i deleted my mozilla account

Submitted by emma in yourpersonalblog (edited )

i used to have firefox sync enabled so i could retain my browsing history and passwords and stuff between devices. but mozilla is an advertising company now, and with no signs of the tide turning in sight, i think it's a mistake to trust them with all that information. so i moved all my passwords into an encrypted database (which i should have done ages ago), and deleted my account with mozilla.

their account management thing is absolute trash, btw, and i got rate-limited for the crime of successfully typing my password multiple times. also i had trouble a while back where they sent emails to my old address, but it was seemingly not added to my account, it wouldn't let me add the old address to my account because it was "in use", and it wouldn't let me log in or reset the password with the old address because it's a secondary email (so what the hell is the point of adding one?)

in the next post in the series, i'll be talking about how i deleted firefox and switched to chrome after going through all five stages of grief. but before i can write that post, those things have to actually happen. stay tuned.

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cowloom wrote

roses are red, violets are blue, firefox is good, but mozilla huffs glue.

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nitori wrote

Animation of Cirno eating glue

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cowloom wrote (edited )

can we take a moment to appreciate that you had this gif on hand, ready to go

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neku wrote

people itt are complaining that mozilla is an advertising company ... while talking about switching to chrome? am i huffing glue?

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flabberghaster wrote

Mozilla gets (got!!!) most of its money from google to use google as the default search engine, but they've seen the writing on the wall for a while and have tried to diversify their income stream from that.

Unfortunately that means they've kind of abandoned their main claim to fame, "we respect your privacy more than chrome does" because they need to make money and they've chosen to get in to the same business as google. Sort of rational for them but a terrible shame for all of us.

There's now basically two browsers and web rendering engines and they're both maintained by spyware companies.

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nitori wrote

Hey, there's still WebKit.. Where Apple's OSes are the only first-class citizens :P

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twovests wrote

There are myriad ways Apple can cement themselves firmly in the good graces of Computers Peoples and one of those is Safari on everything including the BSDs

It will also make Google shit their pants! The profit motive is there! Please, give us a third spyware company maintaining a rendering enigne!

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neku wrote

i don't really contend that, but i feel like claiming that mozilla and google are equally Spyware is throwing the baby out with the bathwater to a ludicrous degree. thats especially so when you consider that mozilla just bought an ad company as subsidiary, whereas ads are google's fundamental stock in trade

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flabberghaster wrote

you're absolutely right, they're not the same, at least not yet.

I still use firefox, because they still allow adblockers and also partly ideological reasons; i don't want there to just be one rendering engine that exists. But i'm not under any illusion that mozilla is not evil.

If we take Cory Doctorow's framework, they're still in the "be good to your users to get them to use you" or early in the "slightly enshitify to please your business clients" phase, and aren't nearly as far down as chromium is yet.

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emma OP wrote

google doesn't need to use chrome to push ads and stuff. they have a vast collection of services that are unavoidable and which people actually use. mozilla, on the other hand, has only one product with wide reach: firefox. so it stands to reason that if mozilla's gonna do something nasty with their ad business, it has to be firefox users who become the victims of it.

i believe this is why mozilla builds support for crapgpt into firefox, and google doesn't build it into chrome. people will simply get that when they use google search anyway.

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neku wrote

what are the chrome manifest v3 changes if not a way for google to make sure people see their ads? and stuff like this? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea i don't disagree with your reasoning but youre giving google more credit than they deserve. also google proudly integrates AI into chrome https://www.google.com/chrome/ it's the first header you see on their website and the second thing you see scrolling down.

i don't really use AI but it makes sense that when every other browser is trying to integrate it firefox would experiment with doing the same by putting an AI thing into its opt-in experimental settings thing. it doesn't even impact you unless you look for it

again i don't disagree with your thinking that a potential ad business could affect firefox users. but tech companies make pointless acquisitions that they never use all the time. if you disagreed with that new setting that firefox introduced that "Allow[ed] websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement," that would be one thing, but this new subsidiary hasnt even impacted the browser at all yet. and even if it did, i can't imagine a world where you wouldn't be able to easily circumvent that using settings or extensions 🤷

at the end of the day bickering about browsers is nearly as stupid as console wars fanboy type shit so you do you but idk!! to me, i think offering a more or less quality browser for free for like 20 years has earned them a little bit of good will. i just have faith that theyre not going to funnel all my browser history towards ad companies in the near future, whereas i dont have that faith in google

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emma OP wrote

to be clear, i'm not switching browsers over their acquisition of an ad business. all i've done is delete my mozilla account.

i'm preparing to make a switch, because i strongly believe manifest v2 support will be removed in the future, and that the ad business will negatively affect firefox. mozilla has followed google off every cliff, and i'll point towards floc as an example of that, since that's essentially just the deceptively named 'privacy-preserving ad measurement' rebranded.

once v2 support is gone, firefox will be on equal or worse footing compared to chrome with regards to privacy. at that point, i may as well go for chrome, since that doesn't have websites breaking in it for bad reasons. i don't care if david or goliath wins when i find both undesirable.

if "AI" is in chrome, i haven't noticed it. i assume they're just doing what mozilla is doing where it's mostly just vapid marketing nonsense.

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neku wrote

oh thats true sorry. i read someone else in this thread talking about switching to chrome and for some reason thought you were saying it 🤦

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twovests wrote

the browser landscape nowadays sucks :( firefox has always been broken for me so i've been using brave for five years

the CEO is a musk fanboy AI cryptocoin far-righty, so you gotta be ready to jump ship to Google's Chrome at any time. but their security people are legit, their privacy track record exceeds mozilla's, and "Shields" controls are a feature that i lovelovelovelove

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emma OP wrote

my perception of brave is very negative due to the people in charge, so i don't think i'll be switching to that.

i've used mozilla browsers since 2003 (mozilla suite, which became seamonkey, then firefox 1.0), and it's very upsetting seeing what we've lost, and all the flavours of chrome we're left with.

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twovests wrote

yeah, that's entirely fair. i hope you can find something within the Browser Hellscape of the 20s

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nitori wrote (edited )

I would've suggested self-hosting the sync, but god, trying to self-host Firefox Sync looks like a nightmare. Not only do you have to build the Sync 1.5 server, you also need to build the authentication server which is separate.. Really glad Pale Moon never adopted that and stuck with Weave/Sync 1.1 (even though it uses a mozilla-esr 52 base which long abandoned Weave, it's cool they got it back during the forking). Even if the sync server gets compromised it's guaranteed they will never be able to read your synced data, because the decryption key is never sent to the server (only the data in encrypted form is) and the encryption/decryption is done locally. This is very unlike Sync nowadays with Firefox where convenience seems to have trumped over security (anyone who has your Firefox Accounts password can retrieve the decryption key for the data stored in the Firefox Sync server)...

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emma OP wrote

yeah, it's open source in the sense the code is available for everyone to use, but no one would want to.

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