Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data

Re:Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data by nonrandomstring on Friday February 28, 2025 @10:23AM (#43206605)

You only need one better browser to switch to. I guess you're getting at a Hobson's choice [0], that there really is only one browser and all others are copies of the same harmful set of properties, so moving isn't worth the overhead (switch cost is a factor in this that we often ignore). To my mind, there must be at least one browser out there that is "less undesirable" than that case. Just iterate your way into your comfort zone.

So often arguments on this axis come down to how much convenience are you going to give up for the trust relation you desire. We get stuck if we mistake convenience for necessity thereby bringing absolutes into a continuous trade-off problem.

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Re:Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data by Dylan16807 on Friday February 28, 2025 @01:09PM (#43208591)

I wouldn't say there's only one, but there are two main clusters for anyone not on a mac, and a handful of teams large enough to do a solid job of running their own variant. There's precious little iteration to do.

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Re:Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data by nonrandomstring on Friday February 28, 2025 @02:26PM (#43209313)

I'm not a typical user [0] but am very mindful of the typical user. Maybe I'd not realised how much the browser space has shrunk and that the experience of "browsing", the abstract task, now breaks down into more specialised tasks.

I'm thinking lately the myth of the "browser" and "web" as coherent data spaces is something even Sir Tim gave up on, right? If the centre cannot hold constellations of specialised clients (which are already "apps" in a sense) look like enduring in the near future at the expense of interoperability and standards. The "best browser" will be the one that strikes the most deals with the parts of the network people want to connect to. It's just like the best "game console".

That seems really bleak for the Internet qua people's network.

No doubt http/s and the worlds of port 80/443 will endure eternal, but the "Universal" search and information space the pioneers and then proto-Google aspired to now seems so remote that the idea of a "browser" is itself a little ridiculous to beards like me. I think today the "browser" has become a clique of PKI suites and CAs, at the behest of banking and retail, backed by broken but well meaning regulation, and unwittingly creating this monster we still call "The Browser". anyway, peace.

[0] I use w3m for 99% of my daily drive and a sandboxed degoogled chromium for any of the "messy stuff"

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