Asking after the privacy debacle and manifest. I’m not keeping up closely, but iirc Firefox is the browser recommended because of Ublock. After the privacy data issue I’ve noticed broken trust from Firefox users, recommendations in favor of switching browsers, and predictions saying Firefox is going downhill fast and that their forks won’t be maintained for much longer.
So I’m here asking the seasoned sailors’ thoughts, aye. Is this just a storm passing by or are you really considering jumping ship?
The whole firefox controversy was overblown. Hardened firefox is still the way to go.
It seems the alternatives are worse but I’m definitely trying out one of the Firefox forks
Switched to Zen and Mullvad
There is no benefit to using Firefox unless you really like uBlock Origin and will not consider another kind of adblocker.
Mozilla is just controlled opposition lead by the same greedy executives as Google anyway, using it won’t make a difference. It’s at best 3% market share won’t stop Google from pushing their crap to everyone else either.
Problems of the modern web in general cannot be solved by just another browser engine. What it really needs is simplification. A way to make it do what it does now but faster and in a way that is easier to implement, but I don’t see anyone doing that in the near future.
Yea sticking with firefox , but with arkenfox hardening… bugfixes are more important than fear of some wordings , at least for now. Vanadium in GOS on the phone.
i wasn’t as plussed as everyone else over it, though i am concerned. i still donate to mozilla as, ultimately, i believe they’re still good for those who champion an ethical, open, and not for profit internet.
i have switched to librefox, though, just because i like their developers and the fact that they’ve embraced mastodon and the fediverse. i also have firefox and nightly (though i use fennec on android because it comes through f droid)
Is Fennec trustable? They had that one vulnerability incident I can’t name and that’s when I first heard about them.
The “vulnerability” was only that F-Droid wasn’t keeping up with their builds, leaving everyone who installed it from F-Droid out-of-date, during a period of known Firefox bugs being exploited.
I recommend IronFox instead
I use it, but I have some problems with it. I made a post about it.
it’s basically just the latest firefox without the proprietary stuff, google services, and telemetry. i’ve never had an issue :)
I doubt that would be the case for Ladybird if the devs keep being how they are.
Can we stop acting like he raised a Nazi salute or something? Denying a PR that only changes minor stuff like pronouns by a not known contributor is well within the rights of a maintainer. Just because he did not communicate it well doesn’t make him or the project transphob
It’s way less egregious than the Brave co-founder making donations in support anti-gay marriage amendments, and even that has been massively overblown (the real reasons to avoid Brave are a) Chromium, b) shady crypto stuff and c) its financial incentives as a for-profit company with investor backing to compromise on its claimed ethical principles). I’m getting so sick of these purity tests on completely irrelevant and unrelated issues standing in the way of genuine alternatives to big tech. People are so eager to let perfect be the enemy of good.
and predictions saying Firefox is going downhill fast and that their forks won’t be maintained for much longer.
Possibly true, but abandoning ship is only bringing us closer to that timeline. People seem to be completely ignorant/delusional about how much work these forks will require to maintain if Mozilla’s full time employees stop working on Firefox. If you have a practical reason to use another fork (like maybe a feature Firefox doesn’t have) then I totally understand using that instead, but if you are simply making some kind of ethical protest change like all the new LibreWolf users who are so loudly virtue signalling at the moment then you need to think seriously about whether this course of action will ultimately end up hurting your ideals. Mozilla definitely has a big communication problem and I understand the desire to distance oneself from an organisation that repeatedly disrespects its supporters and never learns from its mistakes, as it is very fatiguing to endure their constant failures and the massive fall-outs from them, but ultimately I feel like switching away from Firefox is still an emotional decision rather than a rational one.
What other problems has Firefox had? Everything I search sends me to this recent controversy
One of the more recent examples from last year was Mozilla’s announcement of PPA (Privacy-Preserving Attribution). Essentially the organisation is trying to create a new system for click-based advertising where an advertiser can be notified that you clicked on their ad, helping them and the websites which host their ads, without compromising your personal privacy. The way it has historically worked is you click on an ad and give away a ton of your personal data, or you straight up block all these ads and their trackers which makes a lot of the web unsustainable (because it is funded by advertising). Anyway, like with this latest controversy a lot of people didn’t bother to read any of Mozilla’s statements and instead based their entire opinion off clickbait headlines like ‘Firefox’s New ‘Privacy’ Feature Actually Gives Your Data to Advertisers’ which made PPA sound like a reduction of consumer privacy, which it isn’t. And again, like this current controversy, you also had a lot of privacy activists who do not live in reality claiming that anything other than a 100$ rejection of all advertising online equaled 100% complicity and that Mozilla had sold out on one of its core principles.
I am sticking with Firefox but looking at hardening with https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox
I’m not interested in anything based off Chromium, and I don’t really like the idea of going with a Firefox fork much either. You’re not only trusting them to actually care about your privacy and security, and you’re not even just trusting them to actually catch and fix all of Mozilla’s shenanigans as well. You are also trusting them to constantly stay on top of all the latest security patches. There aren’t really any Firefox forks I trust with all 3 of those things at once. Even if there was, there are certainly no forks of Firefox that have anything even remotely close to the capacity necessary to maintain a web engine on their own, so you’re still trusting Mozilla to keep Firefox updated and secure for your fork of choice to even have a chance.
Until a new browser with a new engine comes along that actually lets me use the full uBlock Origin there’s not really any other option besides Firefox that makes sense. At least to me.
It’s mostly overblown. You can watch here or read here. The internet is overreacting again, but Mozilla has done fuck all to grasp why just yoinking understandable language and expecting people to understand legalese and draw lines to their Privacy Policy is making people upset or confused.
Imo, people jumping ship is justified, because a company that makes $37M just on investments should do better about being vocal and prescient champions of privacy. Even if their actual privacy policy is the same as it was a year ago, their failure to communicate with their supporters in a way they can understand should have consequences.
It may be overblown but I am seriously tired of the way Mozilla is being run. The CEO has a $7 million salary. Big red flags always appear each time they increase the salary also. May be a bit hyperbolic but that’s why I’m just using another fork after 20 years
They’re red flag, but even if their stayed purpose is correct at the moment, it sets the stage. All it takes now is a want to sell the data and there’s nothing to slow them down or tell us. Nothing to make them keep the setting to not share telemetry. A little baked in ai, some hooks to monitor …
Jumping ship to a fork is our only recourse. It’s that or ride it out and see if the gun is loaded.
Yup. I’ve been using Firefox for 16 years and I just switched to LibreWolf the other day.
Yeah, and while I don’t have any technical qualms about the direction of Mozilla with regard to Firefox, I’m personally switching for peace of mind and because of the aforementioned inability to communicate well. I don’t like working with or supporting people that can’t just say what they mean. I mean, how hard would it have been to have a human-readable version for stupid people like me and have a legalese version for the lawyers?
Regardless, as people make decisions, they deserve to be informed. It would be stupid to decide to leave Firefox if all you knew was the uninformed outrage of the internet.
That’s fair. Personally I should have called it quits when they started including pocket in the browser, but better late than never.
I mean yeah. I’m not a fan of the changes but there’s no way in hell anything Chromium based will fare any better… do they even have uBlock still???
Probably turn off the telemetry, try a fork like LibreWolf or maybe the Arkenfox user.js if you’d rather stay close to upstream.
Links2 is obviously the best browser. #links2gang
But librewolf is pretty neat.
I still recommend it with a little asterisk:
Disable a bunch of shit in it or download a privacy focused fork of it (like Librewolf)
well Firefox may enshittify, it’s still the best option imo, certainly better than chrome or anything chrome based. even better if you use a privacy focused fork like librewolf.
there are other options out there, you can look into qt browsers, those were the basis for webkit browsers. hopefully soon things like servo/verso become more useable.
The UX of Librewolf sucks ass though. Want to change this setting? Well you can’t, too bad.
How the UX of librewolf is different from the UX of Firefox?
A lot of options are disabled for “privacy reasons”. There is no halfway approach. It’s all or nothing with their strict privacy settings.
For some, that’s perfect. For others, who want a more tailored privacy experience, it’s not a really great option.
I’ve never heard of qt browsers, or servo/verso. I’ll give it a look, seems like I have a few rabbitholes to explore
Servo is an experimental browser engine developed by Mozilla Research using Rust to enhance performance, safety, and parallel processing in modern web rendering. The project showcased features like a concurrent layout system and asynchronous JavaScript execution.
Around 2017, Mozilla shifted focus to other projects and laid off several developers, leading to the gradual abandonment of Servo. However, a dedicated community later formed the Servo 501©(3) nonprofit to continue developing Servo’s technology and ideas.
Verso is an experimental browser built on top of the Servo browser engine. Currently, both softwares are experimental and pre-alpha developer software at best.
