Help us uncover Firefox 3rd party installer
discourse.mozilla.org
In 2023, a significant portion of Firefox downloads came from unknown sources. We believe many of them came from 3rd party websites that let you download Firefox. While some websites are okay, others can put you at risk of downloading an old version or a build with the wrong locale, leading to security risks, a bad user experience, or even malicious installations. Help the Firefox team to uncover this mystery by taking part in the Firefox 3rd-party installer campaign! There will be swag, and y...

From the post:

In 2023, a significant portion of Firefox downloads came from unknown sources. We believe many of them came from 3rd party websites that let you download Firefox. While some websites are okay, others can put you at risk of downloading an old version or a build with the wrong locale, leading to security risks, a bad user experience, or even malicious installations.

Help the Firefox team to uncover this mystery by taking part in the Firefox 3rd-party installer campaign 3!

There will be swag, and you’ll be featured in our blog if you manage to report 10 valid reports. So don’t forget to invite your friends too!

Have any questions about this campaign? Join us on Matrix or watch the recording of our community call with Romain Testard, Principal Product Manager at Mozilla.

Please also help spread the word about this campaign by sharing this on your social media.

Keep on rocking the helpful web,

Kiki & Konstantina

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    844·
    5 months ago

    “We just need to protect our intellectual property”

    Obviously harmful versions of Firefox that do not release the source code are bad but there are probably soft forks.

    • sugar_in_your_tea
      822·
      5 months ago

      This isn’t about forks, it’s about installers that pull directly from Mozilla’s servers. This could be installers that bundle malware/adware with it.

      If you fork it, you’ll be building the source and distributing it yourself. This isn’t about that.

      • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
        318·
        5 months ago

        It could be “forks” that are just installers packaged with distinct configuration files or add-ons.

        • sugar_in_your_tea
          121·
          5 months ago

          Evidence? And if so, I don’t think Mozilla cares (e.g. snaps are probably repackaged installers).

          If you’re renaming things, you’re going to recompile to put your branding on it. So things like Mull, Mullvad Browser, Librewolf, etc will all use their own binaries.

            • sugar_in_your_tea
              2·
              5 months ago

              Cool, I just figured packagers would be lazy and just use upstream builds. That’s what I would do.

              • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
                3·
                5 months ago

                They mostly use mozilla binaries, but download them once and package the install in their own format.

                So this will download once instead of thousands of times