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Comment by abandonliberty | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe the apologists commenting on this.

Firefox put a lot of effort into tracking download to install behavior. Maybe this is the only violation you know about. There's no reason to continue to believe in Mozilla's good faith. They've been captured, and are 90% dependent on Google revenue.

Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28954390

Firefox is dead. It's time to move past denial. It doesn't stand for anything you think it does. I'm sad, too. Time to bury the putrid, rotting corpse.

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I can. I'd still rather use Firefox than Chrome or Edge when it comes to privacy. "Firefox is dead ... Time to bury the putrid, rotting corpse" is ridiculously dramatic.

Mozilla as an org is a husk of it's former self. They're constantly playing catch up with Firefox, almost abandonwared thunderbird, and have little actual usable innovation. What part of Firefox is "open source" when you can't integrate in your own projects? What's the point when the tech is non portable? Chromium is the clear OS winner, so open and modular you can just make your own browsers.

> What part of Firefox is "open source" when you can't integrate in your own projects?

Let's not mix everything up. For a good debate we need clear ideas. Firefox can be built from sources available under open source licenses, it is sufficient to makes it open source. Being embeddable and modular may be desirable features but it isn't a requirement to be open source.

> What part of Firefox is "open source" when you can't integrate in your own projects?

AFAIK, all of it; there are even full independent forks running around. Just because you can't bend the code to your particular use doesn't make it not FOSS.

> What's the point when the tech is non portable

I know that you meant something else with this, but the wording amused me as currently Firefox is the only up-to-date "portable" browser that lets you carry around your browser profile in a usb stick.

Anything with Chromium deletes your extensions, passwords etc. whenever you open it in a new computer.

You are wrong, portable chromium exists.

https://chromium.woolyss.com/

Yes, they exist and the application is portable. It works when you open it.

But your profile is not fully portable. They have a page explaining exactly what I mean.

https://chromium.woolyss.com/#secure-preferences

What about Vivaldi or Brave?

"What about unmaintained Chrome or Chrome with ads?"

What do you mean with unmaintained Chrome?

Your post makes no sense. No idea what you are trying to say.

I like the idea of Vivaldi and honestly probably would use it, but I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for the last 7 years or so and just don't have a reason to switch.

I also think competition is good and am concerned if Blink became the only browser engine.

How about we try and fix this rather than walking away? All the alternatives are even worse.

I still often use Lynx, and eww when I am in Emacs.

NetSurf GTK and w3m are still on the list for me

Useless alternatives. you might as well suggest we use gopher. frankly they'd be better as gopher browsers.

Somebody's never been on low-end systems or stuck without a working video driver and can be happy most wikis work through TUI

Ok then how do you plan to fix this? The only outside entity who has any say what direction Mozilla takes Firefox in is the one paying them: Google.

What're the alternatives to Firefox? The only ones that come to mind are Opera and Brave, and Brave had some controversy too.

What is controversial about Brave? Seems like the best alternative at the moment IMHO

One of many controversies: https://www.techworm.net/2020/06/brave-browser-cryptocurrenc...

Some folks object to the Brave Rewards system and the embedded crypto wallet.

I just disabled all of that. No Chromium browser is my main browser but when I need one, Brave seems like the best option.

If you were to pick between Brave, Vivaldi and I dunno, maybe Edge, just for when you need Chrome-compatibility and pretty much no other reason, which one would you pick and why?

Ungoogled Chromium.

Ungoogled chromium is the most google-less you can go when it comes to using chromium engine.

Honestly forgot this existed. I’ll look into it.

Vivaldi. Like Firefox, it has cross-system syncing (Windows, MacOS, Linux -- including Android & Raspberry Pi).

It is opt-in and also extremely easy to enable/disable.

It also comes with a built-in ad blocker that works really good.

It's fast and doesn't eat your CPU/RAM.

Recommended, 100%.

Disclaimer: Not a Brave shill.

Even without all the controversies, Brave is still Chrome.

Brave is still Chromium you mean. Chrome is a browser by Google. Chromium is the open-source engine.

this: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html

this: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/app/trac...

also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...

then this: https://teddit.net/r/FoamList/comments/q4z5js/brave_browser_...

They report anonymised data that can be turned off. They also connect to servers for auto updates and safe browsing checks, everything you would expect of a modern secure browser.

The people upset with brave for auto updates also consider tor browser spyware because it checks for updates LOL.

I read about librewolf the other day which is a fork of firefox.

Edit: BTW what happens if I download Firefox from site like Softpedia.All the people who downloaded Firefox from this website have same identifier?

Yes, the article mentions Mozilla's http repository[0] and some other third party as ways to download it without a unique identifier.

[0] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

I've been using librewolf for a while after experiencing issue with waterfox.

it is not really a full fork of firefox, it's firefox with a few patches applied and sane default configuration.

I see Vivaldi is good browser, operated by former opera people

I've been using Vivaldi ever since reintroduced tab stacking which I loved from the Opera days. Solid browser, no complaints.

It's closed source, right?

The UI stuff on top of Chromium is closed. They don't want it ripped off I guess. Vivaldi an awesome browser for those who like to customize.

Vivaldi is still Chrome though

Yes, I'm in Vivaldi as well. For now! We need to avoid making software/product choices part of our identity.

A true firefox fan would've raised the alarm years ago, and voted with their feet when it kept moving in the wrong direction and stopped being the best option on the market.

Loving a brand no matter what they do is suboptimal.

Lynx is the only one I trust, but it's quite limited. Everything else has my suspicion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

w3m too.

What's the lynx-but-graphical alternative?

I just want a minimal web view and input a URL. Why doesn't this exist

> What's the lynx-but-graphical alternative?

Dillo or elinks

> I just want a minimal web view and input a URL.

Surf (suckless project)

Also thanks, TIL alternatives do exist

Elinks looks like it hasn't had an update in years. There's a fork of it called Felinks [0] which seems pretty actively maintained. The last release was on December 24, 2021.

[0] https://github.com/rkd77/elinks

It does exist, it's called netsurf[0].

[0]: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

oh! Thanks

Maybe Min [0] works for you.

[0] https://minbrowser.org/

Opera was sold off to Chinese investors, and I recall stories about it offering sketchy banking/bitcoin services.

LibreWolf is one alternative.

https://librewolf.net/

https://privacytests.org/

Looks great, but their only focus is desktop it seems (ie, no android solution)

Well, to be fair if you run Android that’s another bag of privacy problems. But phones are a whole different discussion. We need more Linux phones!

Check out Mull on Android.

Nyxt,"the hacker's power-browser"?! https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/

Librefox https://github.com/intika/Librefox/

As pointed out elsewhere, this is unmaintained, and you should instead use https://librewolf.net/

Does not work with 1password for me. Seems I'm not the only one: https://www.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/comments/qom9br/1password...

Careful, Opera is owned by a Chinese company that is controlled by the CCP.

What you want is Vivaldi.

waterfox and librewolf.

then otter, seamonkey, falkon, k-meleon, srware iron, qutebrowser, comodo dragon and comodo icedragon, dooble, midori, epic.

not sure if maxthon and Avant Browser are still a thing

I always thought Otter was just a mobile browser! Thanks for sharing! I love hearing about obscure browsers!

> Firefox is dead. It's time to move past denial. It doesn't stand for anything you think it does. I'm sad, too. Time to bury the putrid, rotting corpse.

I don't disagree, it's just that I need a browser, and there's no real alternatives.

Looking a lot at Librewolf. Have there been any independent audits of it?

You say all this as if Chrome is somehow not even worse

Chrome is worse. Chromium is the open-source engine which is fine until someone like Google turns it into their minion.

You make it sound like Google took Chromium and created Chrome out of it.

It's the other way round.

The two are separate things. Chrome is built on top of the chromium base. I guess technically chromium and chrome v1 were developed and released about the same time so chicken and egg thing.

ever heard of waterfox or librewolf ?

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