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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Firefox
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Edit: bloody hell, I hadn't looked into Brave that deeply yet, fuck Brendan Eich and fuck Peter Thiel.
Jesus. A day without bad news from Mozilla would be nice. I am beginning to feel a distinct need to switch browsers. ~~and Brave is currently looking like the best balance between compatibility and privacy. I've only been resistant to Brave because it's based on Chromium and~~ I want to support non-Chrome browser engines, but the Firefox forks I've tried like Waterfox and Pale Moon just aren't there yet in terms of usability for me (primarily, wide protocol support for web video playback).
Anyone got any better suggestions, by any chance?
Brave is the funding vehicle of a far right political activist. Fuck Brendan Eich, fuck Brave.
deleted by creator
Seems you're right: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/new-funds-help-browser-maker-brave-try-ridding-the-web-of-nasty-ads/
I had forgotten why I dropped Brave. This was why.
Brave is also Chromium-based, so switching to that does nothing to promote a web without a Google engine monopoly. Of the three serious engine developers, Google (Chromium), Apple (WebKit), and Mozilla (Gecko), Mozilla is still the least worst option (and that's saying a lot as this story makes evident once again). FF alternatives like LibreWolf rely in Mozilla Firefox development because they don't do engine development. I hope the Servo revival turns that into a serious contender.
That's why I still use FF. I wish they were run by better people, but it's still not on par with Google's shit.
And they still offer useful features/services like email masks, cookie containers, and a VPN (which is rebranded Mullvad). If they were awful bad actors, they would be running their own exit nodes and surreptitiously collecting user data that way.
Let's also not forget their many privacy violations, including secretly whitelisting Facebook trackers that everyone seems to have forgot about.
https://librewolf.net/
It's very privacy focused but if sites break you can turn of fingerprinting protection and thing like that in the settings with one click.
Great browser
LibreWolf still depends on Firefox for continued development. If Mozilla goes under, I don't see it having all that much of a future.
If Mozilla goes under, the main funders (except google) will start funding the librewolf team instead, and they'll have more than enough resources to maintain the browser since librewolf devs don't spend 99% of their funding on other garbage unlike Mozilla. Maybe it is about time we hand over the browser to more capable people.
Librewolf is a tiny niche within a tiny niche. No one at Google has even heard of it, and they're certainly not going to start throwing money at a tiny obscure browser fork with zero web engine development experience if Firefox dies. Librewolf is a cool project, and I will gladly recommend it, but it dies with Firefox. It only even makes sense to consider the possibility if you have absolutely no self awareness of how small of a community we are at all.
I don't know, we've had small communities grow gigantic overnight after a larger one collapsed. Lemmy being one example. I think once something like that happens, more developers and users will flood librewolf.
Wanting privacy is no longer niche. People just don't know where to go.
Lemmy is very much not gigantic. It has tens of thousands of acitve users. Reddit has hundreds of millions. Librewolf is even more niche than Lemmy is. Librewolf isn't even really a browser, it's just a small patchset for Firefox. It only has it's own name and logo because Mozilla doesn't like people distributing modified versions of Firefox with their branding attached. Librewolf is very cool, but jumping straight from that to full on taking Gecko maintenance on completely is just a silly idea. I hope that if Mozilla does fail someone takes over Firefox from them, but Mozilla isn't running out of Google money any time soon, and Librewolf isn't even likely to be who takes it over if it does happen. It's way more likely to end up in the hands of a big Linux distro, or even a new organization formed specifically for the purpose of taking Firefox over. All this talk of Librewolf being the savior of Gecko based browsers is completely disconnected from the reality of what Librewolf is.
I'm of course rooting for Mozilla, but if things do go sideways...
Please be Proton, please be Proton
Check out zen browser! Built on Firefox and takes inspiration from arc. Built by a solo dev. I’ve really been liking it. https://zen-browser.app/
Edge with adblock seems fine. No matter what free browser you pick they find ways to profit.