Considering all the change required was checking a box in Settings and the change itself is balanced and understandable-enough, I have to wonder what other browsers these people are going to if they were serious-enough about their privacy to have been using Firefox to begin with
This is true that firefox is really dieing and switching to a better browser maybe a option.
I am considering to find a non chromium base browser
Chromium is not bad but has a extremely large codebase and only one company control the most of the code base technically and this is really bad that no other engine exist.
My consideration are servo project which is rust written and evolving to be a full featured browser engine under linux foundation
Other id ladybird still it is written on c++ which i dont like but they recognise this and will consider switching to a better code.
This is so true - Iâm wondering sometimes why all this Firefox forks pop up if you check how much developers are involved (few) you should questioning yourself how secure such a fork really is as FF codebase is quite large. The ideal would be an opensource browser founded by public resources and even web search should be in the hands of public institutions like Universites not by a single entity but thatâs OT.
Guys, we are ignoring the elephant in the room.
Todayâs Internet is made for Google Chrome, pretty much like many years ago it was made for MS Internet Explorer.
So whatever other browser must be compatible with all those Web Sites and Services that are developed and tested for Chrome.
Firefox struggles both because of the codebase and because of this kind of âlockâ. You go on Outlook and you are told some features arenât supported. Google is more subtle but at the end it is the same, something doesnât work or works with a inferior performance.
So now I read of ânew browsersâ and/or non-chromium.
Yes, it would be cool if somebody comes with a new Web engine and a new whole browser. Problem is even Microsoft ditched Explorer and made a âmodâ of Chromium. Guess what the chances are that a single developer or a small team can come out with this âuniverse-creation-level-taskâ.
honestly, I personally barely see that happen. I mean, okay, I donât use Outlook, but I do use Google, and I generally visit the web a lot. Honestly, I can only remember one website where I had issues because of using Firefox. But even that website, I just use a mobile app for (thatâs what it was developed for in the first place).
To be fair, LibreWolf is known to keep up rather rapidly with FFâs updates, and itâs just Firefox with some privacy-related settings enabled, I donât think they change a single line of the actual code. Though for those willing to do a little bit of manual tweaking, I would recommend Arkenfox instead, which is not much more than a settings file that you apply onto your normal, up-to-date firefox (which also solves the issue of trusting LW maintainers). Mullvad and Tor browsers seem to be in a bit of a sticky situation regarding updates though.
Of course Firefox, it is always preinstalled and configured in Fedora, for me there is no need for any other browser. Also it have all the features and nice UI.
sadly, arkenfoxâ latest release is v128, on aug 26. Now they might be actually busy or have other good reasons for this, Iâm not here to complain. Iâm just saying that, apparently, it can be quite delayed on updates. And with something like a browser, non-delayed updates are very important.
It doesnât matter - arkenfox is not a browser, itâs just a file that modifies a bunch of firefoxâs settings. As long as you keep firefox up to date, all is good. Occasionally they tweak arkenfox a bit to keep up with changes to firefox, but otherwise arkenfox doesnt need to be updated that frequently.
hmm, I mean⌠isnât this like applying kernel patches from a few versions earlier to the latest kernel? I donât know, sounds like thereâs a chance for some things to break⌠I hope youâre correct though, but Iâll probably never feel sure about it
Not really. Arkenfox doesnât modify FFâs code, it just changes some settings. You could get the same effect by going to about:config and manually flipping switches, it would just take a while.
Current situation is we have only two main players in the browser market and one has got 90% user base.
There is not much an incentive to keep a sort of âneutralityâ because any thing that gets implemented in Chrome becomes the âstandardâ for the Web and in the same time developers donât need to test for anything but Chrome.
So for the first issue, it is Firefox that needs to follow Chrome by being âcompatibleâ with whatever change they make, for the second issue when it doesnât work, it is much easier to put an alert for the users saying âsorry, this feature isnât supported for your browserâ than to try to make it work with Firefox.
Obviously it is going to happen more with sites that rely heavily on javascript and provide features like videoconferencing, collaboration, editing, file hosting, ecommerce, etc, basically the âcloud servicesâ from Google and alike.
It is an obvious death trap, we need a more complicated Web, browsers become more complicated, developing browsers becomes difficult, only big players can invest in developing browsers, in some time everybody quits or gets acquired and only one player remains. The same player who makes money with the said complicated Web for which you need the complicated browser.
I mainly use Firefox for its strong privacy protections and minimal data collection. I switch to Chrome about 10% of the time when a site works better there.