Firefox in 2025 and Mozilla Controversies
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Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Use Firefox in 2025
I grew up with the Internet, since before people had Internet connections at home or in their pocket. The browser, being the window to the open web, holds a special place in my heart. In this article I’m suggesting the use of Firefox in 2025, for both technical and political reasons, as it’s still the “user agent” that it set out to be.
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LWN ☛ Mozilla reverses course on its terms of use
Mozilla has issued an update to its terms of use (TOU) that were announced on February 26. It has removed a reference in the TOU to Mozilla's Acceptable Use Policy "
because it seems to be causing more confusion than clarity
", and has revised the TOU "to more clearly reflect the limited scope of how Mozilla interacts with user data
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Jan-Erik Rediger: Seven-year Moziversary
In March 2018 I started a job as a Telemetry engineer at Mozilla. Seven years later I'm still here on my Moziversary, as I was in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Mozilla is not the same company it was when I joined. No one on the C-level is here for as long as I am. There have been 5 larger reorgs in the past year and two layoffs in different departments, plus the big round of layoffs at the Mozilla Foundation. My part of the organization was moved around again and for the moment Data Engineering is nested under the Infrastructure Org. Good colleagues left or were laid off. Just recently my team shrunk again. Notably I haven't posted anything under the mozilla tag since 2022, other than my Moziversary blog posts.
FOSS Force:
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With Google Going Bye-Bye, Mozilla's Evidently Found a New Money Stream… Selling Your Data - FOSS Force
You’ve probably heard by now that unless Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai hits paydirt with his sucking up to Trump and convinces the Orange One to intervene on Google’s behalf, there’s a good chance the feds are going to put the kibosh on Goog’s practice of paying a bounty to browsers that aren’t Chrome, in order to keep them keeping Google as their default search engine.
Over the years, Mozilla has made gazillions of bucks on Firefox this way — with a browser that for the longest time has only been used by three out of a hundred users worldwide. Mozilla’s not the only one benefiting from this practice, of course. In 2022, it became big news that Google paid Apple $20 billion to be Safari’s default for a year. Poor Firefox isn’t getting that kind of bucks, and the money numbers for Firefox will continue to drop as Firefox’s market share drops, but Bloomberg reported that in 2023, Firefox was still pocketing something like $500 million in payments from Alphabet each year.