The “practicality” of the issues, is that i and many others want the best privacy/security tools not something that’s “only slightly shitty” and have no good arguments for why using them is beneficial over the seemingly superior options.
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That’s totally fair, I was just trying to clearly lay out what the situation would be for those who chose to go against PG recommendations and use Zen instead. It looks like you know your stuff so apologies if my answer sounded patronizing.
For what it’s worth, it seems like the wording used was legally required of them by regulators. Mozilla totally failed in communicating why these changes were made and they should work to avoid causing panic in the future. My concern is if Firefox loses enough users, they will have a much more difficult time bringing in money and may collapse. This would take down all the Firefox forks with them. Not just LibreWolf, Zen Browser, and Floorp Browser, but also extremely important browsers like the the Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser.
If Mozilla has to share user data with any third-party companies, maybe that’s an example of “selling” data in some jurisdictions. My concern is that because they changed their ToS, they don’t have to abide by their ethics. So Mozilla can tell us that they would never sell our data, but if they do, it would still be within ToS. That’s why clear communication is important, and as you say, they failed.
Maybe this is the worst assumption made in bad faith, but I can’t trust anyone (not even myself) to interpret what Mozilla can do with our data. And because I may not keep up to date with whatever Mozilla is doing, it seems like a safe bet to avoid Mozilla products altogether.
Lets say Mozilla’s reputation is squeaky-clean and they’re not a controversial company, hypothetically, everyone who uses Firefox could still switch to a fork. What would happen then?
My understanding is that if Mozilla shuts down as a company, the source code would still be available, but it would have to be supported by the community. Isn’t that why Tor and Mullvad browsers are recommended over Librewolf? Because Tor and Mullvad are maintained by the Tor project whereas Librewolf has to get updates from Mozilla? At least that’s my understanding.
But I don’t think this would happen because there would be a lot more conversations about support Mozilla to keep Tor afloat. It seems like a lot of people who are anti-Mozilla are switching to Firefox forks rather than any Chromium browsers. And I think what’s more likely to stop Tor is if every government followed China’s example and blocks Tor.
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All Firefox forks are dependent on Mozilla to maintain the browser base. This includes basic browser functionality as well as security patches. The Firefox forks make various modifications or additions to this Firefox base, but I doubt they make frequent significant contributions upstream.
If Mozilla collapsed it very well could mean the end of Firefox and all their forks. It might be possible if all the Firefox forks got together to try and keep the final version of Firefox alive by patching important bugs and vulnerabilities, but I’m doubtful they’d be able to really move the browser forward. Mozilla already struggles to trail behind Chromium when it comes to supporting certain features so it’s very doubtful a rag tag coalition of forks could replace Mozilla in that work.
The best we could hope for in such a scenario is that a much larger organization comes in to help maintain and advance Firefox or whatever it’s successor would be. The only organization I have in mind that might be suitable could be The Linux Foundation but they might not have the resources for such a massive undertaking. It’s important to remember that modern web browsers are essentially as complex as operating systems and maintaining them requires plenty of resources.
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