browser was collecting and keeping donations made to those creators -fraudulently.

These are the kinds of things that should make a product fail. But they don't. Because humans need a browser - or need a Phone - or need an OS... So we tolerate and forgive and put up with one abuse after another.
We make excuses for the product.
We ignore it hoping it won't affect us personally.
We downplay how bad it is.

We like to ignore red flags and warning signs because it would take an active effort on our part to resolve it.
And...

It always ends up badly. It's like a child not doing their homework, getting bad grades, then lying about how the School Office lost their report card. They only delay the inevitable.

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@zenzen , yeah the whole "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...". Huummm, nope - no confusion here!

We, the users, know that this has changed because you, Mozilla / Firefox, don't want us to continue as we were before this announcement, because what you want from us has changed! I'm absolutely in agreement: I can't stomach these new demands (demands is exactly what they are), so therefore I must stop using Mozilla and Firefox.

Mozilla now wants to find new funding = money (exploiting their users), and now have ambitions, especially since they hired some new, expensive staff.

One thing that pees me off is this - don't they realise that there's a HUGE market out there that DOES NOT WANT A.I. IN EVERYTHING, and also WILL NOT TOLERATE targeted ads and the tracking, etc.. that needs this kind of license to operate? Why not stop following the crowd, which so very many of us are trying to avoid, and provide another path?

@Aravisian, sadly, I have to agree. It's about picking the lesser of the evils... I've always understood that Libre Wolf is very slow at updates / security patches, which is why I've avoided it. Maybe that's changed, or I'm misinformed. I gave Brave a fair crack at the whip but it's definitely not something I can live with. I'm happy with ZEN at the moment, but as Zenzen pointed out; we all need another viable alternative to hand. Will be looking into Mulvad and others that folks have mentioned on other posts previously. I won't have time until the Easter Holidays though, it's going to be pretty intense work wise for the next few weeks.

Your analogy of students not doing their homework, yet expecting to get good grades, is a poignant one at the moment. I've been trying to convince a couple of talented and capable students that if they don't put in the effort, they're going to fail their exams, which start next week! Too little, too late! I'm trying to do better myself!

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Well I just have to thank @0Picass0 and the other members of the forum for bringing this to my attention. I don't stay abreast of news and probably never would have heard about this otherwise. I usually use qutebrowser (but I don't even know if that's a "trustworthy" browser, I just like the hints) but will use Firefox as a "backup" browser. But this? What the heck is this:

Wow what cheek!

Well thankfully to the members of this Forum I will be a little more savvy about this issue and hopefully see some other user reports about potentially not totally slimy browsers.

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I totally agree. They seem to be morphing into a variety of 'Dont be Evil'. Coincidentally I downloaded Zen the other day just to give it a go, before this announcement. I haven't yet opened it.

However, as a web developer I need a browser that displays modern webpages to spec. And I use Firefox Web Developer tools constantly - I'm hoping that can still be a part of Zen. But i still need to maintain the main browsers for testing webpages.

I use Official Google Chrome for my main client, where the team operates through Google Workspaces. There are several tasks where in practice you need to be using Chrome. But, I don't use it for anything else, and I only use it signed in with that client specific login.

I don't like Brave.
LadyBird will be a while coming...
Luckily nobody has mentioned Edge yet :worried:

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What are yous thoughts on Vivaldi ? I used to use it some time back , and it wasn't bad ,I liked it.
But for some reason I can't remember I switched to brave and using it ever since.
Using duck duck go browser on phone ,it's minimal ,that's why I haven't tried it's desktop browser.

Oh ,bout the topic , yea I never really used FF , few times I did I didn't like it lol.

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I have a love / hate relationship with Vivaldi.
I love it. I hate it.

I like what Vivaldi stands for and offers. But, On every single computer I used it on - which was many... A great many... It was always extremely unstable, even causing breakage of the system.
Due to that "I love it" I tried Vivaldi many times, giving it chance after chance. And it always let me down, never getting any better.

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I'm more to Netscape...
I used it on Corel Linux back in 1999.

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This video really goes into Mozilla / Firefox T o U, which was archived 30th January 2025, and exactly what was changed or completely removed a couple of days ago in February 2025:
Mental Outlaw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4JOnQY_qbo

I'm so glad it's the weekend and I've got time to check out some alternatives and delete my Mozilla account. The only way to let Mozilla know how outraged we are is to WALK AWAY, as it's clear in their document the only way to back out of their one-sided contract is to stop using Firefox!

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I was already aware that a big part of Mozilla's income was from Google, and with how Google was called out for monopoly with that kind of practices some months ago and how Firefox has very little amount of users compared to a decade ago, I can understand that they may be realizing that sooner or later, they will be in huge financial struggles if things don't change. I can understand and even agree on that. But that doesn't excuse how they get the money they need.

Look at KDE: adding valuable usability changes to their DE and apps, listening to their community, opt-in telemetry (which doesn't collect anything that could be used by advertisers, from what I've seen on my laptop after looking at the logs with the telemetry set to the maximum for a month), etc. Their income depends entirely on donations, and from what I've heard, last years they surpassed their goals by a big amount. Why? Because they make a product people can respect, and love, because the product doesn't work against them, and instead works for them.

Then there is firefox: while KDE is only one DE out of many and only available for the 4% of computers that use GNU/Linux globally, firefox is available on windows, mac, linux, android and iOS. And it's far easier to download a web browser than a desktop environment. Now, I'm not gonna pretend chrome didn't bring appealing advancements back in its early days; there is a reason why it's so commonly used today. But the raising awareness of how Google actually is and also how even the search engine has been getting worse lately from what I've heard, now more than ever an alternative independent from chromium would be incredibly appealing. The problem comes when they don't respect their users. Why would I recommend something that keeps getting worse, tries to hide the fact that they are profitting from us behind our back and doesn't listen to us? And why would I donate to a project that doesn't respect me?

Instead of investing on AI or ads, the best thing mozilla could invest on is respect.

The defaults are a bit annoying to me, but the browser itself doesn't seem bad. I have been using it for a while on my android tablet because firefox doesn't run well on 2 GB of RAM and I think it's alright. Browses the web, can have multiple tabs and blocks ads. No need for more. Today I installed it on desktop for replacing firefox (will probably go with librewolf as soon as it's confirmed that the firefox forks are safe). The default interface is horrible in my opinion: too many features that I don't need on a web browser taking space on the screen, right-click menu taking the entire screen for the sake of being touch-friendly on a big non-touchscreen... at least it can be customized easily to look more how i want it to, so I guess that's good enough for me.

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I have always headeach with firefox with both release and dev version.
Firefox is very unstable.
Changed for Brave is better option and search engine Qwant.

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First Netscape goes to garbage, then Internet Explorer, then Opera, then Chrome, and now Firefox. Will this beating the heads of users ever stop? I suppose as long as money is he deciding factor, companies will continue screwing us over a buck.

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Same here, I've just installed it again for the nth time... let's see if it sticks this time around.

I'm all for sending a loud & clear message to let them know they're losing business but, just in case you're interested, you should know that you can run your own instance of Mozilla's profile sync server. This is how other browsers like Gnome Browser manage to keep compatibility without sending data to Mozilla. This will also help to keep your data around.

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I've been using Vivaldi for the past few years now, I actually like it a fair bit. That being said, as stated before, there are a LOT of settings you can change in vivaldi. But I tend to keep most things off and keep it fairly basic, so while it seems a bit much at first, it can be as "much" as you want it to be.

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I've been trying it out on and off since it first launched... but just has weird quirks all around. For example, I only installed it yesterday but for some reason it defaults to use zoom at 90% (notice how the reset button is grayed out):

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Another example, that quite literally just found out about it. As I was typing this out, I got a notification here on the forum and I saw a prompt asking me about allowing notifications, etc. But, it took focus away from the input as I was typing... that shouldn't happen.

It has certainly improved a lot over the years, and I really like what they're trying to do with this project, but it's these little things adding up that always make me stop using it long term.

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I'm not sure why it defaults to 90% for you, but you should be able to set it back to 100% in the settings as the default:

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Aha, nice catch. I search for "zoom" and it came up with "User Interface Zoom". Waaay down only now I noticed "Default Webpage Zoom" which was indeed at 90%.

I probably messed that up accidentally... one reason I don't like overcomplicated dashboard settings *cough* KDE *cough*.

Cheers!

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Digdeeper.club provides this table in an article on Web Browsers:

Browser / Feature Spying Engine Extensions GUI library Source code RAM usage
Mozilla Firefox High Gecko WebExt GTK3 Yes (Full) ~260MB
GNU IceCat Mild Gecko WebExt GTK3 Yes (Full) ~300MB
LibreWolf Mild Gecko WebExt GTK3 Yes (Full) ~260MB
Waterfox Medium Gecko WebExt GTK3 Yes (Full) ~300MB
SeaMonkey Medium Gecko XUL GTK3 Yes (Full) ~120MB
TOR Browser Mild Gecko WebExt GTK3 Yes (Full) ~260MB
Google Chrome High Blink WebExt GTK3 No (or not full) ~170MB
Iridium Browser Mild Blink WebExt GTK3 Yes (Full) ~170MB
Ungoogled-chromium None Blink WebExt GTK3 Yes (Full) ~170MB
Brave Browser Medium Blink WebExt GTK3 Yes (Full) ~170MB
Dissenter Browser Medium Blink WebExt GTK3 Yes (Full) ~170MB
Opera High Blink WebExt GTK3 No (or not full) ~260MB
Vivaldi Medium Blink WebExt GTK3 No (or not full) ~290MB
Pale Moon Mild Goanna XUL GTK2 Yes (Full) ~100MB

In respect of RAM usage the author states that they should be taken with a grain of salt; read into that what you will.

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Thought I would take a look at Synaptic Package Manager and see what browsers it would come up with and could only find this one, qutebrowser. It is a DuckDuckGo driven Browser. Going into settings there were things that I did not like turned on by default, I have turned them off. A couple of screenshots will explain what I mean:

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Even DuckDuckGo appears to be going down the A.I. route. I wanted to install Mojeek - no dice.

And in relation to privacy:

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