I myself like Gnome’s Epiphany browser. Yeah it’s not perfect, but at least it works and granted the performance is getting somewhere. Also, I think its based on Apple’s Webkit, but I couldn’t be more far off.
Yeah I wish Vivaldi wasn’t Chromium-based, because I love all the bells and whistles of Vivaldi so much. But like, at the end of the day it’s still partly contributing to the Chromium dominance of the web, so I still have to default to Firefox as my primary.
Same sentiment here. Coming from Opera (in the days it had its own engine) and having been using Vivaldi as my daily since its first public preview, native mouse gestures is the thing I miss the most from Firefox.
I know that the folks at Vivaldi are pretty strongly against the manifest v3 thing, but seems like at one point they’ll have to fold.
I went from Firefox, to Chrome (came as default, didn’t swap because browser was fine), to Vivaldi which was really neat when I started learning Chrome was going to become suck, then back to good old Firefox when I learned that Vivaldi is Chromium.
It’s a shame the web got so complex that it has become unfeasible to make a browser engine anywhere near full compliance for anyone that isn’t a large company.
Chromium is to the modern internet what Internet Explorer was in the mid 2000s. It’s not as stagnant (thankfully), but as far as market share and giving one oversized tech giant arguably too much power over the internet, we’ve basically come full circle.
pro tip: to link to a youtube video at a specific timestamp, you can either right click the video and Copy Video URL At Current Time or add the timestamp to the URL parameters. e.g. if you want to link to the youtube video youtube.com/watch?v=ThiSPArt at the time 1 minute 23 seconds, you can either link www.youtube.com/watch?v=THiSPArt&t=1m23s or youtu.be/THiSPArt?t=1m23s
Icefox I’ve heard about and LIbrewolf I use actively.
The latter has frustrations with Video Downloadheper. IDK WTF to do to make it work. Sticks me to fucking Firefox to rip. Icefox recommender said it should work with VDH but they don’t really know and I ain’t had a chance to work with it.
Have you asked the Video Download helper team? I had an issue before where it wasn’t picking up a media after an update and asked them and they fixed it by the next update. They’re really good with support.
I can’t figure out how to post on github yet. I have little time that isn’t bothered with other things first. I’m missing a bunch of shit I already stole from yt but keeps getting fried cuz im lazy and don’t book it to my vault
It’s unfortunately a relatively complex thing to answer.
First off, there’s the license. The source code is published under a BSD-3 license, which is very permissive, meaning in theory, anyone could fork the repository and be completely free from any control of Google.
However, this is not really a thing in reality.
First of all, for your fork to have any meaning at all, you need people to use it. They’re not going to use your fork, if it’s unclear whether you’re trustworthy and in particular, you need to offer something better than Google and do so for a while, so that people feel like they can rely on you.
Google is also not bound by its license to make future updates available under the same license. If your fork would become too successful, they could re-license and then it would genuinely just become a competition for who has more dev power.
But with the additional caveat that if you don’t also re-license, then Google can continue taking your work and provide theirs on top.
Google also has a load of tracking infrastructure and an ad business, which makes Chrome a valuable investment for them.
There’s very few other organizations for which it would make sense to invest similarly much into Chromium development (and those organizations will then have similarly awful motivations).
Which means a hard fork, i.e. without dependence on future updates from Google, is pretty much not going to happen.
Additionally, you’d need a solid number of users in your fork, if you want to have any say in terms of web standards. So long as Google Chrome has a majority of users, Google can easily introduce proprietary standards, which webdevs will gladly lap up.
So, all in all, Google does have a pretty tight grip.
Presumably, they don’t put any incriminating stuff into Chromium, so that they steer clear of even faint attempts to fork (and because they can just put those into Google Chrome instead).
But there’s plenty room for interpretation in most web standards, so they can implement them in their interest, and then the forks have to stick to that implement, if they want to remain compatible with the web.
Basically, a corporation owning such an open source project removes almost all positive things associated with “open source”. They’re using it for “look we are good” much more than for “we actually care about open source community”.
(edit) oh no, I’ve said something bad about the lesser evil, and the people who have made it their identity to violently cum all over the first thing that isn’t owned by Google are after me. I hope the pipe bomb hitman is at least polite.
I wish this blanket statement were true. Firefox is better in some respects, but surely not all. Tab and session management - just to name two examples - are just handled better by the Chromium crowd, as much as it pains me to say that.
I just wish Firefox updates weren’t so intrusive. Having it hit me with “Firefox updated in the background, restart to continue using Firefox” while I’m trying to use QuickBooks for my job is so disruptive when QuickBooks doesn’t save automatically and never opens back up to where I left it off. I won’t go back to Chrome, but I never had it pull that sort of forced restart on me.
There are lots of people who will never update if asked to update at their leisure. I think it’s far better for user security to have updates be forced by default, with the option to schedule them yourself.
Ah. I guess I don’t notice that since I’m on Linux and just update Firefox whenever I want.
If you go to Hamburger menu > Settings > General > Check for updates but let you choose to install them, you won’t auto update anymore. I agree that would be annoying.
I legitimately forgot this used to happen to me on Windows, it’s so convenient being able to update all the software on my system with the click of a button
From what I understand, Chrome doesn’t need to do this, because when you close it, it keeps running in the background and does its upgrades then, which is also pretty intrusive.
If you’re updating Firefox via the built-in auto-updater, you can tell it in the settings that it should only install updates when you tell it to do so.
What OS? I almost never close out of Firefox on my Macs at home and I’ve never seen that message there. FF on Windows seems to be the same. It’s been ages though since I’ve left FF open for months on end on Linux though.
I’ve had this same experience on Linux Mint. I’ll run apt update & apt upgrade and, occasionally, if Firefox is one of the things being updated, new tabs and new pages won’t load and will tell me I need to do a system restart to continue browsing.
I always update manually, so it never happens without me initiating the update first. But sometimes I’m like, “Dangit, didn’t realize this update would require a restart to keep using Firefox.”
On Linux, disabling Firefox updates in Firefox itself will not fix this issue, because Firefox’s own updater doesn’t actually have this bug! You get this warning when the Linux package manager has already replaced the files underneath the running program.
You say it’s windows, but I think you said it’s a work machine so maybe they’re updating firefox from under you?
Back in the day, Firefox was literally not as good as Chrome. I personally think that has reversed and it’s now much better than Chrome. Leagues better, now that Chrome is banning UBlock Origin. I do wish we had more competition than just Chrome, Safari, and Firefox though…
Servo, as far I know, has no plans to be a browser. Instead, they want to offer an alternative to Blink (the Chrome rendering engine), so that other software can be made with it. This seems to be a common misconception.
Ladybird’s project lead and main developer, Andreas Kling, may or may not hold controversial views that some would prefer to avoid supporting.
I really want there to be more options in the browser market that aren’t Blink based (or WebKit, sorry Apple), but the situation’s tough.
I’m an advocate for Firefox, but it is slowly, slowly entering enshittification.
The addition of AI, dark patterns to enable “sponsored bookmarks” upon reinstall, ads (albeit subtle) when using the address bar for search…
All of these can be disabled, some easily, some with feature flags.
Sure the enshittification isn’t anywhere near the pace as Chrome but it’s happening. And again, this is coming from a maybe 10 year financial donor to Mozilla.
Firefox is better than Chrome, no question but there is an opportunity for a new browser to challenge the field.
You make good points but some people are knew jerking on Firefox’s AI. One of them is client side translation which is really neat as I don’t need to send the content to some Google ad data vacuum.
Another AI model helps differently abled people to have websites described to them using, again, a local model.
There is also Libtefox which uses the same rendering engine without the other stuff if you don’t want it.
I consider it an important act to use non Chromium browsers as not to completely hand over the power of rendering web content to Google.
What telemetry options are enabled by default that are invasive? I’m not saying they aren’t there, it’s just been forever since I installed it and I sync my settings. Also, if our bar for saying something is invading our privacy is so low that we say having a default search browser selection as Google then I think we’re going to far.
There’s a lot of people on here that see literally any telemetry or analytics as evil, even though it’s a necessary component for any software at the scale of Firefox (especially automated bug reports). Mozilla makes it clear they collect as little data as possible: support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
Don’t misunderstand me saying that Google Search being the default is not a major problem as me saying that I’m cool with Google Search or Google in general. You can change the default search engine. Not every “bad thing” these companies do are an equal level of “badness” if that makes sense. A browser shipping with Google Search as the default search engine is very minor to me. I don’t use Google Search unless Duck Duck Go doesn’t give me a good answer.
My biggest problem with Chromium based browsers is very specifically their market share and that it effectively allows Google to define how the web works because of it. I think Safari is still it’s own thing. Firefox is, of course. But that’s it. Even a few years back Edge was it’s own thing but it’s since switched to Chromium. IE is dead I believe, unless there’s still some crazy long term enterprise support release. Opera is Chromium based too, now, but I don’t remember when exactly this happened. Chromium is still mostly controlled by Google. That’s an absolutely massive share of browsers being controlled by Google. (And even many non-browser programs when you consider Electron uses Chromium.)
Chromium is deprecating manifest v2 and the newer v3 has neutered ad blocking capabilities. In Alphabet’s SEC fillings they list ad blocking as a challenge to their revenue. End users can’t just flip v2 back on (unless the devs of their browser put work to let them). End users can change their default search engine though. Very easily. Trivially so. Who knows, maybe as a result of that court ruling we’ll see browsers forced to have no default search engine in the future. I think that’s better, yes, but I really don’t think having Google Search as the default is that massive of a concern compared to much of the other shit they’re doing.
Telemetry is not privacy-invading, it’s pretty well anonymized. It’s also a lot easier to change the search engine than it is to download a completely different web browser.
You should inform yourself before writing. And I say that without any harmful intent. To get a true privacy focused Browser you need to harden Firefox (and may download some scripts from github to do so). Or just use LibreWolf as it has a lot of tracking preventative stuff built in similarly to Mullvad Browser or Tor Browser. Those two are however of course still way better. The latter being the best with regards of anonymity if you know what you are doing. I can just encourage you to inform yourself about the Firefox browser which is better than Chrome of course, but still compromises your privacy in the default shipped state.
Technical data includes information about your Firefox version and language, device operating system and hardware configuration, memory, basic information about crashes and errors, outcome of automated processes like updates and safebrowsing. When Firefox sends data to us, your IP address is temporarily collected as part of our server logs. IP addresses are deleted every 14 days.
There’s maybe a handful where I’m not sure, if you can do them via settings.
One where it’s technically the case, is that they remove Pocket at compile time. But to my knowledge, Pocket integration is pretty much a glorified bookmark. There’s not much code to remove. And it can be disabled via about:config by setting extensions.pocket.enabled to false.
I guess, to be fair to LibreWolf, Mozilla has been helping out the Tor Browser devs since forever, so most things needed for Tor Browser are just a toggle in the Firefox settings.
As a result, though, there’s also lots of settings, which partially need expert knowledge. So, there is definitely room for different presets. But yeah, still leaves the question, whether one really needs a different executable to adjust these settings.