A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
That's exactly what happens if we lose Firefox - Chrome (and those based on it) now have all the power to disable all ad blocking - enabling Google's horrific privacy-less future
There’s still WebKit, which doesn’t suck anymore! (At least from my end-user standpoint)
At least for mobile—I cannot attest to the desktop version.
Which webkit based browser are you talking about?
I suppose anything on the iPhone cuz it’s all WebKit under the hood hahahah
Because iphones are good for privacy...
web kit doesn't suck
I wouldn't go that far. Gnome web is coming along but it has a ways to go
Firefox stands as the lesser of two evils.
The problem is that for the past 8 months, Mozilla has been accelerating making Firefox more evil, and if it continues at this trajectory, it might catch up to Google.
Use forks
It's a good opportunity for any Chrome users in the crowd to switch to Librewolf. It may be a small project but it's been around for a while and they haven't made any mistakes that I've heard about. Google has its various off-brand browsers using the engine, why shouldn't Mozilla get some? It comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled, and has none of the telemetry and ads of Firefox.
One thing to note about using forks is that they have no chance of being on corporate software whitelists, while firefox does. For that reason, adding to firefox numbers is potentially important. I've already seen companies wanting to only allow chrome/edge/safari (even while they officially support firefox ..)
Honestly Firefox is generally easy to maintain. Just update it once in a while and maintain some basic group policies
Have they implemented the update option yet, or does it still rely on unofficial methods for updating?
They provide official deb and rpm builds for linux, which get updated in the usual ways. I don't know about windows but the website says:
you can choose to install the LibreWolf WinUpdater, which is included in the installer.
The LibreWolf WinUpdater works great. You get a small pop-up when there's an update and it updates super quickly (in my experience in like 15 seconds).
Librewolf is also available as a Flatpak
Looks like it's available in the Windows Package Manager Community Repository, so you can update it via winget update LibreWolf.LibreWolf or keep it up to date using the Winget-AutoUpdate tool.
I don't see any issues with Firefox?
I've been using FF for more years than I care to remember, and with the exception of a couple of sites that weren't really that important, I've never had an issue. I certainly never had an issue running uBlock Origin and YouTube.
I flat out refuse to use anything even loosely based on Chromium on principal alone.
There's a few irritating ones on Android at least.
On desktop it's been solid since Quantum
Quantum was an insane update.
I see many people say to just use forks of Firefox. I use Librewolf myself. However, are such forks not very dependent on upstream Firefox not being completely enshittified? Will it be possible to keep the forks free of all new bullshit, or does that at any point become a too difficult/comprehensive task for the maintainers?
Exactly, so you have Firefox, Floorp, LibreWolf and even Waterfox. Just pick one.
Even tho I somtimes don't care about floss I enjoy firefox it's customizable
I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.
I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they've received show that there is real demand for an alternative.
But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.
There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.
I'm probably wrong, but isn't the Mozilla License non-permissive? It's likely more complicated than that. Non-permissive*
Agreed, it's licensed under the MPL, a "weak copyleft" license. Each file that is MPL must remain MPL, but other files in the same project can be permissive or even proprietary.
While I definitely think it's better than a fully permissive license, it seems more permissive than the LGPL, which is the main license of WebKit and Blink. So I don't feel it's strong enough to stop it being co-opted.
Ladybird is the best we have. At the end of the day the big part that matters is source code and the 4 freedoms
even when there are 'no options', there are always options
I used to be partial to Konqueror in the past. I wish it was still actively maintained and developed.
Maybe Ladybird can step in but I am still pissed that they do all communications overe proprietary services (Discord & Microsoft GitHub) which hurts the openness of the project.