Posted on 03/02/2025 8:05:21 PM PST by martin_fierro
As noted a few months ago, Mozilla -- maker of the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client -- is facing an 80% revenue drop due to investigations into its “revenue-sharing” deals with Google.
That revenue drop is apparently prompting Mozilla's all-out search for alternate revenue streams. Mozilla's changes last week to the Firefox browser's privacy notice and usage terms indicate that users' privacy may be sold out.
Specifically, Mozilla's new use terms provide:
“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.”
This changed language, in conjunction with deletion of the following from Mozilla's Firefox FAQ page...
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
... leads to the inescapable conclusion that Firefox users' personal data is now very much up for sale.
Mozilla tried later last week to quell the resulting firestorm, including providing the following "clarification":
"You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content."
This inelegant and heavy-handed legalese strikes me as an attempt to appear to be backtracking, without actually doing that.
Plenty of others are commenting on Mozilla's New Way Forward, and it's not being well received. See for yourself, and consider adopting another browser.
I use www.swisscows.com for my browser
I stopped using both FF and Thunderbird when they went queer (booted co-creater/CEO).
Thanks to martin_fierro for the ping!
Way try ungoogled-chromium again.
Google hooks removed.
This is a major drag. I rely on Firefox and Thunderbird for all my personal computing (Linux, MacOS, Windows, everything other than iPhone/iPad where I use the default Apple apps) and have done so since the demise of the Netscape suite.
Not to mention that Firefox and T'bird are the default applications in Ubuntu and other Linux distros.
Geez Louise, this sucks. All the alternatives are worse in one or more significant ways. So I don't yet have a plan.
I feel you, dawg.
Trying BRAVE browser again, which also runs on Linux. Downside: It’s Chromium-based, but (upside) is still more private out of the box than Edge or Chrome.
Just be Brave and be relatively safe...
Maybe Brendan Eich will put together an email client to compete with Thunderbird, like he did with “Brave” to compete with “Firefox” when Mozilla kicked him out for not being a leftist idiot.
Funny, just yesterday I was researching another email client to use on Linux.
Bookmark.
Chromium based is not an issue as long as all of google’s crap is ripped out. Much of it as possible anyway.
Been using SWIron for years. Focused on Privacy
For those who expect to continue with Firefox/Thunderbird, any specific suggestions for tweaking their settings to maintain maximum privacy?
Yeah, I have Firefox, Google Chrome, and Brave installed on all my machines, work and home (Safari and Edge are there too but I eschew Edge and only use Safari on iOS devices). Firefox has encrypted passwords which I vastly prefer if I'm saving passwords in the browser.
My traditional usage pattern is:
I use Claws-Mail on Linux (and my wife on Windows). It has a conventional style GUI and is aimed at plain text, but it also can do spelling checking, plus display images, simple HTML, PDFs and more (some with plug-ins).
It doesn’t allow directly composing HTML messages, but you can attach any kind of file you wish. It has lots of other features such as message filtering, configurable toolbars and hotkeys, etc. It allows anti-spam filtering (with add-ons), Perl and Python scripting and can support encrypted email (e.g., using GPG)
One of it’s main advantages from my point of view is that it doesn’t try to be your secretary and organize (i.e., dictate) the way you work. (Even Thunderbird had a bit of that.)
We use Claws-Mail as an IMAP client, so all our mail is kept only on our local Dovecot IMAP server for privacy, but still can be accessed from more than one computer (even remotely, if an encrypted tunnel were used).
Claw-Mail can run on BSD, Linux, macOS, Solaris, Unix & Windows. And (of course) it’s free and Open Source.
1. https://www.claws-mail.org/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claws_Mail
3. https://9to5linux.com/claws-mail-4-1-adds-text-zooming-in-the-message-view-many-other-new-features
So do these new Terms apply to Thunderbird? If so, how? I find it hard to believe that Mozilla would actually monetize the content of emails, that's so low I can't imagine even those leftists doing it.
Google, yes. That's why I don't do my personal email with my Gmail account. For my personal email I built my own mailserver for my own domain using AWS, Ubuntu, Postfix, Dovecot, and SpamAssassin. And I use the T'bird client.
So I'm really hoping that T'bird is not compromised, but if it is, maybe someone will fork the sources....
Tr out thorium browser. Been reading about brave and not so good reviews lately, mainly beczuse of the lack of customizability. One quirk I don’t like about it is no way to open links in new tab and to switch to it immediately. Other than that I think it’s OK , but i do rely on opening a new tab with links - ther are a few ways, but they inlcude exrra clicks- I’m gonna check out thorium- saw a few reviews if it on yt.
I can’t vouch fof,it yet, but thorium browser is supposed to be very secure and very fast. But I use thunderbird too, and like it about the best- I’d hate to lose it-
Can it have mu,tiple, accounts? There are 3 of us and we like. To get all our mail in one account with 2 other sub accounts.
That is, all these years it has leveraged the Firefox functionality and simply put a mail app interface over it. Dang! How'd I miss that?
So maybe if Firefox is compromised going forward, T'bird is likewise.
OTOH, the changes in 2023 sounded like T'bird was being rewritten. and if so maybe it won't track changes in Firefox any more.
Now I'm confused.
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