I have always used Mullvad Leta as my search engine, but after changing smartphone and download Fennec, I ended up leaving DuckDuckgo that comes standard for now. However, after the last Fennec update (140.0.0), I was surprised to have Google as a standard search engine. What do you think of this? Someone with this same experience?
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I know Google is bad and all, but in the case of Fennec, is it really that big of a deal? I say that because someone who knows how to get Fennec on their phones will also be aware on what search engine they use, so it's not like the maintainer is advertising Google or anything IMO
๐ Repost of the comment of our community partner @pipes@sh.itjust.works on this post โฌ๏ธ
"Defaults are extremely important, we can't babysit every app update in the devices of a tech illiterate person we help or simply suggested Firefox to"
Note: Standards are also important to show whether developers and organizations are actually privacy in their products and services. It is not a matter of having knowledge to modify your taste. But as it seems that it was simply a problem in updating Fennec, everything is ok. They must correct soon.
It's a fair take, but even still, someone who goes out of their way to get to fdroid and install Fennec should very well be aware of alternatives to Google.
An argument that discards knowledge as a factor only makes sense to me in a context of a tech illiterate installing Firefox directly from the Play Store.
Also, from my own knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong) the point of Fennec is to be as FOSS as possible, and not to have all the provacy-oriented defaults, if that were the case, I presume it would come with uBlock preinstalled, for example.
It's also worth mentioning that Fennec never changes what defaults you set with updates (at least in my personal experience, would like to hear if anyone had a different story) EDIT my own default settings was changed to Google later that day. So can't argue on that ๐