It’s likely that Hackaday readers have among them a greater than average number of people who can name one special thing they did on September 23rd, 2002. On that day a new web browser was re…
Meh, until there is an actually good alternative to Firefox with a mature extension ecosystem I’ll continue to use it and just disable the new features I don’t like. I have tried a bunch of the alternatives and they’re all either massively lacking in extensions, are chromium-based, or are sketchy in some way. I think the most promising potential replacement is flalkon, but it’s not there yet and I’m a GTK Stan anyway.
Any gecko-based fork will have everything good about FF (including the addon store) and none of the Mozilla corporation. Waterfox for a seamless de-mozilla’d fork (and nothing else) or Librewolf for extra hardened privacy and fingerprint resistance (plus daily annoyances that come with that).
I switched from FF to WF about a year ago. Copied over my profile folder in its entirety. Didn’t do anything else. Everything worked exactly as if I’d just updated FF.
After about a year with the browser, I’ll cheerlead it in every thread about Mozilla Corp getting in bed with another ad company or pushing anti-features “that you can toggle off so it’s fine!” into the browser. All the benefits of Firefox as a platform and code base, with no corporation that could profit from you in any way involved. No mandatory ToS, no account, no nothin’. Just a tool for browsing the web, with the full ecosystem of extensions made for Firefox.
I see this take a lot, usually revolving around “doing your part” to keep that tiny sliver of Firefox usage up in siteside metrics. Decide what’s right for your case, but know that Waterfox and Firefox broadcast the same browser user agent so using WF doesn’t take away “market share” from FF. The only thing using FF instead of WF does to “support firefox” is giving Mozilla Corp your data to “not sell, california just calls it selling” and your clicks on its built-in ads - if you’re turning all that stuff off by hand it’s the same as running WF.
Meh, until there is an actually good alternative to Firefox with a mature extension ecosystem I’ll continue to use it and just disable the new features I don’t like. I have tried a bunch of the alternatives and they’re all either massively lacking in extensions, are chromium-based, or are sketchy in some way. I think the most promising potential replacement is flalkon, but it’s not there yet and I’m a GTK Stan anyway.
Any gecko-based fork will have everything good about FF (including the addon store) and none of the Mozilla corporation. Waterfox for a seamless de-mozilla’d fork (and nothing else) or Librewolf for extra hardened privacy and fingerprint resistance (plus daily annoyances that come with that).
I switched from FF to WF about a year ago. Copied over my profile folder in its entirety. Didn’t do anything else. Everything worked exactly as if I’d just updated FF.
You know I don’t think I ever checked out waterfox. I’ll give it a look.
After about a year with the browser, I’ll cheerlead it in every thread about Mozilla Corp getting in bed with another ad company or pushing anti-features “that you can toggle off so it’s fine!” into the browser. All the benefits of Firefox as a platform and code base, with no corporation that could profit from you in any way involved. No mandatory ToS, no account, no nothin’. Just a tool for browsing the web, with the full ecosystem of extensions made for Firefox.
I myself will stick to stock Firefox until a credible alternative to Mozilla’s development work on Gecko arises (emphasis on the “work”).
I see this take a lot, usually revolving around “doing your part” to keep that tiny sliver of Firefox usage up in siteside metrics. Decide what’s right for your case, but know that Waterfox and Firefox broadcast the same browser user agent so using WF doesn’t take away “market share” from FF. The only thing using FF instead of WF does to “support firefox” is giving Mozilla Corp your data to “not sell, california just calls it selling” and your clicks on its built-in ads - if you’re turning all that stuff off by hand it’s the same as running WF.