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Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

> What's the basis of this claim? I use FF as my default browser, and I have not experienced anything like this?

Not @op, but my thoughts on the matter (for what it's worth, I also use Firefox):

Pocket. Just try disabling it. Good luck getting it all.

Then there's the advertisements displayed on the default home page.

Firefox account and Sync. Non-starter for me. I have zero interest in storing credentials in my browser (eg, passwords, autofill, etc) and even less interest in storing anything browser-related outside of my machine; I have no interest in synchronizing tabs across devices using the browser's own functionality.

Then there's the bits about recommending extensions or features as you browse.

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I don't think FF is awesome (it's the least worst practical choice) and it sucks that advertising is enabled by default, but your comment is not fair to FF.

Pocket can be disabled with about:config => pocket.enabled set to false (non-obvious but easy).

FF accounts & sync do nothing if you don't use them. The data is e2e encrypted. It is extremely useful for a huge number of people while doing nothing bad to those who don't use it. FF would be a worse browser without it.

Extension & feature recommendations are done on browser with no personal data sent to Mozilla. You can search the web for details, iirc it was also mentioned on HN.

> your comment is not fair to FF.

I disagree. I could have been a hell of a lot more vindictive.

> Pocket can be disabled with about:config => pocket.enabled set to false (non-obvious but easy).

That doesn't remove the feature from the right-click menu. And, there's a ton of other configs in about:config which mention Pocket, some of them include URLs. Does setting pocket.enabled=false disable retrieval of those URLs?

FF accounts & sync do nothing if you don't use them... except recommend to me that I use them. The data might be e2e encrypted but that's still more attack surface than _not_ having the data there in the first place. Yes, it's extremely useful for a huge number of people but nonetheless it's still a privacy issue for me.

Extension & feature recommendations being done in browser isn't the point. The point is that they're _done_ in the first place. Which means that not only does Firefox parse and render content, but it inspects it and tries to determine what I'm doing and what extensions "might" help. Thanks but that falls right into creepy territory for me. It's only one step away from sending that already-data-mined data to some marketing company.

Right. If your tagline is privacy first, the defaults should be set to maximum privacy (unless if it might break sites - in which case it may be acceptable to set to a less intense config). Any features that is a compromise between privacy and convenience, should be easily enabled/disabled through the UI (not a bloody config file). If they can build a ui for everything else, I don't think it's too much to ask for a simpler switch for privacy related options.

Trying to save my passwords is particularly annoying till I disable it.

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