cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/68754751
There was a time I chose Firefox over the Chromium browser without a second thought. But nowadays, installing and opening Firefox seems like a time-consuming, very bloated experience.
Too many unnecessary features, promotions, sponsored links, and widgets are filled on the homepage. Firefox no longer allows deleting default search engines like google, perplexity, etc but can disable it. What kind of privacy feature is that? Also, all the data collection options are ticked by default. Users are needed to manually tweak it their own. Update after update instead of improving they make all the settings more complex, and there is a lot to set up after a fresh installation.
When I compare modern Firefox with 4–5 years behind Firefox, I feel like I am using browsers like Vivaldi or Opera instead of Firefox. Once we praised Firefox for its ram management in Linux but nowadays, it’s bloat causes using more ram and not a lightweight option anymore. Seriously, Firefox must consider releasing a browser like Brave Origin (Firefox Origin or something).
Isn’t anybody else frustrated with the new Firefox changes? If yes, what practical solutions exist? Debloat using any script or install any forks (no forks seem to be good; some are outdated, some are too much hardened, some are just not for daily browsing, etc.).
I’m just looking for a browser like Ungoogled Chromium but for Firefox (Unmozilla Firefox).
Sometimes I wonder if this folks that are so aggressively against Firefox but ready to eat up on Chrome, might be just bots. I mean I hope so.
Cause otherwise we will have so many options and Google will have the best intersts for all of us 😇
I’ll never switch to Chromium no matter what happens, not on an ideological basis, but because Firefox is the only browser that allows me to create duplicate bookmarks without manually copying and pasting it.
Vanadium is not too bad. But missing ublock_origin.
I think the sponsored links, promotions and Ai efforts come from their crisis trying to make money and to depend less on Googles money. While trying to focus on privacy and not sell user data. That’s a tricky situation to be in, if the browser isn’t making money. I wouldn’t call Firefox bloatware, as it is bloated like any other modern browser.
And it’s not like I wouldn’t have an issue with Firefox either. For long time I am looking for an alternative, and almost switched over to Librewolf. But unfortunately Librewolf have removed the internal password manager of Firefox, and they recommend to use an external manager. Which is the deal breaker for me. So even if Firefox is flawed, I’ll stay with it and do the customization and settings myself, which is a lot.
I don’t have any issue with Firefox trying to make some money by doing such things, but all these features are causing the system to use a lot of RAM too. Once we praised Firefox as being the less memory-hogging browser in Linux, but if it is going this way, not anymore.
I called it bloatware because nowadays it is filled with bloat features no matter what.
We said Vivaldi is closed source just because they didn’t publish some part (the unique design) of their code.
We call Brave Bloat because of its crypto stuff.
Now Firefox has promotional links, suggestions, tracking stuff, etc.; then why not call Firefox a bloatware?
By the way, if the contract with Google ended, then why is the default search engine still Google? Also, what is perplexity doing there?
I guess its fair enough. My point was just to sympathize with Firefox a little bit, to explain their situation and why they are in it. And as said, I also have issues with Firefox, such as integration of Ai in all sort of stuff, just for the sake of Ai. So maybe I shouldn’t be so defensive about it.
It was not about the contract with Google being ended, but governments involved to block Google from paying money to control the market as their default search engine. Looks like they did not block it yet. I think Mozilla wants the money, because otherwise Firefox would stop to exist. Google wants to give money too, because in the grandscheme its little money for them. But Google want to support Firefox, so they can say “look we even support our competition, we are not a monopoly, we are good”.
Because it is a bloatware. Like, what is the point of using Firefox? It’s faster? It was never because of speed. Less RAM usage? No. It was because of privacy. Peoples started hating on Chrome because Google became evil. Then they went after adblockers. Google search became bloated with garbage results, DDG became a better alternative, also marketed as privacy-focused.
It just happens to be that out of all other web browsers, there were no better alternatives, and Firefox seemed the best option at that time. Opera was a spyware. Brave was still fresh. Actually, Brendan Eich, the founder of Brave who also founded Mozilla and created JavaScript, was called out for making an anti-LGBTQ donation, so many people hesitated using Brave when it released. Needless to say, anything Microsoft was hated with a passion.
That’s why people need to keep reinventing the wheel.
Having competition in browser engines is important. Imagine no Firefox was available, everyone was at the mercy of Googles work on the core. I don’t want to use any Chromium based browser, so only a Firefox based alternative it is for me. I also highly liked the way Mozilla and Firefox was operating, but in recent years it gotten worse. And using forks has some trust issues too to me. I can’t trust most forks, but I’m currently reavaluating the situation.
To me Firefox is still the best browser out of all available options. The only thing I would consider is a fork like Librewolf, that still is Firefox with some bullshit removed or disabled. That’s as far as I would go.
Thing is, I have configured my Firefox to be as “private” as possible. It can also backfire, because corps can fingerprint you based on your browser’s preferences. So, when I am saying Firefox is bloatware is because it is out-of-the-box. You can spend hours tinkering with it, but the average person won’t bother doing that, so Mozilla would force them to be part of their ecosystem through all those syncs, branding, AI, no actual strict privacy by default, etc. That’s what I call bloat, that on-boarding experience with terrible UI changes.
You can re-enable the integrated password manager of librewolf, it’s just a setting; be aware of the risk though
Oh, that would change a lot for me. I wasn’t aware it can be enabled. Thanks for the tip, I will look into this.
Honestly, Chromium seems to have the basic features like history and passwords figured out way better than Firefox (or rather, Chrome does), while stripping most of the junk away, as it luckily happens to be proprietary Google bullshit.
Firefox has a bunch of telemetry and bloat, but the fact that my only real dealbreaker for a browser is quality adblock makes Firefox pretty much my only “vanilla” choice.
Imho history is fine on Both (tho I prefer ff) and passwords feels better to use on ff
Ironfox seems to take a fair bit of RAM and spin up my fans. Even if it’s one tab doing nothing.
I do have some addons and sync setup though (with the adjust canvas setting on as recommended).
Ungoogled chrome dosnt seem to have an issue. And like another commenter said so many sites break in IronFox I need backup anyway.
But maybe waterfox or zen is better for my use.
Is Ironfox on Linux too?
Nah. I should have been saying LibreWolf through the comment.
https://codeberg.org/celenity/phoenix
Great project.
My firefox is set to restore my last session, so I never see the homepage.
You can set the homepage to be whatever you want. No chance of unexpected porn popping up at inopportune times that way.
At first I thought you meant the homepage was offering unexpected porn, and I was considering going back. (I live in a repressed state.)
So do I. But there’s ways around that shit lol.
Only expected porn on my homepage!
gemini protocol
oh man its been a while since I last used it, how active is it nowdays? there used to be a BBS which was like Reddit but for Gemini.
time to install a Gemini client :D
This is nonsense
I regularly set up Firefox because I distro hop and like to buy cheap thinkpads. It takes like 30 seconds to do some quick toggles in the settings. Half of them are regular shit like tab behavior because I don’t like the defaults, and that’s okay. 15 seconds to install ublock. Couple minutes in about:config
Would it be kinda nice if all the defaults just happened to align with my specific wants and needs? Sure, I guess. But I’m an adult with agency and am happy to click some toggles.
If maintaining and updating a codebase didn’t take so much labor then it’d be cool to use obscure single-maintainer forks. But up-to-date security and non-google alternatives are orders of magnitude more important to me than having to click a few toggles once.
I would say this is most browsers from what i’ve seen. Just let me do my searches, stop trying to advertise to me, stop trying to get my data…and get the fuck out of the way.
deleted by creator
Wtf is this shit.
wrong thread.
Is Firefox Focus not a thing anymore?
apparently its only available for mobile devices
I’d recommend Mullvad Browser. It has Tor’s anti-fingerprinting features without the Tor part. Designed to use with a VPN to get anonymity from sharing IP addresses. But even if you don’t do that it is still a stripped down private by default Firefox fork. I use it for general searches and some anonymous accounts, and Brave or Zen for signing into personal accounts. Brave is controversial but their controversies are at least understandable, quickly rectified, haven’t happened in a while, and are generally best in class on features. Zen is a little slower due to being based in Firefox and not Chrome, but not much, and is much more clean and customizable than Firefox.
Recommending mullvad, in this economy ? That’s a bold strategy , if nothing else.
I suppose if you’re going to do that then following up with handwaving brave’s historic shenanigans and current CEO is consistent.
“They previous did and continue to do some shit i don’t care about , i like their products” at least shows some backbone.
The corporate defense version of the narcissists prayer is weaksauce.
What a strange comment. Can’t say I’ve ever been called a narcissist for recommending privacy browsers before.
Mullvad is pretty much the most trusted VPN provider. If you don’t want to pay for a VPN, don’t. I explicitly mentioned it is still a good privacy by default Firefox based browser without the bloat of Firefox.
Sure, let’s go through your list, why not.
2016: Brave announces a feature, then are laughed at because it’s a bad idea. They don’t do it. Ok then?
2018: for some reason they allow users to donate in someone else’s name that Brave is not affiliated with. They give them the money after $100 is reached, which is clearly stated. They don’t clearly state which is affiliated and who isnt, confusing the website owners into thinking someone impersonated them. They then label it after someone contacts them about this, and don’t use a dumb ass fundraising system like this again. At no point are they being misleading about where money is going, and this does not affect Brave users in any way.
2020: injecting affiliate links. According to Brave, this was a coding mistake, and it was fixed before they made any money from it. Even if I don’t believe them, from what I can tell, this is not like the Honey scandal where it stripped out other people’s affiliate links to steal their money, but rather only put an affiliate link into a clean link to make Brave money when there would have been no money involved. Not a privacy issue either from what I can tell. It’s an “if x then y” thing during the search process. There’s not someone sitting in Brave HQ reading everyone’s searches and pressing a button, nor is it recorded. Is it scummy and possibly illegal to get money from a company who is thinking someone advertised on their behalf but are effectively not gaining anything? Yeah, and if they did in fact do it on purpose, that is bad. But I can see their logic of it not hurting anyone. Sorta…and if I’m being honest I’m not going to cry for corpos that heavily push ads.
2020: ads on home screen. Like every browser, including Firefox. OK. I forgot this happened because I turned it off. Like I do for every browser, or at least every browser that allows you to do so. Except in Brave’s case, they will literally pay you to not turn it off.
2021: Brave makes a Tor plugin that they didn’t realize conflicts with their ad blocking in such a way that causes DNS leaks. They fixed it as soon as this was found out. Unlike the affiliate link thing, I don’t believe for a second that this would be intentional. Brave does not stand to benefit from this on any way, unless they are fully a fed psy-op.
2023: certainly the most worrying on the list that they’re even approaching this as a feature. However, Web Discovery Program is opt in. Your data is not being sold or used for Brave’s index unless you tell them to. I think their idea here was to build their own index based on consensually given data rather than solely scraping the internet without consent. However I’d really prefer they just didn’t be a part of data selling at all, obviously. Needless to say, this is a big problem with browsers in general. Firefox has stated that they don’t sell data, but they have definitely been in bed with Ai lately and their telemetry is opt out.
Now far be it from me to even approach being a corporate defender. I am. not here to suck Brave’s dick, I keep up to date with what Brave is doing because I don’t fully trust them. But then again, I don’t trust pretty much any browser creators more than I am forced to. I just think it’s really weird that Brave gets so much hate when it isn’t warranted when compared to what other browsers do.
Ungoogled Chromium, for example, removes some key security features from the Chromium project for absolutely no reason, and relies on a bizarre build system that lacks transparency, relying on third parties binaries instead of just, you know, building from source. Helium is a fork of Ungoogled Chromium, and doesn’t fix either of those issues. Vivaldi is closed source. Why are we even entertaining them being a privacy browser if we don’t know what code they’re running? They could be worse than Google for all we know. Firefox refuses to fix a security flaw on Android where they don’t sandbox by site, which has been known about for years. Every Android Firefox fork has the same issue. As good as it is on desktop, that’s why I ultimately moved away from Firefox, because I need to sync tabs from my PC to my phone.
edit: well shit, i just realised i used a meme/reference that might have been mistaken for me specifically implying an economic reason not to use mullvad.
That’s my bad for assuming universal meme knowledge.
<X>, in this economy? was predominantly used to reference economic reasons to not doing something, it has broadened in scope to encompass the idea that the proceeding statement is nonsensical in general (not just for economic reasons)
So “mullvad, in this economy ?” roughly translates to “mullvad is a questionable choice in this current (specific or general) context”
What a strange comment. Can’t say I’ve ever been called a narcissist for recommending privacy browsers before.
No one was calling you a narcissist, read it again.
Mullvad is pretty much the most trusted VPN provider. If you don’t want to pay for a VPN, don’t. I explicitly mentioned it is still a good privacy by default Firefox based browser without the bloat of Firefox.
And my comment had nothing to do with its technical competence (nor it’s economic impact, see note at the top)
Have you really not seen any stories related to mullvad recently?
Sure, let’s go through your list, why not.
Not my list, a list.
And all of those explanations are the handwaving I mentioned.
Your take on them all seems reasonable if not exactly the same as mine.
In aggregate though they indicate a potential pattern.
My response was specifically to your implication that because their many shenanigans were in the past and nothing was a current problem that we should only judge them on their current technical competence.
I also noticed you didn’t mention the current CEO and why someone might have an issue with them.
I just think it’s really weird that Brave gets so much hate when it isn’t warranted when compared to what other browsers do.
Then you probably aren’t hearing all of what people are actually complaining about.
hint : they aren’t usually complaining about the technical competence.
Also other browsers get plenty of shit, a lot of it justifiable.
Ungoogled Chromium, for example…etc
All valid, and I agree.
I could list some you haven’t mentioned as well.
I personally use a variant of Firefox that has a whole bunch of questionable shit turned off or removed.
Despite almost all of their recent moves having been to announce some bullshit that actively makes them a worse option for me they are still currently , barely, the least worst option (for my preferences)
And only then it’s mostly because of the variants.
What I was getting at is that playing down the continuous bullshit from these companies weakens your arguments.
It also genuinely seems you don’t see why the non-technical aspects of these companies might be a point of contention for some people.
I wasn’t sure if you were referring to either or both interpretations for Mullvad, so I responded to both versions of what you could mean by that. Based in your last comment I have a feeling I didn’t hear something recent about them, as far as I know everyone still likes them.
I reread the narcissist thing and I’m really not sure what you mean then. Are you calling the Brave CEO a narcissist?
I do see a pattern, which is why I said I don’t fully trust them and why I noted they were controversial in my original comment. The way I see it is basically this: if you are a dyed in the wool tinfoil hat wearing privacy advocate, and actively part of the privacy community, you are probably a little bit crazy. Privacy should be default, but unfortunately we are in the wild west of information exploitation, that’s why you and I have to go out of our way to find private options. For a privacy focused dev, its them vs the world, and in a capitalist economy, you have to find a way to make your product make money, or it has to be a small enough project to not need much. GrapheneOS’s lead dev, for example, is a bit nuts. Do I trust he is competent and trying to do the thing he says he is trying to do, and do I trust putting his OS on my phone over Google? Definitely. Would I be friends with him? No. Brave I trust a little less, but I see them in a similar way: often trying to find a crackpot method to make money off their product so they can stick around.
I can’t say I’m a fan of their CEO. Then again, I can’t say I particularly like any CEO of any company, so I try to support open source projects with the Unix/Linux philosophy of doing one thing good, so I can support small projects that don’t need a CEO. Unfortunately maintaining a browser is not one of the things that can be done the Unix way. It is basically its own OS in some ways, a lot of work, even more so if it is your own engine like Firefox. For companies that I’m forced to choose between, their personal viewpoints are a concern, just not my biggest one, unless they’re like Satan themselves like Larry Ellison or Elon Musk. I’m forced to pay Microsoft for licenses and support at work, and that bothers my conscience more than using a free browser by a guy who didn’t support gay marriage in 2014 before it went through federally, like just about everyone I grew up with, most of whom have since gotten over themselves. Not saying it’s OK or right, just noting that was at least half of Americans back then.
I agree with your assessment that Firefox used to be the default good option and get steadily worse every day. They got have too big of a team so they’re trying to expand, but that goes against their core audience because we just don’t want extra “features”. They aren’t doubling down on what got them here: being a privacy focused browser. They’re trying to be Google, but can’t be because 1. Google exists, And Chromium is still is the best browser engine functionally, which most people care about most, and 2. It will alienate core audience even more. So their strategy is to go slow enough that hopefully we don’t notice or they don’t go bankrupt because they make most of their money from. Google being the default search engine.
Does this make Firefox a stupid option that I’d criticize people for using? No. It is still one of the best options we have, in a world where most of them are bad because a browser project has to have a certain amount of devs and money behind it to keep up with security and maintenance. And I recommended 2 Firefox forks to OP in my original comment. Firefox vs Brave is really just a predictable trending down of “Stop Firefox we don’t like this minor bad change!” “I’m gonna do it anyway” VS “Hey guys what about this?” “WTAF were you thinking Brave?” “Oh, sorry…”
I reread the narcissist thing and I’m really not sure what you mean then. Are you calling the Brave CEO a narcissist?
I was referring to a theoretical corporate defence version of the narcissists prayer and was again bitten by my ridiculous expectation that meme/reference knowledge is universal
Specifically your defence of brave sounded to me like this slightly altered version of that prayer
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not their fault.
And if it was, they didn’t mean it.I wasn’t trying to imply you are they were narcissists, only that your reply sounded a lot like that prayer.
I wasn’t sure if you were referring to either or both, so I responded to both versions of what you could mean by that. Based in your last comment I have a feeling I didn’t hear something recent about them, as far as I know everyone still likes them.
ah, again, with my assumptions:
TL;DR; A mullvad founder donated a large amount of money to what is largely considered to be a right wing political party
Here’s a small selection links, should be easy to search once you know what to look for:
Note, there is obviously bias and opinions here, have a look in to the actual details yourself for a full picture.
I do see a pattern, which is why I said I don’t fully trust them …etc
I agree with all of that up to this part:
Brave I trust a little less, but I see them in a similar way: often trying to find a crackpot method to make money off their product so they can stick around.
If their crackpot experiments are at the expense of the things i care about i’m out, but that’s a personal opinion, not a universal viewpoint.
I can’t say I’m a fan of their CEO. Then again, I can’t say I particularly like any CEO of any company,…etc
Again, all reasonable takes up to the end part:
I’m forced to pay Microsoft for licenses and support at work, and that bothers my conscience more than using a free browser by a guy who didn’t support gay marriage in 2014 before it went through federally, like just about everyone I grew up with, most of whom have since gotten over themselves. Not saying it’s OK or right, just noting that was at least half of Americans back then.
“He’s not as bad as musk and gates, plus everyone of that generation was like that” sounds a lot like an excuse, even if you specifically state that it isn’t.
I agree with your assessment that Firefox used to be the default good option and get steadily worse every day. …etc
Agreed
Does this make Firefox a stupid option that I’d criticize people for using? No. It is still one of the best options we ha…etc
Again, agreed, until the end.
“I’m gonna do it anyway” VS “Hey guys what about this?” “WTAF were you thinking Brave?” “Oh, sorry…”
That’s entirely glossing over the nature of the sketchy shit being pulled.
As we said mozilla are just stacking those shitty decisions like they were bricks of gold.
but they haven’t done anything even remotely a sketchy as :
- Referral injection/affiliate jacking
- Replacing ads with their own
- This
Presenting it like they are doing comparable things is disingenuous at best.
So you basically ARE calling me a narcissist by proxy, or a defender of narcissists at best.
Well, no more Mullvad for me. Thanks for pointing that out. There are several good alternatives.
I’ll keep it brief. I do find the controversies comparable, for the reasons previously stated. I will not continue to belabor the point as you do not agree. I find Brave’s mistakes to be easier to point out than the proverbial frog in boiling water, but not any less harmful. My goal is not to say everything Brave does is OK, but rather to push back in this concept that they do so many more worse things than similar products, which I do not believe to be true, as well as explain the context, which as much as they are still bad things that should in fact be criticized, are not AS bad as reading the headline sounds, and I can kinda see where they were coming from in some cases. And I’m more inclined to stick with them because they respond to criticism by fixing thr problem. I don’t expect that to change either, they’ve forced themselves aggressively into the position of catering to the core audience of privacy enthusiasts. I’m not telling you to accept it “at the expense of things you care about”. I’m telling you the problems no longer exist, so you don’t have to.
Worth noting that the CEO was the CEO of FIREFOX at the time of the LGBT controversy. He was forced out due to the backlash, so good on Mozilla, but I don’t believe for a second that Firefox employees didn’t know the type of person that he was, or that their corporate culture or values are particularly different than Brave’s. They’re just not arrogant enough to say it out loud. I could nitpick other things I don’t like about Firefox like their VPN, but at the end of the day my opinion is that they are both not great, but some of the better options available. I don’t play favorites just because it’s the thing I chose. It is entirely possible that either company could announce something tomorrow that would be unforgivable to me, and I would not be surprised by either one.
The only reason I point out of something is not “as bad” is because I don’t believe it is possible to stay completely away from supporting anyone controversial. Can’t do it with food production, can’t do it at work even though it makes me feel bad. Can’t do it with web browsers. If a 4th option besides Chromium, Gecko, or WebKit pops up overnight ran by the Jesus Christ of open source and privacy, I’d happily switch and we won’t have to keep having these conversations. But right now, this is what we’ve got: Brave, Firefox, and a few standout Firefox forks like Tor, LibreWolf, and Zen.
So you basically ARE calling me a narcissist by proxy, or a defender of narcissists at best.
I can’t speak to your interpretation but it was not my intention to do so.
For me to be calling you a narcissist i’d need to claim you were saying those things to defend yourself, which you clearly weren’t.
The company isn’t saying that about themselves either.
Well, no more Mullvad for me. Thanks for pointing that out. There are several good alternatives.
This was also not my intention, but i can’t say i’m upset at this outcome.
I’ll keep it brief. I do find the controversies comparable, for the reasons previously stated…etc
All reasonable takes and i wasn’t trying to imply you were trying to sway me, i was just stating my opinions and boundaries were different from yours in this case.
I don’t consider the shenanigans equal on both sides, but we can agree to disagree on this.
Worth noting that the CEO was the CEO of FIREFOX at the time of the LGBT controversy. He was forced out due to the backlash, so good on Mozilla …etc
Fully agreed, in this case i fall on the mozilla side because, as i said, to me it’s the least worst.
The only reason I point out of something is not “as bad” is because I don’t believe it is possible to stay completely away from supporting anyone controversial…etc
Also agreed, there is no ethical consumerism so you do what you can live with.
Zen Browser? It’s great.
CachyOS also has some nice opinionated configurations of the Firefox builds in their repos.
At the moment, I use both, with different configurations for different purposes.
Absolutely agree on every point. I felt this for the last few years, not just with the latest updates. I haven’t updated Firefox for months (a year?), and when I decided to do it after convincing my friend to switch to it because he said he couldn’t find the option in settings I told him about, I was basically ~10 versions behind. So updating it and seeing the redesigned settings that looked less intuitive and completely unnecessary, I felt really frustrated.
There’s a new browser in the making called Ladybird, I don’t know if it’s going to be available on Windows (they say the alpha is for Linux and macOS). Yeah, I am on Windows, sadly, and I don’t plan on switching to Linux, yet. Mozilla was praised for being a non-profit “good guys”, but they’ve been really annoying, perhaps trying to appeal to the mainstream. Truth is, the mainstream does NOT care about Firefox. You need to spend all your funds on marketing it, not making it uglier with each update.
You are running a browser that’s months out of date? 😐
Yeah. I have automatic updates disabled, I would have to download the new version in order to update it. I am using lots of software that is years “out of date”. Because they are better. The newer they are, the more bloated they are. And good things break and get deprecated. I am still on Windows 10 and I can’t be bothered switching to 11. If you think that jeopardizes my security, it really isn’t. My PC isn’t a web server that needs constant updates to keep the service secure; I maintain backups in case things go sideways.
But it is not secured. You do you and I won’t claim to know your full setup and threat model, but in 99% cases, no. There’s no advantage to running out of date software in terms of security or privacy unless it’s offline and air-gapped, and even then. For something like a web browser you absolutely want to keep it updated at all times. I would genuinely recommend reviewing the logic and this decision. If you don’t trust the browser, use a different one. If you don’t want W11, go Linux or Mac but choosing to run end-of-life software because you feel you are getting less bloatware is misinformed.
