Technology

So many people mentioning (inferior, in my opinion) Firefox alternatives in the comments and nobody's mentioned Librewolf? Really? Maybe Librewolf will have to become a hard fork someday if this continues, but for now, it's just Firefox for people who care about their data. Aside from a few justifiably aggressive default settings, I've never had even a hint of an issue with it.

I was hopeful for thundermail.

Not any more, seeing that.

Some of Mozilla's AI integrations have been amazing, despite the community crying about it. Like private, offline translation (I don't care what anybody says, this is much better than sending the contents of your web page to a proprietary Google Translate server), and enhanced screen reader functionality.

But this one puzzles me. They're not being very descriptive, but it seems like it's just integrating generic LLM stuff? Not really what I'm after personally. At least it's opt-in, I guess.

It's almost as if they are out of touch with their users. I don't get it. CEOs are just normal people like us.

/s

waterfox, pale moon, ironfox. there's your multiple models.

Once I saw AI being integrated into Firefox, my trust towards the Mozilla Foundation dropped permanently. I have now switched over to Vivaldi which is an amazing European browser that kinda mimics Opera in many ways (but without the spyware ofc)

I was having issues with Librewolf on a work computer a few weeks ago, so I decided to try Firefox to see if it was LW's security settings.

Holy shit, what a fucking trainwreck Firefox has become! It's so bad that I can't honestly recommend anyone use it anymore. The first time I started it, I saw all kinds of ads and trashy "news" articles that had no relevance to me whatsoever. Plus I had to reinstall all my extensions because they weren't signed and there's no way to disable that requirement. I was so horrified and offended, I just dumped it immediately and tried Chrome instead. What difference is there at this point?

It's just insulting at this point. I understand that they trying to find new revenue sources, and things are still better today than they were with Mitchell Baker as CEO, but it's still horrific how poorly Mozilla is being run. I'm so grateful we still have usable forks from the amazing people running projects like Librewolf. Without them, the web would just be flat out unusable.

Boo.

good fucking god, why does it have to be this way ? do I have to program my own browser now ? is that what they want ?

Ive been wary if firefox since wheneved it was they decided it was okay to shove "pocket" into the browser. These days i dont see mozilla as anything other than anti monopoly insurance for google, which they obviously dont need anymore.

Mozilla as a company has just been a decade of one poor decision after another adding more bloat and doing nothing meaningful to counter chromes near monopoly.

Vivaldi isnt perfect and brave has its baggage, but at least they actually include adblocking out of the box, a feature that just about everyone wants. Sure its easy enough to install an addon to firefox for it but the fact that you even have to do that should tell you everything you need to know about who mozilla is actually working for.

Is it possible for the major forks to just go their own way, or is it more complicated than that? Obviously anyone building a new browser engine from the ground up now with complete HTML, CSS and JavaScript spec is so immense an undertaking as to sound far-fetched, so the open source community would need to leverage whatever it can.

Mozilla has had decades to find a sustainable business structure that aligns with the values of its contributors and users, yet here we are...

As per usual, Google's funding selects the music, and the music is to sink Firefox down even further.