Librewolf, it’s got better anti-fingerprinting, still lets you define your own search engines, and never implemented AI (at least last I checked).
I still use Firefox for when certain sites have a hissy fit with Librewolf’s safeguards (banking, health insurance, etc.) but otherwise it’s my standard.
I hope I get to keep using Firefox in a world where chrome becomes the defacto browser on all mainstream platforms like ie once was.
in a world where chrome becomes the defacto browser
This is already the case.
Nowhere close to the >95% market share IE had in the early 2000s.
Too bad it is
Have you used the containers? I find using the banking container mitigates it for my banks. Its usually my VPN that causes issues now.
its also fast .its a 10/10 browsing experiance for sure .
No, I prefer default Firefox. The product is sound and doesn’t raise any actually security or privacy issues for me. A little bloated? Sure. But doesn’t really affect me to be honest.
I’ve played the custom fork game for a few years with Chrome - I’m not interested in lagging versions or random bugs any more, and because of that experience I now simply want things to work as expected and be updated frequently.
I do use Floorp.
It is, by far, the most customizable and power-user friendly Firefox fork, and it has zero telemetry by default, so I do prefer it over vanilla Firefox because of that.
I also value its focus in performance.
What's performance like? I found it to be very slow the last time I tried it.
It may be a matter of hardware compatibility, a bug, or an issue during compilation or installation — I am not entirely sure. However, at least in my case, it runs significantly faster than virtually any other Firefox-based browser, including vanilla Firefox. It reduces CPU and GPU load by approximately 5–10%, which is substantial given my setup: an Intel Xeon v4 (Broadwell-EP, v3 SIMD) clocked at just 2.20 GHz (base, up to 2.90 GHz with Turbo Boost), featuring 12 cores and 24 threads, paired with an NVIDIA GTX 1060 (3 GB VRAM).
Regarding memory consumption, RAM usage does not exceed 4–5 GB, even under a heavy extension load of nearly 100 installed add-ons. That said, this performance might be achieved in part by my custom about:config flags, the use of CachyOS repositories (optimized up to v3), and forced optimized compilation utilizing Mold, LLVM/Clang, Ananicy, and full LTO, among other tweaks, inside of my makepkg.conf (I use Arch, btw 🤪).
I use it daily on my desktop. Works fine. Except yesterday where they published a broken release.. Oopsy
Yeah, at least they seemed to repair it fast, though
Did they? took 2 days.. and in the meanwhile I had to manually search the web with CHROME.. and to download a sketchy binary from a google drive, where they shared a working deb file of Floorp.. so huh.
Well, at least for me it has worked within a few hours.
they couldn't rollback PPA they said.. :\
Oh, well, the fact is that I use Arch btw, so it might have impact on it, maybe. Idk really, because I don't think that a simply PKGBUILD update would suffice. Maybe just the Debian/Ubuntu artifact was broken?
No. I just use the default. The forks are typically far behind... I tend to use the nightly builds. Cuz I like to find bugs and document them. :)
Hey you're willing to help out so I have nothing bad to say about you using vanilla Firefox.
Yes. Zen Browser. Its fantastic once your brain adjusts to vertical tabs.
Zen has been my main for awhile now, I love how it looks!
I prefer vertical tabs. Don't kill me!
I do now. It just took a while to realize it.
Waterfox. All FF features, no telemetry or AI, no "opt out".
Fennec on mobile.
I use Librewolf but have enabled firefox sync on it. Just don’t like the AI features in Firefox 150 and don’t need an in browser VPN. So far it’s been usable. I also use helium browser for when I’m feeling minimalist or a site doesn’t play nice with something that isn’t chromium.
Either LibreWolf or IceCat.
If you already use Mullvad VPN, I strongly recommend using Mullvad Browser for any task that doesn't require signing into an account to do like quick web searches.
For everything else, I recommend Librewolf if you care about privacy. I heard Zen Browser is good, but I never got the appeal of using vertical tabs since I already have years upon years of muscle memory of having tabs be layed out normally. Maybe there's another niche of Zen I'm not aware of? Not sure.
I have been using Zen as my main for over a year, and it has some random things beyond defaulting to vertical tabs (which was one of the reasons I tried it out since all of the extensions for them always felt wonky to me). Even lets you drag the window around like you do with horizontal tab bar (much easier to find free space to grab without accidentally pulling a tab into a new window for me). Some Chromium browsers also do this. So that does mess with my muscle memory when I switch over to FF and need to move the window and can't.
One kind of nice thing they have is that their version of "Peek" called "glance" kind of loads a page on top of a page without opening a whole new tab. It is kind of wonky in some links work fine, while others will just continue to the page in the original tab and need to press alt when clicking. Might be kind of a "it's just a new tab with extra steps" thing for some folks, but has been something that I have found nice to have.
Also had split tabs before they were added to FF if I remember correctly. Along with having "workspaces" that can have their own pinned tabs and and extra higher layer of pinned tabs above those. They look kind of like the boxes that are present if pinning tabs on current FF but did it first.
Outside of that, I think they managed to make the "look" of the browser better (another personal taste thing). Though FF has gotten some of the "look" closer to Zen.
Nothing "ground breaking" if you are already happy with FF. Just a pretty solid fork for people that aren't looking for something super hardened like Librewolf or even Mullvad. Early days updates had a chance of borking your GUI layout on big releases, but haven't had any issues with it in like 8 or 9 months. Overall the updates when I first started using it kind of reminded me of how early days of FF would actually excite me with obvious changes (not just GUI/UX) that felt like upgrades. This might be a non-starter for folks that prioritize GUI/UX staying more rigidly the same. Which is very valid.
vertical tabs have been a life changer, but you don't need zen for that anymore, firefox has it natively (thank allah). but i also use a 1440p monitor so im perfectly fine with losing a little screen real estate, but that + removing the bookmarks bar makes it look so slick and imho is way more intuitive since the horizontal tabs eventually clump up and you lose track of what tab is what whereas the vertical one is always clear but you can also indent groupings. highly recommend giving it an honest shot but obv you do you
Librewolf on desktop and tablet, and Iceraven on Android.
I changed Ironfox for Iceraven as it has better compatibility and personalization.
I was also looking for a fork. Major concern of such fork is, if I can trust the developers and package maintainers (in Linux), and if its up to date very close to original Firefox. That eliminates almost all forks. Librewolf was a candidate I would have installed and tried, but its missing a feature: it does not have builtin support for passwords. I know why its excluded and understand that. I know how to use KeePass application to store my passwords. But I personally want it in the browser builtin without any additional applications.
BTW no, my reply is not a request for alternatives. I just wanted to point out a missing feature in Librewolf.
Librewolf was a candidate I would have installed and tried, but its missing a feature: it does not have builtin support for passwords.
I always disable password management by Firefox, but I noped out of LibreWolf because it doesn't allow users to block all cookies and then whitelist domains for cookies.
I suspect what a lot of people want is a custom version of Firefox with the garbage surgically removed before compile; where the opt-in options still exist for:
I've been able to block all cookies by default and whitelist certain websites for i'm practically every firefox fork I've messed around with. The options are right next to each other in the privacy tab. I usually use it in conjunction with container tabs so the exempt apps can only open when I set a container.
I tried Librewolf too, and I just disliked the design, and it was also very slow for no reason.
I switched to Waterfox some time back. Switching was quite painless.
And I use waterfox as well on mobile.
Absolutely same, but I've been switching from Opera. I was kind-of veteran Firefox user but my primary browser for many years was Opera. By 2025, Firefox became slow and bloated as hell, even it's visual design (on mobile at least). I've tried a couple of forks, but they were either slow or ugly in my opinion. But Waterfox was not slow and it's look is exactly what I need: modern but not bloated. So I switched immediately.
I use floorp. But they just released a broken version 🙈
I haven't had a good enough reason to move to a fork. Most things I don't like can be changed in about:config.
I'm in the market for one
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