This is just hysteria. Don't worry, we haven't joined G***le.

Now that some loud influencers have freaked out over nothing... is there anything you need to do? Just the things you should have been doing already: reviewing the settings in Firefox related to sharing data with Mozilla and display of sponsored content.

• Section titled: "Firefox Data Collection and Use"
• Using the little search box on the page, look for sponsor

Seems like there are some confusion or misunderstanding because Mozilla made a terms of use for Firefox for the first time. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/firefox-terms-of-use/

UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.

Explicitly removing the sentence that Mozilla does not sell our data is not "freaking out over nothing".

If you tell someone to switch to Firefox, the last thing you should need to do is to tell them, oh yeah, privacy and all that, BUT there is an opt-out checkbox somewhere in the settings. Most people use Chrome because they don't or can't care ... making new hoops to jump through, they can just stay on Chrome.

Having sponsored content, where Mozilla evaluates the data with an algorithm and then internally shows some sponsored content is one thing. Selling your data externally and then showing ads based on this is something completely different. Once the data leaves Mozilla it's someone else "doing the bad stuff", doesn't matter if the third party "promises" not to and "only uses it for advertisement".

Exactly because of Mozilla not selling my data I have been evangelizing Firefox to everyone I know for decades. For that reason I have opened a support ticket with F1TV this week because all of a sudden they decided to block access via Firefox. Otherwise I would not care.

Since non-webkit alternatives aren't up to the task right now, the first destination to move to is LibreWolf. I've heard good things about Ladybird, but until now was thinking "naaah I'm well off where I am right now".