Studying the Freedom of firefox-123.0.tar.bz2
The "F" in Firefox
Some recent reports said that each time you download Firefox (the installer at least) it gives you a different binary, stamped with some 'spying bits' to keep track of who downloads or uses what file. They might call it "Telemetry", but sane people call that "Surveillance" and reject these silly euphemisms.
I was eager to check for myself if the informal packages for GNU/Linux (64-bit) are also littered with "Telemetry", so I downloaded the same object several times with Firefox and then with Falkon (my default Web browser), then checked the hashes/checksums.
I'm happy to report that, at present (and for this particular packaging option), the downloaded files are all identical. That's on GNU/Linux and it's the only operating system I have here, so I cannot comment on other binaries for other platforms.
This thing still makes me queasy about Firefox:
Falkon will never do this. █