You must log in or # to comment.
Firefox. Equally concerned as well.
Looking into Librewolf and Waterfox now!
OK! You’ve had 1 hour to check them out. :D What’s the difference between the two? They’re both Firefox forks, right?
I found a decent answer here https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/18g8tez/what_am_i_gaining_if_i_switch_from_librewolf_to/
That mod sums up a lot that I found. I don’t know the answer because they both have odd downsides.
Yes they’re both forks!
Still Firefox. Every time Mozilla does anything the entire privacy community goes insane. The terms of use they published seem entirely benign, and the only thing anyone can actually point to is the “direction being worrisome”. Well, I’ll get worried when they update the terms to be actually onerous. Everything even possibly annoying can be disabled, and it’s still the only browser engine offering competition against Chrome ruling the web.
I don’t see how you could find the terms not concerning and their removal of stating they don’t sell data
What in the terms is concerning? They still have the bulk of the language in the old data privacy guarantee as well. This seems like they just got a more circumspect legal department who wants to cover their ass.
It’s always been the case that Mozilla could decide to just make Firefox suck ass. Again, I’ll be worried when they actually change the terms to something unacceptable.
While I’m not sure dropping Firefox is necessary at this juncture, I’ve had a good experience using LibreFox. Hearing a lot about Zen, though.
Check out Mozilla’s clarification: https://www.ghacks.net/2025/02/27/mozillas-new-terms-of-use-causes-confusion-among-firefox-users/
I think this diff makes it pretty clear its time to run, not walk: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114078708183574404
Recent news about Firefox finally got me to go with LibreWolf.
I love Librewolf for PC
and Mull for Android.Edit: Apparently Mull has been abandoned. See below for alternate.
Mull development has been abandoned. You might want to switch to IronFox, the community’s fork to continue its legacy.
Thanks for the info!
I’m a Firefox user and I’m not really that bothered about this tos changes. If they do mess things up I’ll probably just switch to some fork that doesn’t do the fuckery.
Wouldn’t be surprised if Mint packages Firefox with it (whatever “it” is) disabled, since they build Thunderbird without telemetry.
Practical response.
There was some sort of bullshit going on in like 2003 with Internet Explorer so my dad switched us to Firefox, I’ve been on it since. Never felt the need to go to Chrome when it cane around.
Zen, absolutely love the workflow and the fact that it is not chromium based.
Waiting excitedly for ladybird, it is already very impressive but still years left until it is daily drive able
Basically a firefox skin, although they have a VPN as a sponsor, did somebody did a thorough check on that browser?
I like zen a lot but I’m struggling to drag a tab from one window to another. The sidebar always collapses on the target window before the tab gets there. Any tips?
Perhaps right click on the sidebar -> disable compact mode? I haven’t had any issues moving tabs between windows, but then again I keep the sidebar persistent
A related conversation can be found here: https://lemmy.ml/post/26534979
Thanks
Firefox. And Thunderbird. And donate to Mozilla.
Don’t really see the point in using a fork that, by the time you boil it down, just takes Firefox’s work and then releases it later.
I want a Google and Apple alternative and I’d rather support it at the top of the chain.
I use Mullvad Browser. It’s maintained in coordination with the Tor Project, and is essentially the Tor Browser with Tor itself stripped out. Same browser fingerprinting protections, however, among other things.
EDIT: I’d like to clarify that this has nothing to do with my trust in Mozilla or Firefox itself, especially not concerning recent panics about benign changes. I still use Firefox on the side, it just does not have fingerprinting protections by default, and hardening it manually leads to minor differences between user configurations (even with Arkenfox if that’s still around) that is solved by Mullvad Browser for me. I use Mullvad Browser for my main browsing, and Firefox for specific exceptions. Firefox itself is fine, and no, Mozilla is not burning it to the ground.
This is my lead contender now that Firefox is shitting the bed. Any downsides?
Well, the hardening, just as with Tor Browser, does break some sites. It comes preinstalled with NoScript and uBlock Origin, the former of which you will either have to learn how to use or disable, depending on your wants for privacy. While it doesn’t include some of the anti-features of base Firefox, it is still based on Firefox so it will have similar performance for similar tasks.
Personally, I use Mullvad for most of my browsing, and Firefox for a few specific things (like staying logged into site long-term and such).
It’s available as a flatpak via Flathub for an easy installation, otherwise you can check https://mullvad.net/en/browser/linux for distro-specific installation instructions.
Mull browser is deprecated, Ironfox is the community fork
Zen for regular activities (I pin all important services), Firefox for browsing for something else.
GNU IceCat is also amazing as concept, but generally unusable since it ends up blocking too much and manually allowing everything is a hassle. But still, the pages that work are clean, and I love that by default the browser doesn’t do anything without your permission - it doesn’t even connect to update and telemetry services, it has 0 connections on startup, unlike almost anything (qutebrowser does the same, but, unless you are a strong Vim fanboy, you won’t like the experience).
librewolf for a while now. can reccomend 👍🏿
I use Firefox. I don’t like the changes but I don’t want to use any downstream browsers and I don’t think any of the not-downstream alternatives do better.
They are better in most of the case, Firefox only is not that good…
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t really see how they can be better beyond philosophical reasons.
I guess bringing back stuff like the proper dropdown menu we had in the 2000s would be an example, but I don’t expect most of them to do something like that.
I expect most of them to have some kind of gimmick that isn’t relevant to how I use a web browser.
Privacy, simply better, better anti-fingerprinting. Sure you can do it with stock Firefox but it’s just simpler to have a pre-hardened browser
What privacy and fingerprinting concerns are there with Firefox?
simply better
Lol. That’s not a reason, ya goof.
Explore the Arkenfox user.js and you’ll see all things that can be improved in Firefox
I’m good.
I just don’t care for downstream projects on browsers, with software so critical I want to get the updates in as fast as possible. I know some of those mentioned in OP had issues with that in the past. And not much reason to anyway for me to switch, Firefox works perfectly fine for me, so there’s not much added benefit.
Understand your point of view but in fact the 2 problems you mentioned are mainly not problems :
1 - Updates? The main downstream browsers received updates the same time as Firefox the same day and sometime the same hour
2 - Benefits? The benefits are mainly under the hood, removing Mozilla telemetry and annoying features (account, pocket…) AND the biggest advantages are the gain in term of privacy due the increase of anti fingerprinting methods
Updates? The main downstream browsers received updates the same time as Firefox the same day and sometime the same hour
I’m not sure if something has changed, but due to changes they’ve made, at least before they couldn’t ship out the updates until they made it so that the updates actually affect their changed codebase. Which understandably causes delays. So there’d always be this delay with something being fixed on Firefox and then being fixed on the downstream projects.
Surely there will be some delay but not that much, for most updates the fixes are transplanted directly to the downstream project making the patches coming very fast, almost as fast as the original project
I’ve just soured on them from when there has been issues. Some security patches took a while because of the changed codebase. Good if that doesn’t happen anymore though.
Should retry it and make your own decision
I use Floorp, it’s balanced well between looks and privacy, you can’t even enable data collection if you wanted to
Apparently, Floorp is another Firefox fork. Has anyone tried this?
I use Floorp as my main browser! I like it, it’s very customisable and kind of weirdly Japanese lol
How so?
Assuming you mean the “weirdly Japanese” part - it’s hard to say exactly, but it’s made by a small team in Japan and just a kind of vaguely Japanese vibe to it somehow. Sorry I know that’s not very helpful lol
Haha, I’ve tried it out but haven’t noticed any Japanese feelings to it. Would like to know if you later put words to it :)
