Mozilla Firefox is Spyware, Even in ESR Form (Debian 12)
EARLIER THIS month I installed Debian 12, which comes with Firefox 128.3.1esr. ESR is Firefox "Extended Support Release" or Rapid Release.
I was curious to check the defaults and see whether the ESR packaged for/by Debian was as bad as "mainstream" Firefox.
The first thing to notice is, in Falkon, by default, all searches get sent to Microsoft, whereas Firefox ESR sends to Google (not that it's OK either, but Google pays Debian a lot of money). The defaults are inherited from the browser ("level"), not system configurations or the "OS level", "DE level" etc.
"Do Not Track" is disabled by default, some options under "Passwords" could be better (don't phone mother ship), and "Allow web sites to perform privacy-preserving [sic] ad measurement" [sic] under "Web Site Advertising Preferences" is greyed out. DRM is turned off by default.
Sadly, "Sponsored shortcuts" and "Sponsored stories" are turned on, but new tabs are a blank page.
All in all, Debian or whoever packages this for Debian didn't go far enough. Consider installing LibreWolf instead. It is available for Debian. It's available for almost every distro, albeit in a less suitable packaging format. █