Firefox is my web browser of choice. It does a lot of things right. In particular, with the uBlock Origin add-on, it’s got the best ad blocking you can get on desktop and Android. Firefox is run by…
  • self ( self@awful.systems ) English
    46·
    11 months ago

    if you’re here to recommend ladybird, tell us why you’re doing advocacy for that trash fire in spite of the well-sourced, ah, downsides pointed out in article and video linked from the OP.

    same for brave. I don’t give a fuck if privacyguides told you it was the goodest browser.

    if you’re here to advocate for ladybird or brave and haven’t read the article in the OP, fuck off. don’t come here pretending to discuss something you haven’t read.

  • BlueMonday1984 ( BlueMonday1984@awful.systems ) English
    38·
    11 months ago

    you_were_the_chosen_one.gif

    I jumped ship to Librewolf a year and a half ago (after seeing Mozilla steal people’s data and sell it to advertisers), and I’m pretty fucking thankful for that. For anyone looking to leave Mozilla to rot, I highly recommend it.

    • self ( self@awful.systems ) English
      11·
      11 months ago

      how are the defaults for librewolf? I’m considering switching but I’m hearing mixed things about the defaults occasionally breaking sites. waterfox seems pretty good too, but I don’t see it packaged as frequently as librewolf.

      • blakestacey ( blakestacey@awful.systems ) English
        12·
        11 months ago

        My only difficulty with LibreWolf on Ubuntu was getting it to be the default browser (it didn’t show up in the list of options). Turns out xdg-settings set default-web-browser librewolf.desktop on the command line did the trick.

      • ebu ( ebu@awful.systems ) English
        12·
        11 months ago

        i’ll go against the grain here: Librewolfs’s defaults are firmly “meh” for me. still an improvement over the “what the fuck” that’s happening in Firefox.

        pros: nixs the annoying Pocket / AI / “suggested” nonsense by default. no annoying extras.

        neutrals: Firefox Sync is off, but one click and a restart to turn back on. reasonable for a non-Mozilla project. no cookies saved by default might be annoying for some, but you can add exceptions right from the URL bar and i only have a dozen or so of those set for various sites. gods, cohost is still in that list…

        cons: ResistFingerprinting is IMHO way overkill and breaks nice things like automatic dark modes just for preserving privacy in the 0.001% of cases where browser fingerprinting matters. same as WebGL being off by default – i just don’t need that kind of protection

        i still recommend it. Disable ResistFingerprinting, enable WebGL, enable Firefox Sync, and decide for yourself if you want auto-clearing cookies or not. i also always enable vertical tabs because my horizontal space is a lot less constricted than my vertical. (it’s a FF feature!)

        • ken ( ken@discuss.tchncs.de ) Banned from communityEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          If you are on Linux I think you will find interest in Konform Browser, which started as a fork of LibreWolf addressing some of your pains. Am dev so please allow me to shill for a bit.

          Specifically to your comment:

          ResistFingerprinting is IMHO way overkill and breaks nice things like automatic dark modes just for preserving privacy in the 0.001% of cases where browser fingerprinting matters

          Konform can respect user theming preferences and dark mode even under Private Mode / RFP.

          Firefox Sync,

          While Konform still keeps it off by default, it allows configuring endpoints for a self-hosted or third-party Sync server from the Preferences without having to dive into about:config.

          Besides that, it goes even further than LW in disabling built-in remote connections, snoopware, and AI integrations.

          I hope you might consider it <3

          fedi thread

      • L3ft_F13ld! ( reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
        11·
        11 months ago

        The defaults are pretty strict, but most of the page-breaking stuff can be changed in the LibreWolf settings and each one has a description which usually contains a link to a wiki article detailing why you’d want to change it or think twice before changing it.

      • Artaca ( Artaca@lemdro.id ) English
        3·
        11 months ago

        started switching and testing options last week. Librewolf’s default are awful, but undoing that has been better than having to look at the ugly Waterfox logo, in my opinion. If the logo is a non issue for you, WF had better default settings. I’m overly particular

  • David Gerard ( dgerard@awful.systems ) OPEnglish
    18·
    11 months ago

    from the youtube browser comments, “Ladybird is our last hope” seems to be the new standard promotional cut’n’paste phrase

    last hope for what, you might ask? well the true anti-woke browser, which is much more important than actually, say, working.

    presumably brave is too SJW for these guys, as well as basically working insofar as it’s just a chrome reskin

    they want the TRUE GLORIOVS FVTVRE that only a nonexistent thing that doesn’t fucking work, and won’t cos the lead bozo is vibe coding it, can offer.

    in fashtech, promises of future glory always beat present day actually fucking working

  • AllNewTypeFace ( AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space ) Banned from communityEnglish
    17·
    11 months ago

    Presumably, if Firefox version N breaks ad-blocking, someone can make a hard fork of version N-1. Security patches, upgrades to OS support and things like new CSS/HTML features can be cherry-picked or reimplemented to it, though Firefox updates in general will not be admitted, as it’s a hard fork (in the way that LibreOffice or MariaDB is). At worst, Firefox will actively make it hard to do this, closing their source or changing their licence to one which prohibits it, requiring any updates to be reimplemented clean-room style, which will slow things down, though if the alternative is actively enshittified, it’s the least-bad option.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn ( sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems ) English
      13·
      11 months ago

      The good news is it generally isn’t necessary to reverse engineer browser behavior when writing a browser. Since it’s mostly fairly standardized, there’s a decent test suite, and the major browsers are all open source.

      Though this comes with some caveats:

      • There are exceptions like the CSS viewport spec which was reverse engineered from an iphone.
      • There are a lot of specifications because browsers have been around for decades and Chromium keeps implementing stuff, and it can be hard to find enough programmers to write all of them / catch up from a fresh start
      • This is a somewhat unstable situation; if we lose even a single major browser engine it’s easy to imagine Chrome maybe not bothering with standardization and just telling people to read the blog posts and code.
      • Web pages will do nonsense like break themselves if you provide a User-Agent string they don’t like. Mozilla has an ongoing compatibility effort where they sometimes have to override the UA string for specific pages. So less popular browsers are already playing from a disadvantageous position.
  • Seminar2250 ( Seminar2250@awful.systems ) English
    13·
    11 months ago

    I used Firefox for largely political reasons (summarized as “Google needs a competitor”), but it was becoming harder and harder to justify. Eventually, I just switched to a Chromium-based browser. I will say that, as an almost-good-enough solution until I wake up from this nightmare to a functioning Servo (🙏🙏🙏) , DNS level ad blocking (using Mullvad’s DNS servers) + uBlock Origin Lite (filtering mode set to “complete”) has been sufficient for me. It even blocks Spotify ads. I think it blocks YouTube ads as well, although I barely watch YouTube on my browser.

    Ungoogled Chromium supports MV2 extensions and seems like a good choice if Firefox becomes unusable or you get fed up. I use Trivalent, a security hardened Chromium-based browser, but it may be tough to install if you aren’t on Secureblue. Also it only supports MV3 extensions.

    this shit is so fucking frustrating, just leave our browsers alone. we want security updates, not an unethically sourced bullshit-and-vulnerability-generator stapled onto the biggest attack surface on our fucking machine

    • sc_griffith ( sc_griffith@awful.systems ) English
      11·
      11 months ago

      small typo.

      So guess what Mozilla did? When you update Firefox, tt re-enables the AI! And if you disable the AI again, it re-enables it again next update! Choose correctly, user!

      “tt” should be “it”

    • self ( self@awful.systems ) English
      21·
      11 months ago

      after a decade+ of Mozilla dropping the ball on purpose and violating user consent, thank fuck we’ve got you! somebody needed to pointlessly restate the latter half of the video while carrying water for the millionaire CEO of a nonprofit grift and I certainly as fuck would rather fucking die

  • Soyweiser ( Soyweiser@awful.systems ) English
    2·
    11 months ago

    Unrelated to the article/vid itself, thanks for making both a video, podcast, and an article. I know it is a lot of work, but I really appreciate being able to read it than having to watch a video.

    “That’s the words of a guy you need to watch your drink around.” chefs kiss.