Proposal: Add a systemwide policy for Firefox to disable antifeatures and improve security and browsing experience

Project Discussion
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23

For those interested in whether Firefox needs our support with their advertizing, I’ll link and let one make up ones own mind. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf

1 Like
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Too much customization can certainly become a problem, especially disabling features that support Mozilla’s business model.

There is a substantial risk of losing permission to use the official branding, and this is likely the reason why telemetry is still enabled by default.

4 Likes
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Absolutely. The question is what is worse, rebranding or shipping a potentially invasive browser

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If something is actually invasive then it is good to take action, but the key word here is potentially. Evidence should be gathered first that objectively problematic things are being forced upon users from a privacy or security perspective. Even then ofcourse it would still be an option to first have a talk with a Mozilla representative about the findings.

There has been a lot of negative attention towards Mozilla lately that is largely driven by a small conspiratorial crowd of tech influencers and Youtubers. I don’t feel they are doing anyone a favor. People are running around with tar and feathers in their hands, but few people are seriously looking at what actually is happening, what the supposed dangers are and how we should best deal with them. It’s mostly outrage and scorched earth talk at this point, i find it quite disturbing.

5 Likes
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absolutely, I think this got clear here.

We should wait and see how Mozilla fixes their TOS. It absolutely is weird how they removed pro-privacy lines and did not replace them with an alternative.

if there are things that are actively invasive, a discussion makes sense

3 Likes
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We recently had the experience with OBS and Bottles on what happen when we cripple upstream projects.

You have several options here:

  1. Opt-out things you don’t like
  2. Use another browser (Falkon comes to mind, but it’s old) and leaving firefox
  3. Use another browser (Falkon comes to mind, but it’s old) and removing firefox
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What about ESR? I don’t know if it’s limited from receiving controversial telemetry eventually, but ESR is default on Debian and at quick-glance it doesn’t have the new tab Weather or daily ping options.

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ESR is always quite a bit behind in terms of new features etc, it probably wouldn’t be a good fit for Fedora.

3 Likes
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Yeah, just don’t:

Maintenance of each ESR through point releases is limited to high-risk/high-impact security vulnerabilities

Immediate red flag for me

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I use Fedora becuase I want packages that are reasonably up to data.

And you would only be putting off any problem for a little while anyway.

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The Bottles package was just broken.

The OBS package may also be broken because the whole media industry is full of copyrights.

Btw Fedora firefox is broken without rpmfusion or cisco-openh264

OBS still hasn’t updated their flatpak runtime, they use EOL KDE 6.6 since weeks.

So Bottles RPM is just not needed, OBS serves a purpose but may be broken, Firefox only serves a purpose as there are no major changes

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Debian is one of the distros that modifies packages for privacy. Firefox was called “Iceweasel” in the past because Mozilla forbid them to use official branding.

And yeah, ESR is unrelated.

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I have used both palemoon and zen, which are both active firefox forks.

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Sure, it doesn’t work or whatever you say, but the problems and controversies with relatively small projects like Bottle and OBS showed us that we shouldn’t just cut features. Imagine how big will be to cut Firefox functionalities.

I think is very obvious that is not a great idea

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This is what is going to happen if we cut functionalities on Firefox, Mozilla will forbid the use of the package with the branding, and I hope you can come upfront and create a new Iceweasel version Fedora

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They have outstanding, unresolved, bugs against Qt that force them to stay on the old version.

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Lol Palemoon is not a reasonable browser. Librewolf is nice but not a fork, just a bunch of configs. Basically a distribution

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Maybe submit a change proposal since this seems like it could impact the distribution?

1 Like
42

Yes absolutely. But change proposals are kinda quick so discussing this first makes sense.

43

Should the pull request be put on hold until the discussion is complete?

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/firefox/pull-request/89