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Neowin has a brief warning that Mozilla plans to collect anonymized user data. The given reason is to better understand how people use Firefox. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of this plan is that it is opt-out rather than opt-in. This is very far from the early days of Firefox when it had previously touted privacy as one of its main advantages.
As stated in the Google Groups announcement thread, they intend to use RAPPOR:
RAPPOR is a novel privacy technology that allows inferring statistics about populations while preserving the privacy of individual users.
This repository contains simulation and analysis code in Python and R.
[...] Publications
- RAPPOR: Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response
- Building a RAPPOR with the Unknown: Privacy-Preserving Learning of Associations and Data Dictionaries
Links
[Update @ 20170824_152224 UTC: fixed bad link to Google Groups thread.]
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Mozilla Plans to Collect User Data, Opt-Out Not Opt-In [Updated]
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In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.
-- Lenny Bruce
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday August 24 2017, @08:25PM (3 children)
They're kinda of irrelevant. I used to use Firefox all the damn time before javascript popped up everywhere and they lagged in performance. My firefox on Windows kept crashing twice a day for the last two years. Crashing at least isn't that bad anymore since it can restore to where it left off without interrupting sessions. But still.
I find Pale Moon to be more stable than Firefox, but alas, lags behind in compatibility. My banking website started to silently fail, while strangely telling me it was simply unavailable. Compatibility is its biggest problem.
These days the only reason why I use Firefox is to verify cross browser site behavior, TOR browser uses it under the hood, and only Firefox/Chrome will run Netflix. I'm finding Chromium to be easier to use and it doesn't have the evil shit that Chrome does.
I stick to the forks because the main players are fucking dicks with privacy, and are constantly trying to shove cloud-based apps down my throat like Pocket. I've never been interested in, nor will I ever be interested in, storing my data and activities in the cloud without zero-knowledge based services. The fact that Firefox is doing this, is absolutely no surprise whatsoever.
Big businesses are addicted to Big Data. Just a bunch of marketing/execuscum falling over each other to suck Big Data's Dick.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @09:05PM (2 children)
From what I'd read a while back google started including binary objects in the chromium source repo that are normally built in.
I am not sure how it acts on non-x86/arm platforms, or if it even builds on them ATM, but those stories concerned me enough to stop using it as my tertiary browser (I didn't like it much to begin with. FF still does what I need most of the time, Seamonkey if not, and then a pool of less customizable browsers in between.)
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Friday August 25 2017, @02:45AM
One of the problems with Chromium is that there are no official builds, so what is and is not in it all depends on who did the build. I'd trust the builds in the official repositories for Debian or Ubuntu to not include anything they didn't have the source for, but some of the other builds? Who knows. Or you could just build it yourself, though my understanding is that the build environment is rather complicated and you need a pretty decent computer if you want it to get done in any kind of reasonable time.
(Score: 1) by xhedit on Friday August 25 2017, @02:48AM
Ungoogled chromium fixes that issue.