What you call Stockholm syndrome, I call reality. ;P
This is an area that we are stuck contending with. Legal solutions are needed here but that path is mired by complex and powerful lobbying. If Mozilla can push for a more private or more protective - even if not fully private or fully protective - then I’d like to see where it goes.
Firefox has 3% market share. Completely refusing to engage with your enemies only works when you have the actual guns to back that attitude up.
If you refuse to engage with the ad industry they just ignore you. Oh and the company that owns a large part of the world's ad industry and owns the browser that has 65% market share also pays like 90% of your bills.
I mean, what's step two of your glorious plan to charge fists raised into battle?
> The advertisers get your data either way, so why not use Chrome?
You might believe that the advertisers get less of your data if you use Firefox.
Similarly: you might be less likely to have your house burgled if there are locks on the doors and a burglar alarm, even though people with those things still get burgled sometimes. You might be less cold outdoors in winter if you wear a parka, even though it's still cold. You might be less bored if you buy/rent/stream some interesting books, music and movies, even though having those doesn't guarantee never being bored. You might be less likely to lose your next chess game if you practice tactics and learn openings, even though you'll still lose if you play Magnus Carlsen. You might be less likely to have a heart attack or stroke if you take those antihypertensives the doctor prescribed you, even though those are still tragically things that can happen to anyone. Etc., etc., etc.
Very few things are absolute and perfect. It's usually a matter of "less" versus "more".
This latest thing gives advertisers more information about me than they would have if Firefox didn't do it. (Unless I turn it off, which in fact I have done.) It doesn't give them very much information about me. I'm pretty sure they would get much more information about me if I switched to using Chrome (e.g., because Firefox supports better adblockers).
For the avoidance of doubt, I do think Mozilla should have made more noise about what they were doing, I do think there's a repeated pattern of them putting things into Firefox that their users don't really want and hoping no one will notice[1], I do think that says something bad about how Mozilla is run, and I would be happier if the Firefox project were run by people less inclined to do such things. But none of that means that you might as well use Chrome instead of Firefox, if you happen to value the things that Firefox still does better than Chrome.
[1] Actually, I think they know perfectly well that some users will notice, and they've decided it's overall better PR to do the thing quietly, wait for people to complain, and then say "oh, whoops, we should have been more open about this, we're so sorry and will totally not do the same thing again in six months".
> You might believe that the advertisers get less of your data if you use Firefox.
Shortly as Chrome implements Privacy Sandbox, both Chrome and Firefox will support the same levels of advertising tracking. For Chrome, this is a privacy upgrade of sorts, but for Firefox, this is a definite downgrade.
As Firefox converges on Chrome in this area, the privacy advantage evaporates.
Does Chrome do anything equivalent to Firefox's "Enhanced Tracking Protection"?
Chrome forces extensions to use "Manifest v3" rather than "v2", which cripples some ad-blockers; in particular, the full version of uBlock Origin will run on Firefox but not on Chrome. (I'm not sure of the details about the v2->v3 migration; maybe that isn't universally true yet. If not, it will be soon.)
"Reduces" and "evaporates" are not the same thing. I see the case for the former, not for the latter.
I dont believe that, and have no reason to believe that at this point.
Any browser that makes me monitor their changes for privacy destruction is basically just chrome with more steps.
Actually it's the other way around. As long as Firefox only has a negligible market share, advertisers are not going to care about it enough to work around Firefox-exclusive tracking protection forever. Regulators are also not going to be concerned that Firefox makes certain business models harder because it is insignificant.
I know it feels right to say that. But really, do you think the majority of people who switched from Firefox to Chrome did it because FF did not address their privacy concerns? Seems ridiculous. However bad FF is, Chrome is much worse.
It seems far more likely that the remaining 3% are the few people who care, and therefore, "pulling this shit" did not cause the current market share.
That's the start of full blown stockholm syndrome.
No data is ever fully anonymous, don't pretend otherwise. So no data should be send at all.