It checks if you’re both human AND not a bumbling tumbleweed.

I read this as “we don’t want you, the user, to interact with our 100% user-content driven website that depends on your presence to keep having value”.

some good stuff

If you want to live in medieval time with your wife/servant, sure.

Yeah, we all know that, but MS being the main force driving this is kinda nuts tho.

Trade it in or recycle it with local organizations

And what are those organizations expected to install on systems that can’t support Windows 11, Microsoft? What are they expected to install exactly?

Kinda like blaming a President at war for not saying “thank you” to its “benefactor” (despite having done so numerous times), no?

“I don’t understand, that user keeps asking me to fix their email, and they’re more angry each time!”

First, mostly as if in Firefox. Go open Netflix, just for the laugh of it.

Second, a fork that depends on Mozilla’s power to develop the upstream is not really in the clear. From a licensing perspective, sure. But let’s assume the worst (because it’s 2025 after all). Firefox is no longer open source. Sure, we can fork from where they left. But building, maintaining, and evolving a browser engine (and the browser itself) requires substantial work. Which means, developers/maintainers, and money. And staying on a “bare” browser might not be viable as long as standards keeps evolving and 95% of people will not care about that stuff.

All that to say, a fork is an option for now. A more tangible solution for the future is needed. A new “Mozilla” without the $millions CEO and structure, Mozilla splitting Firefox into a clean base and a commercial product, something else. But not a fork that just follow Firefox source.

We notice. They’re not hiding. The (numerous) endpoints are all presents in the about:config page. The actual content, though, is not that obvious to get. If we assume the binaries are compromised (I don’t believe they are for now, for the record), an outsider would only see a TLS session. At best we could get the vague amount of data exfiltrated, not really the content. But that’s hypothetical. For now.

how are they supposed to “sell your data”

First step is collecting it. Putting provisions to grab everything from the software you installed on your device and use to do everything is a good start. Second step is selling it. Data broker loves data, surprisingly. And even small, inconsequential stuff can go a long way when you can correlate with dozens, or hundreds, of data points.

if you just never use a Mozilla account

Given how it’s implemented, the data pushed inside your account may be in a safer place than what you use the browser to do daily at this point.

and uncheck all the telemetry

Funny thing. Even with everything unchecked/disabled/toggled off/whatever, there’s a handful of ping back and other small reports that are configured to go out. You can turn these off using the complete config page; the one that warns people that its dangerous and have no clear way to know what most of its options do.

Its not like they can secretly steal your data, since its Open Source

If by “secretly” you mean without us knowing, it would be hard indeed, as long as people did look into the source AND the built images were faithful to the source, too. They are not doing it secretly, at least for now, anyway. That’s the point of their “privacy notice” that includes basically everything, which they then use as a safeguard saying "we can’t do shit (unless specified in the privacy notice).

It seems to me like just more FUD that Google is spreading to undermine our trust in free software

The policy changes comes from Mozilla. Were written, published, and updated by Mozilla, on their blog (and legal pages). What the fuck are you talking about with Google?

Heck, if you knew 2cts about this, Google actually low-key needs Firefox to exists as a counterpoint to Chrome’s hegemony, unless they want another trial for being too good at their job.

Which is probably why the decision was reverted.

There are books for that, that usually take all the important bits and put them in funny, engaging ways. It could be a nice thing to get, even read together.

Fun things, under some legislation, ripping your own CD is not necessarily legal.

Last time I had to wear glasses was during the heavy phase of covid, and wearing masks caused a LOT of fogging up. I’m sure that exact same reason made a lot of people aware of proper glass treatment.

Glasses are mildly inconvenient when it’s cold, somewhat inconvenient when you have to wear headgear that don’t take it into account, and very inconvenient when you have to move your head a lot or look down a lot. Anyway, I took the laser instead of the plastic bit that costs a lot and gets lost easily.

…and I keep wearing glasses anyway because the sun is still a thing that exists outside, anyway.

Ah, the good old “assert dominance by shooting yourself”. A trending tendency indeed.

You should check. I’ve been surprised by the amount of “suggested accounts” on bluesky that were people I lost track of when quitting twitter.

So true. Two years ago I still used twitter for nsfw content, but even that got weird (and really suspicious sometimes).

This is why we can’t have nice things.

As a dev I would try negative value in the custom field.

It sounds like you’re proud of your culture of not giving a crap about rules set to improve safety for everyone. On that account, I agree that we’ll never see eye to eye about this.