Starting in Firefox 138, Mozilla started gating Firefox Labs features behind data collection.
Mozilla had announced that some new Firefox features would be released via Firefox Labs.
It is now a few hours since I posted, and there is reason to celebrate – Mozilla is updating Firefox Labs to let people access features without needing to enable data collection.
A gentle reminder that the Firefox Binary is no longer open source. It is source-available. You license the binary under their own proprietary Terms of Use, which explicitly grants Mozilla to use your data in a manner they seem fit to “operate Firefox”.
They say they are using your data for research purposes but they also say they can modify the license at any time.
Still better than Chrome.
At least ubo works on it
Yes… I was going to comment that.
Sure I agree that Firefox, or Mozilla, is far from perfect. It should be better… but at the same time if we share not actually useful data, namely data to make the product better, NOT unrelated behavioral data to fuel ads, while alternatives (not to say competition) get both, then there is a problem.
I wonder if you will get excoriated for this opinion, since I had to respond to people in my last post with an update because people were adamant that Firefox was open source. 😼
There are two "Firefox"s:
The codebase remains open source under the MPL while the binary explicitly, by Mozilla’s own admission, is not. They are source available.
From the very brief skim I did of your post, it looks like we’re on the same page. I had a few people who don’t understand open source licenses come at me in my Lemmy replies when this was first unfolding. Ultimately it’s on them to understand their agreements.