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. All the settings are now more complex, and there is a lot to set up after a fresh install.
When I compare modern Firefox with Firefox ESR, I feel like I am using browsers like Vivaldi or Opera instead of Firefox. 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 Debloat using any script or install any forks (no forks seem to be good; some are outdated, some are too much hardened, some are just not for daily browsing, etc.).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 (Unmozillaed 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 😇
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://codeberg.org/celenity/phoenix
Great project.
Most people aren’t doing fresh installs often enough to get annoyed. There’s also an understanding that Mozilla will need to do things we don’t necessarily like to generate revenue and stay viable. Google isn’t going to fund them forever. As long as we can turn those things off and configure firefox to our liking, we can tolerate such changes.
Also, the browser engine needs to be maintained anyhow. Moving to something like Waterfox or Librewolf doesn’t change the necessity to support Mozilla.
I know they need to make money to thrive and compete against the competitors, but there is too much to tweak after each update. And it’s really disturbing just because of how Firefox once was.
But by not doing what users need, how is it actually going to stay? Is money the only needed thing for Firefox to survive? Not users?
If every update required users to tweak something to restore a setting to a previous state, that should drive users away from firefox. I haven’t had firefox as my daily since late last year (zen now) but that wasn’t my experience during my decades with firefox and my fairly frequent visits to the firefox subreddit indicate that isn’t the case either. I don’t remember an update causing a major issue since the opt-out AI controversy (v145?) so please let me know if other updates since then have had any serious pushback with opt-out features.
This.
Unmozillaed Firefox for me is also non-woke…
What?
Librewolf is a good browser. Not bloated with features and doesn’t have AI installed by default.
My problem with librewolf is that, despite having RFP (Resist Fingerprint) off, it doesn’t allow me typing accents from my ABNT2 (Brazilian) keyboard (I cannot type words such as “ração”, “óbvio”, “maltês”, etc, I have to type them using kde plasma then copy and paste inside the browser), as if librewolf were US-centric. The devs didn’t point me a solution when I opened an issue ticket, so I went with Waterfox instead. Waterfox allows me to type accents the way I’m accustomed as a Brazilian.
Literally not a problem to me, I can type ração, óbvio and maltês without a problem. Maybe you messed up something on your machine?
I don’t have a big opinion on it, but my preference is on Librewolf over Waterfox simply for the lack of AI being shoved down my throat.
To me, it has definitely nothing to do with system (KDE Plasma on Arch Linux) because Librewolf is the only piece of software in which accents don’t work. Even AppImage programs, which often lack a better integration with the X Session, have no problem with accents.
Also, ABNT2 accents are correctly parsed by Waterfox, even by Basilisk and Pale Moon which I also got here, as well as by the original Firefox (which I keep for things such as internet banking), even though they all share the similar “under-the-hood” Gecko (Goanna in case of Pale Moon and Basilisk), so this problem is part of the Librewolf hardening.
In fact, the very Librewolf FAQ mentions this:
Other common problems brought by RFP include:
[…]
- suppressed keyboard modifier events using alt-keys.These annoyances are intended to protect your privacy […]
Problem is, even if RFP is turned off, this hardening keeps occurring, and it’s PITA having to spin up a KDE Kate just to type something I can type directly in all the other browsers (including in the Geminispace’s Lagrange browser and the TUI-based Lynx, both places in which accents wouldn’t be even expected to begin with). So while I still have Librewolf among my browser installations, I only use it for things such as news outlets and certain websites because this is where it thrives, keeping some resemblance of private navigation.
I don’t know for Brazilian but for me in french, I use a variant of the french keyboard that include all necessary accents on the keyboard and not as alt-codes. Maybe there is something similar in the settings.
Seconded. Yay for librewolf! That’s my go-to browser now too.
Tho I also agree with blackbeans@lemmy.zip, we still need moz to maintain the engine. There are only 2 (?) cross platform browsers engines left.
This is the prob with the web becoming a highly complex app engine. The technical reqs to make a browser engine are so high, only a few huge companies can do it. Even MS gave up. G now has a lock on desktop browsers, esp if you count all the rest like Edge that use G’s engine. That gives G monopoly power to dictate web standards. And pull hostile acts like HW attestation that could lock out open OSs like Linux unless you “authenticate” with Android or IOS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So many websites don’t seem to work on Firefox or Librewolf, always have to keep Chrome handy somewhere
There is an extension called chrome mask on Firefox. It helps Firefox pretend to be Chrome on certain websites.
Librewolf, Waterfox and GNU IceCat are all Firefox forks.
For what you’re asking for, GNU IceCat is probably the best fit - the project syncs up with Firefox ESR but removes all proprietary stuff and maintains it’s own extensions. It has some privacy improvements too but is otherwise set up as a standard browser. It’s basically Ungoogled Chromium for Firefox. The downside is the project doesn’t release project binaries; you have to look for binaries in your distro (and many don’t provide them) or use GNU Guix - the package manager from the GNU project (which can be installed on any system; it’s a bit like NIX). Or build them yourself from Github. Details are here: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
Librewolf and Waterfox are both excellent but by default are very privacy focused and locked down, so you may need to make config changes to get them back to a more “standard” default browser set up (sacrificing the privacy benefits in the process).
Personally I use Firefox; I understand what you’re saying but the steps you talk about are at first install and that’s not something I do often so can tolerate it.
EDIT: Just checked, IceCat isn’t in OpenSuSE’s default repos (disappointingly) but I did find it in Fedora’s repos (both standard and it’s Flatpak store). So it’s a bit hit and miss. Guix is universal but it’s a bit of a bloaty way to do it if you only want one item from it’s repos. Fedora Flatpaks can of course be installed on pretty much any X86/AMD64 system by adding registry.fedoraproject.org as a flatpak remote (alongside Flathub).
that’s why you use librewolf or waterfox (though waterfox isn’t completely anti ai which is a detriment)
I look at Waterfox as the “backup” option because of things like that. It’s not nearly as strong, but if a site’s broken or I’m setting up a device where I don’t nearly care as much, it’s a decent choice that’s better than base Firefox or anything Chromium-based
Kinda like Ironfox vs Fennec on Android, the former is my go-to, the latter is the backup
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.
Only expected porn on my homepage!
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.
