Well, what do we move to now?
- Floorp (https://floorp.app) - Zen (https://zen-browser.app) - Mullvad Browser (https://mullvad.net/browser) - LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net) - WaterFox (https://www.waterfox.net)
Besides that, there's also Brave and perhaps Chromium.
I’m not sure exactly how, for example with LibreWolf’s lead contributor @ohfp, they are supposed to do this but having a much more fleshed (!) out set of biographies for the core team would help? Everyone’s real name, day job, background — the full curriculum vitae if you will. That would be a really good way of building trust with me, and I’m certainly someone in the market for switching to one of these forks.
I’m not saying that this kind of auto-doxing is a requirement and if it were I would be the first to decry it as an obnoxious entrance fee for the bazaar of free and open source software. We’re talking about a browser though — something as crucial as a text editor, kernel, file system, or programming runtime — and to that end it would be nice to have as much real-name trust built with users as Vim, Linux, Ext4, or Python. By way of analogy, everyone is entitled to a private life etc., but if you’re running for office then you should consider sharing as much not as little as possible.
Sorry if I sound entitled. I don’t mean to be. I’m just realistic about how terrifying it would be to find a supply chain attack in my browser.
Obviously if a customer wants to manually kill it, it's on them, but CF has a lot of power in choosing defaults.
As far I know this is because LibreWolf pretends to be Firefox. Looking in the devtools confirms that Librewolf is sending a firefox UA.
My regular firefox instance is pretty much okay. Unfortunately there is a bunch of super popular crapware shit like Teams and Slack that refuses to properly work on Firefox, unless you tweak the UA. The last time I had to do this was about half a year ago, but Slack refused to let me "huddle", unless I changed my UA. Same with Teams, it straight up said I need to install chrome if I want video chat.
Any time I forgot to change back my UA, CF would not let me in anywhere. I got the captcha, clicked on it, it said "all good", reloaded the page, and I got redirected back to the captcha. Endless loop.
Agreed. I recently installed one of the forks, appreciate how it defaults to the privacy related features that need to be manually enabled in Firefox, but won't use it for anything where privacy and security is important. Which kind of defeats the point.
As for how to build trust: I don't have a clue. Things like real names, day jobs, and backgrounds don't really mean much to me. First of all, verification would be an issue. Second, it isn't really an expectation that I hold any other project or organization to. I suppose being in the main repository of a distribution that I trust would help.
(It's also worth noting that trust is more than trust in motivation. There is also trust in the competence of the individuals involved and in the project's decision making process. One can build trust under a handle. True names are not required.)
Elevating a browser to the same standard as (or even higher than!) an OS is completely reasonable.
Also agreed that browsers should be held to the same high standard as operating systems. Many people access confidential data with their browsers, may it be their own data or data about other people. (Going back to the notion of trust, I worked for a bank in the early days of the public Internet. The bank I worked for only allowed clients to use the bank's own software. In retrospect, a big part of the reason was the human angle rather than the technical angle. Sure, web browsers may have used the same level of encryption. Yet that is meaningless when the browser itself may serve as a man-in-the-middle.)
By default - Google disabled the store extension pages for browsers it flags as "Not Google" (incl ungoogled-chromium) but the extensions are still compatible.
I use https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store
There's a longer walk-through here: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-wiki...
Long story short - my extensions work just fine. Ublock, bitwarden, etc.
---
Editing this to add - Ublock Origin (not lite) is still working for me on ungoogled-chromium v133.0.XXXXX.
The same version of Chrome on macOS (v133.0.XXXXX) has disabled it by default claiming it's no longer compatible.
So we'll see how long the fork continues manifest v2 support, but at least right now it's still a much better version of chromium than chrome.
I'm already planning on moving to dns based blocking here, because I still have to touch chrome for work...
The recommendation is because Firefox is the only browser running full uBo (and even before uBo on FF had slightly more features than Chrome). Nothing changed there.
This is nothing to do with UnGoogled Chromium, but with Chromium . UnGoogled Chromium removes the Google parts, it's not making architectural changes.
FWIW uBlock Origin Lite is basically the same user experience as uBlock Origin.
More accurately, UnGoogled Chromium removes the Google parts, but doesn't add back in the stuff Google killed.
Works fine on my machine. What version/distribution are you using? There's a specific patch to enable manifest v2 extensions, so it's supposed to be working.
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-win...
and had not heard about this patch. Links are appreciated...
The rest are basically skins. How much does “brave” contribute to chromium? How much does librefox contribute to the core Firefox engine?
Which unfortunately isn't anytime soon.
I got burned by waterfox in the past, so i'm still reluctant.
I'm as advertiser hostile as i can be as i find that whole industry to be a cancer upon this earth.
Also re MitM'ing for crypto mining: I was never in favor of pushing Brendan out of Mozilla for being a supposed right-wing nut, but I am not surprised either to see that, given free reign, he _is_ a right-wing nut.
So you're saying their Privacy Policy is a lie:
"Our company does not store any record of people’s browsing history."
What we do catch makes me decide how much to trust companies to do what we don't see.
Mozilla becoming untrustworthy doesn't make another company trustworthy.
Firefox's sponsored startpage blocks and search suggestions are opt-out features. If you don't trust an opt-in system, you should trust an opt-out one even less.
Your should read past the initial post to the comments where what your say is refuted.
The legal reasons appear to be that they are and/or have been and/or will sell user data:
> In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar.
- https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...