The issue seems a bit misrepresented by the dev.

I don’t believe I misrepresented it. Others (ex. Privacy Guides) also don’t recommend Qwant for similar reasons.

It doesn’t matter whether this type of data collection is only for logged in users/optional/etc. Selling data and profiling users in any way, shape, or form is unacceptable. We’re trying to reserve our default search engines for the best of the best, and it’s clear that Qwant doesn’t align with the values of the IronFox project by engaging in this behavior, so it can’t make that cut. Users are of course always welcome to manually add Qwant if they trust it or wish to use it.

Also, I just tested creating a Qwant account, and I received the following prompt:

Welcome to Qwant ! In order to offer more diverse advertising and better align with your browsing, Qwant and its partners use limited data to improve your user experience, ensure the proper functioning of our site, and analyze how we can enhance our features. You can modify your cookie preferences at any time via our cookie manager by clicking on our Privacy policy. If you wish to maintain browsing without any processing and/or sharing of your personal data with our partners Qwant recommends that you click on “Refuse all”.

This is extremely vague, doesn’t mention that the partner is Microsoft, that this data is used for tracking and profiling users, etc. - it reads to me like something I’d see on the CMP of Google or YouTube… I don’t think it’s fair to say that users are voluntarily sharing their data or consenting to this.

Shitty of them claiming to follow Mull’s legacy if they’re doing their own thing.

How?

Our change in approach to fingerprinting was very carefully considered and discussed, both privately and publicly.

FYI: Arkenfox doesn’t enable RFP by default anymore either, and LibreWolf is also considering switching to FPP with an approach like ours.

IronFox still has the same core goals/mission as Mull: to provide a privacy & security-oriented Firefox-based web browser for Android. If IronFox isn’t for you, that’s completely fine - but I just don’t understand how this is shitty or compromising Mull’s legacy/ideals.

They changed some basics from Mull and decided to go other ways.

What basics did we change, and why do you have a problem with them?

IronFox still has the same core goals/mission as Mull: to provide a privacy & security-oriented Firefox-based web browser for Android. If IronFox isn’t for you, that’s completely fine - but I’m just perplexed by your reasoning here, and would appreciate any elaboration so that we can improve.

Waterfox contains proprietary Google Play libraries, and doesn’t include any hardening when compared to standard Firefox on Android. It’s a completely different project with a different set of goals than IronFox or Mull.

You would be far better off using standard Firefox over Waterfox, in terms of privacy & security.

We don’t recommend enabling it; you can see our reason as to why we don’t enable RFP here - we use a hardened configuration of FPP instead.

FYI: Arkenfox doesn’t enable RFP by default anymore either, and LibreWolf is also considering switching to FPP with an approach like ours.

We very publicly discussed our approach to fingerprinting and the reasoning for this. But a basic TL;DR is that we’re using a hardened configuration of FPP - which matches all of RFP’s targets, except the few known to cause breakage/be undesirable for users. I’d recommend reading that GitLab issue for a detailed explanation, and please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

FYI: Arkenfox doesn’t enable RFP by default anymore either, and LibreWolf is also considering switching to FPP with an approach like ours.