What's the alternative though? All the others have already sold their users off ...
Free, up to date and does not send neither money nor data to Mozilla.
But personally I don't care so much about privacy extremism:
The day another more liberal organization forks it again, adds Google search for some easy cash and start fixing the extension API etc I am probably going to recommend that.
I already dial back some extreme measure(s), nuking my sessions whenever I close the browser comes to mind.
Also of course I will not use Google myself, but it seems to be the way for browser developers to make a living so I'll allow whoever takes care of the future of Firefox to do the same.
> It is possible that Apple Silicon users see their recently downloaded LibreWolf flagged as broken or unsafe by the OS. This happens because we do not notarize the macOS version of the browser: we don't have a paid Apple Developer license and we don't want to support this signing mechanism that is put behind a paywall without providing significant gains.
Eeerm... no, thank you.
Will reconsider if it appears in openSUSE Tumbleweed repos after passing a security review from the openSUSE team ;)
A browser made by an Ad Tech company that aims to lock down and control the web.
And a browser made by a nonprofit that occasionally makes a minor mistep.
You cannot seriously compare the remote attestation DRM, manifest v3 changes, to, what ? the Mr. Robot ad that was tacky? the pocket integration that's pointless and annoying but otherwise harmless?
Seriously, y'alls double standards are insane and focuses so much towards how bad it was that Brendan Eich got kicked out that it comes off as extremely political
But actively caring about browser companies, and choosing Chrome because Mozilla "sold out" when they added pocket is a pretty wild take imo.
& hey, if you prefer Chrome because you find it more usable or performant that's a perfectly good reason
I'm mostly upset at the people in this thread (presumably not you) who seem to be against Firefox for ideological reasons which seems completely backwards to me
As much as I'd love it though, I don't think it's reasonably to expect everyone else to care as much as we do. There's plenty of other issues that matter too that I'm glad other people are out there caring about on my behalf. Eg. I know being vegan is better but its a big annoying change and I haven't been able to do it yet.
I'm mostly concerned with all the rhetroic here that's trying to paint firefox as unsympathetic when they are clearly the people fighting on our side. If you don't personally care enough to switch to FF, or use Graphene OS, or run Linux etc. I get that, but pleeease don't also try to discourage other people too, y'know?
(& ofc the real solution is through policy and getting an American version of GDPR/California Privacy act, getting courts to stop the NSA etc. Being preachy online is counterproductive to getting broad support and the mission overall imo)
I'm not a privacy fanatic and I don't really care if my browser supports proprietary DRM so that I'm able to watch shows on streaming platforms. However, I see a lot of potential for the remote attestation mechanism proposed by Google to give companies an easy way to enforce "We support this set of browsers on this set of operating systems" and effectively cut off support for Linux and browsers that aren't popular Chromium variants. That doesn't mean I can't go and switch companies but that requires a lot of effort on my part to do so.
I don't think it's fair to claim the nonprofit side only exists to "claim legitimacy." All of their revenue goes back into the corporation or the foundation.
This a very common arrangement used by charities to enable a commercial process that funds the charity. For example, high street charity shops may be part of the commercial sub-entity so that their accounts are processed like a normal company, but 100% of their profits become donations to fund the parent charity's activities, called the charitable purpose(s).
If they didn't separate into a parent charity with a commercial sub-entity, all of the activities of the sub-entity would be subject to charity auditing, accounting and purpose rules, which in practice would make it difficult to run a shop competitively, or alternatively the parent could not have charity status and the shop profit would be subject to tax instead of all being directed to the audited, charitable purpose(s).
In Mozilla's case, if it was a tax-exempt non-profit without a commercial sub-entity giving 100% of profits to its parent, it would not be able to take Google funding as a trade in exchange for making Google the default search engine without losing its tax-exempt status, and it might not be able to pay its software engineers a competitive market rate, even if it needs to do that to compete. It would be able to take donations (not as a trade in exchange for something, just as a donation), but that wouldn't be enough to develop a competitive browser.
That doesn't sound like a bad thing. Googles funding is not a boon but a shackle that holds FF back. Same for developers that expect SV market rates - those will be developers that are used to user-hostile software developement practiced in other SV companies.
> It would be able to take donations (not as a trade in exchange for something, just as a donation), but that wouldn't be enough to develop a competitive browser.
How do you know? Individual donations are also far from the only possible way to fund a real charity.
But it is really a nonprofit in that (like the sibling says) the corp is fully owned by a nonprofit, not public shareholders.
And its not like google doesn't get anything out of their $. They get set as the default engine. Apple gets paid hundreds of billions by google for this. So its not like Google is paying Firefox for control over it's development.
Like, seriously, they're not perfect but its a pretty wide jump in behavior between it and chrome
Same with that hidden spyware ad/extension (distributed using channels reserved for delivering 0day bugfixes). Mozilla shit on it's users without even getting paid for it.
Maybe I have reading comprehension issues, because it seems to me like it isn't worse than selling users off. Mozilla sold its users... to itself. That's really bad, right?
"Selling users off" only matters to anyone trying to push some unheard of and less-secure forks of Chrome or Firefox. Nobody notable code-reviews theses browsers, you're at the mercy at some random person or small group to play catch-up with upstream browsers, and you're ultimately still locked into somebody else's decisions.
I use Firefox because double-clicking code one-liners from my wiki doesn't add a newline when pasted into Terminals on Linux, which I use on desktop for the challenge of it. Windows Terminal on Windows doesn't have this issue from any browser and I'm free to use Edge or Chrome there.