What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox | Hacker News Reader

What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

neilzone.co.uk

154 pointsColinWright144 comments

I decided to just stay with Firefox and disable any rubbish that Mozilla adds as it comes.

I tried Librewolf, but the unstable RPM repository was very annoying, because zypper disallows system updates if even one repository fails to refresh. I also had some weird issues keeping it pinned to my desktop environment's dock. It also didn't want to save its window geometry (very annoying for me), and the only way to transfer from Firefox is to manually copy your profile data.

But mainly, I'm still dependant on Mozilla no matter where I go. They are the ones actually doing the hard work of developing the browser engine; all of these forks are just some patches upon that, so with Firefox I only have to deal with (and trust) Mozilla and my distro, and not some other project in addition to Mozilla.

That's my issue with all of these solo-maintained forks. It's a security nightmare, and browsers are a prime target for supply chain attacks or other forms of subterfuge. The security model just simply isn't acceptable.

So what's stopping anyone from forming a group or foundation based on donations from like-minded people? And maintain a secure, free fork? I see this topic often enough on HN, this might a big enough group.

You need several million dollars per year to be useful. Anyone can form a foundation but if you don't have that much or more it was a waste of time.

it need not be money a dozen developers donating code full time would work but that is harder to get.

Currently Ladybird has 200k USD from FUTO, 100k USD from Shopify and then a bunch more from ProtonVPN, Ahrefs, etc., they also have 7 full time employees and a bunch of volunteers: https://ladybird.org/#faq

They fall short of the numbers you suggest, but it's kind of encouraging that some people can do that for an entirely new project. Time will tell how it works out for them, but I could feasibly imagine a Firefox fork gaining similar ground, should people get tired of Mozilla's stewardship for whatever reason.

After all, even something like 3% of the market share is way more of a proof of feasibility than 0% and if you get a bunch of money when that figure is 0% like Ladybird, things can only get better for a project built on established technology.

Good for Ladybird, but I don't think they can support all the complexities of the Web with only 7 develops (but perhaps with enough volunteers they could - 7 is enough to do the hard thankless work while volunteers do the more interesting bits). Between all the weird layout rules, required speed to be useful, and security (last only because with out the other two you automatically have perfect security since with no users holes cannot be exploited).

Still I wish them luck.

If I had 7 disposable engineers, I'd built an open source modular browser that allows individual components such as rendering engine, JS engine, WASM runtime, etc. to all be swapped out for alternative implementations. The browser itself would basically be a shell and SDK. It's ludicrous that someone has to either completely reinvent the wheel today or fork one of two monolithic browsers that require significant upkeep and cross-domain expertise.

I feel like this approach has a much better shot at being sustainable and giving power back to users and clients, despite having its own challenges. I would like it if political fallouts such as this one didn't mean I have to completely migrate to a brand new system. Compare that to Linux, where I can say, migrate to Rocky if CentOS stops being a viable choice, without losing any of my tooling or configuration.

I felt that way until the last week. But I feel better using another project that mainly or only exists to strip dubious FF behavior from their code. I installed Waterfox, copied my FF profile folder, pointed Waterfox at the copy, and it has been smooth sailing.

Yes I still depend on FF, yes it makes FF just a tiny bit less sustainable, yes I might need to change browsers again. But they have pushed me over the edge with their nonstop shenanigans.

If not LibreWolf, why not use Mullvad Browser, Floorp or Zen Browser, both based on Firefox?

> mainly, I'm still dependant on Mozilla no matter where I go. They are the ones actually doing the hard work of developing the browser engine

You are being reasonable. Firefox is an essential application in my day. I support Mozilla directly -- in a small way, this helps to ensure that Firefox is available to me and others.

Consider --

    Browser Market Share Worldwide - February 2025
    Chrome  66.29%
    Safari  18.01%
    Edge 5.33%
    Firefox 2.63%
    Samsung Internet 2.3%
    Opera 2.09%

That's three Webkit browsers with 90% market domination. GOOG, MSFT, and APPL don't need my pennies.

No software is perfect and no browser is free as in beer and free as in zero risk. There is no browser that is perfectly respectful of privacy (i.e. zero data leakage, zero surveillance). The WWW monstrosity is now tooled for surveillance.

In addition to the actual coding that makes Firefox possible, Firefox has support for uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, and the excellent Multi-Account Containers extension. These alone make me happy to support Mozilla.

I don't like all the features and services that Mozilla has added or tested, but it is interesting to design and test new features. And if the TOS about sharing data must change, that's where we are in 2025.

GOOG dropped the slogan "Don't Be Evil" -- I cordially invite all relaxing frogs to speculate about future increases to the water temperature.

> I support Mozilla directly -- in a small way, this helps to ensure that Firefox is available to me and others.

Money you send to the Mozilla Foundation cannot be used on Firefox, because Firefox is a project of the Corporation and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation, not vice versa. There is no way to help support Firefox development directly, Mozilla employees will always point you to buying one of the Corporation's side projects instead.

> GOOG dropped the slogan "Don't Be Evil" -- I cordially invite all relaxing frogs to speculate about future increases to the water temperature.

the problem is that mozilla also seems to be boiling the frog right now.

I worry less about 2.63 % of the marketshare using some aggregate browsing data than I do about GOOG dominance (60-90%) in the commercial surveillance industry.

but aren't you are just describing another convection cell in the same frog-boiling saucepan?

> I worry less about 2.63 % of the marketshare using some aggregate browsing data

Mozilla's not using that data. They're selling it. They wouldn't be in this kind of hot water if they were keeping the data to themselves.

Brave browser seems like the best choice moving forward

Yeah, the browser that has had multiple huge incidents where they've been caught doing sketchy stuff is definitely who we should turn to...

What sketchy stuff or huge incidents are you referring to?

My understanding is they are, by far, the best privacy focused browser, especially now that Mozilla has committed seppuku

The Controversies section on Wikipedia pretty much covers it

That's just chromium with a weird cryptocurrency racket on top.

Unfortunate but still the best of the options for privacy focused individuals. Especially now that Mozilla is no longer an option

I moved my profile folder into Librewolf, done. The only thing that's bugging me is the 'LibreWolf: Always store cookies/data for this site' option on the navbar padlock dropdown, it only appears for me in private windows, regardless of my 'Delete cookies site/data...' option.

It's annoying because I contributed UX to this librewolf feature a few years ago (because I really wanted it), its finally landed but I can't use it - it was the blocker to adopting the more strict privsec model that librewolf offers by default (it solves the 'cookie exceptions are a pain to manage' problem. Obviously something to do with my kitchen-sink Firefox profile folder copy, but for now I guess I'll just carry on with cookies persisting and at some point rebuild a fresh librewolf profile if I want to adopt their defaults.

So there's at least that, if this ambigious license stuff (and recent ad company purchases) bothers you, you can probably just copy your profile into Librewolf's profile folder, rename, and have done something about this perceived issue without a major disruption

I'm not sold that avoiding Chromium is any sort of win. It seems to be BSD licensed. The code comes from a long and storied OSS tradition.

It is unclear why that having multiple different browser engines is strategically important. As far as I know we've long left behind the world where a hobbyist project could reasonably expect to implement modern JavaScript. Brave's existence and success suggests that competitors building on Chromium are viable.

Not to say it is a bad thing to have alternatives floating around; but at this point it is probably easier to have multiple forks of Chromium than strive to have code with a completely independent genealogy.

The problem with Chromium is that it's controlled by Google. Given they control the engine in the majority of browsers, they get to call the shots on the direction of the web as a whole.

They're not in any position to control the web as a whole; Safari is too strong a competitor.

But even if Chromium was at 100% market share they couldn't control the web. If they start throwing their weight around then the other web companies will start organising around a Chromium fork. The important thing here is OSS/not-OSS rather than market share. Market share can change quickly enough in response to problems. It is like GCC - there was that spat back in the day, someone forks the code and there is a little war until people figure out which is better. Then the better version became "GCC".

It is fine to have one custodian as long as the actual power is retained by the users. Efficient, even.

What "other web companies"? Everyone has an app or an app store.

Whoever. Whatever. OSS is a system for finding the most capable entity in the world at developing a software capability and letting them get on with it. It'll find someone to pick up the slack if Google starts doing a terrible job. In this world of 8 billion humans and however many thousands of companies, there'll be one who knows how to put a web browser together.

If I were going to guess today it'd be brave.com, but the world is large and competitive.

I think that's a tad idealistic, though. You'd need the resources to keep fighting against the constant changes and ever diverging codebase the more Google goes it's own way. And already has been doing it slowly. Also, Mozilla and Apple have been important for keeping privacy relevant every time Google have tried to push for some privacy eroding web standards.

Edit: I agree with the sentiment though but I just trust the current situation more.

> You'd need the resources to keep fighting against the constant changes and ever diverging codebase

Assuming that Google is making Chromium better, sure. If they are making it worse then not keeping up with the changes is an advantage of the fork.

If Google starts making changes that reduce the value of the codebase, then a hard fork immediately becomes viable. If they are good custodians even a totally separate codebase isn't enough, it'll end up in the same position as Firefox - marginalised.

This is very handwave-y and idealistic. Sure, 8 billion humans, and thousands of companies on a cosmic timeline will lift the "most capable entity" to the top, but the road there is going to be extremely long if you just "nah they'll get it" and not do anything else.

I named a specific company, pointed out a specific example of the dynamic featuring GCC and Debian is just one iceberg in the OSS ocean demonstrating that there are more than 30,000 packages built on the principle that free software is better than closed source.

I'm not sure how much more specific and concrete you want the argument to get, but that seems fine to me. The market is big, people care about this part of it. There will be a sponsor for the work if Google isn't up to the challenge.

The only reason everyone uses Chrome is it is really good at what it does and to date Google has been a high quality steward.

Isn’t the push to deprecate and remove Manifest V2 in favor of V3 and therefore removing or at least significantly cutting down possibilities for users to block ads a major push from the Google side? A field in which they, conveniently, make their major cut of their profit? Brave is a big company already, still they’ve already announced that they won’t be able to support V2 for too long as the codebase will break over time.

Only because something is OSS doesn’t mean it’s not controlled by a single entity or consortium. We need competition, especially in something so damn critical like web browsers (which are like OSes for the web).

Mozilla is and has been a savior. They’re doing weird shit, but compared to Google and Apple they’re still as transparent as possible, even with their shit. And their shit is not even THAT bad, while I still dislike it and also thought about replacing FF for a short time. I just hope they come back to the right path, at least in their communications.

Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really asking. Whether or not Webkit can be thought of as disjoint from Chromium is really the question here.

WebKit is substantially disjointed from Blink at this point, a natural result of differing priorities from their developers.

WebKit remains highly embeddable for example, so if you drop a WebKit webview into your Cocoa/GTK/whatever toolkit app you’ve got a mostly-complete multiprocess browser and just need to build your UI around it. Blink on the other hand is hard-coupled with Chromium for things like multiprocess support, which leaves no practical alternative to forking the whole browser (which as an aside, is why Electron drags around the full heft of Chromium instead of just Blink).

That’s moot though because Google has no qualms with pushing through Chromium-only “standards” that make non-Chromium browsers less viable since sites that use these “standards” simply don’t work in anything but Chromium. It’s like the situation with Internet Explorer and its collection of IE-isms all over again.

One could argue that Mozilla and Apple should just follow Google and implement these “standards” themselves, but that lands us right back where we started in that this effectively gives Google full unbridled power to steer the direction of the web as it pleases, which is a massive conflict of interest.

> Does Google effectively own Webkit, though?

No, Google owns Blink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)

which outright forked in 2013, though at that point it sounds like they were already carrying enough patches to constitute a soft fork (which then became a hard fork).

There's a value in keeping using a non-WebKit browser.

> As far as I know we've long left behind the world where a hobbyist project could reasonably expect to implement modern JavaScript.

You should look into Ladybird[0] then. Their JavaScript engine ("LibJS") scores very well in conformance test suite test262[1].

[0]: https://ladybird.org/

[1]: https://test262.fyi/

>modern JavaScript

This is really one of the major problems. Much of the web is now fairly terrible, and so for a browser to get any meaningful traction it must work on nearly all websites; which means that any browser is going to be compromised unless it aims to remain incredibly niche. Some days I can't decide who I dislike more; MBAs or web developers.

People like to point at ladybird, but really the way to go before this can become a daily driver is probably in the hundreds of person years of development

IMO the critical factor will be whether any Chromium forks keep support for Manifest V2 alive. If yes, it will be a viable alternative to Firefox (or FF forks), but I haven't seen indication that a project will pick up the slack.

A browser without proper support for uBlock Origin or similar extensions isn't a browser I'm willing to use, even if ad-blocking is integrated into the browser itself. The freedom to actually control the browsing experience is essential for long-term user freedom.

It'll be gone the moment upstream drops it. Maintaining this in a fork will be a lot of work. Fortunately it's still available even in Chrome for a while, but that's just an ultimatum

That's my expectation too, but it makes avoiding Chrome & Chromium unavoidable.

Even if maintaining Manifest V2 is too much work after upstream drops it that doesn't necessarily mean that they just have to accept Manifest V3 as shipped in upstream.

From what I've read there are two main problems with Manifest V3 when it comes to ad blocking.

Problem #1. The webRequestBlocking permission is gone:

> Note: As of Manifest V3, the "webRequestBlocking" permission is no longer available for most extensions. Consider "declarativeNetRequest", which enables use the declarativeNetRequest API. Aside from "webRequestBlocking", the webRequest API is unchanged and available for normal use. Policy installed extensions can continue to use "webRequestBlocking".

That does not necessarily mean good ad blocking must break. Most people find the ad blockers on Safari to be fine, and Safari does not have that kind of blocking. It has long required the declarative rule kind of blocking.

Some brief searching suggests that the rules for Chrome's declarative blocking are actually more powerful than Safari's.

That brings us to the second Manifest V3 problem.

Problem #2. The declarative rules only allows something like 30k rules. Apple found that such a low limit is not sufficient and raised it to 150k.

I'd guess that maintaining a fork that just raises the limit in Chrome would not be a problem for the Chromium-based third party browsers.

The big question would be whether the current 30k limit is there for technical reasons or for marketing reasons like not wanting ad blocking to be too effective. If it is a technical limit the forkers might also have to rewrite the rule processing engine which would likely be more than they would want to deal with.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/w...

> The big question would be whether the current 30k limit is there for technical reasons or for marketing reasons like not wanting ad blocking to be too effective. If it is a technical limit the forkers might also have to rewrite the rule processing engine which would likely be more than they would want to deal with.

It’s Google. The whole Manifest is there for marketing reasons. The whole browser even. Google doesn’t want us to have a nice browser because it benefits us. It benefits them. And this will continue. With V3 they already did the biggest cut down of af blocking in their browser. They will continue this path.

Their main income is ads. They don’t care for anything else.

> That does not necessarily mean good ad blocking must break. Most people find the ad blockers on Safari to be fine, and Safari does not have that kind of blocking. It has long required the declarative rule kind of blocking.

This presupposes that advertising platforms will not react to the changes to adblocking in any way, but I don't think that's realistic.

The declarative rules can only be changed with updates to the extension (AFAIK, please correct me if I'm wrong). This means users can't block ads themselves (at least uBlock Origin Lite can't do it), and it will take between days to weeks until new block lists have propagated.

Now, remember last year when YouTube started blocking adblockers? They changed their implementations sometimes multiple times per day, and after minutes to hours new blocklists were distributed that got around them. This won't be possible anymore with Manifest V3, so Google just has to update their adblock implementation often enough to finally get rid of them.

And the same goes for other platforms. Once the majority of users is using browsers that only allow declarative blocking, more platforms will start updating more frequently.

This is something I'm confused about. When people "build browsers" it's largely just Chromium with a couple of features tacked on top. I'm not sure why no one is trying to keep only the rendering engine and building their own, much better browser on top of it.

There are people doing that, Qutebrowser, Nyxt does that for WebKit(and they are moving to chromium engine). The main issue why others are not doing that is the issue with cutting yourself from extensions.

Manifest v1/v2 is already an illustration of the problem. Google will use its power to impose (de-facto) standards that hurt users and give itself more money and power.

I can't say that any of the changes of the last fifteen years have really brought about a better or more usable internet. Ads are worse than ever, the browser still doesn't know whether it's for browsing documents or hosting interactive apps, we're still stuck with javascript and no real standard library, and there don't appear to be real efforts towards reigning in complexity. From my perspective the current mode of development failed a long time ago.

In the short term, I've switched to Librewolf. In the long term, we're probably hosed unless some heroic individuals can produce a new mainstream browser (or just a successful, long-term fork of Firefox that does not necessarily rely on Mozilla maintaining Firefox)

It's important to remember that Firefox itself is a good browser, but is far from perfect; it just remains the better option than Chrome. In an ideal world, an ideal browser would look itself would look quite different, as would the web itself.

Donate to Ladybird? They are already quite far: https://ladybird.org

** To clarify - looking for any Firefox alternative, not restricted to the Gecko engine

Is Brave at all a viable alternative? Or do their own ads and all the crypto-shmypto make the switch moot?

Tangentially - has anyone tried building Firefox from the source? [1] I wonder how feasible this would be as an alternative if coupled with disabling all unwanted parts of the browser.

[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/windows_build....

From the article:

> sustainable, viable alternative Free/open source browser, in a state which I can use today, supporting the plugins that I use daily, which is not based on Chromium

Brave is based on chromium.

I'd say Vivaldi[0] scratches that itch better for me, without having to sell my soul to the crypto gods. I only wish it did not crash randomly on MacOS a couple of times per week.

[0]: https://vivaldi.com/

Vivaldi is chromium based and not open-source.

Zen Browser is the closest thing to Vivaldi in Firefox fork land. https://zen-browser.app

Can one copy a firefox profile to Vivaldi? Do you think it's possible?

Probably not since they are based on completely different browsers. You can import bookmarks, passwords, etc. though.

Brave is based on Chromium, so that rules it out for the author based on what they wrote.

I use Brave as my go-to "website doesn't work in Firefox so I've got to use Chromium" browser on my phone. The constant cryptocurrency ads are really putting me off. No matter how many times I go through the settings, there's always some kind of cryptocurrency feature being placed front and center.

I guess they must be making their money off crypto bros in some fashion, but this crap is preventing me from doing anything more than necessary in that browser.

I don't think it's worth it to build Firefox from source when there are so many tiny projects out there maintaining slightly altered versions of Firefox already. You can do it yourself, but then you need to go through every line of code to check if they've added something suspicious and probably end up with some old, vulnerable version as your main browser (because who has time for that stuff).

I built Firefox from source recently, it took under 15 mins to compile on a 7800X3D.

Do websites using akamai work with that browser? Try checking prices on Radisson hotels (their own website, not OTAs), for example. Do prices load, or is it only static resources which work? Same question for Marriott hotels, I can't see any of their rooms unless using an original build.

Both Radisson and Marriott work for me. I guess my IP address has a better reputation?

Radisson doesn't load on Firefox for me, only on chrome. Marriott doesn't load on chromium.

I'm talking about the rooms pages, they show errors when loading prices. Static resources still load.

The situation is similar with other websites behind akamai, such as US ESTA, the static resources load but all API calls fail.

The IP address probably also matters, indeed.

This is untrue, did US ESTA fully on Firefox. Not sure what settings you use but the problem ain't FF nor the website.

Firefox on Linux?

Tried on FF for Windows, OSX and Android.

There’s something up with your internet connection.

API calls which go through Akamai all return their default "access denied" or "something went wrong" html, my 1Gbps internet is fine.

I mean if Marriott’s site isn’t loading on Chromium, the problem is very unlikely to be with Marriott or Chromium.

There are many Gecko-based browsers: Zen, Floorp, Mullvad, LibreWolf, IceCat. Why not use them instead?

Gentoo offers firefox built from source with various privacy defaults such as disabling telemetry:

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/www-client/fi...

It's regularly updated.

It also offers a binary package with privacy default configs such as disabling Normandy which "allows Mozilla to push changes for default settings or even install new add-ons remotely":

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/www-client/fi...

Do you know if Mint does anything similar to this?

It's really been a joy using Firefox from source with gentoo for so many years. Every so often I'm reminded by a friend about all the crap Mozilla does with new Firefox versions on the Windows side, especially apparently when it comes to messing with the UI whereas mine just stays the same and looks much like I had it back when Firefox 3 was the new thing. I'll trust the gentoo maintainers to keep at it. I also think a big canary on the actual impact/difficulty of disabling for privacy-invading and related things would be for the tor project to give up and switch to a chromium-derived base for their browser bundle.

But Mozilla has long since lost any goodwill from me. I use Firefox because there's no alternative for what I want from a user agent. If I could configure or find extensions to make some Chromium-derived thing look and behave the same way, I'd just switch already. (Minimum: adblocking at least as good as ubo, NoScript, RSS feeds, and the big one, close feature parity to TreeStyleTabs or Sidebery. The full scope of everything else I'd really want on top is too much for here.)

Brave is just bag of privacy lies. They have to make money somehow. If the browser is free, who's the product? Ask your AI or just Google it.

> They have to make money somehow. If the browser is free, who's the product?

The problem is that this covers Firefox and all the Chromium browsers. We've left behind the ability to pick a good option and are instead looking for the least bad option now.

When I used Brave a few years ago the adblocking worked as advertised and the crypto features required an opt-in. The issue was that it was unstable after opening a few tabs and didn't have feature parity with Firefox.

I feel like we just went back 20-30 years but MS Windows has become the modern Web browser.

- It is totally controlled by big corporations.

- It is very expensive to reimplement.

- You kind of need it to take part in the world: open and edit an Office doc correctly (but you can also be a freak and use LaTeX if want)

- Using a Webkit/Blink based browser is like a dual boot or VM running Windows. Firefox is our Wine/Crossweaver

Whatever you think about what happened to Mozilla recently, it is gonna go downhill from there. At some point their engineering is gonna start to really suffer and the quality / security will become a concern. Maybe Librewolf will make some patches, IDK.

I am starting to find the Web really boring (to use and develop for). I am tired of proving that I am human by clicking for 2 minutes on images of buses and bicycles. I hope something cool like this [0] happens soon because I am pretty sure all the cool kids will rush to it.

- [0] https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/WASM_Wayland_Web_WWW/

That sucks. I'm kind in the same boat, but with one additional requirement: It should have an android app that I can install uBlock origin. The few times that I had to browse from a phone without an adblock I had to stand in awe as to what a lot/most people have to suffer through daily.

(The other more minor requirement for me is bookmark tags, but I may be able to hijack my way around that)

It's the only browser that supports Manifest V2. If you want true ad-blocking capabilities, use and support Firefox. If you're up to Chrome tyranny or Brave lies then go ahead and switch. I consider changing the privacy notice meaningless when I block everything and disable telemetry etc. But at the same time I know y'all are prone to internet drama to get more ad traffic and attention.

I'm testing Zen (https://zen-browser.app/) on macOS since a while back. Updates seem to lag behind the upstream by everything from 2 to 10 days. Every now and then a Zen-specific update shows up. So far the experience has been good. I don't know how true to their word of protecting privacy the authors really are, as my web proxy shows that the browser connects with Google infrastructure at sporadic intervals through the day even when the browser is sitting idle with no loaded tabs or active extensions. My feeling is that it is too frequent to be the auto-update check. I really hope I'm wrong or goofed up with keeping an eye on its network chatter.

I think most FF forks are dependent on Google Safe Browsing and some of Googles DRM services.

Uses it, but not dependant on it. I keep these things disabled.

Moved from Firefox Dev Edition to Librewolf. No deal breakers yet.

Procedure to transfer over painlessly: Install and run Librewolf. On both browsers go Help > More troubleshooting information > profile folder > Open. Close both browsers. Delete everything inside the librewolf profile. Copy everything from Firefox Dev profile directory into Librewolf profile directory. Run Librewolf with "--allow-downgrade" once. First run was a tad slow with extensions doing some 'recombobulation'. You can now run Librewolf normally without the above allow downgrade option. Enjoy.

Switching between forks of it seems a bit pointless to me if the base project is in trouble.

The Chrome/Chromium mono-culture google created is imo the problem here. Until a solution to that is found this will continue to be a problem

I'll wait for Ladybird to be more mature.

Until then, I'm more than happy with Thorium:

https://thorium.rocks/

So far, the only complain is it doesn't support Netflix (usual DRM stuff):

https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/523

I don't see Floorp [1] mentioned a lot here i think... i quite like it, might be a good alternative for now, until something better comes along.

Also there's Arkenfox [2] of course, if you want to fine-tune privacy settings.

[1] https://floorp.app/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floorp

[2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

Discussion of alternatives here:

https://boilingsteam.com/poll-trust-in-firefox-mozilla-is-go...

There is Waterfox that syncs with the Firefox bookmark service. Testing it out for the last day, also looking for an option on iOS otherwise will stick with Firefox.

I'd love to know the results of your test. Plese let me know if there's a social media account where you'll post your results.

I've been using Brave at work for my default browser but Firefox for personal things. I've been really impressed by Brave and so, since the Firefox news, I have decided to use Brave as my personal browser. I understand it's chromium based which is a non-starter for some but that it's open source and that Brendan Eich isn't a Google fan makes it tenable for me to try.

It's the best option we have.

It really isn't, people just keep saying that out of habit

What is then? I have my gripes with Mozilla, but they’re far better than Google.

Firefox forks, such as Librewolf and Waterfox.

As long as it's the only one supporting Manifest v2, I think it really is the best option.

FWIW, webkit's github [1] links directly to the "Epiphany Technology Preview" at gnome.org as a supported project. I have no idea if that leads to a full-featured modern browser for Linux, but I'm pretty sure if it doesn't, there should be a fork that does or creating one might be worth considering, and should be even fun and relatively easy to get kicked off. Also, since Webkit is based on KHTML, there might be re-integrations into KDE worth exploring. Ages ago there used to be Safari builds for Windows Apple created to get Safari into the hand of web developers that weren't using Macs, but it doesn't look like there's anything left to pickup.

[1]: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

This blog entry makes me feel heard. I've chosen Firefox through Debian, but the browser is one of those problems that may kick me off the web entirely. People complain that Firefox is dependent on Google, but the forks are also dependent on Google, through Firefox. Chromium is dependent on Chrome. Moving to Apple explicitly attaches you to a company that wants to monopolize your purchases.

This is pushing me to deal with the internet only through single-purpose things that are not browsers, which can be even worse. Losing the browser seems similar to losing general-purpose computing (losing general-purpose social computing, maybe?)

edit: will Apple eventually buy Ladybird? Seems like that's what's going to happen.

> Will Apple eventually buy Ladybird?

This is the first time I've heard of the idea. Considering how the project has decided to replace C++ with Swift, a language with strong ties to Apple, it seems like a possible scenario.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1822236888188498031.html

Any thoughts on Mullvad Browser?

https://mullvad.net/en/browser

It appears to be a closed-source variant of the Tor Browser, itself based on Firefox.

If I were going to use a Firefox variant, I'd probably go with LibreWolf.

It's FOSS and maintained by Tor Project team members: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/mullvad-brows...

My mistake, thanks.

it's a tricky situation. I'm using Firefox not because I particularly like it, but because it's not as terrible as the others.

I've switched to Waterfox (yet another Firefox fork) and so far I'm happy with that choice

https://www.waterfox.net/

While these forks are nice and all, I'm not sure how meaningful it is in the bigger picture if 99% of the work done on it is still done (and paid) by the same people.

Similarly, I don't get those "I use brave instead of Firefox", as if that wasn't 99% chromium.

Don't get me wrong, I know there's not much choice. But that whole direction of "action" that people take just seems like a working marketing tarpit to me.

At least Brave is a profitable company that employs multiple people and they can keep up with Chromium's changes (Some manifest v2 extensions are kept available or certain UI features are reverted).

Most of the Firefox forks are 1-5 person gigs. They are not sustainable.

At this point, "marketing tarpit" seems like a pretty accurate description of Mozilla's stewardship of Firefox as well, so if I'm going to get sucked one, I'd rather it be the one that's taking a maybe untenable stand for something that I agree than the one that's trying to gaslight me about whether "disseminating user data to a third party for valuable consideration" is what most people would consider "selling user data".

That is an unreal standard to hold anyone to while using Microsoft or Google products, because this wouldn't even register compared to what these companies do on a regular basis. People are just less dependent on Mozilla so moral outage doesn't feel as pointless.

I'm not sure I understand your criticism. Are you arguing that I'm holding Mozilla to an unfair standard, or other users? I don't pretend to have any moral high ground about what I use versus other people; I just don't personally find the argument that using a fork of Firefox right now is a "marketing tarpit" to be compelling enough to convince me to change my mind about it.

I spent some time yesterday getting it set up in the light of the recent debaucle, and overall I'm mostly positive on it. The vast majority of things worked pretty much exactly as I'm used to with Firefox (with most of the settings being the same, and even about:config working pretty much identically other than having some things I used to set manually as default, like allowing custom userChrome.css and turning off a lot of telemetry). I was intrigued with the built-in tree style tab support (which from what I can tell in this release notes seems like it's being developed in collaboration with the developer of the popular addon), and although right now it doesn't seem to easily support all of the customization from within the settings that the addon itself does, I still really like the idea of it being a first-class browser feature rather than an addon. Unfortunately I seem to be running into a bug that's already been filed as an issue where toggling it on or off causes my browser window to disappear briefly and then relaunch, which also seems to happen automatically if I last closed the browser with it toggled on, making it a bit too jarring for me to use yet, but given how recently it seems to have been added into the browser itself, I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up getting fixed in a reasonable amount of time (and if not, I can always just use the extension itself, which still seems like it would work).

In a lot of ways, it seems like Waterfox is actually doing a better job of being the type of browser I want than Firefox is anymore; there are a lot more built-in UI customization settings that I'm much more interested in seeing development effort go towards (including some simpler but nice quality of life things like choosing whether to place the tab bar on the top or bottom, or aligning the contents of the URL bar and the tabs either either to the left or to the center, or even whether certain elements should have rounded or square corners) than whatever Mozilla seems to be interested in experimenting with nowadays. Obviously I'm pretty early in my usage, but compared to my expectation that switching over would be either a huge hassle or not really have any immediately obvious differences, I've noticed a number of small but nice changes from my experience with Firefox but not much hassle overall; the only sticking point I currently have is that so far I haven't been able to log into either Gitlab or the webmail site for my custom domain on Namecheap, but I think the former might just be my own error after hitting a limit on two-factor attempts after misunderstanding whether it was asking for my U2F key (which from further research doesn't seem to be supported yet) or an authenticator OTP code, and the latter seems to be getting an error from the server terminating the connection, which is frustrating but feels like it's mostly the fault of the server for apparently not trusting a browser it doesn't recognize (and even seeming to ignoring the user agent when I try to set it to something more "normal"). Given that my Gitlab usage is entirely personal (and mostly just consists of using it as a git server with repos I create using the CLI tool and then don't log into to look at much) and my email also forwards to Gmail (although admittedly with a sometimes annoying delay for stuff like confirmation emails for logins), using a different browser just to access those maybe a couple times a month isn't really going to bother me that much.

I was just checking their site. Not even mention of Firefox other than an external quote? Looked a bit shady tbh.

I moved to LibreWolf - https://librewolf.net/

How are they funded? Or, in other words, how do we know they won't end up in the same situation?

There's probably no ideal out there, just different better (or if you prefer, 'less bad') options. With the modern web, nothing is permanent. If a company or software is amazing, it could always become awful in the future. In principle software always potentially suffered from this problem, but the modern web really accelerates this process. There's effectively no web browser which can remain static as the web around it changes so rapidly. And, in order to be meaningfully useful for a broad audience it would also need to keep up with Chromium, which is incredibly well-funded. I think we're in a losing game.

I respect what they do, but it's a bunch of patches and scripts on top of Firefox, maybe less demanding that the real deal. Also:

> no donations means no expectations

Which is very healthy way to take care of a personal project. And if Firefox ever closes, all the forks will have to close at the same time anyway.

I downladed WebKit for Windows nightly on a whim, not really usebale (as in no extension support) but I wish it were…

Please keep using Firefox.

And tell people it’s the only place you can get manifest v2 and fully powered ublock origin

For people who use LibreWolf - do you happen to know if it honors Firefox' internal settings relating to disk/memory caches? I insist on configuring Firefox to store as little data as possible on disk in favor or using in-memory caching.

Pardon the noise, I found the answer within the product description:

* Disable disk cache and clear temporary files on close.

There are more Gecko-based alternatives to Firefox: Mullvad Browser, Zen Browser, Floorp, GNU IceCat, next to LibreWolf. There used to be also Pulse Browser and Flock Browser.

+1 for icecat, it's the way to go until ladybird is ready. you'll need to disable some of the default extensions to make it usable.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

https://icecatbrowser.org/index.html

I moved to Waterfox on Android and, in a couple of small things, it works better for me than Firefox; but being a soft fork it has some of the problems of LibreFox.

As the post is saying: I'm disappointed, but there is no technical reason to drop Firefox for now. Yet I feel like I must do something when the ToS is still hot, although I don't expect any change from Mozilla.

I have to say Firefox (and forks) for Android is several levels inferior to chrome (forks). Just slower and consumes way more battery - and does not even have the customizability of alternatives.

It supports web extensions.

So does MS Edge but you get Microsoft ads and tracking.

FF has ublock origin, so already end of story there. But it also does a better job of allowing me to request desktop site and actually get it, and thus around some website bugs.

Chrome forks like Kiwi also have ublock, extensions or desktop view.

What you do will, in part, depend on how you feel about 2 things:

1. Mozilla is now an advertising business - see e.g. links in this El Reg post [0].

2. How you feel about the alternatives.

Behind the PR bluffing of the last few days, #1 is clear. Mozilla has hitched the wagon to advertising.

There's unlikely to be a single good answer for #2. All the alternatives have compromises: Vivaldi is chrome-based and has some closed source code; Brave has crypto and Eich's political views (and also chrome-based; the various firefox forks (LibreWolf, PaleMoon, Waterfox, ...) all have questions over their sustainability.

Perhaps the most promising is Ladybird, but it's a good way off yet.

Let's hope we're near the botton of the enshitification curve and there are positives on the horizon somewhere.

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduces_te...

Personally I’m going to stick with FF until Ladybird is released and then jump ship.

Using the www less is also an option. Wikipedia works fine as a mobile app.

My needs are:

- I like Safari as a browser and can live with it - at least on Mac and Safari. But goodness, its sync and almost anything it does with iCloud is atrocious. Now, Apple being Apple they definitely wouldn’t let anyone else fix that.

- I also need to use Android where I use Safari.

I would happily ditch Safari and Firefox if I can use a browser (without crypto shenanigans, edgy UI) all I need are:

- robust sync (tab, bookmarks, and if possible preferences) across platforms (at least between iOS and Mac; and I repeat, no Safari/iCloud isn’t that)

- Decent tracking/ad blocking. Doesn’t have to be top notch

- Snappy

- I am fine with closed source because I have been using Safari all these years

I would recommend Vivaldi then. I've been using it for half a year and it's pretty good.

I tried it for last two days and then uninstalled it. Didn't click. But I found Vivaldi much (!!) better than Brave.

I am trying Orion now based on a comment here. Let's see how it goes.

The only thing that saves Safari syncing for me is the tab groups. iCloud automatic syncing is terrible. I'm pretty sure it's not even syncing my iPad's open tabs for some reason and I have no idea how to start troubleshooting it except for removing my iCloud account and then signing back in.

I mean it's just pathetic. I see tabs that I closed from both Mac and iPhone months ago and it had stopped showing up in iCloud Tabs and then it decides to show up again. This is just one among the countless problems.

The point is such problems are so old - years/decades - that you know 1. Apple doesn't want to fix it, 2. Apple is not capable of fixing it. I really think both 1 and 2 are correct.

I wish Apple just made great and safe hardware let the software be handled by entities with software expertise.

By the way someone suggested Orion. I think it has tabs. Might want to try.

The Orion browser has been great for me on MacOS and iOS. It won’t help you with your Android requirement, but every other point is covered! (Allows for Firefox / Chrome extensions too)

I will give it a try. The icon reminds me of an old browser called Camino (if I remember the name correctly). I loved that browser.

A quick notice: I opted to play the intro video and the video was completely useless, without any control or a way to exit or anything at all. Luckily it didn't go for mins but it was also not like a splash screen. Honestly that is not a very good first impression imho.

But the interface is very promising. Doesn't look "odd" on Mac the way I feel on Brave or even Safari. Will give it a shot. Imported everything from Safari except passwords.

What’s wrong with Chromium?

Chromium based browsers are beholden to Google's whims the same way Firefox forks are to Mozilla's. I expect those Chromium browsers planning to continue support of effective APIs for adblock will soon find they don't have resources to maintain those patches as more of the underlying infra gets removed from upstream, for example.

My level of trust in Mozilla has fallen, but it still doesn't look likely to fall below my trust in Google in the short to medium term

For me: no Multi-Account Containers, full uBlock Origin about to be disabled.

No manifest v2, worse privacy options, controlled by Google and so sure to get worse over time.

I basically do not care anymore. It is impossible, What I do do is use Mullvad VPN on my phone where you can block all ads, and I use hosts file and Mullvad on my Laptop.

The only thing that will kill surveillance capitalism (fascism?) is to stop giving them the eyeballs, so get everyone you know to do what I do.

I've been thinking about this question myself. It's just a matter of time before Mozilla ends Linux support. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the whole Mozilla leadership team runs everything like a regular corporation with Windows and MS Office and Teams and uses Edge as their primary browser. We're one cost-cutting decision away from not having Firefox as an option on Linux.

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