Firefox has a lot of issues, but maybe we don't have any other option.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/20260243
Google Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled
Google Chrome is now encouraging uBlock Origin users who have updated to the latest version to switch to other ad blockers before Manifest v2 extensions are disabled.
I think people come down a lot harder on Firefox than they should. It's a great browser, and they do a lot for the freedom of the community and as an open source ambassador.
I feel like people generally feel that, given their prominence, they could do a lot more. This is certainly true. Their weird corporate structure, their half-baked experiments like Pocket or VPN, their Google ad money, these are all valid issues.
But do you know what else is supported by Google ad money? Chromium and every browser built on it. Do you know what has a far more corporate culture? Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc. Do you know who else had weird little money making experiments? Every other browser (Brave's Basic Attention Tokens, DDG's Privacy Pro, etc.).
Firefox makes a bigger target because of their relative popularity and long history.
It has always felt so goofy to see people say "x" based Chromium browser is better than Firefox because Firefox takes Google's money but "x" based Chromium browser doesn't. Like... It just completely ignores the investment Google puts in Chromium lol. Google's money into Firefox equals bad, but Google's money into Chromium, oh, that's actually not bad because we just cover our eyes and ears and go "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" or something???
All that to say, I'm glad to see someone else explicitly share this opinion.
When Chrome came out it was heavily promoted by everyone I knew (apart from my best friend) I tried it, didn't like the UI (still don't) and didn't see the point of it.
People talked abour how fast it was, and I felt that Firefox was fast enough, and Firefox just worked as I wanted it to, why change?
I kept stedfast with Firefox, apart from when the horrible Australis UI was launched, then I switched to a fork called Pale Moon, which I used for several years untill the current UI was launched.
I've best heard it described as: people love Firefox to death.
People, use whatever you like, but if you actively discourage everyone to stop using it, we might lose it - and with it, Librewolf, Palemoon, Tor Browser, and everything that's not Chrome or Safari.
That's exactly what happens if we lose Firefox - Chrome (and those based on it) now have all the power to disable all ad blocking - enabling Google's horrific privacy-less future
It's a good opportunity for any Chrome users in the crowd to switch to Librewolf. It may be a small project but it's been around for a while and they haven't made any mistakes that I've heard about. Google has its various off-brand browsers using the engine, why shouldn't Mozilla get some? It comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled, and has none of the telemetry and ads of Firefox.
One thing to note about using forks is that they have no chance of being on corporate software whitelists, while firefox does. For that reason, adding to firefox numbers is potentially important. I've already seen companies wanting to only allow chrome/edge/safari (even while they officially support firefox ..)
Honestly Firefox is generally easy to maintain. Just update it once in a while and maintain some basic group policies
I don't care about telemetry that reports what features I use and sends crashes, only actual marketing telemetry. Is Fennec a good choice for me? Stuff like Pocket is annoying but you can sort of disable it in about:config. Basically, I hate stuff like Pocket but don't mind stuff like syncing or non-ad based telemetry.
I also recommend iceraven (Note link uses github) which adds pc extensions to mobile and removes telemetry and more
Have they implemented the update option yet, or does it still rely on unofficial methods for updating?
Firefox stands as the lesser of two evils.
The problem is that for the past 8 months, Mozilla has been accelerating making Firefox more evil, and if it continues at this trajectory, it might catch up to Google.
Use forks
I'm not really sure what you mean. Firefox is pretty good, and I honestly think the privacy-friendly ads thing is a good initiative. If you're going to block ads anyway, it won't impact you, and if you won't block ads, having them be more privacy-friendly is a good thing. As long as Mozilla doesn't sell my browsing data (and there's no indication they are or will), I'm all for harm-reducing features/settings.
As long as Mozilla doesn't sell my browsing data (and there's no indication they are or will)...
Mozilla thinks so poorly of PPA data collection that they didn't tell their users, and then basically said their users were too stupid to be told. Consider, they hid this from their user base then Google hid "privacy sandbox" from theirs.
If you don't consider this an indication of Mozilla's bad will, and I'm not sure why you would ignore it, Mozilla FakeSpot already sells private data to ad companies. Directly.
...I'm all for harm-reducing features/settings.
Which this objectively is not. In what universe are advertisers going to use this instead of, not in addition to, other telemetry? Especially because this is a proprietary technique that works on 3% or less of browsers, whereas advertisers that cared about privacy could have just used different URLs in their ads to do their own private telemetry.
At best, this introduces data funneling through Mozilla corporate servers for no functional purpose.
I don't see any issues with Firefox?
I've been using FF for more years than I care to remember, and with the exception of a couple of sites that weren't really that important, I've never had an issue. I certainly never had an issue running uBlock Origin and YouTube.
I flat out refuse to use anything even loosely based on Chromium on principal alone.
People like to bemoan the funding model, as well as the Mozilla Foundations broad overview and general "business vibe"
There's a few irritating ones on Android at least.
On desktop it's been solid since Quantum
Quantum was an insane update.
Yeah same.
People on here love to go all doomposting on every little thing though, so for them stuff that they'll never actively interact with is automatically horrible. But them, I bet those very people are the ones that do "proper privacy stuff" like blindly turning on hardening settings, and then in turn also complain that Firefox "keeps making FF use more memory and be slower and not load pages properly" when they have changed so many settings that they'd in turn make a compelling case for why most companies don't allow so much fiddling with settings: It just leads to endless complaints.
Firefox has a lot of issues
I dunno... I mean, what are your expectations?
Ultimately I have actual problems in my life, my browser choice is an absolutely marginal decision I make when the actual goal is to visit a website that in itself is usually just a tiny component of something else - say ordering something, checking on a piece of information, etc etc.
It's kinda weird to even think so much about browsers - excluding when you are actively developing for/with them - that you recognize issues beyond a single big one like "Has no support for an adblocker". I can get behind that being big enough to matter in regards to which browser is usable or not.
But again, if you develop for Firefox or an addon for it, I can see why details matter and you'd probably have a long laundry list of issues, sure.
I dunno… I mean, what are your expectations?
Honestly, some sites just don't want to work properly. Firefox is my main browser. For some reason, Dicks Sporting Goods has like a 50% success rate on whether the page wants to load correctly. I fire up Brave when I'm looking at their website.
usually just a tiny component of something else - say ordering something
Funnily enough, when I go to a restaurant and they have receipts with QR codes (I think it's Clover), it just doesn't work in Firefox.
Oh that exact one works fine for me, weird.
I haven't tried a receipt, but the menu to order stuff works fine w/ Firefox's QR scanner.
I see many people say to just use forks of Firefox. I use Librewolf myself. However, are such forks not very dependent on upstream Firefox not being completely enshittified? Will it be possible to keep the forks free of all new bullshit, or does that at any point become a too difficult/comprehensive task for the maintainers?
At that point the forks will become its own thing and depart from Firefox.
Which is ironically and exactly how Firefox came to be.
Netscape fucked up Navigator, some folks forked Navigator and created Phoenix - which then was renamed to Firebird, then Firefox. And somewhere in that timeline the Mozilla foundation ditched Navigator in favor of the fork.
But is it viable? I know very little of browser development, but my impression is that it is a lot of work to develop and keep the browsers secure. If Librewolf separated completely from upstream Firefox, would they be able to keep the browser secure without significantly expanding their team?
I ask in earnest, as I said I know very little about this.
I switched back to Firefox two or three years ago. It was tough at first but now that I have it setup for me, I like it so much better than Chrome. Very little noise, ad-free most of the time.
Now I only use Chrome when I'm shopping because that's the only thing it's good for.
Firefox's desktop market share is the lowest it has ever been, and its mobile share is zero-point-smithereens. not to be a party pooper but google and chromium's monopolistic hold is only growing stronger.
Librewolf works just fine, out of the box.
You're being downvoted by clueless people.
Stopped using librewolf as updating it was a really cumbersome and also it being downstream from firefox meant it received all the security patches and updates later. I have been using arkenfox user.js as my primary with a regular profile in cases where arkenfox breaks the website.
Even tho I somtimes don't care about floss I enjoy firefox it's customizable
Exactly, so you have Firefox, Floorp, LibreWolf and even Waterfox. Just pick one.
Waterfox gang.
I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.
I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they've received show that there is real demand for an alternative.
But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.
There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.
I'm probably wrong, but isn't the Mozilla License non-permissive? It's likely more complicated than that. Non-permissive*
Agreed, it's licensed under the MPL, a "weak copyleft" license. Each file that is MPL must remain MPL, but other files in the same project can be permissive or even proprietary.
While I definitely think it's better than a fully permissive license, it seems more permissive than the LGPL, which is the main license of WebKit and Blink. So I don't feel it's strong enough to stop it being co-opted.
GPL is not good enough, a new browser meant to thwart Google should have a strict anti-corporate anti-commercial license, even if it doesn't fall under the umbrella of open source.
If you don't believe me, please consult proprietary vendor android distributions.
Good luck with that
Maybe you should make everyone sign a EULA and pay royalties
Ladybird is the best we have. At the end of the day the big part that matters is source code and the 4 freedoms
To nobody in the real world, the 4 freedoms could matter any less if they tried. That is not to say it's not important to have certain things be standardized and open source, but if you skew your perspective that much, you cannot find actual solutions: You aren't even recognizing the actual problem.
What does the article have to do with Firefox? It's not mentioned once...
even when there are 'no options', there are always options
I used to be partial to Konqueror in the past. I wish it was still actively maintained and developed.
Maybe Ladybird can step in but I am still pissed that they do all communications overe proprietary services (Discord & Microsoft GitHub) which hurts the openness of the project.
Is GNOME Web that good? I'm actually asking because I have yet to use it.
The experience varies depending what you are browsing, but for me, it is plenty good. I can use my misskey account, github/gitlab account, can watch YouTube and few other streaming services as well (although how well or if they run at all depends on what streamingservice you use). Webkit GTK has few issues with touch screen devices, like backspace key of on-screen keyboard not working properly or stylus not working properly etc. Also, the PDF view feels a bit janky.
Got it. I'll take that into consideration once I try it out. Especially since I view PDF files on my browser a lot.
I've been using Waterfox for quite a while now, very few complaints. Still the same Mozilla Gecko engine, but still not completely controlled by Mozilla yet.
Mozilla == Democrats
Google == Republicans
{qt,gtk}webkit, netsurf, ladybird, textmode browsers == The actual way forwards
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk on US Politics
No, webkit is for all those anarchist, anti-establishment people. On a serious note, Gnome Web (Epiphany) is pretty amazing. Other than a few stuff like, Netflix not working (thanks W3C for giving us DRM /s. Also, google and widevine are the worst thing in tech) I have not yet found any particular issue. A very limited number of firefox extensions also work on it.
The Nyxt browser -- webkit as rendering engine, extensible by Common Lisp -- was making good progress, though its progress slowed down considerably lately; and there are a few 'showstoppers' preventing everyday usage, at least for me.
Americans, unable to understand anything if they cannot delineate it in white vs black.
This just got spicy
I guess I'll stick with... Google?