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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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Trust is hard to gain, very easy to lose. And much harder to regain, once its lost.
I have been a Firefox user since... its Mosaic days. And even after Chrome became a thing, FF remained my default choice. It was just my browser, I would shrug at anyone telling me Chrome was so much better.
Alas, their recent switch in regards to data/ads and after that their focus on AI, after a few previous decisions of them that quite worried me too, convinced me to do what I had never imagined I would do: replace FF as my default browser.
I now use Waterfox, and if Firefox is still installed on my Linux box I have not used it since (I'm a liar: I clicked it once, out of habit). I just don't feel comfortable using it, it's not my browser anymore. It's just a browser, like Chrome or Edge, some corp is trying to force feed me, and to screw me with. Thx, but no.
I would love to see FF change path and regain my trust. But this will take some efforts.
Single reason it's my main browser still are addon functionality.
Interesting, it's also not a chapter in https://browser.engineering/
That being said I imagine Google messed up the whole landscape with its Manifest V3 situation.
Also I imagine after a certain expertise threshold, one can relatively easily re-create an addon themselves. I'm thinking people who are familiar with Tridactyl or GreaseMonkey might not be as sensitive as this problematic.
I still remember the Mozilla Internet Application Suite before the browser part was spun off into Firefox and the email into Thunderbird. Some of their moves have been disappointing but I'll still never use Chrome
I remember that too.
BTW, Waterfox is a fork of FF ;)
Thanks for tip
The advice I've always read is to avoid forks because they usually get security updates slower than the main browser. Is that true of waterfox?
It might or might not be true, but I'm not sure it's particularly helpful advice. It's too wide-sweeping. Literally everything is a fork, apart from Firefox and Safari. Maybe Chrome, since they hard-forked and now go their separate ways from WebKit. But still, that's only 3 browsers. And unless you think that Firefox needs to be avoided because of its privacy violations but somehow are ok with Google Chrome, "avoid forks" doesn't work as an option.
Same boat. Used Mozilla since back when you had to futz to get it to compile.
Fuck Mozilla. Fuck FireFox.
LibreWolf fixed what the Foundation and Board enahittified.
I feel more sadness than anger. Like I feel a lot more sad realizing younger people will probably not be able to experiment a free and truly personal web, like the elders among us did. That corporate-free Web used to be the norm... with its clumsiness and its many quirks, its ability to tolerate conflicting opinions too. Now, everything is policed and so... neutered. It's also ad-saturated. It has turned into a TV, just worse.
Seeing Mozilla take that pitiful road made we feel a lot more sadness than anger, really. They were one of the few that were supposed to stand for another model. But I was not that surprised either...
Slap yourself. Don't accept defeat. Rage, rage against the dying of the 'net
Used Firefox for god knows how long. Reading your post made me want to try out Waterfox and I must say I really really like it so far. Gonna keep using it and maybe I'll even uninstall Firefox down the line.
No need to rush a decision, give it a swirl and you will see ;)