❌ Software Removal | Firefox

[dm17]

Description

Pretty unfair that you're recommending Firefox and not Waterfox. Especially since FF has recently banned free speech extensions from its repo. Twitter censors everyone, so we have Gab. Gab made an extension, and Mozilla censors it? This is going too far... Part of "privacy" is what you're allowed to see & use (in the privacy of your own computer)!

[beerisgood]

Forks are always behind mainline in terms of security.
Also Waterfox doesn't have any stuff you can't do in Firefox.
Firefox + gHacks user.js is much better solution then such a fork with just few maintainer

[Kcchouette]

April fool was the 1rst, not the 12th.
Anyway, thanks for the laugh

it was in my head.

Anyway, in term of privacy, tor browser is recommended in top.

[quantumpacket]

From what I've read, Mozilla has removed the addon from their addons website saying it violates their terms due to promoting hate speech. That's fine, if they wan to do that they are within their right to do so since it is their platform. However, from what I've read is that Firefox blacklists the addon and will remove it when you restart the browser. I haven't confirmed that is the case, but if true that is stepping over the line. Mozilla has no right to remove/block an extension that an end-user has chosen to install on their system.

Let's not split hairs in regards to left/right wing politics, but look at the implications and precedent that is being set that could be applied to any addon. I don't think @dm17 is wrong to see this as a something to be concerned about.

[dm17]

From what I've read, Mozilla has removed the addon from their addons website saying it violates their terms due to promoting hate speech. That's fine, if they wan to do that they are within their right to do so since it is their platform. However, from what I've read is that Firefox blacklists the addon and will remove it when you restart the browser. I haven't confirmed that is the case, but if true that is stepping over the line. Mozilla has no right to remove/block an extension that an end-user has chosen to install on their system.

Let's not split hairs in regards to left/right wing politics, but look at the implications and precedent that is being set that could be applied to any addon. I don't think @dm17 is wrong to see this as a something to be concerned about.

Thank you; I agree... And just look at all of the stuff Waterfox strips out of Firefox! That there is so much tracking and crap in there now that Waterfox even has a major following is evidence that Firefox is not a "privacy tool"!

[beerisgood]

@quantumpacket which "addon" you're talking about?

[quantumpacket]

I believe it's this addon https://dissenter.com/download once again, I have yet to test that the browser blacklists it, but there was a reddit post asking for help on preventing Firefox from unloading it on restart.

[beerisgood]

So you blame Mozilla to blacklist a addon on a external site which doesn't provide the source code for that addon and track users on their website itself?!:
https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdissenter.com%2Fdownload#requests

Sound like invalid / trolling post

[dm17]

@beerisgood I didn't mind your first post, but now this is borderline trolling. As I have said twice, the topic is not just Mozillas censorship. Primarily, based on the fact that privacytools.io is supposed to be about privacy and Firefox is not defaultly as private as other browsers with your data.

So the politics of George Soros & the Mozilla foundation aside (and their supporting RiseUp) - we can speak objectively about the privacy of Waterfox vs Firefox. It is simply unfair to be promoting Brave & Firefox as the top privacy browsers. Brave defaultly whitelists Facebook and Twitter trackers. Most users will never figure out how to disable most of Firefox's privacy issues - and Waterfox goes much further than one can do manually anyway.

[quantumpacket]

It was originally hosted on the Mozilla addons site, which as OP has stated was removed. The source code is here https://github.com/gab-ai-inc/gab-dissenter-extension/ also what does their download page have to do with this post? Tracking is done on even Firefox's download page.

[beerisgood]

@dm17 I never vote for Brave. Instead i vote for removing that Chrome/ Chromium shit

[five-c-d]

part of privacy is what you are allowed to see & use

Hmmm, this seems like a slippery slope. When a browser has advert-blocking on by default, I do not consider it to be restricting my freedoms nor invading my privacy somehow, when it blocks me from seeing those adverts. If I want some other behavior, I can adjust the settings, and if the browser does not let me adjust the settings the way I want, I can install some other browser.

Same goes for browsers that have anti-phishing and IP-based anti-malware blacklists ... often these are implemented questionably from a privacy perspective (the people providing the blacklists use them as a means of spying on what websites I visit while they scan for whether I'm visiting a website I should not ... typically that was the real motive for providing the free-as-in-beer service in the first place I often suspect), and also the very idea of letting some third party blacklist websites is questionable from a freedom standpoint (often the listing process is politicized either overtly or covertly).

Similarly, if an OS comes with a firewall on by default, that prevents me from visiting certain websites, or even blocks entire domains from loading (a la PiHole or the old-school HOSTS file with badsites explicitly prevented from loading), that is not a privacy invasion, that is usually a desired behavior. As long as I can turn it off, if I choose.

Here is background, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#Dissenter

mozilla-sysadmins versus gabDissenter-devs... unclear to me what the current state is?

FF has recently banned free speech extensions

You sound like you are saying there was more than one such incident. Are there other examples of where firefox sysadmins and programmers, have seemingly let their political biases or their systems of ethical beliefs, lead them to blacklist addons for non-technical reasons? I will note that mozilla corporation might be subject to the legal constraints against certain kinds of legislatively-defined-hate-speech in Germany and France and such places, is there any indication whether the removal of GabDissenter was due to it being made illegal by a court, rather than just firefox people deciding on their own? I will also note this, https://xkcd.com/1357/ ...and that the addons website is something mozilla pays to host.

There is a reddit-thread about GabDissenter versus MozillaAddonsSysadmins, and like a lot of things nowadays, seems to be full of self-censorship and maybe forum-mod-censorship and possibly even reddit-sysadmin-censorship (I'm not familiar enough with reddit to say on way or the other). https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bbugc5/firefox_bans_free_speech_commenting_plugin/?limit=500 Google has removed the pages from their cache, and Chrome has followed mozilla in blocking the extension in question. The reddit thread DOES assert that the GabDissenter addon can be installed still, just, no longer installed from addons.mozilla.org -- it has to be installed from the extension-owner's site with some kind of different code-signing procedure, or something? Quoting:

• One thing I'll note (since it hasn't been stressed enough), is that Mozilla is not saying that Firefox users can't use the Dissenter add-on. They are just saying that they are unwilling to post it on https://addons.mozilla.org Of course that is within their rights.
• To be clear, they are still willing to sign the add-on to let users add the add-on with a guarantee that it was distributed by Dissenter, to let people get updates, and to prevent them to have to load "temporary add-ons" (which are basically just add-ons that are being developed, and not distributed).
• There are interesting conversations about free speech going on here, and I have participated in some here, but I wanted to make it clear that while Mozilla is removing the add-on from their website, Dissenter is free to host it themselves - and Firefox users can continue to use the add-on without much fuss.
• Firefox hasn't banned the add-on, since it is still installed, and can continue to be installed. Mozilla has removed the add-on from their site. There is a difference

End quoth. I dunno whether what is said there is true, or maybe, was true at one point and now firefox is detecting and unloading the addon at runtime, or what. But the waters(heh) around the most recent firefox-versus-waterfox controversy seem pretty muddy.

waterfox-vs-firefox is a different issue, and a thorny one

I don't have a firm opinion on the waterfox-versus-firefox question, except to say that every year there is always Yet Another Firefox Fork which promises to provide better privacy and on-by-default settings and whatnot. PrivacyToolsIO even used to list one, the JonDoBrowser project if memory serves. But it is actually shockingly tough to maintain a soft-fork of a complex thing like Firefox, and almost none of these projects tend to make it over the long term.

The default behavior of Firefox w.r.t. privacy is "pretty good" (compared to chrome especially), and with a few key addons (also listed further down the page), that becomes "very good". Soft-forks that promise to do better, tend to end up doing worse: they fall behind on the upgrade-treadmill, and at some point are not pushing the security-patches needed (browsers are a huge risk when it comes to using them without the latest security-patching done promptly).

As for the question of whether Waterfox should be WorthMentioning (which is distinct from the question of whether Firefox should be delisted-or-demoted), unlike most of the soft-fork efforts waterfox seems to have been around quite some time. Not sure how well they keep up with security-patches, but well enough not to wither away over the years, at least. They have a wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox and the project was started in 2011. It has mostly nerdy-technical difference with stock firefox, but also some good moves for privacy: no Pocket, telemetry, data-collection, startup-profiling, the EME/DRM disabled by default, and the default search-engine is Ecosia rather than Google-or-similar (they started out as a tree-friendly search engine in 2009 but as of 2018 have apparently begun to rebrand as also being a privacy-oriented search engine).

p.s. Brave is not the best of all available options, but in some situations it is necessary: not just Chrome, and the reference-implementation Chromium, but also every other major browser (in terms of market share I mean) browser except firefox-and-firefox-clones, is based on the same engine as chromium. That means Safari, Opera, and MicrosoftEdge are all running on the same basic rendering-engine and javascript-engine as Chrome... and in turn, means that webdevs fairly often JUST test their websites on Chrome. Firefox is down to the single-digits of market share nowadays, much like it was back in the days of MSIE6 dominance fifteen years ago. Point being, there are plenty of websites where TorBrowser just does not work right, and firefox is also at risk of such things happening, so a webkit-or-chromium-based browser that tries to respect privacy is needed pragmatically today, even if not ideal from a long-term perspective.

p.p.s. There is no need for accusations of trolling, and counter-accusations of the person making the accusation getting accused of trolling. Please stick to the merits of the case, and whether privacy is at risk with a particular tool, and if so to what degree, compared to other tools that provide similar functionality. Personal bickering is non-helpful.

[dm17]

part of privacy is what you are allowed to see & use

Hmmm, this seems like a slippery slope. When a browser has advert-blocking on by default, I do not consider it to be restricting my freedoms nor invading my privacy somehow, when it blocks me from seeing those adverts. If I want some other behavior, I can adjust the settings, and if the browser does not let me adjust the settings the way I want, I can install some other browser.

Same goes for browsers that have anti-phishing and IP-based anti-malware blacklists ... often these are implemented questionably from a privacy perspective (the people providing the blacklists use them as a means of spying on what websites I visit while they scan for whether I'm visiting a website I should not ... typically that was the real motive for providing the free-as-in-beer service in the first place I often suspect), and also the very idea of letting some third party blacklist websites is questionable from a freedom standpoint (often the listing process is politicized either overtly or covertly).

Similarly, if an OS comes with a firewall on by default, that prevents me from visiting certain websites, or even blocks entire domains from loading (a la PiHole or the old-school HOSTS file with badsites explicitly prevented from loading), that is not a privacy invasion, that is usually a desired behavior. As long as I can turn it off, if I choose.

Here is background, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#Dissenter

mozilla-sysadmins versus gabDissenter-devs... unclear to me what the current state is?
waterfox-vs-firefox is a different issue, and a thorny one
p.s. Brave is not the best of all available options, but in some situations it is necessary: not just Chrome, and the reference-implementation Chromium, but also every other major browser (in terms of market share I mean) browser except firefox-and-firefox-clones, is based on the same engine as chromium. That means Safari, Opera, and MicrosoftEdge are all running on the same basic rendering-engine and javascript-engine as Chrome... and in turn, means that webdevs fairly often JUST test their websites on Chrome. Firefox is down to the single-digits of market share nowadays, much like it was back in the days of MSIE6 dominance fifteen years ago. Point being, there are plenty of websites where TorBrowser just does not work right, and firefox is also at risk of such things happening, so a webkit-or-chromium-based browser that tries to respect privacy is needed pragmatically today, even if not ideal from a long-term perspective.

p.p.s. There is no need for accusations of trolling, and counter-accusations of the person making the accusation getting accused of trolling. Please stick to the merits of the case, and whether privacy is at risk with a particular tool, and if so to what degree, compared to other tools that provide similar functionality. Personal bickering is non-helpful.

I appreciate the long and thoughtful reply. The following addresses a few issues:

1. Here's an incomplete list of privacy features that Waterfox has over Firefox:
   https://github.com/MrAlex94/Waterfox/#user-content-features
   As you can see there are a load of privacy enhancements that Waterfox has over Firefox - even after a power user does the typical privacy-enhancing modifications to Firefox.

2. Since this project is called "privacy tools" and not "security tools," then is the fact that Firefox has quicker security patches an argument for it to stay in the recommendation list no matter what? I think not.

3. As previously mentioned, the censorship the Mozilla foundation is participating in is not a primary component of my GitHub ticket. The lack of privacy in two main PrivacyTools recommendations a) Firefox, and b) Brave - is the issue (especially when compared to the well supported alternatives like Waterfox).
   a) Firefox - please see Participate with suggestions and constructive criticism on reddit.com #1 for a list of privacy features Firefox lacks, and Waterfox has.
   b) Brave - how can defaultly whitelisting Facebook & Twitter trackers be seen as "privacy centric?" We can open another ticket about this; I'm trying to keep this one focus on the Firefox recommendation.

4. You said, "As for the question of whether Waterfox should be WorthMentioning (which is distinct from the question of whether Firefox should be delisted-or-demoted), unlike most of the soft-fork efforts waterfox seems to have been around quite some time. Not sure how well they keep up with security-patches, but well enough not to wither away over the years, at least. They have a wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox and the project was started in 2011. It has mostly nerdy-technical difference with stock firefox, but also some good moves for privacy: no Pocket, telemetry, data-collection, startup-profiling, the EME/DRM disabled by default, and the default search-engine is Ecosia rather than Google-or-similar (they started out as a tree-friendly search engine in 2009 but as of 2018 have apparently begun to rebrand as also being a privacy-oriented search engine)." -- Agreed - great points!
   And you also said, "almost none of these projects tend to make it over the long term." But that doesn't seem like a reason not to promote and try for privacy. Netscape didn't last either.

security and stability not good for FF

Forks are always behind mainline in terms of security.

Mozilla develops at an unstable speed as they tend to push frills and extra features. It's actually wise to stay behind a bit because the feature richness they always chase actually causes security bugs. Users on the chronic upgrade path are always exposed to the highest number of unknown bugs, which are more risky than known bugs that can be controlled for if needed.

I sometimes have to pin a past version of Firefox because of a reckless release, and in a couple cases it took a couple years for Mozilla to put out a version that overcame nasty behavior like spontaneous crashes.

OTOH, Firefox + gHacks (Librefox) empowers users to decide whether they want to be on the bleeding edge or not. That control is an advantage for advanced users. Novice users will just take any upgrade, which means they'll take upgrades that just deliver new functionality (read: more bugs).

Mozilla ❤️'s CloudFlare

Recent versions dance for CloudFlare (a privacy abuser). It's said to be disabled out of the box but it's still not a privacy-respecting direction.

Does Mozilla alter users' configs?

However, from what I've read is that Firefox blacklists the addon and will remove it when you restart the browser.

👀 yikes; that's really fucked up if it's true. Fair enough if they want to control what's in their repository (since 3rd party repos are an option).. but to take end-user control away from users (who should be in control over their own installations) is an unacceptable appropriation of liberty.

Firefox doesn't teach visitors anything new

Everyone knows about Firefox so users don't get much value out of seeing it on PTIO. Exceptionally, if PTIO actually studied Firefox in depth and had strong reasons to dismiss other forks, then it would make sense but this doesn't seem to be the case. It's likely one of the blind crowd-following endorsements.

Tor Browser is a Firefox fork in the top slot. Showing users Firefox only distracts them from what they should be considering.

(FF-guts) Waterfox vs. Librefox (Firefox + gHacks)

I've not dug into that but perhaps someone should. The problem with letting Tor Browser stand as the only Firefox implementation is that it can't handle profiles. So if a user wants a secure way to do profiles using a Firefox-based client then one of these might be the answer.

(edit) Starting to dig in a little... Waterfox has had lags of ~9-14 days on security updates. Librefox wouldn't have that problem.

PTIO's focus is mass surveillance and FF-raw defaults to sending telemetry data. PTIO should put its own mission above all. It seems Waterfox is more suitable than FF-raw for endorsement, but the listing should warn users about the security update lag and let them decide. These are the relevant features to PTIO:

• cookie prompt? (I don't have the details on this yet but it sounds relevant)
• default search engine is not a mass surveillance hotbed (although Ecosia is sometimes hostile toward Tor users)
• telemetry data removed and data collection minimized
• In-browser ads removed (Pocket removed) - possibly relevant.. depends on whether the ads are personalized. Burden is on Firefox proponents to show that Pocket does not snoop or make used of snooped data.

For me ATM, FF-raw is a loser. Endorsement should go to Waterfox or Librefox. Someone needs to dig into the pros and cons of Waterfox and Librefox strictly in terms of mass surveillance and present their findings.

(Chromium-guts) Brave vs. Ungoogled Chromium

Brave - how can defaultly whitelisting Facebook & Twitter trackers be seen as "privacy centric?"

Indeed it's a problem. Ad blocker projects usually profit by kickbacks from advertisers in exchange for favorable treatment. Ads are already unfair, creating an arms race whereby vendors are forced to push ads to offset damage done by their competitors' ads. Then ad blocker projects like Brave manipulate ad exposure to game it to be even less fair.

I looked into Chromium-based browsers a year or so ago and short-listed these for a closer look:

https://github.com/eloston/ungoogled-chromium (sources from Iridium and Inox)
https://iridiumbrowser.de/ (ungoogled-chromium sources from it)
https://epicbrowser.com/ (mac/pc only)
https://www.comodo.com/home/browsers-toolbars/browser.php (windows only)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_%28browser%29 (ad replacement)
https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset
http://otter-browser.org/

In the end I favored Ungoogled Chromium. I didn't keep good notes so I don't recall why it came out ahead, but it's certainly harder to trust Brave with all its controversy and advertising shenanigans.

"Web Browser" category is in the wrong place

It shouldn't be at the top level. It's software, and should be under the software category.

[dm17]

Thanks @libBletchley, very concise reply.

Would be nice if the folks that thumbed down my post (Mikaela, lumbo7332, abbluiz, ookangzheng) would state their reasons why. I don't see how to @ them though.