I feel like I’m going crazy. I keep hearing people talk about how they still trust Firefox more than any of the alternative browsers. Most recently, it was in this article in the Register, Firefox is fine. The people running it are not. But Firefox is not fine. Firefox is turning into a tool for surveillance capitalism.
Look, I’m not here to tell you to stop using Firefox. I don’t really care what browser other people use, and I don’t really care what criteria you use to choose your browser. For me, privacy is pretty high on the list, but it may not be for you. That’s fine. What’s crazy-making for me, though, is hearing people — and it’s not just the Register, the hosts of Late Night Linux have been saying the same thing for months now — talk about Mozilla’s move into surveillance capitalism and then turn around and say that they still trust Mozilla more than the alternatives.
You still get better ad-blocking in Firefox.
Really? Do you actually believe that? Because just a few paragraphs earlier you said:
You might think Mozilla would, say, buy and integrate an ad-blocker… Other browsers integrate ad-blocking, and you don't even need something controversial like Brave – for instance, Vivaldi has offered it for years…
But no. Instead, Mozilla goes and buys an ad firm and then removes its promise not to sell your data.
I just can’t square this circle. Am I really going to get better ad-blocking in Firefox when advertising is built into the browser? Even if uBlock is better than Vivaldi’s built-in blockers, it’s not going to protect me from ads the browser wants to show me. I absolutely cannot make sense of the idea that Mozilla bought an ad firm, excised their promise not to sell my data from their Terms of Use, and yet somehow is still my best choice for a privacy-respecting browser when there are still browsers out there promising to respect my privacy.
Vivaldi, for example, positions itself as privacy-focused similarly to the way that Mozilla used to. It often comes up when I hear people discussing Mozilla’s move into surveillance advertising, and yet Vivaldi is usually dismissed, the implication being that Vivaldi is less privacy-respecting, less trustworthy, than Firefox. But nobody ever says why a company that promises to respect your privacy is worse than a company that is explicitly going to surveil you. It makes me feel like these folks know something I don’t. Like there’s some reason why Vivaldi is worse than Firefox on privacy, and everybody knows this reason, so there’s no need to re-hash it. Every time I come across something like this my anxiety spikes just a little bit, because I’m left wondering, “what don’t I know about Vivaldi?”
Mostly it just kind of seems like all Chromium-based browsers are guilty by association with Google. Which I get. I’m apprehensive about using a Chromium-based browser because Google controls Chromium and I have no idea how much of Google’s surveillance is baked into Chromium. But if there is actually evidence that Chromium is untrustworthy — that Google’s surveillance isn’t added on top of Chromium when they build Chrome — then it seems like that is at least worth mentioning in passing.
Even so, it seems like the best case for Firefox is that it’s now just as bad as the rest. Maybe all of the major browsers are untrustworthy. In which case, sure, I’d go with Firefox. At least it’s open source. But “they all suck, so you might as well choose Firefox,” is very different than “Firefox is still better than the rest,” which is what I keep hearing, without explanation.