TL;DR: Mozilla is now enforcing data collection as a pre-requisite to access new features in Firefox Labs. This is backed by the Terms of Use that Mozilla introduced a few months ago.
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I always find it hilarious that all of these anti-Firefox articles and posts always seem to point people toward Chrome, in the end. It’s almost as if there’s a concerted effort by a mega-corporation that specializes in spyware to trick people into using their products by artificially seeding social networks with pro-Google sentiments. So strange…
It is the overarching theme in every aspect of life nowadays.
PLEASE LOOK AT THIS ARTIFICIALLY BLOWN UP DETAIL
While literally every other point will show you the opposite is true. Its how capitalism works in general.
Foss is a huge thorn in their side too. One reason why google seems to destroy aosp slowly.
What a misleading, clickbait title:
Mozilla moves away from open source
When the author really meant:
Mozilla does a thing I don’t like
That kind of makes sense? Aren’t the labs when they’re A/B testing or benchmarking new features before general release and toggle random people’s settings doing so? I vaguely recall some drama around that.
If I turn off telemetry I want those off too, it makes sense they’re linked. It you want a new feature there’s always nightly+about:config, but I don’t want it downloading random config toggles especially if it’s not reporting back that it broke my stuff. The code should be what I installed, not some random lab blob downloaded off their servers at runtime.
like literally the point of firefox labs is to work with mozilla to get feedback on possible future features.
That kind of makes sense? Aren’t the labs when they’re A/B testing or benchmarking new features before general release and toggle random people’s settings doing so?
Per the article, the A/B testing rollout already exists in Studies:
Mozilla introduced studies as “controlled A/B tests built right into Firefox” and they “allow us to compare proposed changes to the default experience in Firefox for small, representative, populations before shipping those changes to everyone.”
I have no detailed knowledge on any of this, so I don’t know how accurate the article really is.
IIRC they used labs for “ads” in the past, so disabling labs was already recommended, now it’s just double recommended.
this article seems like clickbait
they’re just requiring telemetry to test optional features that are in testing.
Is nothing sacred? 🙄
Are there any open source forks that still allow bookmark and settings sync?
@renard_roux @yoasif
In LibreWolf you can enable the Sync feature. That’s the only fork I’ve triedI’d like a browser that can sync those things with a local folder that I can sync/backup however I want, no account required. Does anyone know of such a thing?
Couldn’t you do that with Firefox? It stores all that stuff locally already, doesn’t it? Just disable sync and use whatever software you prefer to watch those directories.
Edit: here’s how you can figure out where the settings and bookmarks are stored locally on your system: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data
Thanks, I’ll look into it. I tend to avoid messing with the local app folders which are often hidden and can be break if you change something.
Personally, I’ve been sharing this folder across different installations for years, even between different operating systems. I’ve never had any major issues so far.
The only minor annoyance is that whenever I switch between Windows and Linux I have to restart the browser once, otherwise extensions do not load on the first run.
So yeah, I would say diy-syncing this profile folder is feasible and very reliable. Same thing is true for Thunderbird, but I’ve been doing it for less time. And I would assume the same thing is also true for Chromium-based browsers because I do it with Signal which is Electron-based.
For what it’s worth, on Windows,
AppData\Roamingis intended to be shared across devices to some extent (there’s more nuance but the point being I’d be less worried about syncing data from there).I’ve migrated my Firefox profile to multiple different computers and even from Firefox to Floorp. No issues. It’s also something I have backed up to my NAS daily since it contains everything - just plop it in and I’ve got everything the way it was before.
