The other day, I made a post about Firefox’s web extensions, specifically for YouTube. A lot of people pointed out Mozilla’s recent TOS update, which pertains to selling personal data. I noticed there were no suggestions, though. What alternative would you suggest, Lemmy?
Leaving Firefox and its derivatives is mostly out of the frying pan and into the fire. Proprietary browsers are worse, and Chrome and its derivatives are worse, thanks to Manifest V3.
That leaves Firefox/Gecko derivatives, like LibreWolf, and possibly some Safari/WebKit derivatives like GNOME Web.
Librewolf
Just switched to it the other day. I liked the letterboxing and its assistance to reduce fingerprinting and OOTB ublock origin. And the familiarity of Firefox made it an easier transition from reg Firefox.
What are the advantages?
Fork of FireFox,
with a focus on data privacy + security:
https://librewolf.net/I’d also like to add IronFox,
similar to LibreWolf, but for mobile:
https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/From what I know, librewolf is just a script. Sm it will be susceptible to Firefox’s policies
After a brief scroll through their source repo, I think it’s a set of patches which gets applied by a script while compiling the browser from source.
So it’s unlikely that it will be susceptible,
unless they forget to patch some telemetry out during a release, which is unlikely, since the projects goal is data privacy + security.
I switched to firefox-esr and will be happy to wait for tab groups and vertical tabs in the June/July version.
Currently I’m angrily sticking with Firefox. But once Floorp switches to the current version of Firefox as base I’ll totally try this one. According to what I found, they will switch with the next major release.
Isn’t it absolutely proprietary?
Seems like not entirely. But oh well. It looked so good on YouTube. Especially the customizations and alternate UIs.
Zen Browser is pretty nice
I’m with you. I have Waterfox and zen installed but mostly use zen
I still use Firefox on PC and Fennec on my mobile. So far I have no plans to change that.
Is Vivaldi better with its TOS?
Firefox, with no 3rd party AI agent added. People made a fuss but Mozilla wasn’t doing this. It was an optional AI add-on that would work this way. You don’t have to add this, and things will be as they were. Look up clarifications that have been released since. It’s really not as shady as everyone was trying to make it look.
I refer you to the changes to Firefox’s ToS, restricting downloads of explicit non illegal content, as well as removing the guarantee of data privacy and no data selling.
I don’t know what the AI stuff is about, but there’s enough here to conclude Firefox will not have the users best interest in mind moving forward and ultimately eliminated their selling point.
The things they did are shady enough.
I’m going to have to read about the download restriction thing. Thanks for pointing that out.
I feel like Mozilla addressed the data sharing thing but I can see how a later clarification might feel disingenuous or that trust was already lost.
I guess I’m still partial to it and find Mozilla relatively much less shady than Google, M$ and Apple. Maybe my bar is set too low and I should be trying less popular browsers to see how I get on with them.
