Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

I am, unfortunately, looking at alternative browsers because of this. Firefox was the best fit. Big enough that they could reasonably keep up but not one of the corporate browsers that I have 0 trust in. It wasn't perfect but it was better than chrome for sure.

Browsers are like cars now. It is becoming impossible to buy a new(er) car and have your privacy respected, but it is unreasonable to expect any normal life (at least in most of the US) without using cars or browsers. So, things like cars and browsers should have strong protections because there is no avoiding them. Unfortunately that is obviously not the case. You should never be forced to sign an adversarial TOS to earn a living or live a normal life, but here we are. TOS that are effective without you even reading them, that say they own you, everything you type, everything you do, that change and bind you without your consent or knowledge and what are you going to do about it? Given any reasonable choice I will take it, but the reasonable choices are dwindling.

LibreWolf? It's Firefox without the Mozilla branding

I've been using LibreWolf as my daily driver for a couple of years. Highly recommended! Available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Ranked as the highest for privacy protection in a 2022 study: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/06/15/privacytests-reveals-how-y...

Occasionally, you might get a broken website but to fix it you just click on the shield icon and lower the privacy settings.

Any recommendations for an Android Firefox replacement?

I am using IronFox (on GrapheneOS). But I don't really use my phone for browsing the internet very often.

Fennec on F-Droid

I use https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser for its ability to install any extension, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean. If you don't need that, I'd recommend IronFox because of its explicit security goals.

I switched to LibreWolf over this, and it's good so far. A couple of things:

* I had to switch off the fingerprinting protection. For me, running at 60 FPS and without automatic CSS dark mode detection isn't worth whatever fingerprint resistance it provides. Sadly, you don't have granular control over RFP, you have to turn it off entirely.

* It doesn't have Google Search available by default, but it turned out to be fairly straightforward to add. DuckDuckGo is just too slow to load for me compared to Google, and their AI integration is stupid. Google doesn't have AI answers and text fields like DDG does in my region.

* Their implementation of container tabs don't seem to support automatically opening certain URLs in certain containers, which is annoying. Maybe I can get the official container tabs extension working, but I kinda wish LibreWolf either had proper container tabs or left it out in favour of the Mozilla extension.

Otherwise, it seems great. I found it hard to pick between all the different Firefox forks and rebrands, but LibreWolf seemed like one of the more serious ones and I don't regret going with it.

honestly, at this point it makes sense to use vanilla Firefox for you, that offers exactly what you need and it's still quite good about privacy.

I agree, which is why I used vanilla Firefox until now. I don't want or need the additional privacy features LibreWolf (or other forks) offer.

But I don't want to use a browser from a company which gives themselves a broad license to do whatever they want with whatever data I enter into the browser. It's probably just a matter of time until Mozilla exercises this right to send stuff I enter into Firefox back to Mozilla for ad targeting and AI training purposes, and I don't want that. I have some faith that the LibreWolf team will notice such features and rip them out when they appear.

"But I don't want to use a browser from a company which gives themselves a broad license to do whatever they want with whatever data I enter into the browser"

As this discussion made abundantly clear, that's not what it says at all.

Nothing I have seen makes that clear at all. In fact, from what I can see, the ToS makes it very clear that they are giving themselves a license in the way I describe:

> When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

Mozilla is clearly planning to do something which requires them to have given themselves this license, and I'd rather not be on Firefox when we figure out what that is.

I switched because of this. Day 1 so no opinion yet.

You can always buy old cars. Can’t use old browsers unless you really like getting pwned.

Icecat is the GNU build of the open-source base of Firefox. I think that's the best bet until Ladybird is ready for daily diving.

Fennec on Android.

Brave is fantastic.

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