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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

** 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....

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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.)

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

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.

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).

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

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.

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 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.

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