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This entry contains outdated information. Firefox's AI integration has made it unsuitable for desktop use.
(4 August 2025)
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First, don't misunderstand me: Firefox is still a fine internet browser. You can still use it to remain secure from advertising and the corporate feudal state's personal data scraping. You can still disable telemetry, making it difficult for anyone to intercept data about your particular installation. You can still enhance its ability to keep your data private by installing the Privacy Trifecta on it. However, Mozilla Foundation is a very big name in privacy-oriented technology, and we have a media whore for a president. While scrabbling about for ways to keep his name and face on the front page of all the news websites, Trump might point out Mozilla as a potential target for some investigation or another, and suddenly American Firefox users will find their data getting dumped into the AI misinformation synthesiser that Elon and the Funny Bunch replaced the FBI with. In the worst case scenario, Firefox users will be named in a report as enemies of free enterprise.
As I've recently had to remind others, this is not the worst-case scenario. We have a lot of time and a lot of money to burn through before we get to the point where Trump is going to start rounding up people who don't have Hispanic-sounding names, and there's still enough of the legacy political system left in this country to keep putting up walls in his path to complete authoritarianism. But, we do need to start thinking about how exposed we will be if the nightmare scenario comes to pass.
For anyone who considers themself computer literate, I'm recommending switching from Firefox to LibreWolf. It isn't hard, especially on any version of Linux. Unlike Windows, where you need to trace down and run installer programs, all you need to do on any given Linux distro is type 3 lines into your terminal. The LibreWolf website's installation page will tell you which. LibreWolf is a fork of Firefox that's so similar to it, you can even download addons for it from the Firefox Addon site. While using it, the browser looks exactly like Firefox, with everything structured exactly the same way. The differences are under the bonnet; first, LibreWolf collects no telemetry of any kind, as opposed to Firefox where you needed to opt out of sending usage data to Mozilla. Second, uBlock Origin comes built into the browser and is pre-configured to block social media trackers and advertising beacons. Third, LibreWolf does not use integrated AI training as has been planned for Firefox, nor is the code repository stored on Microsoft Github. Fourth, and most importantly, the source code is decentralised. Rather than having an office where everyone goes to work specifically on Firefox, LibreWolf uses contributions from developers all over the world, which get concatenated into occasional updates to the software. On Linux, updates are done through the terminal as well, so if you're trying to get more experience using it, this program will help you there.
Unlike Firefox, which either updates itself (Windows) or bundles updates in with the rest of them (Debian-based Linux), LibreWolf has to be updated manually. On Debian-based Linux distros, the procedure for updating the software is exactly the same as for installing it. The operating system is smart enough to know you already have the program installed, so it will only update it, not try to install another one (so you won't end up with discrete program files for LibreWolf 138.0.2-1, 138.0.3-1, and 138.0.4-1). It also won't try to update the software with a version that you already have, so if there hasn't been a new build released to the Codeberg repository, it'll tell you.
The decentralised nature of the browser's source code will help to prevent any monolithic data-gathering attempts and to hamper efforts to build tracking abilities directly into the program. That's sort of the whole reason why I, an enemy of the Trump regime, wanted to get away from Firefox. Elon has supporters all over the tech sector, and I'm sure a few of them work for Mozilla. There's every reason to think that he might use one of those people to build any kind of stealth malware into Firefox; anything from simple cross-platform trackers, to keyloggers, to beacons; things that can be used to monitor all use that the computer gets and can point an arrow to political enemies in the physical plane.
With that, let's get started, shall we?