cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/68754751
There was a time I chose Firefox over the Chromium browser without a second thought. But nowadays, installing and opening Firefox seems like a time-consuming, very bloated experience.
Too many unnecessary features, promotions, sponsored links, and widgets are filled on the homepage. Firefox no longer allows deleting default search engines like google, perplexity, etc but can disable it. What kind of privacy feature is that? Also, all the data collection options are ticked by default. Users are needed to manually tweak it their own. Update after update instead of improving they make all the settings more complex, and there is a lot to set up after a fresh installation.
When I compare modern Firefox with 4–5 years behind Firefox, I feel like I am using browsers like Vivaldi or Opera instead of Firefox. Once we praised Firefox for its ram management in Linux but nowadays, it’s bloat causes using more ram and not a lightweight option anymore. Seriously, Firefox must consider releasing a browser like Brave Origin (Firefox Origin or something).
Isn’t anybody else frustrated with the new Firefox changes? If yes, what practical solutions exist? Debloat using any script or install any forks (no forks seem to be good; some are outdated, some are too much hardened, some are just not for daily browsing, etc.).
I’m just looking for a browser like Ungoogled Chromium but for Firefox (Unmozilla Firefox).
Honestly, Chromium seems to have the basic features like history and passwords figured out way better than Firefox (or rather, Chrome does), while stripping most of the junk away, as it luckily happens to be proprietary Google bullshit.
Firefox has a bunch of telemetry and bloat, but the fact that my only real dealbreaker for a browser is quality adblock makes Firefox pretty much my only “vanilla” choice.
I’ll never switch to Chromium no matter what happens, not on an ideological basis, but because Firefox is the only browser that allows me to create duplicate bookmarks without manually copying and pasting it.
Ironfox seems to take a fair bit of RAM and spin up my fans. Even if it’s one tab doing nothing.
I do have some addons and sync setup though (with the adjust canvas setting on as recommended).
Ungoogled chrome dosnt seem to have an issue. And like another commenter said so many sites break in IronFox I need backup anyway.
But maybe waterfox or zen is better for my use.
Is Ironfox on Linux too?
Nah. I should have been saying LibreWolf through the comment.
I think the sponsored links, promotions and Ai efforts come from their crisis trying to make money and to depend less on Googles money. While trying to focus on privacy and not sell user data. That’s a tricky situation to be in, if the browser isn’t making money. I wouldn’t call Firefox bloatware, as it is bloated like any other modern browser.
And it’s not like I wouldn’t have an issue with Firefox either. For long time I am looking for an alternative, and almost switched over to Librewolf. But unfortunately Librewolf have removed the internal password manager of Firefox, and they recommend to use an external manager. Which is the deal breaker for me. So even if Firefox is flawed, I’ll stay with it and do the customization and settings myself, which is a lot.
I don’t have any issue with Firefox trying to make some money by doing such things, but all these features are causing the system to use a lot of RAM too. Once we praised Firefox as being the less memory-hogging browser in Linux, but if it is going this way, not anymore.
I called it bloatware because nowadays it is filled with bloat features no matter what.
We said Vivaldi is closed source just because they didn’t publish some part (the unique design) of their code.
We call Brave Bloat because of its crypto stuff.
Now Firefox has promotional links, suggestions, tracking stuff, etc.; then why not call Firefox a bloatware?
By the way, if the contract with Google ended, then why is the default search engine still Google? Also, what is perplexity doing there?
I guess its fair enough. My point was just to sympathize with Firefox a little bit, to explain their situation and why they are in it. And as said, I also have issues with Firefox, such as integration of Ai in all sort of stuff, just for the sake of Ai. So maybe I shouldn’t be so defensive about it.
It was not about the contract with Google being ended, but governments involved to block Google from paying money to control the market as their default search engine. Looks like they did not block it yet. I think Mozilla wants the money, because otherwise Firefox would stop to exist. Google wants to give money too, because in the grandscheme its little money for them. But Google want to support Firefox, so they can say “look we even support our competition, we are not a monopoly, we are good”.
Because it is a bloatware. Like, what is the point of using Firefox? It’s faster? It was never because of speed. Less RAM usage? No. It was because of privacy. Peoples started hating on Chrome because Google became evil. Then they went after adblockers. Google search became bloated with garbage results, DDG became a better alternative, also marketed as privacy-focused.
It just happens to be that out of all other web browsers, there were no better alternatives, and Firefox seemed the best option at that time. Opera was a spyware. Brave was still fresh. Actually, Brendan Eich, the founder of Brave who also founded Mozilla and created JavaScript, was called out for making an anti-LGBTQ donation, so many people hesitated using Brave when it released. Needless to say, anything Microsoft was hated with a passion.
That’s why people need to keep reinventing the wheel.
Having competition in browser engines is important. Imagine no Firefox was available, everyone was at the mercy of Googles work on the core. I don’t want to use any Chromium based browser, so only a Firefox based alternative it is for me. I also highly liked the way Mozilla and Firefox was operating, but in recent years it gotten worse. And using forks has some trust issues too to me. I can’t trust most forks, but I’m currently reavaluating the situation.
To me Firefox is still the best browser out of all available options. The only thing I would consider is a fork like Librewolf, that still is Firefox with some bullshit removed or disabled. That’s as far as I would go.
Thing is, I have configured my Firefox to be as “private” as possible. It can also backfire, because corps can fingerprint you based on your browser’s preferences. So, when I am saying Firefox is bloatware is because it is out-of-the-box. You can spend hours tinkering with it, but the average person won’t bother doing that, so Mozilla would force them to be part of their ecosystem through all those syncs, branding, AI, no actual strict privacy by default, etc. That’s what I call bloat, that on-boarding experience with terrible UI changes.
This is nonsense
I regularly set up Firefox because I distro hop and like to buy cheap thinkpads. It takes like 30 seconds to do some quick toggles in the settings. Half of them are regular shit like tab behavior because I don’t like the defaults, and that’s okay. 15 seconds to install ublock. Couple minutes in about:config
Would it be kinda nice if all the defaults just happened to align with my specific wants and needs? Sure, I guess. But I’m an adult with agency and am happy to click some toggles.
If maintaining and updating a codebase didn’t take so much labor then it’d be cool to use obscure single-maintainer forks. But up-to-date security and non-google alternatives are orders of magnitude more important to me than having to click a few toggles once.
Absolutely agree on every point. I felt this for the last few years, not just with the latest updates. I haven’t updated Firefox for months (a year?), and when I decided to do it after convincing my friend to switch to it because he said he couldn’t find the option in settings I told him about, I was basically ~10 versions behind. So updating it and seeing the redesigned settings that looked less intuitive and completely unnecessary, I felt really frustrated.
There’s a new browser in the making called Ladybird, I don’t know if it’s going to be available on Windows (they say the alpha is for Linux and macOS). Yeah, I am on Windows, sadly, and I don’t plan on switching to Linux, yet. Mozilla was praised for being a non-profit “good guys”, but they’ve been really annoying, perhaps trying to appeal to the mainstream. Truth is, the mainstream does NOT care about Firefox. You need to spend all your funds on marketing it, not making it uglier with each update.
So many websites don’t seem to work on Firefox or Librewolf, always have to keep Chrome handy somewhere
There is an extension called chrome mask on Firefox. It helps Firefox pretend to be Chrome on certain websites.
gemini protocol
oh man its been a while since I last used it, how active is it nowdays? there used to be a BBS which was like Reddit but for Gemini.
time to install a Gemini client :D
Zen browser is Firefox based and is okay. Floorp was also okay when I used it.
Haven’t used stock Firefox for a while. Only on my phone when ironfox refuses to load for god-knows-why.
I keep meaning to try Zen for some reason it keeps getting lumped in with non-open source forks like Floorp in my brain
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Wtf is this shit.
wrong thread.
Librewolf for desktop Ironfox for Android if on iOS you are fucked and were not using it anyways because it sucks on there
Zen Browser? It’s great.
CachyOS also has some nice opinionated configurations of the Firefox builds in their repos.
At the moment, I use both, with different configurations for different purposes.
Is Firefox Focus not a thing anymore?
apparently its only available for mobile devices
My firefox is set to restore my last session, so I never see the homepage.
I really like Mullvad browser. Some people say it has too many privacy features which make it unusable for daily browsing but for me it works just fine.
