“Each Firefox download has a unique identifier”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30715163

If you are using Windows [which is where the above applies], does that firefox download token make a difference to your privacy?

But does that identifier ever get transmitted anywhere? How is this unique identifier used to track me?

There's only a few use cases for a unique identifier, zero for one that is never used.

Look at the highest comment on that thread from car_analogy, he lays out a plausible scenario at what the consequences of Mozilla tracking downloads could be.

Except that scenario is not plausible at all.

Why would you be downloading a network installer only to move it with USB to another supposedly "secure" machine just so THAT machine can then do the downloading part instead of just downloading the binary on that machine in the first place?

Secondly who is downloading Firefox binaries off of Mozzilla website for a "secure" machine? That only happens if you are running Windows and at that point your pants are already soiled.

Most plausible is that some IT department would have same installer on all the machines and then Mozzilla would know that all these machines belong to same organization, but if your IT department is running network installer for every instance for Firefox they install then please fire your IT department.

Literally all this info does is to tell Mozzilla that you installed a Firefox or if you are some kind of weirdo who moves some 10kb web installer from friend to friend to install Firefox they might know that all these people at some level know each other, but again this only applies to Windows users.

I just don't understand why HN is making this out to be some Firefox killer.

and instead, they move to a totally untested unknown fork like LibreFox who is ran by who exactly? Almost sounds like an intelligence operation.

Why Mozzilla with two z?

Kids, please start using Debian again.

   apt-get install firefox

I think that one's only on sid (unstable). For the rest of us it'd be

    apt install firefox-esr

THIS is why Debian exists.

Thank you. I am done with Firefox. I switched to Chrome on Windows and Safari on IOS. There is no point of using Firefox when they do all kinds of shady and bullshit things.

Can you explain WHY that matters?

The linked post has a lot of useful info that will answer your question on more that 1 way. Give it a read.

Firefox's default settings are optimized for usability and not breaking websites. For privacy and security some of that must be sacrificed. The Tor Browser, LibreWolf and arkenfox user.js all make Firefox less usable, or not usable at all in some cases.

If I can't use site X using a secure browser, it's site X that's broken, not the browser. There's billions of websites, and only a few browsers. If a site doesn't want me to visit it, I'll just find another site.

Default config of Firefox include advertisement and "participate in studies". That means intense tracking. You can disable all of that garbage, but most do not even know, that it exists and is enabled by default (along with telemetry).

You have to ask yourself what is more important to you having to do couple option changes, but keeping the browser up to date and secure or having sane(r) defaults, but lacking behind in security updates.

Yes, I'm sure the author does their best, but I doubt this is their day job. Meaning if there is an update during working hours he might not get to update his fork until several hours later or if he is on vacation it might be days or weeks. What happens when he abandons the project? Usually the fork projects wind down after some time and there is no indication for the users that they are using abandonware with God knows how many missing security patches.

Of course there is ideal world where we wouldn't have to make these choices, but at least I am going to stick with Firefox until something actually bad happens.

libreWolf seems to be built regularly using the latest version of Firefox. If it ends up using the nightly build of of firefox nightly or dev edition in the future it could release security updates even faster then firefox "mainstream" itself. LibreWolf does not appear to be maintained by a single person like you implied. Its a relatively new project it can either go one of two ways: become popular and gain lots of supports + maintainers, die a slow death. After having actually used it for a few days it seems good to me. I'll continue to evaluate it as my daily browser.

I am not convinced that is better. Firstly important security fixes will be pushed as hotfixes past nightly into main instead of waiting for a regular patch cycle. Otherwise you are just announcing bugs to the world.

Secondly there is a reason why nightly channel exists. It is because it is not stable. Yeah, back in the day I ran nightly for years without seeing an issue, but also I'm not really sure if there was any benefits.

As far as I am aware the dev channel is just main Firefox with better webdev console/tools. So I don't know if that has anything going for it security wise compared to the main.

Does Firefox Focus (for Android) do the same?

It does have a "Send usage data" option that is enabled by default.

There is also a "Studies" option which I had not seen before.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-opt-out-studies-fir...

"There is also a "Studies" option which I had not seen before."

Yup. This sort of behavior, of where stuff like this just creeps in with an update, is why I would never consider donating to mozilla at its current shape.

(along with the fact, that they continue to reduce engineers, but increase the CEO salary, despite marketshare is falling)

I switched to Chrome on Windows today. Mozilla is a trainwreck. They reportedly get $350M-450$ million per year from Google. Is that not enough to make a fucking browser and stop firing engineers every year?

Mozilla does only their bullshit outreachy and woke bullshit instead of focusing on their only product that matter. I don't really care if their engineers are women, trans, non-binary, black, hispanic, indian etc. All I wanted a top notch browser that's not based on chromium, but that was too much to ask.

I miss the old Mozilla when they made the New York Times ad with their donors names on there.

Mozilla lost another user...I guess is time to increase their CEOs salary!

Yeah, not really.

That's only minimally possible with a whole lot of plugins that should be added there by default, plus removing the fingerprint function.