Still the best browser to support, still the best hope of defending open web standards from Google. Call me when they implement the ads in an onerous way.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Fucking finally. So many reactionary nerds here. Yes, it may turn to shit. It may not. The result is unknown. What I do know is Firefox has been my browser of choice for two whole decades. Chromium actively is killing adblockers. Firefox right now is not.
If something happens I'll make a switch. Right now, nothing has.
The trouble with "wait and see" is that people will often forget what we were waiting for.
Speaking of which, do you remember FakeSpot? That was Mozilla's first foray into directly selling private data to ad companies. At the time, a lot of people said, "they might allow it now, but let's wait and see."
And today, Mozilla FakeSpot continues selling data to ad companies.
Just use a soft fork. The engine is unlikely to get compromised
Speaking of the engine, if Mozilla ever decides to stop developing gecko, it’s going to force the community to continue that work on their own. If that ever happens, it would have a big impact on all the forks too.
Why having DRM behind a "do you want to install DRM to play media" button is seen as a bad thing? Otherwise everyone would have to use chromium.
No one can tell you here beyond "DRM bad". Which it is, and I hate it, but you're exactly right. All it would do if Firefox refused to implement would drive most users to chrome because there DRM works.
We are not the majority. The majority (and by that I mean roughly 96% of users) want their browser just to work. Taking a moral stand doesn't resonate with them, they just see a broken browser and move on.
They could just make a download button instead of a toggle. Also it would be nice to be able to disable DRM popups. (I'm looking at you Forbes)
The problem is that toggle gets turned on easily. They could make it the user choice with a option to rip it out completely.
people complain when they were dependent on google and now they complain when they push an alternative to google that is a privacy friendly advertising firm.
like it or not most sites depend on advertising; offering an alternative to google is exactly what the foundation should be doing.
Best option though. Chromium browsers are all subject to google's wrath, and there are plenty of Firefox forks to go around. If you don't like vanilla Firefox, try Abrowser, available on Trisquel GNU/Linux, a fully libre GNU/Linux Distribution as well as from the Arch GNU/Linux User Repository.
I wish the time he spend complaining was developing an alternative. But he rather support the Apple ecosystem.
He's so petulant online with people that I can only imagine how awful it must be to have him as a boss.
Librewolf is a good option
DRM is opt-in. For sure it is kind of in favor of Netflix and Co. But they could just forced people to use Chrome, couldnt they?
If they gave you a warning before it downloaded that would be fine. It also would be better if they had a option to completely disable it. (No popups)
But no, they decided to make it happen in the background with no user interaction. This is just one of my many complaints against Firefox.
It is opt-in when you open a site that needs it.
Not defending DRM here but it does not get loaded until I allow it.
The problem is some sites use DRM for ads.
Never had this. I use a separate profile for Netflix and never had a DRM request outside of Netflix
Spotify and Crunchyroll also require DRM, like almost all commercial video sites.
I live pretty well without them currently :)
Thoughts on Mullvad browser?
I’m not a security expert, but I think it’s roughly on-par with LibreWolf. I think they both come without Encrypted Media Extensions.
https://mullvad.net/en/browser/hard-facts
And here's a listing of the compile options:
[…]
- --disable-eme (Encrypted Media Extensions, for other DRMs)
The Mullvad Browser is the Tor Browser without Tor, that is, it's a Firefox-based browser with lots of privacy and anonymity improvements, but without the Tor network layer. Mullvad actually sponsored the Tor project in return for some help getting it done, or something along those lines.
As far as I understand (I'm not super familiar with LibreWolf), Mullvad fork should be "better" in that regard.
TY for the info 👽
Do Firefox forks support the same Firefox addon ecosystem, or do they have smaller selections/manual steps?
That website raped my eyes
Yeah, it fucking sucks [blah, blah, blah], it's green text on black.
I'm gonna keep using and recommending LibreWolf for the foreseeable future.
But I wonder what other alternative web engines do we have with both Chromium and Gecko being run by advertisers now?
I know Palemoon runs a fork of a really old version of a Gecko and I used it for a bit back when Firefox 58 broke most add-ons. But I'm a bit iffy of it's security these days.
At the moment, we have Blink (Chrome), Gecko (Firefox), Webkit (Safari), Servo, Ladybird and Goanna (Pale Moon).
I wish Librewolf disabled DRM
Vivaldi is even worse: Unlike Firefox, its proprietariness doesn’t end at a closed-source DRM binary blob.
In fact every Chromium-based browser is worse than Firefox: Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening
Vivaldi is good in some ways (I miss the old Opera and Vivaldi is a spiritual successor to it), but we really don't need more Chromium-based browsers in the world. It's becoming a Chromium monoculture, which is bad for the web.
If you want to use a different browser, try Librewolf.
Proprietary Chromium browser. No thanks
Others have commented on the issues with Vivaldi, but do you have points on what you like about Vivaldi? People might suggest non-chromium browsers that do the same things
I'm not op, but these are some things that I appriciate about Vivaldi:
- Mouse gestures that work anywhere in the window with different options based on what I start the gesture on (eg. Right clicking on a link and dragging down opens the link in a new foreground tab {dragging down then up opens it in the background} but doing so on empty space opens a new tab)
- A scrollable side bar for tabs instead of the horizontal one that is standard (not in addition to or requiring hacky workarounds)
- The ability to minimize tabs or send them to the bottom of the cycle order (this needs to be able to be done with mouse gestures)
- The ability to easily highlight parts of a link so that I can copy part of the text (Vivaldi highlights with a click and drag and drags the link on a click, hold and drag; Firefox doesn't appear to do either)
- Not having to worry about third party extensions security issues or having this core functionality stop working because the extension maintainer has to update it for the new browser version.
- The fact that it just works with minimal configuration
Unfortunately I am looking for alternatives to Vivaldi since Google has decided to kill quality web browsing on Chromium browsers. Much of the web is virtually unusable to me without a tool like ublock quieting things down to work past my sensory processing issues. At times it is hard to think that the majority of web devs have anything but distain for disabled people.
I do use Fennic on Android (with ublock and darkreader) because Mozilla decided to block access to about:config in the mobile version and I have yet to find another way to always force pages to load the desktop version. (Mobile versions of sites disable most of the built in accessibility options like the ability to zoom)
The settings I set in fennic if anyone is curious:
- browser.viewport.defaultZoom (set a sane default zoom)
- browser.viewport desktopWidth (say that the screen is large enough to not trigger CSS mobille layouts)
- general.useragent.override (work around browser sniffing; I've yet to find an extension that actually works for this)
I would definitely use Vivaldi if it wasn't Chromium-based, but it is so a no-go from me.
@watson387 Isn't Chromium, in an open-source way and far away from Google, a good choice?
I don't support Google's web takeover so I don't want to use their browser, open-source or not.