No More Firefox

Mozilla is seemingly allergic to making good decisions, as shown by two recent (anti-)features it has brought to Firefox. First, is an AccuWeather widget on the new tab screen, enabled by default. On the surface, this seems mundane, but in order for this to work, Firefox is sending your “approximate” location to AccuWeather servers periodically in the background, even if you disable the widget🔗. This is the browser that tries to market itself as the go-to browser for privacy control.

Next, is Mozilla’s experimental integration with AI chatbot🔗. Why? Who is asking for this? What telemetry data is being sent to the integrated services? Who knows! At least this one, in contrast to the weather widget, is opt-in, but regardless it shows how out of touch Mozilla is with its userbase. Firefox’s only defining feature is that it is not Chrome, so following in Chrome’s footsteps in implementing AI integration is a head-scratcher.

I have been using Firefox forever, and it makes me sad that it just gets worse and worse and worse. I’m not sure how much longer it (and by extension the Gecko rendering engine) will be around, since it is only allowed to exist because of Google donating money to avoid antitrust action. For now, I’ll be switching to LibreWolf, a Firefox fork that actually delivers on the privacy promise. Hopefully Servo takes off well enough to be used as a daily driver sometime soon.