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
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.
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
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.
Yup. I’ve been using Firefox for 16 years and I just switched to LibreWolf the other day.
I am sticking with Firefox but looking at hardening with https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox
I tested this some time ago and it benchmarked slightly better than default Firefox but also broke multiple sites
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
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.
For real. People can’t stop sucking Metas dick, despite them facilitating actual genocides, eroding our society and using your socil life as a means of profit, but god forbid the maintainer of a project is not nice enough
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)
That asterisk is a problem though, having to go through and make it secure is an issue. What if you miss a setting? What if you misunderstand a setting? None of it is particularly upfront and easy. It doesn’t ask you when you first install it to set this stuff up, it encourages you to just get stuck in and start using it straight away.
It’s not too complicated for a nerd whose hobby is computers or someone who has studied computers, but for the layperson it’s too much.
That’s why Librewolf is so good. It’s secure by default, with all the settings toggled to privacy and you can ease that off if you wish, for convenience or whatever.
Firefox essentially can’t seem to decide if they want to be FOSS or capitalist, that’s an issue.
The other fun part is when it updates and changes your privacy settings.
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.
Left them 4 years ago (after 20ish years), so…
