General rule of thumb: Every time an organization updates their terms of service and/or privacy policy, it is never because they have your best interests at heart.
Specific thoughts on this latest Mozilla action (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/firefox-terms-of-use/)
Setting aside the "worldwide license" bullshit, the privacy policy appears to have broadened both the classes of data Mozilla aims to collect, and the situations in which they collect them.
These are not the actions of an org that cares about your privacy.
I'd specifically like to bring attention to the "To market our services." bases for data collection under which Mozilla now claim the right to gather, among other things, Unique identifiers and Browsing data - under which Consent is only considered if they have a legal obligation, and of course it's opt-out.
There is also the incredibly broad "To comply with applicable laws, and identify and prevent harmful, unauthorized or illegal activity." in which Mozilla states they may gather "all data types" - among the defined types include: searches, browsing data (visited URLS), content and any other data.
In support of nebulously defined "identify and prevent harmful," and in response to law enforcement.
That "learn more about" link just goes to a list of definitions.
This is far from the start of this journey, Mozilla have been working towards this point for many years.
A creeping corruption that I think has finally taken hold.
They themselves, say it best:
"Although we’ve historically relied on our open source license for Firefox and public commitments to you, we are building in a much different technology landscape today"
I need a web browser, I need it to be open source. I need it to be secure and maintainable. I need it to work in my best interests.
Firefox is no longer that browser, I'll be working to move off of it. I don't think there is an obvious place to go, yet.
For those asking what my current plan is:
I'm going to push forward on migrating my use of more complex web apps to a standalone equivs where available (e.g. mastodon / rss readers)
In the short term, probably tor browser to do more general browsing. I trust that team to be able to strip out most of the bad, and keep the rest generally locked down.
Long term: It's time to really commit to building something better.
@sarahjamielewis if you're a Gnome user and can live without plugins etc, Gnome Web (Epiphany) is pretty good. It also has webapp support, so you could maybe bundle elk.zone for Mastodon.. (nicer than Tuba?). Qutebrowser is also pretty cool, but it's using Chromium, hence untrustworthy (imho). Servo looks promising, but it's highly alpha. FWIW, I ruled out Firefox a long time back because it's a Google funded project (hence no PWA support?).