I’ve been a loyal Mozilla user for over two decades. In fact, I started using their Firefox web browser even before it was called Firefox. (It was originally christened Phoenix in 2002. But the developers renamed the app to Firebird in 2003 because of trademark issues. And it was again renamed, finally, to Firefox in 2004, due to yet another conflicting trademark!)
Terms of Use backlash
Recently, alarms went up throughout the tech segment of social media because the Mozilla Foundation introduced a Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time as well as updating its Privacy Notice. In particular, many people protested the following language in the Terms:
“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.”
At first glance, this license agreement—commonly seen in Terms of Service across various apps and websites—might seem harmless. If Facebook/Meta or Google/Alphabet put up such terms for their services, very few people would bat an eyelash. But Mozilla has always prided itself on being a privacy-friendly organization that isn’t profit-driven.
Brendan Eich, CEO of rival browser maker Brave Software, summed up public reaction in one blunt response: “WTF.”
Worse still, eagle-eyed observers noticed that Mozilla updated a web page that encourages everyone to switch to Firefox by removing the following sentence: “Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data.”
As you can imagine, a lot of people did not like this at all.
An attempt to explain
Faced with this online mob of angry netizens, Mozilla responded with a blog post clarifying that yes, “you give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox,” no, “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you,” and no, “we don’t buy data about you.”
In particular, Mozilla updated the overly-broad license grant to something that’s a little bit more clearer:
“You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”
While some have been mollified, others are not convinced, especially when Mozilla confirmed that “in order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners.”
“Commercially viable”
And therein lies the rub. Firefox, while being free—both as in “free beer” and “free speech”—is not free to maintain. Mozilla requires revenue to pay for its servers, compensate its employees, and fund its operations.
For much of its existence, a huge proportion of Mozilla’s income (to the tune of $300 million per year) was from Google paying Mozilla to make Google the default search engine. This made the browser maker very dependent on Google and so Mozilla tried to launch a few paid services to diversify its income, including Mozilla VPN and Firefox Relay (an email and phone masking service).
Where do we go from here?
The vast majority of internet users do not care (or even know) what browser they use to surf the web. But for a vocal minority that value privacy and are capitalism-averse, the choice of browser is as important as the choice to delete one’s Facebook account, or leave Twitter/X, or install an ad blocker. And Firefox is increasingly becoming an indefensible choice.
As Neil Brown, a tech-focused English lawyer, wrote on his blog in response to these events, “what, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla’s Firefox?”
One obvious alternative is to use Chromium, the open-source component of Google Chrome that’s stripped of Google services. In fact, other rival web browsers, such as Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc, and Vivaldi, all make use of Chromium as their web browser engine. But Chromium might not be good enough especially since Google maintains a strong control on the development of Chromium.
For those on macOS and iOS, Safari is the default option. But tough luck if you’re on Windows, Linux, or Android.
There are of course the numerous Firefox forks, including LibreWolf, which seems to be the most popular and which I already use on my Linux laptop, and the new Zen Browser, which The Register praised for being “blissfully free of Google code.”
For now, I’m sticking with Firefox—it remains the least problematic and most practical option. But rest assured, I’m watching Mozilla closely.
