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?
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ and https://www.privacyguides.org/en/mobile-browsers/ will likely have documentation that is updated within a day of any relevant news being available
Links2 is obviously the best browser. #links2gang
But librewolf is pretty neat.
The whole firefox controversy was overblown. Hardened firefox is still the way to go.
Fuck Mozilla, is all I’ve got to say.
I switched to https://librewolf.net/ on Desktop and https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox on Android.
I’ve been trying ironfox but it crashes when i tap “customize homepage”
have you experienced this?
I just tried now for the first time and no it doesn’t crash when I press “customize homepage”.
Me too! I’m using graphene, are you?
yeah, on graphene.
hmm can’t find mention of a bug for this combination. barely even the two mentioned in the same webpage.
I’m also on GrapheneOS running IronFox and customizing the homepage works fine for me.
maybe it’s caused by graphene+ironfox+some other setting or other app
Iron fox was updated over night for me and now no more crashing.
Is Vanadium not as ideal compared to Ironfox? I’m new to GOS
According to the devs vanadium is preferred for security, something about Firefox not having comparable sand boxing (?). Not sure, they wrote in length about the reasoning but at a certain point my eyes started glazing over.
I’ve been using Firefox for a long time on desktop and mobile, so when I switched to graphene I just kept with it.
I may try to switch over to vanadium though seeing as I’m already in “switching” mode.
If you use android, GOS or not, you are using chromium webview anyhow. So using a Firefox browser is just adding on. There is no way around that issue until a proper non chromium WebView is available (gecko is not). But before that happens we will more likely have decent linuxphones instead of android. Vanadium is way more secure than any other browser , only competition would be bromite, also chromium based. Firefox on mobile is light-years behind vanadium security wise, no excuse for not sandboxing. https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
Using this as an opportunity to promote the LibreWolf community on Lemmy: !librewolf@lemmy.ml as well as their new Mastodon account: @librewolf@chaos.social
I’m not affiliated with them btw
Same, I’m done with Firefox / Mozilla…
Librewolf, Waterfox, Floorp seem like viable options.
Firefox with like 10 different settings checkboxes unticked through its settings to disable phoning home, prevent sponsored suggestions, prevent recommendations, etc. + ublock origin extension installed, obviously.
It used to be just an install and go ordeal. Now you have to have all these caveats. I used to send technical and interaction to Mozilla but given their terms changes I can’t be confident in them with even that much information anymore.
Final thought is I don’t see what Mozilla’s endgame is. It costs a lot of money to develop a competitive and impactful web browser, I understand that much. Where are they supposed to get their money from? Well. I don’t get paid millions a year to solve this problem, but it seems pretty obvious the current leadership have made their minds up to make Firefox yet another advertisement browser.
For example from me, because I like their relay function.
You mean the Email relay? There are great alternatives like SimpleLogin or Addy.io. Both have their own browser extensions, but you can also connect them to Bitwarden and use that for browser integration.
Didnt know that about Bitwarden.
Very neat. Thank you~
Left them 4 years ago (after 20ish years), so…
What’s a good alternative?
I am sticking with Firefox but looking at hardening with https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox
For privacy I recommend arkenfox
+1 I tried to apply betterfox even on mobile, I feel sort of improvement or could be placebo I’m not sure hehe…
I tested this some time ago and it benchmarked slightly better than default Firefox but also broke multiple sites
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.
I still recommend it. I’m not fully happy with the situation but for now I consider it my best option.
- I consider Chromium-based browsers out of the question as they give too much power to Google. This is already showing to be a problem with new APIs and “features” that Google is pushing into the web platform and the bigger the market share gets the more control they have.
- Web browsers are the biggest attack surface that most people have. Displaying untrusted webpages and running untrusted code is incredibly difficult and vulnerabilities are regularly discovered. I don’t yet know a Firefox fork that I trust enough to reliably respond to security vulnerabilities quickly and correctly.
So for now I am staying with raw Firefox. Not to mention that as a disto-built Firefox I have some insulation from Mozilla’s ToS. But I am very much considering some of the forks, especially the ones that are very light with patches and are mostly configuration tweaks.
as well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM
Do they just try to remove DRM from media as it comes down, or can you not watch any DRM media at all on it?
They disable it by default, because it requires the execution of proprietary code, but you can reenable it.
I’m skeptical about Ladybird, that’s why I have such high hopes for Servo
I doubt that would be the case for Ladybird if the devs keep being how they are.
Can you link to more info on this
It stems back to a PR from the SerenityOS project where someone changed a “he” to a “they” in the documentation and the PR was declined for “personal politics”
Here’s an article about it: https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
It does leave out this response by Kling on Twitter:
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
Nope. LibreWolf & Waterfox are top-tier, Zen and Mullvad Browsers aren’t bad at all
I will say as nice as Zen seems (I agree that it’s not bad), I don’t really like the whole “vertical tabs” shtick. I mean, I can see why some people would like that, but personally I never got into it. It just looks weird to me and I like seeing more of my tab names (weirdly enough that’s exactly what a lot of pro-vertical users claim is good about them lol).
Also, from a privacy standpoint, not a huge fan personally of the fact that unlike LibreWolf, Zen Browser doesn’t have ResistFingerprinting enabled by default (not sure if it’s even in there tbh).
i agree with wanting see more of tab title. for people who regularly keep 50+ tabs open, that is a pipe dream.
if tabs are so many that their iconized anyway, making the tab bar vertical and iconized isn’t much difference.
and if the bar would expand on hover (hopefully in near future), like in Brave (not sure if it’s a Chrome feature), then it can be wide enough to see plenty of title without reducing the webpage size most of the time.
Right? To me it’s the opposite of minimal.
Exactly!
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.
If Linux can be developed, then a public fork run the same way for browser can too. It’s possible just no interest yet.
A huge chunk of Linux development is subsidized by the hundreds of corporations which depend on it and pay developers to maintain things. There is no corporate interest in developing and/or maintaining an alternative browser engine when chromium already exists and dominates the market.
Yea I thought of that and have no real answer. But should that be solved, without advertising income, it would change everything
It would be amazing of course, and my entire attitude towards Firefox would change overnight if we had that kind of guaranteed security. At the moment I just look at it as the best least-worst option for the short to medium term future. I recently learned about Ladybird but that is still a fair way off, so for now my priority is to continue supporting Firefox and trying to avoid a future where Google has theoretical control over everything.
What other problems has Firefox had? Everything I search sends me to this recent controversy
Switched to Zen and Mullvad
Just switched to Floorp. Loving it.
