Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road.
Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?
I constantly see this take and I'm afraid I don't agree with it. Firefox is continuing to lose market share, and I think it's less anything they're doing and due simply to the fact that Google is a household name while Mozilla is not. When the user is already using a Google phone, email, search, maps, drive, and document editor, it follows to also use their browser. Simply being a solid browser isn't enough to motivate people to switch away. So I think they should try out some new interesting ideas in the hope that some of them take off. Now, I don't think this is the feature to do that, but I won't criticize them for trying.
It's not like the power users who currently use Firefox and yet dislike this stuff are going to switch away from Firefox, since there's nothing to switch to other than Chrome, which is clearly worse.
Personal anecdote, I didn't like Pocket being added to Firefox, but eventually I did start using it - only because it came from Mozilla. And I currently pay Mozilla money for Relay (along with VPN), which are examples of them expanding outside of their core browser features.
> When the user is already using a Google phone, email, search, maps, drive, and document editor, it follows to also use their browser.
I think it's more that everyone used Google for search (because it at least was legitimately the best by a good margin) and then Google used that position to push Chrome. The other stuff may have helped, but I think search was 90% of it.
Actually I still use Firefox. But with stuff like that, it puts me rather off of it. Firefox isn’t better than chrome anymore and Mozilla acting as a Media Company and adding sponsored links and sponsors in their products is just not cool for a so called privacy focused company, pocket was already a strange thing and now that.
What I think I am waiting for from Mozilla is instead of this enrich the suggest experience just go full Yahoo like Microsoft did with Microsoft start. Make an organic 'good' home page, and let people who want to not use it switch it out and capture interest that way. Make links people can share so you can convince them to try Mozilla. You have to FIND Mozilla nowadays, and in comparison I look at what Opera has been doing lately in actively helping people find them. I am at least seeing a path for Opera to grow more than Firefox right now.
At this point, most of the people still using Firefox desperately want a private browser. It would be nice for Mozilla to come up with innovative new features as they did in their heyday, but everything they have attempted for the last several years has broken beloved features and betrayed the privacy of users.
I just feel like they should be concentrating their time into adding features to Firefox which Google either will not or doesn't care to add to Chrome, not trying to compete with Google's entire business suite: that's a losing uphill battle and the pitch "we're slightly more private" is a hard one that they aren't even doing well... if they want to make a commitment to 0 data storage with no suggestions or analytics, that would be one thing, but they refuse to do that and so can't hold this narrative.
Right now, Firefox's strategy seems to be focused on trying to follow in Google's footsteps and do everything they can to implement something almost as good as Chrome just without some--but not all!--of the extra things we hate about Google. The result of this strategy is there are simply way too few answers to the question "why should I use Firefox instead of Chrome?" that aren't "because someone has to lest we lose the war, and it may as well be you (as I guess you drew the short straw today)" :(.
I want to be clear: these unique selling propositions can be really small. If you are using Linux on a computer with a touch screen, Firefox implemented good multi-touch with kinetic scrolling support for X11... it puts Chromium to shame, and so if you are using such a computer you are likely to use Firefox even if it is less performant or doesn't work with a few websites you like. The goal isn't to only target the majority by chasing analytics: it is to win a thousand 0.01% minorities that add up to 10%.
The only other UI thing--and I'm using Firefox right now, and have been using Firefox as my primary browser for months now--that I can think of are container tabs. This one is interesting because, frankly, it doesn't buy me that much over Chrome's support for multiple profiles, and yet I do slightly prefer the feature, and clearly a bunch of other people do if you look around: implementing this feature won Firefox a bunch of users who now consider this part of their workflow and can overlook other faults.
Firefox used to be really good at this: they owned the space of web developers due to Firebug--which was also a critical market as it meant websites tended to work in Firefox--but Chrome saw that and took it from them. If I were in charge of Firefox, my hail marys wouldn't be allocated to end user acquisition: it would be focused on what I can offer developers to get them back to using Firefox as their primary browser. But like, it isn't even clear to me Firefox right now cares about developers anymore :/.
I mean... not only did they lay off the entire MDN writing team back in 2020--which to me was putting Firefox at the forefront of developers' minds (in the same way you mention users knowing about Google)--but, as far as I understand, they also laid off a lot of the dev tools team. Their website showing the features of Firefox for developers sounds strong, but I feel like Chrome also now has all of this stuff. I am excited to see that Firefox claims to have better support for CSS Grid debugging, I guess?
I also say that, because another place Firefox used to have a unique selling proposition is that it was "the hacker's browser": you could easily alter any part of the interface due to its crazy XUL layer, and I knew a ton of developers and users alike who would sell you on Firefox due to the crazy Firefox-specific extensions you could install. But as Chrome added extension support, Firefox not only wanted to be compatible with Chrome's extensions... they dropped (almost) everything that was unique about Firefox.
As it stands, they at least do retain some functionality that isn't just the same as what Chrome offers: support for synchronous fetch hooks (which I might be describing poorly) that is used by the more advanced ad blockers. This is a great USP because, of course, Google isn't going to support those... but Firefox stops there. I contend that it wouldn't be a big lift for them to add some extra Firefox-specific extension API surface and get, for example, the Tridactyl user community back to 100% on Firefox.
And there is frankly a ton of uncharted territory on being able to make powerful web extensions. I used to be in charge of the iPhone native code extension community, and I seriously feel more crippled trying to easily modify a web page than I ever did with a native Objective-C app, and that's insane: I myself constantly run into roadblocks due to being unable to dig into the private data of JavaScript objects or closures, and I see other developers complain about being locked out of styling web components.
Firefox should lean into "it is easier to hack the web with Firefox" as we know Google is going in the opposite direction. Despite the insane complexities of jailbreaking your iPhone, we had around a consistent ~10% marketshare; and no: that wasn't piracy! Not only did the US Copyright Office investigate and say we weren't the problem, we had a thriving ecosystem of paid native app extensions! (Though, frankly, if Firefox managed to hold ~10% marketshare entirely on the back of piracy, I'd be OK with that!)
Otherwise, as it stands, Firefox seems to be removing unique selling propositions as they focus on narrowly re-implementing exactly the set of things offered by Chrome. They have decided that the only market worth targeting is the mass market, and so they are making the same analytics-driven decisions Google makes with respect to safety, streamlining, and prioritization that forsake developers and power users as part of a losing battle with Google for 90% of the web when they used to own the other 10%.
> Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment
They can do that for as long as Google is willing to pay. Without additional revenue stream, the day Google decides to cut cost and stop sponsoring Mozilla, that's the day Firefox will run into big trouble. Any additional revenue stream is going to help.
It's not a sponsorship, it's a sale.It's also made such deals with Yandex, Baidu, and Yahoo before. The sale is for eyeballs on your search (ad) service. Firefox is getting in a precarious situation with it though as the number of users on Firefox has been decreasing (in absolute terms) despite the number of web users increasing.
If you ever figure out a bulletproof solution to "just taking the money and building a good product/company without any technical debt and organizational cruft", please do share your results – this would be somewhat valuable for humanity!
That's what they are and have been for like 8 years. It's fine. It would be more productive to put it to good use on the browser. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have tried but... they did for almost a decade and they aren't remotely close to being able to sustain themselves without google. It's not defeatist to say that making up for the 600m$/year might be a bit of an unreachable goal at this point.
Chasing ghosts isn't more sustainable than the money from google. Yes it's a business relationship. but I'm not sure how they aren't completely "vassalized", to use your term, at this point already. It's not a potential problem, if google stops paying they would shutdown in a matter of months.
It's not a bad thing, Firefox as we know it wouldn't exist by now otherwise
> You want them to be Google's vassal state and wait for death instead of trying to become self-sustainable?
There's no shortage of privacy respecting open source software that somehow doesn't have to choose between depending on Google and selling out their users. Firefox knows that most people won't opt out. They're choosing to take Google's money and screw over their users at the same time.
Antitrust actions in the US and EU may force Google to cut off those payments (to Mozilla and Apple), and if that happens, Firefox needs to survive somehow.
Somehow open source browsers still get made without a $600 million “rich uncle.” Mozilla is pretty bloated. This can buy like 1200 good engineers. People make browsers with a couple people sometimes.
Sadly Firefox already shows sponsored spammy & clickbaity "articles" on the default new tab page which always makes me cringe whenever I see it on other pcs.
Capitalist organizations, even nonprofits, incentive moving money to the top. Mozilla has the same kind of cancer that Wikimedia has documented. Firefox is open-source, but Mozilla is not.
> Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links.
Browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox, suggestions from sponsors. Each of those can be individually turned off and on.
Why do you think Firefox Suggest using browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox isn't building the best browser "for the user"? Or were you just ignorant of what Firefox Suggest did and didn't bother to take a moment to look it up in Firefox?
They don't need my data to show me suggestions from my own browsing history, bookmarks etc. They only need it for "suggestions from sponsors", which is ad spam.
I would respect the announcement more if they just came out and said it - "we need cash to keep running and Google is offering to pay us a bajillion dollars for some anonymized search data. Sorry folks."
> This data will not be associated with specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP addresses as potentially identifying metadata. No profiling will be performed, and no data will be shared with third parties.
So it seems they aren't selling it directly. But I wouldn't be surprised if aggregated numbers could be used for sales deals. (Hi Bing, we have 137M "travel" searches a month, I'm sure that you could put some big juicy ads next to those if you purchase the default search engine status)
Why would Google need this information? Don't they already get all of that and more in the queries themselves?
Or is this about supplying Google with a user profile that persists beyond incognito tabs, cleared cookies/history etc.?
I read it more as "we, Mozilla, want to know what Firefox users use their browsers for" rather than "we want to hand this data to Google on a per-query level". That said, it is incredibly vaguely worded.
I still use Firefox because I'd like there to be more than one web browser in the world, but boy oh boy they're trying as hard as they can to get me to quit.
It's also much easier to compile, and thus hack upon since it doesn't require a datacenter-scale distcc setup for all the <s>CVE-generation code</s> C++
Firefox is still the most secure browser you can get once you've beaten it into submission through hundreds of about:config changes. Last I checked you couldn't even fully disable service workers or WebRTC in chrome.
I use both Chrome and Firefox. Either it will reaffirm me that my preferred browser is indeed better, or I will find out what I have been missing out.
I might not have been running multiple browsers daily if any one browser is perfect, but currently some websites seemed optimized for Firefox while others seemed optimized for Chrome. (And a small handful of websites are actually better with Lynx).
I didn't mean to imply Arkenfox is unstable, it's great. I meant the Arkenfox maintainer is playing whackamole with FF. Every so often FF adds a spying feature (like this one), then Arkenfox has to react and turn it off and cut a release, then everyone has to run the updater script. My system auto updates Firefox, but not Arkenfox. So if I don't want any windows of vulnerability I'm stuck having to pay attention to updates and make sure I run the updater script at just the right time.
That still doesn't disable all telemetry from being sent. There's a whole slue of settings that you need to change in about:config and then there's still no guarantee.
Even if you follow those steps you listed there and uncheck all those boxes you're shown in the standard settings pages, then Firefox will just continue to send out 'pings' when you interact with certain elements in the browser interface. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Mozilla is like one of those politicians that just won't stop yapping about traditional conservative family values, who is later found to have several extramarital children and numerous affairs with same-sex partners themselves.
They already did this way back with their other telemetry stuff. You had to disable it through about:config and then Mozilla introduced new flags/renamed them and even added a flag if you have disabled telemetry that you had to disable again manually.
It might be possible to disable this feature through a policy file [1] just like other features can be disabled, e.g. here's how to disable auto-update:
{
"policies":
{
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
Create a text file named policies.json in a directory named distribution inside the Firefox installation directory. In my case that ends up looking like this:
> Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla [...] Rest assured, the way we gather these insights will always put user privacy first [...] Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox
Wouldn't actually putting "user privacy first" lead to the conclusion that gathering insights like this shouldn't be done on a opt-out basis and instead be opt-in, at the very least?
Personally, I'd see "privacy first" as not needing to sell any user data at all, in the first place, but we're clearly beyond that already.
I don't have a problem if the server side is tracking metrics on what queries are being made. When it becomes a problem is trying to associate the queries based on a single user regardless on anonymization attempts. Of course there's no money in that.
Do you believe there is no utility in knowledge? Do you believe absolutism is the only philosophy for privacy?
I think telemetry and the data software collects can help with usability, design, and product enhancement and that it's very likely this can be done to some extent without harming privacy.
> Personally, I'd see "privacy first" as not needing to sell any user data at all, in the first place, but we're clearly beyond that already.
That requires users paying, something often suggested, but I have not heard of working commercially for anything where a competitor can supply a user as the product alternate. Privacy just isn't that valuable.
That's clearly not a solution either since expensive products and services with subscriptions still routinely collect every scrap of data they can get their hands on. Companies will always make more money by violating your privacy while also charging you as much as they possibly can so that's exactly what they do.
I think a small fee subscription can be very attractive. Less than $5 a month. I already pay $5/month for better search experience. Sometimes Kagi finds things neither DDG nor Brave can.
> Wouldn't actually putting "user privacy first" lead to the conclusion that gathering insights like this shouldn't be done on a opt-out basis and instead be opt-in, at the very least?
At the very least collection of non-anonymized data should be opt-in at most. So where is the problem?
I’d rather they make Firefox subscription based. I’d rather pay $5 a month and have no ads or tracking of any kind. They can even run a separate fork of Firefox or something for this purpose. If Firefox goes down Google will lock internet behind a DRM and we gonna need another rms or Torvalds to deliver us from this hell.
Can you imagine a world without Linux, with Windows and Mac pretty much the only mainstream alternative? I’d rather pay a small fee not to have that.
Paid web browsers have been tried... Opera and OmniWeb probably the most notable examples, and it just doesn't seem like there's a workable market there.
Mozilla is a browser vendor; the question is appropriate for them. It may also be a good question for every other browser vendor, but it's still valid for Mozilla.
Quite a few company and organization names are referenced. These include well-known ones like "Google" and "Microsoft", but also others that (at least to me) are far more obscure, such as "our third-party ad platform Kevel" and "AdMarketplace (a third-party referral platform)".
Questionable words like "send", "sends", "sending", "share", "shares", and "sharing" also appear quite a few times.
More broadly, the notice is quite long. A software product that truly respects its users' privacy should have a short privacy policy, mainly because it isn't collecting data to begin with, it isn't sending data to third parties, and so forth.
I know some people will claim that the data collection and sending that Firefox does is somehow acceptable because some of it can be disabled, or because it might be less than what other browsers do. I don't buy into those arguments. A privacy-respecting browser would have users opt in to enable any functionality that might transmit user data, or just not even include such functionality at all by default (it would have to be voluntarily added via an extension, for example).
Readit News
Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?
It's not like the power users who currently use Firefox and yet dislike this stuff are going to switch away from Firefox, since there's nothing to switch to other than Chrome, which is clearly worse.
Personal anecdote, I didn't like Pocket being added to Firefox, but eventually I did start using it - only because it came from Mozilla. And I currently pay Mozilla money for Relay (along with VPN), which are examples of them expanding outside of their core browser features.
I think it's more that everyone used Google for search (because it at least was legitimately the best by a good margin) and then Google used that position to push Chrome. The other stuff may have helped, but I think search was 90% of it.
And tabs. That was a cool idea.
Deleted Comment
Right now, Firefox's strategy seems to be focused on trying to follow in Google's footsteps and do everything they can to implement something almost as good as Chrome just without some--but not all!--of the extra things we hate about Google. The result of this strategy is there are simply way too few answers to the question "why should I use Firefox instead of Chrome?" that aren't "because someone has to lest we lose the war, and it may as well be you (as I guess you drew the short straw today)" :(.
I want to be clear: these unique selling propositions can be really small. If you are using Linux on a computer with a touch screen, Firefox implemented good multi-touch with kinetic scrolling support for X11... it puts Chromium to shame, and so if you are using such a computer you are likely to use Firefox even if it is less performant or doesn't work with a few websites you like. The goal isn't to only target the majority by chasing analytics: it is to win a thousand 0.01% minorities that add up to 10%.
The only other UI thing--and I'm using Firefox right now, and have been using Firefox as my primary browser for months now--that I can think of are container tabs. This one is interesting because, frankly, it doesn't buy me that much over Chrome's support for multiple profiles, and yet I do slightly prefer the feature, and clearly a bunch of other people do if you look around: implementing this feature won Firefox a bunch of users who now consider this part of their workflow and can overlook other faults.
Firefox used to be really good at this: they owned the space of web developers due to Firebug--which was also a critical market as it meant websites tended to work in Firefox--but Chrome saw that and took it from them. If I were in charge of Firefox, my hail marys wouldn't be allocated to end user acquisition: it would be focused on what I can offer developers to get them back to using Firefox as their primary browser. But like, it isn't even clear to me Firefox right now cares about developers anymore :/.
I mean... not only did they lay off the entire MDN writing team back in 2020--which to me was putting Firefox at the forefront of developers' minds (in the same way you mention users knowing about Google)--but, as far as I understand, they also laid off a lot of the dev tools team. Their website showing the features of Firefox for developers sounds strong, but I feel like Chrome also now has all of this stuff. I am excited to see that Firefox claims to have better support for CSS Grid debugging, I guess?
I also say that, because another place Firefox used to have a unique selling proposition is that it was "the hacker's browser": you could easily alter any part of the interface due to its crazy XUL layer, and I knew a ton of developers and users alike who would sell you on Firefox due to the crazy Firefox-specific extensions you could install. But as Chrome added extension support, Firefox not only wanted to be compatible with Chrome's extensions... they dropped (almost) everything that was unique about Firefox.
As it stands, they at least do retain some functionality that isn't just the same as what Chrome offers: support for synchronous fetch hooks (which I might be describing poorly) that is used by the more advanced ad blockers. This is a great USP because, of course, Google isn't going to support those... but Firefox stops there. I contend that it wouldn't be a big lift for them to add some extra Firefox-specific extension API surface and get, for example, the Tridactyl user community back to 100% on Firefox.
And there is frankly a ton of uncharted territory on being able to make powerful web extensions. I used to be in charge of the iPhone native code extension community, and I seriously feel more crippled trying to easily modify a web page than I ever did with a native Objective-C app, and that's insane: I myself constantly run into roadblocks due to being unable to dig into the private data of JavaScript objects or closures, and I see other developers complain about being locked out of styling web components.
Firefox should lean into "it is easier to hack the web with Firefox" as we know Google is going in the opposite direction. Despite the insane complexities of jailbreaking your iPhone, we had around a consistent ~10% marketshare; and no: that wasn't piracy! Not only did the US Copyright Office investigate and say we weren't the problem, we had a thriving ecosystem of paid native app extensions! (Though, frankly, if Firefox managed to hold ~10% marketshare entirely on the back of piracy, I'd be OK with that!)
Otherwise, as it stands, Firefox seems to be removing unique selling propositions as they focus on narrowly re-implementing exactly the set of things offered by Chrome. They have decided that the only market worth targeting is the mass market, and so they are making the same analytics-driven decisions Google makes with respect to safety, streamlining, and prioritization that forsake developers and power users as part of a losing battle with Google for 90% of the web when they used to own the other 10%.
Of course, changing the UI, using Google safebrowsing as default and other anti-user practices have nothing to do with it. /s
They can do that for as long as Google is willing to pay. Without additional revenue stream, the day Google decides to cut cost and stop sponsoring Mozilla, that's the day Firefox will run into big trouble. Any additional revenue stream is going to help.
I am no CEO but that seems very clear to me.
Deleted Comment
Chasing ghosts isn't more sustainable than the money from google. Yes it's a business relationship. but I'm not sure how they aren't completely "vassalized", to use your term, at this point already. It's not a potential problem, if google stops paying they would shutdown in a matter of months.
It's not a bad thing, Firefox as we know it wouldn't exist by now otherwise
There's no shortage of privacy respecting open source software that somehow doesn't have to choose between depending on Google and selling out their users. Firefox knows that most people won't opt out. They're choosing to take Google's money and screw over their users at the same time.
Obviously not. It's very difficult to make people understand something when their jobs depend on them not understanding it.
Browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox, suggestions from sponsors. Each of those can be individually turned off and on.
Why do you think Firefox Suggest using browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox isn't building the best browser "for the user"? Or were you just ignorant of what Firefox Suggest did and didn't bother to take a moment to look it up in Firefox?
> This data will not be associated with specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP addresses as potentially identifying metadata. No profiling will be performed, and no data will be shared with third parties.
So it seems they aren't selling it directly. But I wouldn't be surprised if aggregated numbers could be used for sales deals. (Hi Bing, we have 137M "travel" searches a month, I'm sure that you could put some big juicy ads next to those if you purchase the default search engine status)
Why would Google need this information? Don't they already get all of that and more in the queries themselves?
Or is this about supplying Google with a user profile that persists beyond incognito tabs, cleared cookies/history etc.?
I read it more as "we, Mozilla, want to know what Firefox users use their browsers for" rather than "we want to hand this data to Google on a per-query level". That said, it is incredibly vaguely worded.
More importantly: "Google is offering to pay us a bajillion dollars for some anonymized search data"
Citation needed here. Your head isn't good enough.
I've been using Arkenfox to turn off all the telemetry/etc but it increasingly feels like a game of whackamole.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
I might not have been running multiple browsers daily if any one browser is perfect, but currently some websites seemed optimized for Firefox while others seemed optimized for Chrome. (And a small handful of websites are actually better with Lynx).
"Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox. Here’s a step-by-step guide [0] on how to adjust your settings."
---
1. Click the [hamburger menu button] and select Settings.
2. Select the Privacy & Security panel.
3. Scroll down to the Firefox Data Collection and Use section.
4. Check or uncheck the box next to Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla.
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-data-mozilla-help...
Even if you follow those steps you listed there and uncheck all those boxes you're shown in the standard settings pages, then Firefox will just continue to send out 'pings' when you interact with certain elements in the browser interface. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Mozilla is like one of those politicians that just won't stop yapping about traditional conservative family values, who is later found to have several extramarital children and numerous affairs with same-sex partners themselves.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...
I had the settings disabled, then updated to the latest version ("126.0 (64-bit)") and settings were kept disabled.
So at least for now it looks like it respects your current settings.
Note says it takes 30 days for them to remove your data history.
I wonder if pihole or similar could just block the dns for this crap.
Wouldn't actually putting "user privacy first" lead to the conclusion that gathering insights like this shouldn't be done on a opt-out basis and instead be opt-in, at the very least?
Personally, I'd see "privacy first" as not needing to sell any user data at all, in the first place, but we're clearly beyond that already.
I think telemetry and the data software collects can help with usability, design, and product enhancement and that it's very likely this can be done to some extent without harming privacy.
That requires users paying, something often suggested, but I have not heard of working commercially for anything where a competitor can supply a user as the product alternate. Privacy just isn't that valuable.
That's clearly not a solution either since expensive products and services with subscriptions still routinely collect every scrap of data they can get their hands on. Companies will always make more money by violating your privacy while also charging you as much as they possibly can so that's exactly what they do.
At the very least collection of non-anonymized data should be opt-in at most. So where is the problem?
Can you imagine a world without Linux, with Windows and Mac pretty much the only mainstream alternative? I’d rather pay a small fee not to have that.
That's not the world we live in today?
Software subscriptions are a hard "no" for me. Even if I loved literally everything else about Firefox, if they did this I'd have to stop using it.
I do donate on average €2/month for various projects, though.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
Quite a few company and organization names are referenced. These include well-known ones like "Google" and "Microsoft", but also others that (at least to me) are far more obscure, such as "our third-party ad platform Kevel" and "AdMarketplace (a third-party referral platform)".
Questionable words like "send", "sends", "sending", "share", "shares", and "sharing" also appear quite a few times.
More broadly, the notice is quite long. A software product that truly respects its users' privacy should have a short privacy policy, mainly because it isn't collecting data to begin with, it isn't sending data to third parties, and so forth.
I know some people will claim that the data collection and sending that Firefox does is somehow acceptable because some of it can be disabled, or because it might be less than what other browsers do. I don't buy into those arguments. A privacy-respecting browser would have users opt in to enable any functionality that might transmit user data, or just not even include such functionality at all by default (it would have to be voluntarily added via an extension, for example).