It’s been a long time coming, but the trust in Firefox and its mother organization, Mozilla, seems to be mostly gone, after a recent commit on the source code removed the “we don’t sell your data” promise, along with a change of Privacy notice and Terms of Use.

A Commit Too Far

You can see the changes in this commit.

It’s been something like 10 years that Mozilla is no stranger to doing shady things and playing a double game with its users, one one hand pretending in its PR to be a “champion of privacy”, and at the same time deploying tracking services without asking its end users (the famous studies). I have seen multiple times privacy settings being reset to collect data when updating the browser. Adding you sponsored links by default, and all that kind of things.

At the same time, Firefox has lost a huge amount of market share over the years (most of it going to Google Chrome), and its presence on the desktop is now just a blip of what it used to be:

Well, it was a good time to ask people what was their level of trust in Mozilla when it came to respecting their users. Most of our surveys get between 100 and 200 answers. This one skyrocketed to more than 700 hundred (thanks to numerous boosters on the Fediverse). And the result is unsurprising:

For background, a lot of our followers are Firefox users, so this is likely to be somewhat representative of our of the core audience of Firefox. And it looks like trust has been completely shattered, with more than a third of respondents having no faith in Mozilla anymore, and the majority (54%) having serious doubts. When people are on the fence, it could go either way (losing trust, or regaining trust), but even if only half of these respondents end up not trusting Mozilla, this is a devastating blow.

Following the backlash, Mozilla has tried to backpedal with a clarification. Unfortunately, the clarification confirms the initial fears. They are removing the mention of not selling data because of a wider meaning associated to the word selling in certain jurisdictions, such as in California:

We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

Well, if that’s what Mozilla is doing, then yes, it is clearly what most people would understand as selling your data, as in making some kind of profit or revenue from what they collect.

Alternatives to Firefox

Now the talk is all about alternatives, and those of you who are looking for your next browser, here are some things you can consider. As you will see, you do not lack options.

Librewolf

A hardened fork of Firefox, LibreWolf takes Firefox’s base (ESR) and dials up the privacy settings while removing telemetry and other potential leaks. It is pre-configured with strict anti-tracking, no telemetry, and uBlock Origin (an ad blocker) included out of the box.

Site: https://librewolf.net/

Waterfox

Waterfox is an open-source browser forked from Firefox (ESR), originally created by Alex Kontos in 2011 to optimize for 64-bit systems when Firefox lagged in that area. Over time, it evolved to emphasize privacy, speed, and user control. Unlike Librewolf, it does not ship with uBlock Origin under the hood, leaving you the freedom of installing your own extensions to maximize your privacy.

Site: https://www.waterfox.net/

Zen Browser

Forked from Firefox, Zen Browser builds on the latest stable Firefox releases (not strictly ESR like some forks). It uses the Gecko engine with minimal changes to the core, focusing instead on enhancing the user interface and experience, with a radical approach to clean up Firefox‘s UI. Development started in April 2024, with its first public alpha in July 2024. It entered beta in December 2024, emphasizing a modern, visually appealing design. It’s probably not your first choice if you are looking specifically for a focus on privacy, but let’s keep it in this list anyway.

Site: https://zen-browser.app/

Gnome Web

GNOME Web is the default browser for the GNOME desktop environment, built from the ground up by the GNOME project. It’s a lightweight, open-source browser that uses WebKitGTK (a WebKit port for Linux) as its rendering engine, unlike Firefox’s Gecko or Chromium’s Blink. Its focus is simplicity, integration with GNOME, and a clean browsing experience, with some privacy considerations baked in (no telemetry and some tracking protection). However, since it is not based on any of the major browsers, you don’t get to access something like uBlock Origin, so this may be something to factor in.

Site: https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/

Ungoogled Chromium

This is a stripped-down version of Chromium that removes all Google-related services, telemetry, and dependencies while keeping the browser functional. No Google tracking, no built-in data collection, and enhanced control over what the browser can access. It’s barebones and relies on you to configure it.

Site: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

GNU Icecat

Another Firefox fork (based on ESR), maintained by the GNU Project, IceCat focuses on free software purity and privacy. It also blocks trackers by default, disables proprietary plugins, and includes privacy extensions like HTTPS Everywhere and LibreJS (which checks for non-free JavaScript). It does not get as frequent updates as other browsers, but its development is still well alive with the latest version being released in January 2025. However it’s not super easy to install, as they do not provide binaries for every distro out there, so you have to compile it. Even on Arch’s AUR it seems that there will be problems to build it because of incompatibilities with clang and python.

Site: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

Pale Moon

Pale Moon is an open-source web browser originally forked from an older version of Firefox (around 2011, based on Firefox 38 ESR). Developed by Moonchild Productions, it’s designed to maintain a lightweight, customizable experience while sticking to the classic Firefox interface and Gecko engine (though heavily modified). It diverges from Firefox’s modern direction, focusing on efficiency and user control rather than chasing the latest web trends.

Site: https://www.palemoon.org/

Brave

Brave is built on Chromium (the open-source base of Google Chrome) but strips out Google’s tracking elements. It’s designed with privacy and speed in mind, featuring a built-in ad blocker, tracker blocker, and script blocking. It follows the Mozilla Public License for all of its components. However it does integrate a system based on crypto tokens to reward the visits that you make to certain site creators, which is something you may want to avoid.

Site: https://brave.com/

Ladybird

Ladybird is a web browser project aiming to be a truly independent, user-focused alternative. It started as part of SerenityOS, a hobby operating system created by Andreas Kling in 2018, but forked into a standalone project in 2022. Unlike most modern browsers, Ladybird doesn’t rely on existing engines like Blink (Chromium), WebKit (Safari), or Gecko (Firefox). Instead, it’s building its own engine from scratch, called LibWeb, paired with a custom JavaScript engine, LibJS. The focus is on adhering to web standards, delivering good performance, stability, and security, all while prioritizing user privacy over monetization. It’s in pre-alpha, targeting a usable alpha release in 2026, and is backed by the Ladybird Browser Initiative, a nonprofit funded by donations (e.g., from GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath and Shopify). So it’s still early days, but it should become an interesting option to consider later in 2025 or next year.

Site: https://ladybird.org/

The Future is Bright

While there is some alarmism about the decadence of Mozilla and Firefox, ultimately good things will come out of it. Investments into other alternatives will increase (like Ladybird) and the void will be replaced by other incumbents, especially since Privacy protections and Ad-blockers are values that attract a certain following. This will lead into a more fragmented market place, which should ultimately lead to stronger standards.