Firefox has effectively become spyware, and so, yes, it should be replaced. There are several forks that work well. I’m using Floorp (stupid name, but really nice with some improvements over vanilla Firefox). Zen is another one gaining in popularity. Try them out! Don’t let Mozilla walk away with your data.

i haven’t really read the change the firefox foundation has made

Here you go: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Mozilla_introduces_TOS_to_Firefox#Mozilla's_Business_Model_=&_Potential_CCPA_Violations=

Or you can watch a helpful video. https://youtu.be/-8bTquKjzos

Basically, the internet is overreacting again, but it’s partly because Mozilla is shit at communicating. They should know better and understand that we’re all experiencing rapid enshittification. Corporations aren’t trustworthy. You can’t just remove mention of “not selling your data” and just expect average people to parse the laws and your ToS and your Privacy Policy and connect all the pieces.

If anything, a fork would take its place. If something like that would happen. It doesn’t even need much change, only the name and branding, and the user agreement. While doing so some defaults would change too probably, as a sideeffect. To be honest, I hope this happens.

Plenty of distros do package closed source software that does who knows what. i wouldn’t worry about it for now. if you are on a distro that takes a hardline stance on privacy, it was probably gone a while ago, but i don’t actually know any such distros right now.

Firefox is licenced under a copyleft license. Mozilla can’t stop distros packaging it even if they wanted to.

They’d need to replace the branding, but that’s not a big deal.

Look up ffupdate on GitHub. The latest vanilla Firefox on any Linux with just 1 command (after it’s been configured)