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?
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
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’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:
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 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.
The browser project dedicated to open web standards steered by a compromised non-profit or the browser project dedicated to undermining the traditional web browsing experience steered by the largest advertising company on Earth … Let me think …
It’s incredible unfunny to read people here on Lemmy (or in the Fediverse in general) talk about dropping Firefox for Chrome or a Chromium browser. it’s like complaining that your country is going wrong by voting Trump.
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 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.
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~
I’ve been using LW & Mull/IF before the outrage-TOU update and while they’re great for me I wouldn’t recommend them to everyone. I still keep FF as a backup and many ppl should continue to use FF for the time being as it was JUST A TOU update…for now.
this is the most balanced policy.
I’m not sure why it seems no one else is recommending this type of backup-for-rainy-day strategy.
ppl are silly
vehemently agree!
I’d ditch Mull, and go IronFox. It’s a fork of Mull that is actively maintained.
i know i use IF.
I am staying with FF until Orion is useable on linux. They just started development
Orion on MacOS is really good. Great protection and defaults, plus extensions from Firefox and Chrome work.
Left them 4 years ago (after 20ish years), so…
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.
