It's too bad making a decent web browser is such a massive undertaking so there aren't literally thousands of alternatives to choose from. :/
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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And they're all chromium under the hood. The illusion of free choice.
As it stands today Mozilla is the only thing keeping google from being labeled a browser monopoly, but man can Mozilla let go of the footgun for once.
Mozilla and Safari.
Ah Safari, the IE8.5 of modern browsers...
The "best" argument I've heard recently for that heap of shit? The extensions have the best UI integration! Lol
People do so much bending over backwards to excuse every shitty thing apple does.
Safari is more energy efficient on macOS compared to other browsers.
But like it or not the (artificial) hold Safari has over the iOS/iPadOS ecosystem is the only thing stopping a complete Google hegemony over the web browser market.
Mozilla is circling the drain and the few nascent new browser projects are years away from technical maturity and may never establish any meaningful market share anyway.
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No, not Safari. While it's technically true that Safari's WebKit engine isn't based on Chromium's Blink engine, that's only because the genetic relationship goes in the other direction: Blink was initially forked from WebKit (which was itself forked from KHTML, by the way).
Point is, Mozilla's Gecko is the only major browser engine that's fully unrelated to Blink.
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I feel like you'd be interested in Ladybird. It's a fully independent web browser under development, it's still in its very early stages but they seem serious about it.
We need a better funding model for open source.
Praying that people will donate enough to support your browser isn't exactly great and really doesn't work for most open-source projects.
Unless they are doing something new in that space, it'll just he smooching up to big donors in back rooms.
At least Firefox is open about their deal with Google.
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The challenge for Ladybird and other independent browser projects is the enormous size and scope required of modern browsers, which is also still growing. Web browsers are now probably second only to operating systems in complexity in the personal computing space.
Plus even if they do reach technical maturity, they still have to convince people to use it. That’s not been going very well for Mozilla, and they already have a working browser.
We need the Swiss gov to step in and start developing their own browser lol
What's a good alternative that isn't chromium? I'm on Mozilla mobile
LibreWolf is a Firefox fork that is not affiliated with Mozilla.
Here's the problem: there are three web browsers.
Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko - that's it.
A "fork" that depends on the same browser engine and rendering engine is not really a fork, it is just a UI flavor. For the sake of security, privacy and data handling, this choice is as meaningful as changing your desktop environment on Linux.
If you access anything financial or personally identifying (taxes, banking, credit cards, medical services, driver's license, an email that is linked to any of those accounts, etc) you should use the browser distributed by the engine's primary developer (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). If you use something else, you are dependent on a downstream third-party developer to properly implement the engine and ensure that its data handling is properly integrated with the browser application and the OS, and you are dependent on their keeping the engine in their knockoff version up to date. You will always be behind the security patches of the main branch, even if the downstream developer is doing everything correctly. On the internet, this is an extreme risk.
Sure, sorry if fork wasn't the right term, I was just saying LibreWolf is Firefox sans Mozilla. The LibreWolf team is very privacy focused.
Full disclosure I use Vivaldi - which is chrome - because I'm a filthy heathen.
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This is such a braindead fucking take. Companies should explore new technology not just take a look at the current popular opinion and run with it as absolute fact. The majority of this post is literally just using AI as a boogieman, oh no they're creating jobs that relate to AI! The company is over!!!
They saw three roles that mentioned AI and took that as absolute proof that Mozilla has "fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads". Grow the fuck up. The internet takes money to run, ads are an inevitability so no shit a major browser company has someone managing that aspect of their browser.....
I see they have fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads
oh, but they had 9 open listings for AI!!!!!! THat's a THIRD of the cOmPaNy's listings!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Are you not aware of how big Mozilla is? https://leadiq.com/c/mozilla/5a1d88fe2400002400628c85/employee-directory
N. America: 1.5k Asia: 468 Europe: 378 Africa: 86 South Africa:44 Oceania: 25
That alone shows how insane this take is. Mozilla dipping their toes into the water with a handful of roles doesn't mean mozilla is focused on it alone (or even at all!). Secondly, there is a lot of value that can be taken from AI (both server and client-side), without even touching the subject of generating images/video/text/etc. Things like auto-transcriptions, summaries for the seeing impaired, etc.
But then we get these posts essentially fear mongering any perceived interest as slight as it may be into AI. Absurd.
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Hate to say it but can not realy blame them. They need to make money somehow. And Google wont pay 80% of their bills forever.
I mean, I understand this argument, but Mozilla is still vastly superior to the alternatives. And as others have pointed out, even if Mozilla kicks the bucket, Firefox is open source and forks exist.
Mozilla has been making a lot of questionable decisions, but they are nowhere near the point-of-no-return yet. Mozilla is still a company, and companies make corporate decisions.
god this is depressing.
Mozilla has been a sinking ship for decades now.
There's a reason Chrome was able to steal the alt browser market from Mozilla at a time when even laymen understood that IE was awful - Mozilla stopped innovating the second they were winning. They had tabs! What more could you want?
Chrome came along at a time when browser performance wasn't a focus, when JavaScript meant websites were slow, and said "fuck that, let's make it fast". Say what you will about Chrome or JS, Google was on to something and the modern web today is 95% thanks to Chrome pushing things forward.
Everyone jumped to Chrome and Mozilla fucked around for literally years before they got the memo that actually browser performance matters. They were once the best browser tools on the market until once again Chrome pushed the envelope, and once again developers switched while Mozilla sat back and did nothing.
Mozilla meandered back and forth, releasing shitty products nobody wanted (like pocket and send) instead of focusing on the most important thing: the browser.
Yet they're somehow still here, hobbling along, doing fuck knows what instead of making a better browser and innovating to beat Chrome.
Stopped innovating? Just because the user interface didn’t change much? They’ve contributed a ton to web api’s and the open web in general. They also contributed massively to rust, and private / secure browsing standards. It has absolutely not been left to languish. Now I prefer some other UI’s but you won’t catch me claiming Mozilla ceased innovation.
They’ve also contributed in general to JavaScript. So yeah, Google definitely pushed the envelope there, but Mozilla didn’t just watch it all happen. Also, factor in that they were key contributors to web assembly.
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The problem is that browsers aren't profitable. Mozilla need a revenue source other than donations, and that's why they're trying to make another product that'll stick. They need to make money somehow. If Google stops paying them because of the antitrust lawsuit, Mozilla will probably disappear in a few months.
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Chrome came along at a time when browser performance wasn't a focus, when JavaScript meant websites were slow, and said "fuck that, let's make it fast". Say what you will about Chrome or JS, Google was on to something and the modern web today is 95% thanks to Chrome pushing things forward.
That's where the web started getting worse.
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I never switched to Chrome and never really noticed any performance issues. If a page took half a second or a second to render, it was an absolute non issue to me.
I think performance was part of Chrome's success, but there was also all the memes in 2010 about installing chrome to replace IE, and the ads that Google ran on their search page. I don't think Pocket came out until Firefox was already deep into the decline. I do think Chrome held onto those users because of their ram efficiency at the time, and nice features like built-in translate. Now, users can't switch because the web depends on Chrome, just like back in the IE days.
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A few days ago there was a thread that was talking about fingerprinting.
I started playing with cover your tracks by the EFF.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
It turns out that Firefox was routing all my browser DNS traffic around my pi-hole. (It is called DNS over HTTP or DOH)
I had no clue.
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AI + Ads = AIDS.
Just say no, kids.
Damnit. I love Firefox. What is the best alternative?
There really isn't one. The closet would be Konqueror with KHTML and one of Mozilla's discarded projects called Servo (which is a beta project now run by the Linux Foundation). The rest are Chrome in a wig and Safari.
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Reports of its death are GREATLY exaggerated. I would suggest continuing to simply use firefox and disable any future crap you don't prefer.
That said librewolf which is intended to be firefox with stronger privacy settings by default that said
- Default settings break more websites
- You have to get extensions manually from for instance github because it doesn't use mozillas addon (it can probably be enabled)
- It doesn't use the built in password manager which is in fact privacy preserving so you have to enable it or use something else
- you don't get syncing via firefox sync which is in fact already privacy preserving so you have to enable it if you want it
- It doesn't remember cookies without manually adding an exception to each site this is extremely obnoxious. I'm sure its configurable though
At this time it is far easier to disable the few things that may be undesired from firefox vs turning librewolf into an acceptable option.
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Unfortunately OP is right.
Here's some alternatives that use the same base as Mozilla, and maybe they might pick up the shards soon: Waterfox, LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser
Considering Manifest V3 in Chromium and how the browser kit is forcing quite a few things on us there's also a solid chance people will independently rework the chromium base into a new web browser toolkit soon, but we'll have to see. Either way, next few years will undoubtedly bring a lot of change to the browser landscape.
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So they probably scrolled through a page of job ads and cherry picked a few so they could talk smack..
You can do this with any company
I looked at their jobs list and counted 35 jobs. Of that I count 9 that are AI-related and 4 that are ads-related. The list also includes a few generic jobs like "Chief of Staff", "Client Analytics Manager", "Staff Test Engineer" or "Fixed-Term Social Media Trainee".
Basically at least 1/3 of the jobs they're advertising that have a specific team mentioned are AI or ads jobs.
You can't do this with any company. The correct number of ads people working at Firefox is 0.
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The tech world is steaming Full Ahead toward an inflatable Gibraltar.
Only a good AI can stop a bad AI with a pun
has anyone tried zen browser? it looks so good. I'm not used to open software looking good so I'm a bit skeptical, especially since no one's talking about it. but i started using it along with librewolf and I'm thinking of switching completely.
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No, worries. We will always have forks. Mozilla wins simply by having their only competitor be Google.
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people been saying the ships been sinking since netscape. version 130 now
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AI -> ADS
AIADS
AIDS
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