Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to adjust your settings. We also don’t collect category data when you use Private Browsing mode on Firefox.
firefox develops an optional predictive search feature like every other search engine and browser has that actually protects user privacy that can easily be turned off so naturally the internet loses their mind over it and declares firefox dead.
don’t worry, it’s balanced out by the every other day threads of firefox shills screeching about how much more private it is and how it uses so much less ram.
people never want to admit that things aren’t black and white.
Mozilla wants to be an AI company. This is data collection to support that. Telemetry to understand the user browsing experience doesn’t need to be content-categorized.
Unless they’re going to publish their data, AI can’t be meaningfully open source. The code to build and train a ML model is mostly uninteresting. The problems come in the form of data and hyperparameter selection which either intentionally or unintentionally do most of the shaping of the resulting system. When it’s published it’ll just be a Python project with some magic numbers and “put data here” with no indications of what went into data selection or choosing those parameters.
I just want a command line interface to my browser, then I’ll tell my local mixtral 8x7B instance to “look in all my tabs and place all tabs about ‘magnetic loop antennas’ in a new window, order them with the most concrete build instructions first” 100% open source model. I’m looking into the marionette protocol to accomplish this. It would be nice if it came with that out of the box.
What does “open source” mean to you? Just free/noncorporate? Because a “100% open source model” doesn’t really make sense by the traditional definition. The “source” for a model is its data, not the code and not the model itself. Without the data you can’t build the model yourself, can’t modify it, and can’t inspect why it does what it does.
I think the model can be modified with LoRa without tge source data ? In any case, if the inference software is actually open source and all the necessary data is free of any intellectual property encumberances, it runs without internet access or non commodity hardware.
Then it’s open source enough to live in my browser.
You can technically modify any network weights however you want with whatever data you have lying around, but without the core training data you can’t verify that your modifications aren’t hurting the original capabilities. Fine-tuning (which LoRa is for) isn’t the same thing as modifying a trained network. You’re still generally stuck with their original trained capabilities you’re just reworking the final layer(s) to redirect/tune it towards your problem. You can’t add pet faces into a human face detector, and if a new technique comes out that could improve accuracy you can’t rebuild the model with it.
In any case, if the inference software is actually open source and all the necessary data is free of any intellectual property encumberances, it runs without internet access or non commodity hardware.
Then it’s open source enough to live in my browser.
So just free/noncorporate. A model is effectively a binary and the data is the source (the actual ML code is the compiler). If you don’t get the source, it’s not open source. A binary can be free and non-corporate, but it’s still not source code.
I mean, I would prefer a data set that’s properly open, “the pile” laion, open assistant and a pirate copy is every word, song, video ever written and spoken by man.
But for now I’d be happy to fully control my browser with an offline copy of mixtral or llama
Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla
As well as profits and corporate interests.
People speak very good thing about Firefox but they like to hide and avoid the shady stuff. Let me give you the un-cesored version of what Firefox really is. Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances and they also do stuff like adding unique IDs to each installation.
Firefox does is a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings and config like the OP did.
I know other browsers do it as well, except for Ungoogled and because of that I’m sticking with it. I would like to avoid programs that need no snitch whenever I open them. ungoogled-chromium + ublock origin + decentraleyes + clearurls and a few others.
Now you’re free to go ahead and downvote this post as much as you would like. I’m sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox isn’t as good and private after all.
I genuinely didn’t know all that. Thanks for bringing that up. I’ve been lazy and told myself countless times I should switch to LibreWolf. Now’s the time.
First of all, Lunduke… has very funny opinions on things, as his politics massively shifted in the past 4-5 years, as someone who used to follow his rants before he became a rightwinger. His interview at Chris Titus channel was also a bit unhinged, and Titus protected him by hushing him a fair bit.
Secondly, unique IDs are only a thing when you download the Firefox online installer stub from their website. If you download the offline installer from their website or from any decent Windows software site (Majorgeeks, Filehorse et al), this is not a problem. Also, this is not at all a problem on Linux, since the software installation method is fully centralised.
What I will criticise is CEOs have been leeches at Mozilla. Emily Baker has been an absolute leech, and there is no denying about it. The new CEO is also a leech. But that has not affected Firefox. It may, however, affect Firefox as the developer money is snatched by CEOs. What has affected Firefox is how the world has shaped up, and people are okay with having less privacy because western elites have helped create that ecosystem for masses to cuck themselves. I am not going to honk trumpets for their inclusive politics like a liberal, but it has allowed to distance them from clowns like Brendan Eich, which has been fairly helpful.
Also your point about UGC using uBO is nonsense. Manifest V3 simply disallows the full capabilities of uBO on Chromium browsers due to its hard cap on memory limits. Raymond Hill has a lot of words to say about it. uBO Lite is about as good as uBO easy mode but even lighter, and you cannot block selective domains or scripts at all. Not to mention, uBO on Firefox allows importing extra filter text files, which is not an option on Chromium browsers.
Firefox has customisable user.js and userchrome.css, so the former allows implementing Arkenfox’s configuration and such things.
I’m NOT sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox is as good and private after all, if you can put in a little work. You may cry, whine and bang your head about it. Your disinformation cope attempt has failed.
Lunduke has a problem with Mozilla’s “politics” as a white Christian rightwinger, as do people like Luke Smith, for reasons that should not need much explanation. He fell into that rabbit hole few years ago, and wishes to remain there.
I’m on the “OK but keep an eye on it” train, here.
Devs need feedback to know how people are using the product, and opt-out tracking is the best way to do it. In this case, it seems like my personal data is completely unidentifiable.
I was coding in the IE6 era, so I’d really prefer to not end up in a browser engine monoculture again.
Here’s the current list of categories we’re using: animals, arts, autos, business, career, education, fashion, finance, food, government, health, hobbies, home, inconclusive, news, real estate, society, sports, tech and travel.
All we want is 1990s Google, guys. That’s really all we want. None of this AI BS that kind find a country in Africa that starts with a K, just Google without the evil enshitification layer on top.
If you had the right query, yes. But getting there if you didn’t know the exact words in the website used to take a number of attempts and google-fu. By early 2010s this was vastly improved.
I feel like you had to learn how to use it, operators and phrasing etc. They dumbed it down with search suggestions and even further by changing search terms to synonyms, and now outright ignoring terms. Height of Internet search was definitely pre 2008. More like 2005.
I switched from Alta Vista at Google in the early 2000s because the Alta Vista index was stale and full of spam. Google search tools were comparatively primitive (av let you do things like word stem search) but the results were really good.
There are definitely 2 kinds of people commenting this post. The first one who supports telemetry (and Big Tech) and another one that supports freedom and opt-in. This is interesting to see on something like Lemmy. I think the ones who support telemetry are devs and it is a little bit concerning to me
No one supports telemetry. People support Mozilla, because they are the maintainers of the last standard respecting, open source and independent browse engine.
That’s pretty important as Microsoft and Google etc are trying to take possession of the internet for themselves .
This isn’t even telemetry, it’s data collection for AI. That they refused to say that let’s you know that they think what they’re doing needs to be obfuscated.
In life, people will frequently say things to you that won’t be the whole truth, but you can figure out what’s actually going on by looking at the context of the situation. This is commonly referred to as “being deceptive” or sometimes just “lying”. Corporate PR and salespeople, the ones who put out this press release, do it regularly.
You don’t need to record content categories of searches to make a good tool for displaying websites, you need it to perform predictions about what users will search for. They’ve already said they wanted to focus on AI and linked to an example of the system they want to improve, it’s their site recommender, complete with sponsored recommendations that could be sold for a higher price if the Mozilla AI could predict that “people in country X will soon be looking for vacations”.
To improve Firefox based on your needs, understanding how users interact with essential functions like search is key.
Buddy, I just want to type a search term and get results. Stop spying on my search. Your only job is to transfer it to the server and then present the result. I don’t need you to suggest some bullshit to me, or think of “ways to improve search”.
This helps us take a step forward in providing a browsing experience that is more tailored to your needs, without us stepping away from the principles that make us who we are.
No. What the fuck? They are sounding more and more like Google. We need a new alternative that isn’t built from Gecko or Blink or whatever the engines are called.
Buddy, I just want to type a search term and get results.
Telemetry can help them do better at providing that. Devs aren't magical beings, they don't know what's working and what's not unless someone tells them.
That’s like saying the window pane between me and the teller has to understand the conversation and dynamically modify the light between him and I. The window pane’s only job is to let light through. Keep it at that.
No, this analogy would make more sense if it was a matter of recording a large number of interactions between customers and tellers to ensure that the window isn't interfering with their interactions. Is the window the right size? Can the customer and teller hear each other through it? Is that little hole at the bottom large enough to let through the things they need to physically exchange? If you deploy the windows and then never gather any telemetry you have no idea whether it's working well or if it could be improved.
You’re describing telemetry to improve the overall performance of the window. That’s very different from what Mozilla: listening in to what is sent between the teller and I. They even gave an example of a trip to Spain and recording it as travel. That’s going way beyond the performance of a window. The teller is probably already doing that. The window operator has no business listening in on that discussion nor recording even a summary of details of the discussion.
In this case the content of the search is all that really matters for the quality of the search. What else would you suggest be recorded, the words-per-minute typing speed, the font size? If they want to improve the search system they need to know how it's working, and that involves recording the searches.
It's anonymized and you can opt out. Go ahead and opt out. There'll still be enough telemetry for them to do their work.
The example of the “search optimization” they want to improve is Firefox Suggest, which has sponsored results which could be promoted (and cost more) based on predictions of interest based on recent trends of topics in your country. “Users in Belgium search for vacations more during X time of day” is exactly the sort of stuff you’d use to make ads more valuable. “Users in France follow a similar pattern, but two weeks later” is even better. Similarly predicting waves of infection based on the rise and fall of “health” searches is useful for public health, but also for pushing or tabling ad campaigns.
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