Here is an article in the Kuketz IT Security blog about firefox and which data it captures and trasnmits to mozilla. Very detailed and interesting.
The blog is only in german.
Fazit:
Die schlechte Nachricht vorab: Firefox ist im Auslieferungszustand kein datenschutzfreundlicher Browser. Im Gegensatz zu seinen Konkurrenten wie Google Chrome oder Microsoft Edge lässt er sich aber zu einem datenschutzfreundlicher Browser umwandeln.
The bad news in advance: Firefox is not a privacy-friendly browser by default. However, unlike its competitors such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, it can be converted to a privacy-friendly browser.
Yeah, it’s not so bad, but I understand why someone would think it’s a little bit fishy to have the defaults that way, but as I understand it, it’s about the money as always, so no surprise there. It seems there is still some balance: they get the money to develop this relatively lone browser and they haven’t still completely sold their souls.
But if you’d like to get Mozilla out of your browser, you might try Waterfox. It’s been years since I’ve tried it, but maybe I will test it again soon myself. With that you can also run legacy addons if you’re into that. Because of the new addon API, I know legacy addon would be the only way for me to dream of having spell check for my native language in browser…
Does anyone here know if the Linux version of that Mac OS-X application “Little Snitch” is working properly nowadays? It enabled a user to monitor and/or block all outgoing traffic in an easy to use format. I know it was being worked upon but that was ages ago and my memory is a bit hazy, I didn’t keep the details of the project.
Funnily enough I am listening to a song called “Zero Degree Of Liberty” by Porcupine Tree!
Waterfox was acquired by System1 which is an ad company in the beginning of 2020 if I remember correctly. Frankly, I haven’t been following its development ever since but it might be worth to do some research if privacy is your primary goal for using Waterfox.
I had a look at Waterfox and all (most?) of the other alternatives just a few days ago, and apart from the fact most appear to be running on dated code stability seemed to be an issue. At the moment I’m sticking with Firefox with a few addons for privacy.
Me too I am staying with Firefox for now.
I have been using a arkenfox’ user.js as a template to create my own user.js for hardening my profiles to some extent.
arkenfox user.js is quite extensive out of the box. It disables all the telemetry stuff etc. “by default”.
It might break some sites if used “as is”. If I am not mistaken Librewolf makes use of it as well.
A template is a good idea. A nice way to examine the process. I’m pretty locked down with FF at the moment BUT I do use the sync feature to bring all my stuff across 4 EnOS machines, which blows the whole thing apart really and now I have an up to date Android phone to contend with as well!!
If you like you could create a couple of test profiles to try things out.
Firefox Profilemaker seems to be an easy way to create user.js with reasonable privacy features etc.
I’ve just looked at that. It sounds like fun! I may well try that one out on my second machine. At the moment it’s sitting there doing little apart from distributed number crunching via the BOINC application (choose your poison & bandwidth).
As soon as anything becomes popular the bigger corporate companies try to buy it out. It represents competition and they have to stifle it. Success seems to be a self defeating thing. Unfortunately some people desire money, domination and power. They will do anything to keep hold of those things. Empty short-sighted things. Unfortunately they may destroy us all. What they fail to see is that they will also destroy them too. Idiots!
Every option is a compromise! 