On: Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

[ahartmetz]

Firefox is fine, what are they on about? I'm not going to switch to Chrome because Firefox is a few percent away from perfect. Firefox desktop recently added tab groups and it's a fantastic feature.

[m463 → ahartmetz]

It phones home, a lot, from the moment you install it. It has plenty of connections to google too.

The good thing is that the source code is mostly* out there and you or someone else can figure out what it's doing.

[*] don't know about drm stuff

[gxnxcxcx → m463]

There's shady shenanigans from the moment you download the Firefox installer, before you even install it.

Each Firefox download has a unique identifier (2022): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30715163

[ahartmetz → m463]

What does it phone home about?

[baobun → ahartmetz]

Everyone asking this should MitM their own browser and take a look into the requests.

Eye-opening and pretty straightforward with e.g. mitmproxy. Strip TLS with a temporarily trusted self-signed cert to get the whole picture.