Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
Acceptable Use Policy links to https://www.mozilla.org/about/legal/acceptable-use/ which says "You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to[...]Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence"
It's against the Terms of Use to use Firefox to... watch porn?
Either their legal team made a mistake, in which case they should correct it and issue an apology ASAP, or they really do intend to own you, in which case I recommend switching to an alternative browser which is only a browser, like Dillo, Ladybird, or Netsurf.
So only bookmarks of porn sites if you have Sync active, sending porn tabs to a Firefox instance on another device, browsing porn while on the Mozilla VPN, or using Firefox Relay to sign up to a porn website with an anonymous email address
Fine by me since I don't use a Mozilla account, but sounds to me like I shouldn't get a Mozilla account either
Bookmarks and tab URLs don’t contain porn, generally? References are not typically considered explicit, though certainly their language isn’t clear enough about that.
If you bookmark a collection of data: / blob: links then that would be the outlier scenario where you shouldn’t use any third-party server-involved bookmark syncing service, as presumably they’ll all either break or ban you once they find you using their bookmark table space for data storage.
It seems like they might be "use[d]...to...[u]pload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality"
Bookmarks and tabs hinge on how you interpret "grant access". Do URLs to publicly available websites grant you access, or does the phrase only apply to cookies, passwords, login-urls, etc.? I'm pretty certain it would apply to login-urls, email-confirmation emails, password-reset emails, etc, but for normal URLs I could see it either way
I think this is the most damning point: their terms extend to cover the text in URLs, and so by definition all text including titles and URLs — as well as any pages visited, due to tab syncing — would need to be in compliance with policy. If it’s as clearcut as presented here, anyways. Do the other browser profile syncing services have similar language? Is such overreach unique to Mozilla Corporation?
Though, considering how few people are likely to care about the legal exposure risk of continuing to use Firefox Sync, I don’t imagine this will end up being particularly enforceable in practice.
Favicons are not contained within bookmarks under normal circumstances, but I don’t know if Sync syncs those or if the browser fetches them on each endpoint.
It's pretty odd if you aren't allowed to use their VPN to watch or share porn
- send unsolicited communications (for example cold emailing an employer about a job)
- Deceive or mislead (for example inviting your brother over for a surprise party under false pretenses)
- Purchase legal controlled products (for example sending the pharmacy a refill for your Xanax)
- Collect email addresses without permission (for example putting together a list of emails to contact public officials)
look, i'd have similar clauses if I ran such a service. Porn gets very messy very quickly. Revenge porn, porn of generally unconsenting parties etc. are all to common and people who share know it is wrong and so try to use things like vpns to hide. The problem for you as a vpn provider is proving they're doing the wrong thing with your service, so it is much easier to simply say there is a blanket ban and then selectivly enforce.
The upside for users in general is such a vpn service tends not to be associated with underbelly behaviour and so isn't blocked from 90% of the web.
Do hammer manufacturers required you to sign an agreement at the hardware store with a bunch of legalese so they aren't held liable if you use the hammer to beat someone to death?
Do alcohol companies get shut down when people drink and kill someone with their car?
Did you know that a nonzero percentage of child molesters wear Nike sneakers when they kidnap children? Why doesn't Nike actively try to prevent this?!
So why should a VPN provider need to explicitly dissuade its customers from breaking the law with their service? Why should a web browser be afraid of being on the hook when someone breaks the law via the web?
I don’t think this is really true at all, at any decently busy establishment there’s no way the bartender could possibly be responsible for what their patrons do after leaving when they barely have time to take their orders
but bars are aiding these drunks. a hammer is a tool specifically for hitting and removing nails. If you put that burden on a hammer, you'll have to put that in a pencil and every object in the world.
I have and continue to use my hammer, which is none but an Estwing, for demolition work. Often there are no nails directly involved and when there are, I use a prybar. I have also used it to open beers, 'fix' computers, as well as procure therapy to various things that plead for it. On several occasions I've even used it tied to a rope to throw over an unreachable tree limb.
That this may be used as evidence in court against me, well, has me almost welcoming a firing squad. What a silly silly planet.
I honestly doubt that this is true for the country I live in. How would a bar keeper know your intention to drive? And your ability to drive might be impaired before showing obvious symptoms of intoxication
I am unsure you know how a VPN works, because non of your comparisons work in anyway shape or form as representing the same thing.
A more appropriate comparison is a real-estate company which manages corporate offices, leasing out a corporate office space. That space is being offered under the proviso that NO brothel is opened there, underage or otherwise. Now, they won't ask you what you're doing and generally won't look but if there is a single complaint of you running an underage brothel, they look, and see any brothel activity, instead of wasting time they'll simply evict you and avoid the entire mess and waste of resources spent investigating. Easy.
The alternative is having to painstakingly prove the wrong thing was done, which is notoriously difficult, and ties up a lot of resources.
They might clarify that in the agreement. I doubt many people are intimately familiar with Mozilla, Firefox, 'services', etc. to distinguish. I am and I didn't think of it in a brief reading (which is all I have time for).
Then they shouldn't explicitly say “Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.”
And yet these terms of service—for Firefox—specifically apply the AUP to “your use of Firefox,” no?
The entire AUP is prefixed “You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to:”. There’s nothing in the AUP that doesn’t refer to “Mozilla’s services.” When the Firefox TOS explicitly includes this AUP, how could it make sense unless they think of Firefox as one of their services?
At the risk of restating the gp’s quote:
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
Its against the ToS to watch most PG rated movies. It objects to graphic depictions of violence as well, and has no exception for brief graphic depictions of sexuality.
TomK32:
You treacherous cowards! Is thy mind void of any knowledge or are you driven by a devil that you deny the existence of this programming language?
Mozilla VPN is a service Mozilla provides though. White-labelled Mullvad or not, it a contract between Mozilla and the user and therefore presumably covered by this terms of use.
I would say porn is probably in the top 3 if not number 1 use for VPNs
I wouldn’t expect the bookmark to run afoul of this clause, since the bookmark isn’t the content. Now it’d be a curious case if the bookmark contained a base64-encoded pornographic image.
You seem to be assuming competence on the part of the author. But, as is common with documents that lawyers generate, they probably don't care if it's reasonable or if practically every one of their users violates it. Like when you get an employee contract that claims your new company owns every idea you ever had. Some people will claim it's just "lawyer stuff" and is somehow okay. It's really not okay.
If you're syncing a bookmark that is somehow illegal content, it would come to rest on their servers and they'd potentially be liable for it. (IIRC they encrypt everything at rest, so this is a speculative risk)
Welp, they stopped being open source, then. From the OSD:
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
The terms are very clear that they apply to Firefox the application itself (but not the source code if you compile it from scratch)
> Mozilla grants you a personal, non-exclusive license to install and use the “Executable Code" version of the Firefox web browser, which is the ready-to-run version of Firefox from an authorized source that you can open and use right away.
> These Terms only apply to the Executable Code version of Firefox
But not the source code if you compile it from scratch
> [Continuing previous quote], not the Firefox source code.
However the source code excludes DRM components, and while the terms don't mention it I believe also some API keys
> In order to play certain types of video, Firefox may download content decryption modules from third parties which may not be open source.
(It's not clear to me that these terms are currently in effect. Certainly I haven't been asked to agree to them yet).
However, the "acceptable use" clauses that OP complains about are not part of these ToST Rather they seem to apply to Mozilla "services", which are related to Firefox accounts (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/services/)
You are right! That's really confusing since the acceptable use clauses themselves talk about Firefox services. Their lawyers need to get their shit together.
Mozilla's management and legal has always been amazing when it comes to unforced errors. These changes are actually pretty normal, but they're also worded more scarily by being more encompassing than they need to be. Mozilla has always sucked when it comes to communicating with the outside world.
The squeeze on any content that religious people find 'yucky' is double-pronged in the US - encouraged both by governments and businesses. Paypal, Visa, Mastercard et al are given complete discretion over what transactions they can block, and they have already extensively used this to deprive legal NSFW platforms and creators of their income.
So, on one end, state governments are trying to strongarm NSFW services by imposing draconian requirements that ask users to submit their private data to some random opaque 'benevolent' third party business - and on the other, payment processors are using their legal right to refuse whatever transaction for any reason so they can starve them of income.
I dont think the pressure from payment processors is because of puritanism, but rather payments in this space tend to come with a much higher % of fraud and chargebacks and they've decided it's not worth the risk.
"risk management" is not puritanism - sex work has a different/higher risk profile for PSPs (fraud, chargebacks, etc) and it's easier to say "no" than to come up with a new product to serve customers.
An enterprising PM at a PSP or fintech could look at the size of the sex industry, measure the risk of providing payment/banking services to sex workers and businesses and offer them at a premium like any other "niche" financial area.
And while we're on the topic of "draconian" regulations from the government - it's not outside their interest to limit the availability of obscene content from children. This isn't a "think of the children" argument so much as "children consume graphic pornography at huge rates and porn providers make money off them as consumers and producers with such inept guardrails that age verification has been a meme for 25 years." I don't think validating your identity with a government ID (and storing it forever) is a good countermeasure but I disagree its some kind of draconian limitation on free speech. If porn sites didn't buy and sell sex from kids and self regulated, this wouldn't be necessary (nb4 "it's the parent's problem" - good luck!)
I know this is late and likely won't be read, but I have a few objections to what you said.
First of all, not all NSFW transactions are created equal. A person subscribing to a website, a person buying a physical product, and a person paying an artist to draw what they want all have different risk profiles. (The former is far more likely to cancel). Does this change the opinion of Paypal, Visa, Mastercard et al? No, they blanket ban everything. They pressure businesses and platforms to stop selling this content and to cut out any of their NSFW creators, and the websites often have no other option. These big companies are the only available avenue for sending and receiving money.
Second of all... I think that being free to do legal transactions with whoever you want in exchange for anything you want should absolutely crush the payment processors' right to moderate their transactions in accordance to their own guidelines, rather than the law. Again, you have almost nowhere to run if these businesses turn you down - there is no digital cash. I think that companies that process transactions should be mandated to not discriminate between them, as long as it is lawful.
Lastly... The reason why this verification debate has been standing for 25 years is because it's not solvable. Every proposed scheme for reliable age verification that I've heard of either trades off your privacy, or isn't watertight (and might as well not be there). You can only have one. Given that private companies and governments love private data, and that we've had open internet for 30+ years now and nothing catastrophic has happened so far, I say we should let it be.
That's exactly a "think of the children" argument. CSAM moderation was always fairly strict on the big sites -- they knew it was both an existential threat and the route through which puritans such as "duped" here (nice name) would try to attack -- but they really tightened up with the ban on third party content. Now they have a chain of responsibility for every video. So, "duped," if you actually have an example of the problem you claim is rampant, why aren't you acting on it? Why aren't you lighting the fuse on that chain of responsibility? Do you want to promote the abuse of children? Or do you admit to making it up so that you could use it as a pretext for your agenda?
Also: yes, building a government blackmail database is draconian.
The Puritans have been trying to ban porn here since the concept has existed, it's never stopped, and it's never going to stop. They're miserable and they want everyone else to be too. That's like most of their religion. Going to church, being ashamed of bodies, and judging people.
Yes, I'm working on cutting every addiction, that's a big part of being a practicing Orthodox Christian. My biggest weaknesses are video games but I have wasted plenty of time on shows as well and I haven't done either as much in the past month or so.
But sexuality is a big part of our lives and while wasting time on any addiction like doomscrolling and binge watching is not good for us, porn can taint our relationship with the opposite sex and that's worst in my opinion
Sorry if I may have sounded judgemental and good luck with your self-improvement trip. Orthodox Christianity can be helpful with tackling self-moderation issues. Just make sure you don't pay much attention to any extreme guilt-tripping moralisms you may hear along the way. (I am of Orthodox Christian background myself, and I have heard my fair share of them.)
It's ok, you were right to doubt that I understood that porn isn't the only sin. Any waste of time/ resources in pursuit of egotistical pleasure is a sin as far as I understand it. But we are taught that God is merciful, as long as we fight truly with our sins.
Do you think pornography is harmful to you, and can it be inferred that pornography is also harmful to others?
This is the reason why your viewpoint is not accepted by others
If you search YouTube for "effects of porn addiction" you will find mostly clips from secular sources. A lot of scientists/psychologists say it's harmful
> If you search YouTube for "effects of porn addiction" you will find mostly clips from secular sources.
This is not an argument. You can find sources saying anything you want on YouTube. If you want to be taken seriously, you need more than random videos or a Wikipedia article.
> A lot of scientists/psychologists say it's harmful
addiction to anything is harmful. You might as well have said using porn unhealthily is unhealthy. It's a tautology, and it's moving the goal posts disingenuously.
The argument is about moderate use, just like any other vice.
Yes, pornography is harmful, for everyone, for people who watch at and many of those who participate in its production. No exception, it's a bad thing and it's a shame that society is being okay with it.
Are you seriously saying porn is being suppressed? It's a bigger industry than it has ever been.
Visa has the option to do business with whomever they like or dislike and I'm not even sure they don't support them because of religious reasons.
I'm not saying it should be banned but saying the people who are against it or don't want to do business with such entities are miserable is twisted given it is an industry where most of the actors are victims of abuse, the viewers learn a distorted view of sexuality and younger generations have less respect for each other because of it.
All speech is "just stating one's view", if you want to view it like that. That doesn't mean it doesn't have effects on the world. Consider white racist group members standing outside a mostly-Black voting location shouting slogans.
> I'd say porn makes people miserable not happy/ fulfilled.
Yes. And no.
It depends on a lot of other things: what porn you're looking at [1]; what stage you are in; how fulfilled you are with your life; etc.
The addiction to porn is like any addiction: a symptom of something else not going well; addiction which you won't get out of if you don't find a way to fix the issue. That isn't to say that you shouldn't treat the symptom as well, if/when it hurts you too (and any addictive behaviour can quickly hurt).
The very tricky thing is that, the same thing (alcohol, sex, drugs, porn, sport, work, food) can be addictive to someone, and just recreational to another; beneficial and harmful.
The key is understanding why, for each and every one. Not to shame.
[1] porn is not necessarily the most extreme, garbage, inhuman stuff; although those are very liberally used by most porn websites. Some stuff are definitely harmful, to anyone, on either side of it. Some are well thought-out and promote educational, healthy, loving behaviour - guess why, those of most often written and produced by women.
Confused. What do Firefox's terms of service have to do with puritanism ? Have Firefox developers become puritanist or something ? That would be extremely surprising if true. Any evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) to this ?
"You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to[...]Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality“
It's gonna be a weird few years that's for sure. I'll leave it to the historians to decide when the actual tipping point was but the shift in the GOP from being run by Republicans with a few bones thrown to Conservatives every now and again when it's time to drum up votes to the show now being run by Conservatives is going to be the point between two political eras.
It's by far not the first time
this has happened but it's kinda surreal to be alive for one.
I'd say it was the decline and fall of the Soviet block. Without the external pressure to remain competitive, the balance shifted from realism towards ideology.
The U.S. still has competition from Europe and China, no? I'm not convinced that the puritanical fanatics would ever make the rational decision to ease up on their efforts for the sake of the economy. For non-Western examples, see Iran and Afghanistan since the mid 20th century.
> The U.S. still has competition from Europe and China, no?
Not militarily, at least not the way the Soviets were competition.
If the US really is on the Roman path and transitioning from the republic to the empire, it's not clear Europe + China have enough force to keep MAD in place.
Europe + China have between 500-750 nuclear weapons usable on short notice. Depending on how well classified US missile defense programs work, it's possible for the US to only lose a single digit number of metropolitan areas.
Combine this with the fact that large, dense urban areas primarily contain the current administration's political opponents, and that may become acceptable losses.
A potential alliance between the US and Russia being on the table (or at least a non-aggression pact) further bring a non-MAD world order into the range of possibilities.
It's not any more surreal than the extreme shift in the other direction we had before. If anything, what you are experiencing now is just the expecte (over)correction to that.
At least in the US, slavery is alive and well. 13th amendment abolishes slavery except as punishment for a crime, and prisoners all over the country perform forced labour for a small fraction of federal minimum wage.
I don't think that's the problem here, as I don't want to see porn on e.g. Mozilla's forums either. There's a place and time for that content and Mozilla shouldn't be the one to decide for others. The problem is whether Firefox is a Mozilla "service" or not, and the way the terms is linked implies that it is.
I'm all down to write off contract law as "puritanism" but the rot is far deeper than an aesthetic (and frankly I'm unclear how puritanism applies to this situation at all).
EDIT: I'm not sure why porn is particularly interesting here when most internet activity seems to be potentially against terms of service.
My conspiracy theory is that gears are slowly turning to revamp the culture, redefine what’s acceptable/not acceptable and eventually suggest that if you won’t have kids you’re not accepted in the society. Basically a funky way to reverse the population decline, as the governments are realizing this problem won’t be fixed by free markets and etc.
People aren't having kids because of stagnant real wages and soaring home prices. In the US, the median home price is now $450k. In Canada, it's $650k. And when people do have children, they're on average having fewer, later in life (with a greater risk of complications): https://www.northwell.edu/news/the-latest/geriatric-pregnanc...
I doubt banning porn or abortion or engaging in cultural engineering will fix this.
And then there's this phenomenon, discussion of which was once verboten in goodthink circles (like HN) due to its anti-feminist and "incel" optics, but has since grown enough in strength and scale to shove its way through the Overton Window so that even respectable, MSM sources cover it: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...
Top income brackets aren't really having more than 2 children either, which is a requirement for growing population. Like most studies has shown that, in general, educated women, freedom of choice and etc. will negatively impact birthrates. It's the same thing everywhere. Sure, income, less social pressure and etc. affects it somehow, but there's just no real need in general to have 3 kids in this day and age. Asking a woman to give away at the bare minimum 6 years of their youth won't cut it nowadays. And honestly, I don't blame them, I think exactly the same way.
I have no idea why people keep saying it's monetary reasons. Why would anyone have 3 kids nowadays? There are no real incentives, other than "I want a big family". Society actively discourages large families as well. The amount of people in their 20s aiming for that is getting smaller and smaller too.
The best way to have more kids, unironically, is making everyone as poor as possible, removing any other method of entertainment, and making "having kids" the only choice. That's how it worked for the eternity, and some people want a percentage of people to go back to it, so it would support the current established system.
If everyone has 1/2 kids, the outcome is the same as having no kids, just with more years to get there. That’s Japan’s biggest problem right now. People are having kids. Tokyo is fairly kid friendly, and infrastructure/culture is there. But nobody wants to have 3 kids.
Simply not true. 2 is the replenishment rate. 3, is a 1.5 increase generation to generation. Our population is out of whack with the resource load. Your model is orders of magnitudes too simplistic.
I don't think creating the illusion of an imaginary middle class ever helped anything. I believe it only makes things worse, as now a lot of people think they are not working class, just because they have an above median wage. Snap it, even some even hold to the illusion that they are rich, just because they have a house with a mortgage and a private pension.
What you need to have a modern, western country instead of a dog-eat-dog wild west is welfare, including universal health care.
But welfare is considered as an evil communist plot in the US and the people who are led to believe that they are somehow above the working masses keep voting against their own interests. Not just in the US, unfortunately.
First of all, US population has been steadily growing, so I don't get why big business (whose interests current administration represent) would need to engage in long-term culture engineering for steady supply of new workers.
Second of all, majority of US population is urban. People in NY or Bay Area can't elect a president who represents their interests due to how Electoral College is designed but attempting to change their opinions on having children by banning porn is a pipe dream.
It doesn’t support economic models in the long run, unless you start modifying the definitions of “consumption”, “growth” and “value created”. It also doesn’t work well unless you create some utopia where everything is automated for old people and they can live without support from the younger generation.
The problem has not been solved, and all western governments are hoping to delay the problem through immigration. This buys them time to see what solution Japan, SK and China can come up with, and copy that instead of taking risks with potentially abysmal results.
There is a huge line of people wanting to get into the US. Authorities can pick and chose whatever they need at the moment (highly educated tech professionals and scientists or cheap labor for manual jobs, etc.) and instantly "magically" get such people, already grown and educated at someone else's expense.
The culture dies if locals don't have children and the immigrants don't assimilate. There are already many pockets of micro cultures in the US and that's what the people in power are using to divide us already.
I'm increasingly convinced that the goal is to balkanize the US and establish a Network State guided by silicon valley, as described by Curtis Yarvin
The whole modern US culture is literally "immigrants who didn't assimilate" with small pockets of native Americans. From my outsider perspective there is very little common between techie from Valley, NY yuppies and a rust belt redneck. Adding some asians and mexicans just improves your cuisine ;)
Again, it's just a fun conspiracy theory in my head, and no, it doesn't have to be big business. Like you realize churches have been pouring money in ads, apps, and etc. right? They're actively trying to get back all the lost memberships.
US population is growing for a combination of immigration and just slightly better birth rates than others. It's nowhere close to above-replacement levels (2.1). Just check out the population pyramid, and you can see there are less younger kids than older ones.
It seems like not so much a conspiracy theory as something totally transparent and out in the open. There's a huge political push to birth as many babies as possible. Major political parties have it as part of their platform. Their spokespeople talk derisively of "childless cat ladies" and how you're not a real contributor to society unless you produce babies.
The "Birth" lobby is a stool composed of several legs:
1. Attack abortion
2. Attack contraception
3. Attack porn
4. Attack education
5. Attack "women in the workforce"
All of these things are seen as contributing to declining birth rates, so they're opposed by Big Birth. You can see the same politicians tend to go after these things in lock step.
I don't think they can succeed though, because the 5. is the crucial step, as being a baby-making machine is a full-time job, and no lobby is going to get a lot of following from the business with the premise to cut the available workforce by half.
If the plan is to have most people out of job soon-ish, then big population with bunch of young people without good prospects is a recipe for disaster.
Pretty much, yeah. Like everything is factually right, but I completely disagree with their method. So far, they’ve failed at each step.
There’s a very obvious “pro-religion” push going on across all social media as well, but it’s hard to pinpoint when/how it started. Not sure how far they’ll have to roll back women’s rights to get where they want to, but it’s incredibly sad to watch. Not sure how fathers with daughters are going to watch this happen in real time as well.
> Either their legal team made a mistake, in which case they should correct it and issue an apology ASAP
I don't think it is a mistake but more the translation of a vision and strategy that took hundreds of meetings to be laid down very precisely.
I have nothing to back what I am gonna say but I am wondering if their strategy might be to truly become the default browser of governments who are uncomfortable having Chrome or Edge as the default browser. Especially since now they get augmented by a lot of AI.
Firefox has it largest market share in Europe and Germany it seems and with the concerns with are hearing over there about Big tech I wouldn't be surprised at some point some govs try to make their workstations Firefox only.
Also some governments are trying hard to restrict access to porn, violence and social media for children but we know it is almost impossible to do it at the network level. So they might try at the browser level with the help of Mozilla and some "sanctioned Internet AI safety" inside the browser?
I really don't know but think about it, Mozilla is a dead man walking with it's 2% market share and huge cost of maintaining one of the most complex piece of software. They have to do something about it.
What just tipped me off is reading on Wikipedia [0]:
> On February 8, 2024, Mozilla announced that Baker would be stepping down as CEO to "focus on AI and internet safety"[2] as chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
The damage to Mozilla she wrought is immeasurable. It'll be talked about for decades as a lesson in an organization losing its way by ceding power to the wrong individual(s).
So the text of the policy itself limits its scope to Mozilla Services.
But the purpose of that section is unclear to me. If it just means you have to comply with that policy when using features that use Mozilla services, why is that section necessary, since the license for the services should already apply.
If it is trying to mean that all the terms for Mozilla services also applies to any use of Firefox... that is really clumisily written, and also just generally terrible.
I'm pretty sure this is about Mozilla services. AFAICT, Firefox itself is licensed under the https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License and as such doesn't put any restrictions on how you use the software.
A bit of an issue is that the Firefox terms of use page [1] says "Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy", and the Acceptable Use Policy link points to their Acceptable Use Policy page regarding Mozilla services [2].
So either they're saying your use of Firefox, regardless of whether you want to use Mozilla services, must also follow the same acceptable use policy that your use of their services would, or it's a massively ambiguous way of saying your use of Firefox in combination with actual Mozilla services must comply with the policy.
If it's the former, their terms of use would be in conflict with the commonly understood definition of open source and free software licensing. If it's the latter, it's just poor legalese that fails to make its intent clear. (Interestingly, the Mozilla Public License does not seem to explicitly say that there are no restrictions regarding the use of the software for any particular purpose, although that is a commonly accepted part of the definition of free software and open source.)
I don't think they use a separate EULA for the binaries. I've found this:
> Mozilla software is made available to you under the terms of the Mozilla Public License 2, a free software license, which gives you the right to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to give copies to your friends and to modify it to meet your needs better. There is no separate End User License Agreement (EULA).
Firefox was the last bastion of freedom on the internet and the replacements aren't ready.
> But do you think these can be a full browser replacement without extension ecosystems like ublock origin et al.?
I'm now actually trying to use qutebrowser as a replacement... it's not easy due to the lack of extensions, but mitigating factors are:
1. it has integrated adblock (though no cosmetic filtering)
2. there are userscripts to integrate with the Bitwarden CLI or a running instance of KeepassXC.
interesting they have resources to build a browser. also interesting (and sad) they focus on Apple and not Windows. Hopefull, they'll port it to Windows and Linux.
I'm using LibreWolf for a few days. Only annoyance I've found is zooming in on a site(HN) does not stick. I'm pretty sure I don't have to zoom all the time on Firefox or Chrome.
The applicable laws of North-Korea might differ than the applicable laws of Russia which may differ from the law of Qatar, etc. It might be even impossible to uphold this world wide even if you tried.
So i guess it's more a 'we at Mozilla don't want any trouble' thing.
I hate to say this but I am again surprised not by the ToS update from Mozilla but by the people who are surprised that Firefox or Mozilla is doing this.
May be I am way too cynical than average people. What is being stated here is actually inline of what they think is right. They think watching Porn is wrong. Which is why you shouldn't use Firefox to watch porn, or anything else they deemed wrong.
And that is speaking from someone who joined the Firefox 1.0 New York Times Ad.
I guess we will all have to do it again. This time for Ladybird.
No they are not. They are saying exactly: "You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to[...]Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence"
Firefox-the-browser isn't a service, it's a product. Their services are things like profile syncing. It makes sense to me that they wouldn't want content on their servers that they could get in legal trouble for hosting.
Mozilla's ToS applies for Firefox's use, and this is literally written by Mozilla themselves:
“Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy”
There's no distinction between the browser and Mozilla's online services here.
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And even if it were referring only to features such as “profile syncing” (and it doesn't refer only to that), does this mean that people can't have bookmarks to porn? And why would Mozilla care about how people use profile syncing at all? I thought it was e2e encrypted.
> Mozilla software is made available to you under the terms of the Mozilla Public License 2, a free software license, which gives you the right to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to give copies to your friends and to modify it to meet your needs better. There is no separate End User License Agreement (EULA).
It should really be up to Mozilla to make the licensing of their products and the terms of use of their services clear and unambiguous. If users have to figure out how to square Mozilla's legal terms with Mozilla's other legal terms, they've failed.
So, as someone else pointed out, saving bookmarks of porn and using their bookmarks sync service would be a problem.
It's easy to laugh and dismiss that. But what if you're a journalist covering war? You're going to have plenty of bookmarks of graphic violence, and therefore run afoul of this license.
Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
Acceptable Use Policy links to https://www.mozilla.org/about/legal/acceptable-use/ which says "You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to[...]Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence"
It's against the Terms of Use to use Firefox to... watch porn?
Either their legal team made a mistake, in which case they should correct it and issue an apology ASAP, or they really do intend to own you, in which case I recommend switching to an alternative browser which is only a browser, like Dillo, Ladybird, or Netsurf.