Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.
This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.
I have librewolf, don’t use it much. Is it functionally the same as FF? In terms of plug-in and website compatibility.
Most consumer sites are optimized for chrome and even safari, firefox & Edge (Obviously) face issues with scripts and plug-ins.
It’s basically the same, but the devil is in the detail. DRM disabled from the get go, which is a show stopper for some sites (say, netflix). Some sites will bork themselve on the strange user-agent. Some advanced privacy features are quite hard to disable willingly, which may or may not be a good thing if you actually have to get things done on sites that breaks.
One would argue that sites that breaks when privacy features are enforced are not worth it, but you don’t always have a choice in that regard.