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Mozilla Turns Firefox Away from Open Source, Towards Spyware: Firefox Labs Now Requires Data Collection (www.quippd.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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TL;DR: Mozilla is now enforcing data collection as a pre-requisite to access new features in Firefox Labs. This is backed by the Terms of Use that Mozilla introduced a few months ago.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@renard_roux @yoasif
In LibreWolf you can enable the Sync feature. That's the only fork I've tried

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'd like a browser that can sync those things with a local folder that I can sync/backup however I want, no account required. Does anyone know of such a thing?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Couldn't you do that with Firefox? It stores all that stuff locally already, doesn't it? Just disable sync and use whatever software you prefer to watch those directories.

Edit: here's how you can figure out where the settings and bookmarks are stored locally on your system: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Thanks, I'll look into it. I tend to avoid messing with the local app folders which are often hidden and can be break if you change something.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Personally, I've been sharing this folder across different installations for years, even between different operating systems. I've never had any major issues so far.

The only minor annoyance is that whenever I switch between Windows and Linux I have to restart the browser once, otherwise extensions do not load on the first run.

So yeah, I would say diy-syncing this profile folder is feasible and very reliable. Same thing is true for Thunderbird, but I've been doing it for less time. And I would assume the same thing is also true for Chromium-based browsers because I do it with Signal which is Electron-based.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

For what it's worth, on Windows, AppData\Roaming is intended to be shared across devices to some extent (there's more nuance but the point being I'd be less worried about syncing data from there).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

I've migrated my Firefox profile to multiple different computers and even from Firefox to Floorp. No issues. It's also something I have backed up to my NAS daily since it contains everything - just plop it in and I've got everything the way it was before.