cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40386879
Mozilla is making it clear that they do not care about users any more.
Firefox is full of ads, with ads being in the homepage shortcuts, the news feed and the omnibox dropdown, as well as various ads for Mozilla services throughout the UI. Their ad network is also marketed to companies as allowing them to reach adblocker users.
Mozilla’s 210M+ global users are typically hard to reach. They're usually hidden behind ad blockers, nearly half avoid dominant social media, and most say no to default platforms. They’re selective, tech savvy, and paying attention. From: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/
Firefox is also full of tracking, with their mobile app sending data to the tracking company Adjust, and it having options for "personalised extension recommendations" and "Install and run studies". The latter allows them to install what they want into your browser without your consent out of the box.
Their tracking protection also mostly works only in private / incognito mode by default, with tracking scripts being allowed to run in standard windows with just isolated cookies protecting you, which is not a decision that a company who actually cares about privacy would make.
Mozilla is also partnering with Perplexity, an AI search engine who wants to collect as much data as possible even outside of their app to sell "hyper personalized" ads, which is exactly who you shouldn't work with if you claim to care about privacy. From: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/
I recommend switching to Librewolf as it takes Firefox and removes this bullshit. Some other alternatives like Brave are just as bad.
All the ads/suggestions can be easily disabled, as can the AI stuff. Perplexity only tracks you if you use it, and that blurb is about their browser, not FF. Everything FF is doing with AI is local models, which I still won't use but are vastly preferable to cloud models that are sending reams of data through third party servers.
At the end of the day Firefox needs to make some money for it to continue existing, that's the world we live in. So far they are still by far the least onerous big browser, and their continued existence makes all of their various forks possible.
What would a boycott look like? Librewolf is still downstream from FF, as is every other commonly suggested alternative, and as you say the other options are worse, the vast majority being Chrome-based. Frankly, unless the people doing the boycotting are regular donators to the project, I don't know why Mozilla would notice.
The backlash to the recent AI announcement is real and they're already reacting to it, but just like every time FF gets bad press it's overblown and irrational, and likely encouraged by Chrome and other big money interests that would love it to go away entirely.
I've doing that since 2021, additionally avoiding anything Gecko.