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.
Isn’t the only reason firefox gets google ad money is because google is afraid they would slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit? Firefox getting money from google doesn’t seem like a valid criticism.
I believe it is because Google is the default search engine in Firefox.
It is, but I’m pretty sure they have to give all users the choice now in the EU, when you launch first time.
I think it’s the other way around, Android has to ask you what you want your default browser (and search engine?) to be, but if you choose Firefox, it will still have Google as its default search engine.
Firefox’s marketshare isn’t big enough to count as a gatekeeper, I don’t think.
I’m not in the EU, but I have Firefox set as my default browser on Android and it works fine.
Ah yes, maybe you are right.
Come to think of it, I only saw this on Safari, Android and Edge, and they are all gatekeepers.
That’s exactly the reason.
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.
it actually WAS really good when it first came out and for a few years, it was also back during the days where google still kind of follows the “don’t be evil” principle.
Yeah there’s a good reason we all started to use it, unlike Firefox it was far far quicker to boot up and load pages. And used significantly less resources, so there was really little upside to using Firefox apart from a few addons not being available for a while.
Yup, I used it for a year or two, then I found Opera, which was about as fast and also had an independent rendering engine. Around that time, the independence of the rendering engine really mattered to me, so when Opera switched to a Chromium base, I switched back to Firefox. Firefox has since caught up in perf and is the best non-Chromium browser for me (well, I use Mull on Android because FF isn’t on F-Droid and has some defaults I prefer to Fennec).
I have very strong doubts about the security of Palemoon
Today I am not certain I would use it, but at the time I wasn’t concerned.
Why?
It is based on a old version of Firefox but I don’t see evidence of them back porting security fixes
Ah man, shucks.
Chrome was so lightweight and fast when it was launched. And it had a blazing fast Javascript engine. No other engine came close to it.
It was a pretty awesome browser back then during the “do no evil” era of Google.
Sure, I get what you are saying, but I never had an issue with Firefox and Javascript.
Oh, I understand. I’m just saying that the reasons were enough for a lot of people to give it a go, me included. You probably had a beefed up machine back then in 2008. I didn’t, and launching a browser took several seconds, whereas Chrome launched like in one second or so.
Of course, Chrome started to suck and I came back to Firefox, especially when they caught up with Javascript.
I think it had more to do with the webites I visited, and being used to slower connections
Got it.
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.
Not true.
Navigator died a horrible death, and Phoenix (later Firefox), being a fork of it, survived just fine.
Building a browser was a hugely different (and waaaay smaller) job back then.
But let me know when Servo or Ladybird are viable. Until then, don’t burn any bridges.
My point is that none of those forks have to start from scratch if Firefox disappears. One of them will replace it.
As long as a browser is good enough for browsing the net, I’m okay with it.
I don’t need, for example, DRM. If half of the web uses it, then fuck it. The other half is still hundreds of millions of web pages for me to consume.
They won’t have to start from scratch, but they’ll fall behind on webcompatibility and security patches in no time.
I think you’re assuming too much.
If Firefox disappears overnight, do you think the devs working for it are just going to sit down and twiddle their thumbs? They’ll pick another project and carry on.
There are several examples of this happening. MySQL vs MariaDB, OpenSSL, PDF viewers, hell, even Linux can be included here too.
The issue at hand is not Firefox disappearing overnight. It’s the slow decline of the userbase continuing until the ones that do don’t bring in enough money to keep paying enough developers.
And no, the devs aren’t going to twiddle their thumbs - they’re going to take jobs elsewhere. Firefox is still mainly dependent on paid labour.
People could try to start a new company (hopefully another non-profit), but it’ll face the same challenges. I hope it would be successful, but I sure as hell won’t be counting on it and actively contributing to the demise.
Honestly it’s more that Lemmy as a whole is just a big group of curmudgeons. Most discussions on here veer strongly negative, not limited to Firefox.
That was after the reddit migration. Lemmy was much better before the reddit doom-and-gloom gang made themselves home.
I don’t see what’s relevant about your argument. Whether they came from Reddit is irrelevant, they’re here now and this is how they behave.
It was not an argument. Just an observation. And your opinion doesn’t make it less relevant.
As the matter of fact, both can co-exist.
Reddit fucked up Lemmy, and now that they’re here, welp, it’s bullshit.
Reddit didn’t do anything to Lemmy, people came to lemmy.
I want there to be a competitive market so that Firefox gets better. Without good competition it will continue to rot.
I don’t understand the premise of this statement. Do you think Firefox doesn’t have competition in the browser space?
It only has Chromium which somehow is worse than Firefox. We need something that supports all the same features as Firefox but isn’t a fork
Are you talking about the rendering engine? Safari still uses WebKit. Everything else was killed off by chrome. No one wanted to make addons for Internet Explorer, so they switched to Chromium as well.
It would be extremely difficult to put something new into the market at this point. If even Microsoft lacked the resources, it’s hard to imagine anyone succeeding IMO.
That’s certainly what I mean, but I can’t speak for anyone else. I used Opera for years until they switched to being a Chromium-based browser, and Safari isn’t an option on Windows or Linux, so I use Firefox. It’s really not any more complicated than that.
We will watch Ladybug with great interest
True, I forgot that is happening. Hopefully it makes a big splash. It’ll be interesting to see how they handle add-ons. I doubt that a modern browser can succeed without it. From my understanding, there may not be any interoperability with existing browser extensions.
It doesn’t have competition in terms of a “private browser”. As far as I can see there is only Brave, and Ungoogled Chromium which is soon to be an unviable option because of the switch to Manifest V3 for Chromium.
There are of course browsers like Mullvad Browser, GNU Icecat and Librewolf etc. but they are all based on Firefox, so I wouldn’t really count them.
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
There’s still WebKit, which doesn’t suck anymore! (At least from my end-user standpoint)
At least for mobile—I cannot attest to the desktop version.
Which webkit based browser are you talking about?
I suppose anything on the iPhone cuz it’s all WebKit under the hood hahahah
Because iphones are good for privacy…
web kit doesn’t suck
I wouldn’t go that far. Gnome web is coming along but it has a ways to go
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.Yeah IMO there is nothing in vanilla Firefox to complain about that you can’t disable easily from the settings. You only need librewolf or the arkenfox user.js if you’re a privacy nut.
“Privacy nut” might be a little harsh, as it’s a valid concern.
I don’t mean it as a derogative, but there’s a certain point at which you have to either go whole hog on minimizing your digital footprint, or accept that some companies are gonna know more about you than you would maybe prefer. I think the Firefox defaults are much less onerous than, say, signing up for a loyalty program with any major retailer, and you can disable the few things that do any tracking.
Agreed, Firefox is better than most. I’m using it myself on both mobile, Windows and Debian.
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I found that some websites just don’t work in mull, so it’s a tough sell to anyone who isn’t big on privacy
I just said I don’t care about privacy hardening though lol
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?
They provide official deb and rpm builds for linux, which get updated in the usual ways. I don’t know about windows but the website says:
you can choose to install the LibreWolf WinUpdater, which is included in the installer.
The LibreWolf WinUpdater works great. You get a small pop-up when there’s an update and it updates super quickly (in my experience in like 15 seconds).
Librewolf is also available as a Flatpak
Looks like it’s available in the Windows Package Manager Community Repository, so you can update it via
winget update LibreWolf.LibreWolfor keep it up to date using the Winget-AutoUpdate tool.
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.
They didn’t really hide it, they just didn’t advertise it. It was in the release notes, hence why the media picked up on it. And on release, there was a checkbox in the normal settings to opt-out, so it’s honestly not that bad.
FakeSpot
That’s an opt-in extension, it’s not part of the core browser. I honestly don’t know much about it, and their privacy policy isn’t appealing, so I won’t use it. If it becomes part of Firefox by default, I’ll disable it.
In what universe are advertisers going to use this instead of, not in addition to, other telemetry?
What telemetry is this providing? AFAIK, Mozilla isn’t providing any kind of personalized info, it’s merely aggregated data.
And the reason they’d pick this is to get access to privacy-minded people who would otherwise block their ads, but may choose to exempt these ads. Mozilla has some anti-tracking features, and there’s a significant subset of Firefox users that block ads out of principle of avoiding tracking. If websites want to get some of that advertising revenue, they’ll comply. That benefits all Firefox users, because some sites may choose to use this method of targeted ads, which still provides the site with ad revenue without providing the advertisers with details on their customers.
That’s the idea here. It’s not going to happen on day 1, but having the capability means Mozilla can pilot it and see if websites are interested. And it’s possible Mozilla’s ads are more relevant because they have access to browsing history, not just whatever advertisers were able to figure out from their network of ads.
They didn’t really hide it, they just didn’t advertise it. It was in the release notes
Which the average person doesn’t read. That’s how you hide it.
They hit it worse than Google. You know, Google. The advertising company, Google.
They hit it worse than Brave.
And on release, there was a checkbox in the normal settings to opt-out, so it’s honestly not that bad.
That checkbox should have been unchecked and not given a label that hides the true intent of the data gathering. The same way Google (as previously mentioned) also wraps their extra data gathering in the label of “privacy.”
The terrible rollout, and the terrible corporate response, should be enough to give any person pause about trusting Mozilla. And in slurping up private telemetry, that is what Mozilla Corp requires from you: even more trust.
When a company goes behind your back, gets caught, and then tells you to trust them, do you trust them?
AFAIK, Mozilla isn’t providing any kind of personalized info, it’s merely aggregated data.
That’s the sneaky part about Mozilla’s careful marketing scheme. They collect data that is personal, they just pinky promise that they won’t release anything but aggregate data once they’ve finished slicing and dicing this private data.
FakeSpot
That’s an opt-in extension, it’s not part of the core browser.
I’m talking about the corporate subsidiary that sells private data directly to advertisers. It sells browsing and search history. It is part of Mozilla, and I see very little separating its privacy practices from everything people unknowingly pipe into Mozilla servers through Firefox.
And the reason they’d pick this is to get access to privacy-minded people who would otherwise block their ads, but may choose to exempt these ads.
Again, if advertisers can already reach privacy-minded people without using Mozilla Corp as an intermediary, why wouldn’t they do that and reach 100% of people? In what universe does a browser with a dwindling user base encourage anybody to use their proprietary tracking solution?
Here’s a chart.
Technology PPA Topics Using different links Corporate creator Facebook Google none Needs you to trust 3rd party? Yes (Mozilla) Yes (Google) No ~% browsers it works on <3% >60% 100% Guaranteed privacy increase? No No No If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don’t trust the advertiser, why would you trust them to partner with a data slurping company?
not given a label that hides the true intent of the data gathering
I think it’s pretty clear, the checkbox reads: “Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.” There’s also a link that explains what that means.
The real issue is that there should’ve been an advertisement that the option exists. I found it by reading release notes (I’m a nerd and am interested), but as you said, a lot of people don’t read those. However, the impact here is also pretty low, since AFAIK companies aren’t actually using this ATM, and generally speaking the data should stay with Mozilla. The official doc says:
A small number of sites are going to test this and provide feedback to inform our standardization plans, and help us understand if this is likely to gain traction.
I disagree that it should’ve been unchecked, because that completely kills the whole point of this pilot program. Perhaps it should only be there for people who have allow being part of surveys.
When a company goes behind your back, gets caught, and then tells you to trust them, do you trust them?
I don’t think they’ve done that. I don’t think there was anything malicious here, they just didn’t think it was relevant to inform all users about, probably because only a handful of sites are using it.
So they haven’t lost my trust. I was much more frustrated with their Pocket rollout than this, because Pocket really felt like it should’ve been a separate, opt-in service.
I will agree that Mozilla has made some questionable choices in the past, but this one doesn’t really stand out to me. Maybe I trust them too much when they say no personalized data leaves my machine (but I have yet to see any evidence that it does).
It sells browsing and search history
But only if you use the extension. Mozilla doesn’t collect that data w/o the extension being installed. If I opt-in (or not opt-out) to the PPA feature, that data will not go to that subsidiary, nor will it be associated with me in any way if it’s ever provided to third parties. At least that’s my understanding.
If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don’t trust the advertiser, why would you trust them to partner with a data slurping company?
Mozilla isn’t an advertiser. Google and Brave are. So Mozilla is far more likely to limit what access to data advertisers have, so I’ll trust them way more than Brave or Google.
Instead of removing it, I think Mozilla should expose some tools so ad-blockers can optionally allow privacy-respecting ads with some metadata (maybe that exists?).
I think it’s pretty clear, the checkbox reads: “Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.”
Nowhere does this explicitly state that Mozilla receives non-anonymous information from the user. If anything, they do their damnedest to obfuscate this fact.
But yes, I am shocked that they did not notify their users, and I am even more shocked that they use the excuse of being too confusing, especially after the collection of pop-ups I have found them display on far more trivial things in the past.
It sells browsing and search history
But only if you use the extension. Mozilla doesn’t collect that data w/o the extension being installed. If I opt-in (or not opt-out) to the PPA feature, that data will not go to that subsidiary, nor will it be associated with me in any way
Mozilla FakeSpot is Mozilla. Their privacy policy specifically states that data can be transferred to their parent company, and it also states that data is sold to advertisers. On the other side, Mozilla’s privacy policy says that “Firefox temporarily sends Mozilla your IP address, which we use to suggest content based on your country, state, and city. Mozilla may [read: will] share location information with our partners”…
I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t even know if Mozilla considers Mozilla FakeSpot to even be a partner or just a core component of the company.
Mozilla isn’t an advertiser. Google and Brave are.
Mozilla now owns a subsidiary that sells geolocation and browsing history information to advertisement companies. Mozilla now owns a subsidiary that processes advertisements. Mozilla’s Firefox browser now contains a data aggregation and reporting utility that’s turned on by default.
If that’s not an ad company, what is? Brave is one too.
I don’t even know if Mozilla considers Mozilla FakeSpot to even be a partner or just a core component of the company.
I think it’s irrelevant provided the only data FakeSpot sends to advertisers comes from data it collects on its own, and not from data Mozilla has collected from other sources (e.g. PPA). Those should always be separate.
Brave is one too.
Well yeah, they have their own search engine, and they place ads on webpages, so they’re absolutely an ad company, since that’s their core revenue stream.
With Mozilla, it’s a bit trickier because they don’t directly place ads, and the PPA feature is still in an evaluation phase. Pocket is certainly an ad-based product, and Fakespot definitely seems like one, so I guess there’s an argument there? But the vast majority of Mozilla’s money comes from Google for search. Is that advertising revenue? Kind of?
Mozilla is a weird company. I’d rather them be an independent, privacy-focused ad company instead of reliant on search deals, provided they can handle ads in a privacy-friendly way. I’d prefer them to offer a replacement for ads, where users could pay whatever the ads are earning for the website instead of seeing the ads, and I see this as a step toward that. If Mozilla controls the data collection and potentially ad selection, they could also theoretically offer customers a way to pay to drop that nonsense. That’s my horse in this race.
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.
Use an extension to spoof your useragent, and it will probably load just fine
If it works intermittently like that it’s probably just crap code, and it will be crap in any browser.
No, it’s not intermittent; it’s useragent specific. There are a lot of websites that will work fine in Chrome or Edge, won’t work properly in Firefox, but will work properly in Firefox when you lie and say you’re running Chrome
That should be illegal. And punished with public flogging of the persons responsible.
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.
So what you’re saying is, you’re not the target audience for the article.
Sure, but the article author is quite likely not the target audience for Firefox.
Sure, but the article author is quite likely not the target audience for Firefox.
I don’t follow the relevance of that statement.
“People focus WAY TOO MUCH on space rockets! I don’t care about them that much!”
“Ok, that means the article is not for you.”
“Sure, but the article author is not the target audience for space rockets.”
Okay?
I mean is it so difficult to understand? That’s not meant in an insulting way, but maybe I’m considering the point to be more obvious than it is depending on perspective (so the problem is me, I mean).
Ultimately, this always comes up, and then there’s so many related points. “Firefox keeps being made worse”, “Wow look how Chrome owns everything and Google forces it down everyone’s throat”, “Look how MS pushes Edge”, and they all have in common that they seemingly misunderstand how people - excluding a niche like those over here - utilize their web browser.
That is, they don’t. Do you honestly think about the brand and the specifics of your hammer every time you hammer in a nail? You don’t. It has a specific used: To hammer in a nail. Does it do that? Cool! Is it perfect? You don’t actually notice, because your mind was on putting in a nail, not admiring the hammer, customizing it, or complaining about how the serial number is written the wrong way. Not only do these problems never cross your mind, evaluating the problem presence never crosses your mind: You could not realize the problem in the first place, as your context for the action never establishes a perspective where the hammer in itself could even have problems of its own.
Or to loop it back around to browsers: A browser is not a concept that most users actively create in their mind. In particular not when browsing to web pages. They tap that icon, but only because it is the action needed to create the outcome. All further points are not only irrelevant, they’re not points in the first place. They cannot be. The context does not have space for points about the browser.
And it’s this inability to grasp the not only invisibility but also sheer mental inexistance of browsers as a category of software in most users that very many hardcore users and privacy nuts seemingly struggle with. Which makes sense. We cannot not think about it. But likewise, everyone else cannot think about it. And that second group is orders of magnitude bigger. And they use whatever their system ships with, because that’s how their phone or laptop, well, works. Sometimes you buy a device where the icon for accessing web content is different. Yeah. Doesn’t matter, tap it or click it.
That’s not me selling users for stupid, either, another sentiment I see a lot. They are trying to put in a nail, and their actual problem is locked behind that. They are trying to solve a problem, and their brain has neither space for points about their browser, not for points about the concept of a browser as a whole. Because what they need that tool for is in itself just a secondary step in trying to solve an actual problem. Say, looking up whether it was 300g or 500g of flour for the recipe they’re half-remembering.
Everything you said, I’ve already known. Most people don’t care about their browsers/ad-ridden smart TVs (yuck), spying phones, etc, etc.
But the article posted here is not for them. It’s for the people who care.
And that’s all I’m saying. You pretty much said at the beginning “Who cares?” for which I replied “Well, clearly not you, but other people do care.”
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.
For Firefox forks, it’s viable since the forks aren’t doing all that much in the grand scheme of things. That isn’t to say what they’re doing is in any way bad, it’s just that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
Firefox is a secure browser and already has 99% of the work done. Most changes which forks make can be done just by changing the config. Some unfortunately have to be made seperately, and that does require extensive testing. Some can even be lifted from other open-source projects.
Separating from source just isn’t viable. Something nuclear would need to happen for any fork to decide to seperate from Firefox. If we just look at the Chromium side of things, Microsoft found it easier to switch to Chromium than to keep making IE/Edge from scratch, and Microsoft surely has a lot of resources to burn.
Firefox is a secure browser and already has 99% of the work done. Most changes which forks make can be done just by changing the config. Some unfortunately have to be made seperately, and that does require extensive testing. Some can even be lifted from other open-source projects
This is also true for Google’s Chrome
As far as I know Google doesn’t let some pretty basic stuff from Crome into Chromium, for example translation (might even go as far as the inbuilt password manager). Potential forks either lose those features or have to implement them seperately.
Now that Manifest v3 is rolling out, apparently Google is able to somehow block the change from being easily reverted which is additional developmental load (or just show ads). Manifest v3 won’t impact Brave too much since it only applies to extensions, while their adblocking is baked-in, but it’s worse than uBO.
Firefox is fully open-source and doesn’t artificially make enabling adblock an issue which might attract more simpler forks (as opposed to Opera, Brave and Edge having companies backing them, Firefox forks mostly have volunteer developers or open source collectives making them).
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.
I couldn’t help, so let me ask What about firefox stops you from using it for online shopping?
For shopping? That can also be done via Firefox.
I don’t want to use Firefox for shopping.
Why not? I’ve never heard of anyone that uses a different browser to shop online.
If Google wants to specialize in being a shopping mall with ads, then I am more than happy to use it as such. I don’t run ad blockers as I am fine with ads when I’m specifically trying to shop.
Aside from that, I just prefer to not connect my daily driver browser to accounts that I use where privacy isn’t a concern for me.
Recently, Mozilla rolled out a shopping checking extension that only works on big monopolies like Walmart and Amazon, and has been criticized by small businesses for being unfair against their products.
The Mozilla subsidiary behind this, FakeSpot, also sells private user data to advertiser companies.
So I can definitely understand why you might run away from a company that’s not honest about promoting an open and free web when it’s pushing the monopolies with their tools.
That’s definitely a reason hmm
I don’t owe anyone a reason for my preferences.
I see, it’s because of potential trackers and cookies. So if you use another browser it’s less likely those companies can track you. (despite you have the same IP address). I’m just saying, if you do give your reason, we might can provide a better solution here. Like maybe a VPN.
I already run a VPN. Some of my computers use it, some don’t. I don’t really use the Internet on a couple of them.
I also run a mix of Linux and Windows machines. It all depends on my intention for that machine.
Chrome is Google for me. I don’t (usually) connect my Firefox browser to Google.
Chrome is good for shopping? I feel like if anything it would be worse as it is a data collection machine
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.
Exactly, so you have Firefox, Floorp, LibreWolf and even Waterfox. Just pick one.
Even tho I somtimes don’t care about floss I enjoy firefox it’s customizable
Waterfox gang.
What does the article have to do with Firefox? It’s not mentioned once…
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.
