Spyke
firefoxยทFirefoxbyTuta

Take a look at these alternative browsers to Google Chrome & let us know which is your favorite! ๐ŸŒ ๐Ÿ”

Take a look at these alternative browsers to Google Chrome & let us know which is your favorite! ๐ŸŒ ๐Ÿ”

If you're looking for a new browser find out more ๐Ÿ‘‰ https://tuta.com/blog/best-private-browsers

@firefox @duckduckgo @puffin @Waterfox @ecosia @palemoon @zenbrowser @mullvadnet @torproject @Waterfox @Freenet @librewolf

View original on mastodon.social
lemmy.world

These are all just chrome and firefox with extra steps.

45
Nalivaireply
lemmy.world

They're not "run on Chromium" like apps run on Windows. They use Chromium as their integral part. Better analogy would be taking Windows, uninstalling some but not all pre-installed apps, adding a bunch of bells and whistles to it, and saying that you've made an OS that is an alternative to Windows.

19
XLEreply

Exactly. Calling Chromium-based browsers "Chrome with extra steps" might not be exactly accurate, but it conveys the truth of the matter pretty accurately

4
Nalivaireply
lemmy.world

You linked a marketing page. It says "it's a layer", sure. They conveniently omitted that other "layers" they mention - UI and synchronization between devices - aren't even close to be comparable in complexity with engine.
Like that one guy in your school project, slacking off for a month, and then coming in hot with writing a page out of 30, and getting equal share of the credit.

2

Exactly. Nobody in their right mind will say that Ubuntu is a Linus Torvalds free alternative to Linux.

3
roofuskitreply
lemmy.world

Good analogy, what happens if Microsoft decided tomorrow that windows was no longer a profitable venture and stopped maintaining it?

Relying on Chrome and Firefox for alternatives to Chrome and Firefox is still an issue. Especially with Mozilla, if they folded the community would not have the resources to maintain Firefox.

4
Nalivaireply
lemmy.world

When Google will discontinue Chromium as an opensource project (notice that I didn't say if), all those browsers will survive for half a year and then die due to lack of compliance and security updates. Chromium is incredibly complicated, web protocols are even more complicated, none of that is good, and people are rapidly losing the ability to maintain complicated projects due to LLM-induced mass psychoses.
The fact that the engine can in theory be forked now doesn't add much.

6
Nalivaireply
lemmy.world

For you? Depend on your budget and how many people you employ.

0
roofuskitreply
lemmy.world

I kind of assumed you would reply with a lack of understanding of the resources it takes to maintain those engines and keep them complaint with web standards.

3
roofuskitreply
lemmy.world

It's still a problem. I didnt say we had other options right now. But pretending it's not a problem isn't going to fix it. Do you really want to rely on those companies for your browser engines? Mozilla is at least an alternative to Google, but a tenuous one. And Microsoft taking over development of either of those isn't an improvement.

2
Nalivaireply
lemmy.world

itโ€™s highly unlikely that they will just stop

It's like you never heard of Google and their practices.

1
fizzlereply

Gecko would die the minute mozilla said they weren't going to maintain it.

No one is going to pick it up.

1

Pedantry isn't really an argument, its just pedandtry. Those engines rely almost entirely on the resources provided by Google and Mozilla's development of their broswers. Open source is all well and good, but those engines are not primarily maintained by the community, they're maintained by employees at Google and Mozilla.

2
fizzlereply
quokk.au

The majority are soft forks - compiling chromium with some flags, patches, presents, and add-ons.

2
Dopreply
lemmy.zip

Yeah, but not on mobile unfortunately :/

1
Railcar8095reply
lemmy.world

Except duck, all the ones I know are Firefox forks.

Duck AFAIK is neither

2
the_riviera_kidreply
lemmy.world

I'm guessing it was left off the list because it's not open source but honestly I was just making a joke.

3
one_old_coderreply
piefed.social

Vivaldi is really good visually and has good features. But the fact that it is closed-source and may not have uBlock Origin is a bad thing. I used to accept black boxes a long time ago when I was starting to write my own programs, but I have now seen all the bad things coming from closed-source applications that I am very careful now.

It's not more a privacy risk than other applications, but you cannot check or know whether it's the truth. And what happens when they start to fuck me up because it's "free" and I have to spend a whole week-end migrating to another browser because the CEO needs more money and starts to do weird stuff with his project?

I may over react, but I have seen bad behaviors for more than 20 years, and I am careful now. If I don't use it, I avoid 48 hours of technical support trying to find an alternative. Also it is based on Chrome which makes it more restricted for the plugins. Yet another bad thing that I can avoid right now by not using their product.

A summary would be: it's good (good), but it's based on Chrome, it's restricted, I am dependent on yet another company that will switch sides because it technically has no clients (it's free), and it's closed-source.

Last but not least, they had a thing in their terms of services which said that they could close your account without warning if you didn't behave elsewhere on the internet. Another red flag.

3

@one_old_coder on those are good points. I'm using uBlock origin on it and have disabled ads. I am very much concerned about who might have access to my data, stored passwords, etc. I understand where you're coming from. I'm not sure if I trust a fork of Firefox if the base is at risk. From what I can tell, Vivaldi and Water/Librefox are all kind of circumventing what Google and Mozilla are doing. Ultimately, the best thing would be to build an entirely new browser, IMO. In the meantime, it's good to know what the best options are.

1
fizzlereply

Me personally: its chromium based, and doesn't it have an email client?

I wouldnt call it trash necessarily but... its not my thing.

1

All I see in that photo is a bunch of logos on white backgrounds. Thatโ€™s some lazy ass icon design.

3

I love PaleMoon, but can't really daily drive it. Mostly just use Waterfox and Firefox. Waterfox is fantastic and fixes pretty much every issue I've ever had with Firefox.

Do search engine browsers like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia have anything to offer? From my experience they're just Firefox but worse. Has anything changed recently?

3
TigerAcereply
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Totally agree. It's made for comfort, safety and privacy. Norwegian based, works with the Dutch privacy and non Ai search engine Startpage, Swiss Proton VPN and has all the features old Opera had (before sold to China and made into a crypto mining piece of shit).

These days Firefox has turned to shit just like chrome, so it doesn't matter whether you have a Firefox or chromium based browser. It's just the build structure.

2

Good old Firefox straight from their apt repo, that way I get security patches/bug fixes in a timely fashion without the need to be rebased/rebuild by a third party.

Thankfully they have added the AI switch which made me come back again.

( FYI: You have added the lemmy.world community of firefox not the official account on mastodon.social which is why its now showing up here https://lemmy.world/post/47155266 kinda cool that it works but also a bit confusing :) )

2

Firefox is still my daily driver. I used to use Brave strictly for YouTube, but my parents recently shared their YT premium plan with me soโ€ฆ When I get the time, I might go to Librewolf, but I do like the syncโ€™ed profiles with FF. Havenโ€™t researched LW enough yet. On mobile, DDG is my default browser on work and personal devices.

Since a MacBook Pro is my daily personal laptop, I also use Safari quite a bit. For that environment, itโ€™s pretty good.

1

@Tutanota The freenetbrowser script sets up a dedicated profile for icecat, waterfox or firefox that uses Hyphanet as SOCKS5 proxy to ensure that no unsafe access can sneak through.

https://github.com/hyphanet/browser/blob/main/freenetbrowser.in#L210

We should investigate adding librewolf and zenbrowser to the list of browsers to select as base for the profile but need to test first that the automated profile setup works for them.

@firefox @duckduckgo @puffin @Waterfox @ecosia @palemoon @zenbrowser @mullvadnet @torproject @librewolf

1
HubertMannereply
piefed.social

this is funny as im in the midst of maybe going to waterfox or librefox. why floorp?

2
Flagstaffreply
programming.dev

It's a bit of a first a world problem: Waterfox blocks Ctrl+Shift+A as an add-on shortcut. It's to unify my muscle memory with my Edge-only work laptop (press that in Chromium browsers to search through tabs), at least for as long as I can't get Keysharp or possibly AutoKey or something lower-level that can override it to work on Linux.

1
HubertMannereply
piefed.social

yeah that is definately not something that would get me looking for alternatives. Things like a lack of no script is my thing.

2
Flagstaffreply
programming.dev

Oh, yeah, all Mozilla browsers can run NoScript (which I use, by the way! Wanna share whitelists? lol). Anyway, I couldn't get Keysharp to handle ^+a either, so I'm sticking with Waterfox because there is currently no Floorp for Android.

1

yeah im on firefox and getting going on waterfox or libre fox is a goal. I just got onto bazzite and need to moves some stuff over and I take a long time to do things though because there are so many things to do.

1

@Tutanota @firefox @duckduckgo @puffin @Waterfox @ecosia @palemoon @zenbrowser @mullvadnet @torproject @Freenet @librewolf

I've been using Firefox again for the past year. It is on all my platforms. And most importantly the Android version also supports uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. Although, some websites will not behave properly.

Most browsers I have tried out do way to much feature wise (looking at you, Vivaldi). This leads to having to expand too much time/energy configuring them. Because I just need basic features and don't want to speed hours turning everything off.

1

You forgot to mention in your list GNU Icecat, though the logo is there. From the list I favour also LibreWolf and the Torproject, though some others are wonderful like Otter, Helium, Qutebrowser, surf or Nyxt.

1

I could swear Icecat went unmaintained like a decade ago, but after looking it up just now it seems like I hallucinated that.

1