PSA (?): just got this popup in Firefox when i was on an amazon product page. looked into it a bit because it seemed weird and it turns out if you click the big “yes, try it” button, you agree to mandatory binding arbitration with Fakespot and you waive your right to bring a class action lawsuit against them. this is awesome thank you so much mozilla very cool
https://queer.party/@m04/112872517189786676
So, Mozilla adds an AI review features for products you view using Firefox. Other than being very useless, it’s T&C are as anti-consumer as it possibly can be. It’s like mozilla saying directly “we don’t care about your privacy”.
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I hate the anti-pattern of “Not Now”. How about “No”?
Best I can do is accepting three options: “Yes,” “No,” and “Remind me later.”
“Not now” or “No, I don’t want this awesome feature” bullshit infuriates me.
These should be flatly illegal. No means no
We had a whole generation of people that were taught that ‘no’ means ‘maybe later’ (the whole point of the ‘no means no’ ads about daterapes), and that same generation is now running these companies. What did we expect to happen?
Hot take and I can guarantee this will be downvoted but I think people are putting way too much blind trust into Mozilla for this.(edit: Apparently not here, pleasantly surprised at that)They just purchased an advertising company, they made the T&C waive your right to a class action lawsuit. They keep giving their CEO raises and laying off their workers. Mozilla is actively enshittifying but people don’t react until it’s too late because it’s a boiling frog situation.
Whether you think the feature is useful or not, Firefox is unfortunately shifting away from being a privacy-focused user-focused browser. The saving grace is that it is open source and forks can be made of it, “Firefox” itself can survive anything as long as there’s enough interest to keep it alive.
I think that Mozilla does great work, but they’ve lost sight of their goals, and are changing focus. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but this needs to be looked at objectively instead of with brand-loyalty. At the end of the day, they’re just another company with financial interests prioritized over user interests.
Hot take
Thats not a hot take anymore. A lot of people in privacy communities are moving to forks of Firefox that disable Mozilla’s bullshit.
Which forks?
On desktop I’ve been using Librewolf, Mullvad Browser is good too. There’s also some forks on Android, Mull and Fennec, of those I prefer Mull
Edit: Waterfox is another fork on desktop that had some controversy when bought by an advertising company, but they’re independent again as of last year
Do the same browser plugins work on librewolf?
Yes. Out of the box, it has uBlock Origin installed.
What would you recommend for Android?
Also, have you found anything that works well with Firefox Sync? I use Sync for my bookmarks but it doesn’t seem to be able to sync with LibreWolf
I’d recommend Mull, it’s pretty much Librewolf for Android
As for the syncing I’m not sure
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I know Librewolf says that. I have tried to use Sync but after signing into my Mozilla account Librewolf doesn’t recognise me as logged in and doesn’t sync.
Fennec
isn’t fennec a 1:1 rebuild? I believe it still has everything turned on
What even would be the purpose of such software?
rebuild for distribution on fdroid as not to violate trademarks
It has some of the proprietary stuff and telemetry removed
Commenting to check these out later
@DoucheBagMcSwag @nia_the_cat Did you checked it?
I’m actually trying IceRaven right now
Thank you.
Mullvad Browser (Tor Browser without onion network), Librewolf, Arkenfox (not a fork, just hardes regulär Firefox and disables mozilla’s telemetry)
I downloaded it but the option to come back to where I left off when I close the program was greyed out. I’m a tab-a-holic and I don’t like that. Any comments about that?
I think mullvad browser uses always icognito so it does not save any site data to disk. I think it is not adapted to your use case.
You can opt out of it?
What irks me is that they proudly announce that these features are baked in directly in the browser. Why the FUCK would they do that? I want my browser to be a browser only. Everything else must be relegated to an optional add-on.
they made the T&C waive your right to a class action lawsuit
Fakespot did already have that before they got acquired. Which doesn’t mean it’s not worth changing, of course.
man why do people always label the most cold-ass takes in the universe as hot takes
Depending where you are it is. On some Mozilla communities you’re downvoted into oblivion or dogpiled on for saying this. I was pleasantly surprised here that it wasn’t
A lot of them are very fanboy heavy
until it’s too late because it’s a boiling frog situation.
That’s a common misconception. If frogs are thrown into boiling water they almost die instantly, if they are placed in a pot that’s slowly beginning to boil, they desperately try to escape after a while
Huh, that is a surprising new revelation.
They are burning money
AFAIK this is the result of their acquisition of fakespot.com
Why not just be a web browser and leave stuff like this to browser extensions?
Oh right, you enshittified yourself.
Edit to add: Why give them money when they apparently already have too much of it from corporate inputs (most of it from Google)? I think they ask us for donations in order to retain their non-profit image, for PR purposes.
You are not wrong. I got curious how much they receive in donations, but could not find anything about it in their financial statements.
That is where I looked and could not find it, albeit only on my short commute from work.
LibreWolf
Fakespot is from Mozilla, if you trust Mozilla, why don’t you trust Fakespot?
And why is it useless? With the amount of fake AI reviews an AI to detect them is not completely useless.
But the popup is annoying.
People shouldn’t trust Mozilla either. It’s a company that does company things. Just because it’s not as far-gone as Google doesn’t mean it’s incapable.
I never said they should trust. But if they trust Mozilla with the telemetry/pockets/whatever they put on the browser this one is just like the others.
I trust Mozilla to do what they promise with my private data
Using AI to detect AI is completely useless. It’s been a big issue in academics, where a professor will plug your essay into an AI detector and then you get dinged for plagiarism because your entirely handwritten essay gets marked as AI. It’s just glorified pattern matching, it has no concept of real or fake.
If the AI could really detect any discrepancies between human and AI-generated text, it would stop making them.
And why is it useless?
It’s not useless. It’s just that it’s bloatware that’s unnecessary for many.
Like a car with a bright orange “Order Bird Food” button in the middle of the dashboard. If you don’t own any birds, then it sucks.
Nothing new in the helm of browsers. Pockets is a extension baked into the browser.
Many browsers have VPN/Ad Block native to the browser. Opera GX have all that bullshit that surprising can deceive a lot of normies to use it.
Sadly this type of bloat sells as “features” to some people and Mozilla gains users with it. Btw I’m not defending this practice I just seeing for what it is, marketing.
Sure, sure, other browsers do it. But I expected more of Mozilla.
Pocket was already bad enough, but it was kiiiiinda related to browsing anyway - it was a glorified bookmarking tool. It had a nice purpose too - save pages for online reading - but they seem to have gotten rid of that and I’m mad about it.
Shouldn’t trust Fakespot or Mozilla
Lol who the f trusts Mozilla nowadays?
Click the big X button in the top right corner
Average Windows enjoyer
FakeSpot is a hilarious company run by trend chasers, “crypto enthusiasts and web3 believers.”
If Mozilla chasing the AI trend isn’t bad enough, and their privacy policy doesn’t hurt your soul, FakeSpot also only works on the biggest and most predatory platforms (Walmart and Amazon).
FakeSpot also only works on the biggest and most predatory platforms (Walmart and Amazon).
that also happen to be by far the most popular, and also where you are the mos likely to see fake reviews
“If the privacy invasion and corporate trend chasing doesn’t hurt your soul”?
Did you miss the privacy invasion where Mozilla now sells private data to advertising companies directly?
all the data that goes through the firefox integration is anonymised
We are talking about Mozilla FakeSpot, not Mozilla PPA…
I know, there’s so many privacy issues right now that it’s hard to keep track.
i am talking about fakespot
The letters “anon” don’t appear anywhere in the privacy policy.
So where are you pulling this claim from, because it doesn’t smell right…
anonymization is not a silver bullet. Data gets deanonymized all the time. It’s very easy to accidentally leak useful information
they seem to be basically saying that they make most of their profit by selling your private data to advertisers, trend calculators etc etc
I puked a little when I read both names in the screenshot OP posted.
didn’t the Firefox management say they would focus on their core product rather than random little services like this
At this point, I’m glad I switched to Mull on my phone. It took a bit of overcoming the resistance of using Firefox for decades (Stockholm syndrome), but I don’t miss Firefox one bit.
Now I need to do that on my desktop, but I’m still shopping. Librewolf? Palemoon? Ice Weasel? What are folks here trying out these days?
On Android I am using Waterfox. Still looking for alternatives on desktop.
Mullvad Browser is pretty good on desktop.
Isn’t Mull basicslly Firefox since it’s just a Firefox-based fork? The UI seems to be identical to me - don’t notice any other differences on my phone
Yes, it’s Firefox without the bullshit.
It’s ironic that Firefox started the same way, actually.
When Netscape open sourced its browser and then fucked it up, some folks took the source code and built “Phoenix,” much, much later becoming Firefox.
Isn’t Mull basicslly Firefox since it’s just a Firefox-based fork?
I don’t understand why that would be a bad thing. If Firefox starts to enshittify then a fork from before the enshittification is exactly what I want.
It’s not - quite the contrary. I was just wondering what the commenter that I replied to meant when they said that it took them some getting used to. For me, it’s just a slight change in design and a different icon
Yeah but to be fair they bought this years ago. Just took them forever to integrated. I suspect any changes in direction will truly show in 3-4 years, once the current backlog (no don’t look at my company’s Jira, TYVM! 😑 ) is cleared.
AI shit alone, I never understood the urge to build a whole OS in the browser. I want my browser to view websites. If I want more, then I can install extensions. I’d rather them release this as some sort of “official” extension. Might switch to LibreWolf (do you have any other suggestions?)
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Oh they’re finally integrating fake spot? That’s awesome, actually! Pretty cool plugin, that!
Sure, Mozilla customer representative #37.
Must be an easy world where anyone disagreeing with you has to always be a shill. Gets you around annoying concepts such as arguments, discussions or opinions.
Nah my good shill. I’ve had very interesting discussions about contrarian points in the past, and they’ve been enlightening. This one is… I mean, if you’re really not a shill, then be aware that baking that feature into a web browser is selfishly unnecessary.
and its behind OHTTPS so your usage of it is completely anonymized
anonymized data can be re-identified
I actually love Fakespot. I’ve had it installed as an extension for years, but now it’s native
And that’s the bullshit part. It shouldn’t be native. A browser should be a browser.
I’ve used Firefox since it was released. I will be considering other browsers due to this. I do not want AI in my products.
Librewolf and Floorp are good Firefox based alternative browsers.
Floorp
Thanks, these look interesting. I’ve been using Firefox forever for my personal browsing (but Edge for work) and I’d prefer to stay with it if I can.
I don’t think AI is what’s wrong here…
Different priorities for different people. The AI is what I really have an issue with right now. I’m sick of it being shoved down everyone’s throats, and I have big ethical concerns about it in general.
Why do you think it’s useless?
If someone wanted it, they could’ve installed the Firefox extension, but now for users who doesn’t want this, they have an intrusive feature that is just a bloat. Also, even if I wanted it, it’s fairly useless unless you live in western countries.
Okay, but why do you think it’s useless?
Because not many people from somewhere like greece shop on walmart or best buy, and many people who use Firefox also are anti amazon
Hmm, that might be a bug - it looks like it was only meant to be available in the US. I’ve never seen it, at least.
It’s not a bug. I don’t think they saw it. They just need something to be angry about.
Can you opt out?
I beluga there is an
about:configsetting to disable it. You can find more details somewhere in the comments of this post or the original post that I quoted.apt remove firefox (or via pacman, windows settings etc)
Otherwise should be a bunch of flags you can set in about:config
