Well, it’s that or Chromium, and chromium prevents adblockers, so Firefox it is
There is ungoogled chromium but that only really goes so far.
LibreWolf is currently the best bet imo but being at a point where all the best choices are based on projects from dogshit companies isn’t great
but being at a point where all the best choices are based on projects from dogshit companies isn’t great
Sadly all too expected
The only possible non-gecko engine alternative to Firefox that isn’t even viable yet is Ladybird and I haven’t done a deep dive on its governance at all.
It’s Firefox for the foreseeable future
There’s also Servo, or Orion. The former being nowhere near done like Ladybird and the latter being iOS and Mac exclusive atm.
Orion is using WebKit on the backend, which is well established and available in a few other browser projects
Ladybird is ran by transphobes afaik
It looks like someone did a PR in 2021 asking them to change their language in their build instructions to be gender neutral and they locked it to say that that was not the place for ‘ideologically driven requests from new accounts/non-contributers’. The same person said they wouldn’t be against that PR in 2023. The team then changed their docs to use general neutral language, as far as I can tell.
While it’s still a huge red flag, I’d be interested to know if you’re aware of any other viewpoints or specific actions from other devs from the project.
No I’m just parroting what the nerds in my life have said
Understandable. I was just curious because someone recently mentioned the SimpleX dev also being a conspiracy lover and a bigot, which was totally true.
Got it. This was the piece I was generically worried about having not looked into it beyond occasionally checking for project updates. Hopefully a fork arises over time.
Ok but that aside mention of the AI cult definitely gave me the creeps. I also definitely know at least one, maybe two people that would totally join it too (if given the right elevator pitch).
i’m not usually a huge fan of this publication, but this writeup hit the nail on the head.
i wish i had something insightful to say beyond just saying mozilla is still the best we have, and thats bad.
firefox has become so dogshit on linux there’s constant UI bugs and page loads are much slower than they used to be
I remember when i could actually use firefox on linux on my 2011 celeron with 4gb ram
Yeah problem is the only other option seems to be Brave and that’s also run by shitheads
I don’t think there are many browsers that aren’t run by jerks.
Librewolf is a firefox fork with the bs removed.
Librewolf user here, no real issues once you get the privacy and security settings to your liking.
I switched from librewolf to Zen a while back, but now Librewolf has vertical tab support so it’s won my heart back <3
Brave isn’t open source either as I recall.
And it’s based on chromium.
Exactly, and chromium is only nominally open source. The reality is that Google has the final say on how the project is developed, and maintaining a viable independent fork would require a herculean effort.
I think Brave is at least mostly open source. Their builds are public and come from their github repo. I think they might throw in some proprietary bits during packaging (maybe related to drm or crypto or ads?) but I’m not 100% certain.
I’ve been tying to convince myself to use Brave for like 6 months but their crypto and ad history makes me wary.
My understanding is that the open source part is basically just the underlying Chromium engine, but all the UI code that drives it is proprietary.
Ah, gross
