i love firefox but honestly right now i find edge to be much more aesthetically pleasing, especially with vertical tabs and grouping. if firefox can add these two items, i’d switch to firefox in a heartbeat (and they’re already adding tab groups)
there is sidebery but i just like the edge version more. the extension wasn’t as fluid, plus i like how i can have native profiles for work, uni, and personal built in without extensions like profile switcher, which relies on a third party program. nothing against it; and i still donate to mozilla and firefox. i’m looking forward to seeing mozilla’s approach to tab groups though.
yup vertical tabs are the dealbreaker for me, edge got me hooked. Floorp is a fork that has it, haven’t used it a ton yet but i keep hearing more about it. I’ve been using Arc which i’m enjoying.
Librewolf doesn’t respect your choice in system fonts if you uncheck “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above”. I don’t use it for that reason.
You can but it won’t be respected. It will continue to default to their included Noto fonts despite whatever font you select. You can test this yourself. I’m sure they do it for some “privacy reason” but if I wanted that trade off I’d simply use the Tor Browser or one of those hardened firefox profiles.
Source: One person’s opinion on their personal Fediverse account
… Not that I disagree, mind. I’ve been on FF since like. 2007? Which was the moment I figured out that other web browsers besides IE7 existed?
Never saw reason to hop to Chrome(ium) even before I knew/cared about datamining or enshittification or any of that stuff. Back then it just looked like “another browser, that does things a bit different but has no features that entice me that Firefox lacks”. Then as I learned about the political side of things I was like “Huh, guess I’m glad for myself then!”
I used Netscape “back in the day”. With some interim transition attempts including the likes of Opera, I eventually switched to Chrome because it was genuinely more featureful and faster.
I was a happy Chrome user until they decided to deprecate manifest V2 and fuck up my ad blocker, at which point I switched to Firefox and haven’t looked back.
Or just use multiple browsers? If one size fits all for you then good for you but there is no Firefox based browser that can replace Vivaldi for me. So I use both, one for my power user needs and other for private browsing (hardened Firefox, normal FF isn’t great for privacy either)
Havent used Vivaldi in some time. Have a look at floorp but of course they dont have all the addons vivaldi has like notes and stuff.
And yes, regular FF is simply a “just works” browser but with lots of stupid bloat. Librewolf is actually great as they have a modern CI/CD build pipeline and do all the hardening for you, its more sustainable and secure to share effords.
It’s objectively worse than Firefox. For example, Firefox recently passed all minimum security requirements by the German Federal Office for Information Security. No other browser meets them.
Firefox’s extensions actually let developers do stuff, so we have tons of tab groups extensions. My favorite is Simple Tab Groups. But if you dont like that one, you can swap it out for a different one! DO YOU GET THAT KIND OF CUSTOMIZATION IN EDGE?
If you use Edge than you probably use Windows, which means that Microsoft can already mine your data. I guess it’s better to have your data mined by only Microsoft than to have it mined by both Microsoft and Google?
Not sure of this is still true, it often feels like edge is the main spyware feature of windowless in general, integrated into windows search.
Everytime you search for an app or file it doubles as a edge search query to present in the results. You can try disable all the spyware on windows if you want. Edge still stores it in the microsoft cloud so you can sync.
Copilot is a golden ticket for them now. Its literally an edge based application.
I can packet inspect and watch them sell data? No lol they collect telemetry but you can use a derivative that doesn’t because it’s open source. That’s not the point though, the point is they don’t sell data. You can look at the finances yourself stateof.mozilla.org
Hmm guess they’re running a charity then. Your tracking is not data? I guess you and I have different definitions of what data is. Sure, you can lock it down if you really want. But so can every other browser.
Edge works better with specific vm coursework but not sure why. On Firefox I would press a key and it would input 0-2 times. On edge, it worked just… Normal. That’s the one up that edge has had for me.
Some people Firefox and some people just love to edge. They get close but don’t really get it all the way.
Iceraven is a mess. Their extension list is totally random, has tons of duplicates and more. I went through all of them and testes them and reported what was broken and what was missing.
That alone is enough to convince me not to use their browser. Mull is based.
Just use Floorp. Gives you even easier UI customisation by allowing you to switch to the old UI via the settings, and also includes Webapp support and support for Workspaces.
Firefox dev tools are much better for typical web development.
Not true, not even close. That was true like 15-20 years ago, but nowadays, especially when I’m debugging Angular (yes the extension for chrome is better) and developing stuff that will be used by people who go for Chrome.
You say Angular. But what else can we expect for a framework for making WebKit/Chromium apps. Angular working in Firefox is an afterthought because it has very much similar featureset.
I’ve to work with what I got :P Either way even if I was doing jQuery or Vue (like I did in the past) I wouldn’t ever use Firefox because even without the Angular extension, just plain JS/CSS debugging I like Chromium dev tools more.
Besides the fact that my target users are always Chrome users and by using Firefox for development in the past I run into issues because specific features would work in Firefox but not on Chrome and vice-versa… or some piece of CSS rendered differently Chromium offers a level of polishness on small details that Firefox wasn’t ever close to. Firefox’s dev tools are always playing catch-up time to Chromium’s, that’s what I see.
Maybe I’m biased like you seem to be, but in the opposite way :P
Chrome dev tools are better for JS debugging, but Firefox wins with everything else, IMO. Especially their flexbox, grid and font visualizations and debug tools are amazing.
I cannot use Firefox without them. They adjust the text rendering to be more... normal, I don't understand why they aren't default, but maybe things change at higher resolutions (but I don't own a 2160p monitor to test).
I've accidentally fell into a Linux space, my bad! This will work on Windows, I'm not sure of alternatives on Linux, I gave up using it before I could play around with Firefox.
Try looking for aliasing options under gfx.font_rendering and trying them out.
No offence, but I used to think Windows had good font rendering while I was using it. That was until I started using Linux distros. Now every time I boot into Windows, I again remember how awful Windows looks in comparison - washed out, pixelated, gives me eye strain....
I have the inverse - where Windows is so fine and pixelated it looks blurry. Linux is sharp and legible. It may be to do with with sub-pixel rendering. And this has been the case for across multiple computers and laptops, windows versions and Linux distros.
Mullvad Browser is torbrowser without tor. Its basically the same as Librewolf, afaik Librewolf uses arkenfox user.js which is based on torbrowser.
But the Torbrowser has a “disk avoidance” principle, which means they always use “private browsing” mode as that never saves data on your hard drive.
This means it always deletes everything, session, cookies, tabs, searches, …
MullvadBrowser is not more private than Librewolf and ALSO has these things making it basically unusable for daily usage.
This may lead to people using it “for the private stuff” and a shitty browser for the rest. Which makes no sense, as Librewolf is the same.
And also, private browsing doesnt allow containers, meaning “multi account containers” and “temporary container” are nonfunctional. You dont need to run multiple damn browser sessions, just use containers.
no stored session = not a browser normal people will switch to
not more hardened or privacy optimized than librewolf
no profile support too I guess, because private browsing.
But sorry your statement is correct, it is a privacy focused version of Firefox.
But not sure what the “use more to separate activities” means, I try to do that with containers and mail aliases and its already complicated. Running and updating 2 browser engines will not help here.
Also, a browser for your searches. I guess containers could do that but my understanding you still can get finger printed easily plus I could not get to use them consistently. Having different browsers made it easier, at least for me.
No that clears browser data, the fingerprint is very complex. If you mean cookies, Librewolf and Firefox can delete all but you can add exceptions where you want to stay logged in. Very handy, also not there in private browsing.
For me its way easier to use a different browser for each use case. Librewolf for something, Mullvad for something else, also Brave, also Vivaldi. 4 different browsers are making my life seriously easy. Why would I stick to 1 browser with many profiles? If something breaks in that one browser (which happens quite often) all I have to do is fire up a different one and try again. Different people different use cases, different streamlines.
If your browser breaks I hope another profile is not broken? Running 4 browsers at a time is seriously problematic for RAM, attack surface, updates etc.
I will do a post on introducing firefox profiles (as they are hidden away) and GUI integration into desktops
Tor Browser is based on Firefox-ESR, while Librewolf is based on Firefox-Release. Because of this, they do not have identical features and preferences. Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser are designed for stability and minimal customization for the purpose of blending in with other users. Librewolf is designed to receive new features, better privacy defaults than standard Firefox, and allow users to more easily configure preferences. All of these browsers are valid options for privacy-minded people, depending on personal preferences, including separating activities/identities between different browsers. Container tabs are certainly good for privacy, and hopefully the feature can one day be used in private browsing mode.
All of these browsers are valid options for privacy-minded people
However they are bad options for those looking to switch from chrome. Even to myself it was very annoying that it always deletes everything, to someone who “already makes life hard on the web” for itself as some like to note in real life.
Mullbad Browser is fine for systems like Tails (not sure if they have it) and maybe for environments like libraries and such public places, where everything is our should be volatile anyway.
Well yeah, people still using Chrome probably need to take baby-steps to reclaim little bits of privacy for themselves. For those users, switching to Firefox is probably the best option. But technically, Mullvad Browser and Tor Browser can both be configured to disable private browsing mode and be non-volatile. It's just that normal users are unlikely to know that or to know how to do it.
Name one other browser that is not based on Chromium. If it is based on Chromium, it has to deal with what Google throws at them.
I say this as an enthusiastic Brave user. Brave is great at what it does currently, but the more terrible stuff Google builds into Chromium, the more patches they’ll have to maintain. This can make it harder to maintain their fork.
Worse than that, most Chromium-derivative users aren’t Brave users. Many web apps already don’t work as well with Firefox’ JavaScript Engine (Gecko) as they do with Chromium. This gives Google immense power.
That’s a solid criticism. Firefox + uBlock Origin or Librewolf are good desktop alternatives. But what’s the alternative on Android? Last time I checked, there wasn’t any on privacyguides.
Btw I do always turn off all their rewards and wallet stuff and follow most of the privacyguides.org recommendations.
Thanks for your help in making privacy-focused software available on Linux btw!
Cromite has adblock. Vanadium too but it may break on on-GrapheneOS as it has security patches that break on regular android.
Mull is very fine for me, I use Vanadium and Mull, Vanadium for crappy sites (because mobile hardened firefox doesnt support as much sites as desktop for some reason). Vanadium is very likely more secure, unlike on Desktop where that is not easily said.
Cromite is the best recommendation I can give. It is currently under consideration to be added to privacyguides.org (you can find it on their issues page on the GitHub), and it is expected to be added (as was Bromite, which is where Cromite forked from after development on Bromite was stopped). The main developer of Cromite (uazo) has actually asked the evaluation to be paused until the licensing for aac and h264 are figured out, as licenses are very expensive, and a recommendation on the PrivacyGuides website would likely draw many more users to the project, potentially causing legal trouble. You can track progress on this issue here. It’s worth noting that the dev of Cromite was an active dev of Bromite before Bromite’s lead dev abandoned the project.
Of course there’s other browsers! There’s Opera…uhh that now based on Chromium. Oh, how about Edge…that’s Chromium based too now. I know, there’s the KHTML engine!..no, that’s been officially discontinued.
Both OP and the author of the linked post explicitly say “Chrome”, not “Chromium”, and seem to imply those are the only two choices available to users.
If it is based on Chromium, it has to deal with what Google throws at them.
I understand their blog post, and if I were to build a browser today, I’d probably do the same.
But that doesn’t mean this situation isn’t problematic. It’s similar to car-centric infrastructure: in this situation, for any individual, choice X makes sense, but that will make the situation even worse for the whole population. A cumulation of many tiny Prisoner’s Dilemmas.
I wrote Chromiun in the description too. Chrome is simply what people use.
Plain Chromium, even with all GUI settings, all degoogle policy configs and flags enabled, contacts Google like hell.
I tried googeeteller and its scary.
Have not tried Vivaldi for a long time, but its fingerprinting resistance was nonexistent, it is filled with useless features and has no container support, so nah.
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