Well, Mozilla seems to be making some pretty questionable decisions, So I’m considering switching browsers for the third (Is it the third?) time. The thing is, I really like the way Firefox works, so I’ve been trying out the more famous Forks like Waterfox and Librewolf, although I’m going for Floorp. However, I’m wondering: is using a fork enough? I mean, they are Forks maintained by other people, but is there a chance that whatever Mozilla does to Firefox could affect those Forks? Should I jump to a totally different browser like Vivaldi?
Mozilla isn’t doing anything to Firefox. The Anonym purchase you linked to was literally to acquire a technology they developed which would, if implemented web-wide, end the dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion that is the current paradigm where a few dozen large companies track everything everyone does on the internet all the time. “Privacy preserving” isn’t just a buzzword in that article - privacy is actually preserved, and the companies involved (including Mozilla) learn nothing at all about you - not your name, not an “anonymous” identifier, not your behavior, nothing. Moreso, Anonym didn’t just create this technology, the entire company was purpose-founded to create this technology.
There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about Mozilla in particular at the moment. Very little of the animosity they receive is truly deserved once you dig past the narrative and find out what Mozilla’s actually up to, and why.
Continuous Mozilla hit pieces coming out….
I wonder which company motivated only by greed and the fact that their entire business model is “obliterating your privacy” is behind them
Either you make a deal with the devil or use the company that made the deal so you don’t have to
Ads should be tailored to the content of the website they are on. Not to me in any way whatsoever.
Then you might be interested in this new technology being tested by Mozilla that aims to replace tracking cookies.
But the people employed to create content on all the websites and YouTube channels you use regularly care quite a great deal about advertisement or they’d have to do something else for a living.
What, you don’t use free services online?
I have YouTube premium, so that part of my money is distributed to those creators. I also have subscriptions for news sites, podcasts and comics through Patreon and other services.
And to be clear: I don’t have a single problem with advertising — I have a huge problem with tracking me wherever I go online. When I’m on a site for Japanese language learning, show me ads for flights to Japan but stop tracking every website I visit.
I am paying for the services I use.
I am donating regularly to Firefox and Thunderbird. It’s a myth that software can only exist through ads and tracking.
So instead of multiple providers tracking people all the time there will be a single company doing it, but it’s okay because I should trust them for what reason? Why wouldn’t tracking companies just use their own tracking on top of this new technology?
I didn’t read too much into it, but roughly speaking: Because the technology by design aggregates data immediately and drops any personal identifiers/ the unaggregated data in the process. Other companies can build whatever they want on that, but if done properly, it is impossible to reconstruct user-specific data points and profile the users that way.
This type of privacy-preserving aggregation technique is not new, it is fairly common for things like demographic data, where you want to know things like population density and incomes for some area, without just publishing an exact address with corresponding income for every person (as an example).
Edit: I think I missed your point a little bit. I am unsure, but it seemed that Anonymous is responsible for designing the framework, not doing any tracking (i.e. it wouldn’t necessarily be “put all trust into them collecting it”). Maybe rolling out that technology could be done in a way of blocking other tracking, or maybe it is intended as a basis for regulations to take up. Maybe someone else can give more informed input on that.
Using a Chromium-based browser when you’re bother by ad tech makes no sense whatsoever. Chromium is mostly developed by an ad company.
Remember folks, Chromium project is under Google’s control. They don’t care about web-standards. They just make their own standards since they have a 70% market share. The only notable Chromium fork which is worth mentioning is Ungoogled Chromium.
Vivaldi is a no go, it is proprietary software and also based in chromium. I’ve had similar thought process to yours and I am also using Floorp. Librewolf is great but too privacy hardened for the common lay user. These forks are cleaning the s*** out of firefox so no need to worry.
Floorp and Zen are to Firefox what Vivaldi is to Chrome.
They provide a better UI and other features and strip out a lot of the bad stuff from the parent browser.
But fundamentally, Floorp and Zen and Vivaldi would not continue very long if the upstream decided to suddenly stop producing code, or altered their codebase in a significant manner. (This is what killed Palemoon and Seamonkey). This is always a threat.
So really, it’s a shit situation for browsers right now. Just choose a browser engine and then pick whatever UI you like the most on top of it.
I’m optimistic that Servo turns out to be the new Mozilla without repeating its mistakes. It should be the reference implementation browser upon which everything will rebase and it should remain non-profit. This was the original goal of open source Mozilla 25 years ago but then the techbro crew rolled in and started grifting.
(I’m also aware that WebKit still exists but Gnome Web is seemingly the only browser built with it and there are no extensions).
Today the Mozilla Corporation is just a place for the already wealthy to funnel money into their golden parachutes. It’s a grift. Personally I think it’s time to move on. Last week I pulled the plug, deleted my ~/.mozilla directory, so for the first time in a quarter century I don’t have anything Mozilla-related installed.
–Gnome Web from Flathub
–Chromium in the Debian repo
–Chromium in the CalyxOS build
I would love to use Vivaldi and this is likely the best option left since it’s all the old Opera devs, but FFS just make it libre software guys. They seem to be financially stable with their team of like 30 people and run one of the largest Mastodon instances and have a great community.
Its got the best interface out of any of the Chrome reskins, especially with the left side tabs. They are trolling Mozilla right now with the whole, “we are the only browser not run by a marketing company or trying to build AI into the browser.”
But for me it being closed is a non-starter.
Like for fucks sake just make it libre software. Brave is open and literally nobody is building on top of it (morally bankrupt company though), what does Vivaldi have to lose by becoming libre software? They have nothing to lose and a competitive advantage to gain by becoming libre. There’s literally a community waiting to embrace you.
FWIW, I am kind of behind the curve. I used the Mozilla Suite from Milestone 18 all the way until it was SeaMonkey and didn’t switch until 2009 or so; then Firefox/Thunderbird until earlier this month. So if you have suggestions, I’m open.
(I’m also aware that WebKit still exists but Gnome Web is seemingly the only browser built with it and there are no extensions).
The engine behind Safari? That is one of the most used browsers today, even moreso than Firefox?
What email client do you use? I’ve been unhappy with Thunderbird but haven’t looked too hard at replacements yet
About ten years ago I was really hesitant on claws because at that time the interface looked ugly and extremely dated, but I gave it a shot and found that once I got past that, it works perfectly for me, it did everything I needed it to do, and with one exception it still does. The interface has not had a facelift in the decade since, so it is ten years more dated than it was back then, but I’ve had so few other complaints that the ugliness is now endearing.
The one issue is that my work uses office365, and for a while I thought it just wasn’t going to work with claws, but at some point I discovered a miraculous piece of FOSS called davmail (in the AUR for arch, if you use debian it’s in the main repositories) which allows you to access microsoft email through any client.
None of the forks are immune to Mozilla enshittifing the engine itself.
Browser engines are complicated beasts, the w3c specifications are thousands of pages and a proper engine would have to implement it all.
It’s the reason why not a single chromium fork is able to maintain manifest v2 in defiance of Google, because they would have to then maintain the engine themselves for the most part
