I mean don't use anything besides Firefox, pretty obvious.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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I actually wonder about that. So Firefox is seemingly becoming more corpo in their approach. Their home tab now has random adverts and suggested sites that I should visit. I guess the general vibe that I'm getting is "sleek, polished", which triggers some latent suspicion about the way they are headed. As many people, I keep returning to Firefox every year or so, just to see whether it can be transitioned to. Maybe that's why it's so jarring.
I am also worried that "Firefox is the only real alternative" is not a healthy state of things. We get Chromium flavors, high maintenance nonsense, and Firefox.
turn off the promoted shortcuts, remove the unwanted default pins. takes just a few seconds, and firefox will remember your choices, unlike some browsers.
Yup, first thing I did. But the fact that it was on by default gave me pause. I'm not naive, they need to make money, but it wasn't even a clearly communicated and justified option. This smells of "our greatest asset is the number of eyeballs we can attract" which is typical of products that are free in order to grow a user base which they then sell to the highest bidder. The Mozilla foundation does good work, but it's ultimately not about intentions or even organization policies - these can yield to pressures once the course is set in a particular direction. I'm going to fully switch to Firefox once that adblock Chrome policy comes into effect, but I wish there were more than a handful of options for me to choose.
You can use forks if you want, but you can also turn that stuff off altogether.
Most famously TOR is a Firefox fork.
Yes, Chromium flavours vs Firefox flavours is not healthy.
It's less unhealthy than a defacto Google monopoly though.
It's impossible to build a new web browser... At least until someone proves otherwise.
My estimate (source: sounds good in my head) is you'd need a dozen or so browser experts working full time for years to build a browser capable of rendering most modern "web-app" style websites.
The core specs have a lot of integration tests (one of the shittier ones written by yours truly!), and most of the specs are pretty readable for experts (I hate the CSS Device Adaptation Module Level 1 spec though).
There's just a lot of it and a lot of subtle interactions which is where the time would go.
If you were foolish enough to set many millions of dollars on fire* to do this you'd end up with a browser lacking in key non-core-spec areas too. Off the top of my head: print layout, security, JIT performance, HTTP2 / HTTP3, general browser performance, UI polish, PDF rendering, mobile version, plugins, and DRM "support" (good luck getting the DRM gatekeepers to let you bundle that stuff with your browser). Add some more years for all of that.
* and/or smart enough to make it an open source project and convince people to do it for free, see the other commenter's link to Ladybird below
This appears to be a good excuse to hate on CSS Device Adaptation Module Level 1, let me quote from it so you understand the great sorrow I had when I needed to understand it:
This section is not normative. This section describes a mapping from the content attribute of the viewport element, first implemented by Apple in the iPhone Safari browser, to the descriptors of the @viewport rule described in this specification.
...
Below is an algorithm for parsing the content attribute of the tag produced from testing Safari on the iPhone. The testing was done on an iPod touch running iPhone OS 4. The UA string of the browser: "Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7". The pseudo code notation used is based on the notation used in [Algorithms].
...
If a prefix of property-value can be converted to a number using strtod, the value will be that number. The remainder of the string is ignored.
Me and my mate had to come up with some fake policies for a fake Pirate Party and one of our policies was that the Irish government should commission a new internet browser. After all, the current bunch have a massive budget surplus that they want to get rid of before Sinn Féin get in.
you know what the solution to this is. gotta reset the web from scratch.
I'll watch its career with great interest, thank you for the link!
Well, you do get Firefox flavours. There are a ton of forks available, many which are very privacy-centric, such as Fennec or Mull on mobile.
There have been a few bad signs over the years.
Most striking was the "Looking Glass" plugin. This was a Mr. Robot (popular TV show at the time) promotional plugin that would alter the behavior of a few tie-in websites as part of an ARG. Besides that it was "harmless", though had a vague description rather than saying what it was.
It was pushed by default to users using their user study framework. It was launched quietly enough and without going through the normal process. Even a lot of firefox devs didn't realize it until the press blew up.
And one of the responses to the push back was:
we heard from some of our users that the experience we created caused confusion
Despite Firefox leadership and marketing being the ones who were confused about the proper way to use their own user study framework, or avoid launching bad changes.
Aside: Mozilla also only just stopped accepting cryptocurrency donations in 2022, despite ostensibly caring about the environment and the internet.
Overall Firefox is still pretty good, despite being under-invested in by Mozilla, but if you use it you should recommend that at the end of the day there's a lot of corporate influence in it right now.
Vivaldi has been great the whole time
Except that it uses chromium which contributes to the Google dominance of web standards
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uh have you tried xydfgq-blurble browser it's my home brew fork of chromium and firefox i call it "chromefox" which is also my fursona
thinking of changing the name to something lighthearted, marketable and non-objectionable like "GNU-Scrotum"
i am the only maintainer and i keep up with 110% of security issues
we are not in the android store as the oppressive statists at google said that if i ever switched on this uh "piece of shit" in a built up area theyd cut my nuts off, but
ignore the FUD about chromefox spilling your bank account and leaking your tastes in hentai and fucking your cat it's all LIES FILTHY LIES by THAT BITCH ANDREW he is SUCH an asshole
anyway free software stallman was right peace out
I just curl pages and render it all in my head. It's easy with my 10 Morbillion IQ
the only reasonable way to interact with the web is to write a shell script that mails the source to each page you try to view to the 2001 laptop you insist on using even in spite of freer modern options, I said, reaching for delicious foot skin to chew
Lmao look at this chud actually trusting awk, head and date
@morrowind I created my own binaries by flipping the switches on the front of a PDP-11 though, I don't trust gcc, and neither should you
flipping the switches on the front of a PDP-11
lmao, look at this chud actually trusting random hardware. I only use custom designed, hand made (by me!) computers which I flip switches on to program. I also mine the materials myself, and went back in time to make make sure they were acceptable before being created in a star or something.
Can you give me 10 mormillion iq in exchange for 10 morbillion cents ?
this post is like a specially crafted basilisk for parts of my brain and soul I normally refuse to acknowledge
My advice of "stay away from anything a youtuber tells you to use" is becoming more and more vindicated every day.
It’s funny you say this as I was telling my SO after seeing the Opera GX browser on some YouTubers screen in the background that that automatically made me wary of their content because Opera isn’t all that great, let alone a “gamer” specific version of said browser. Then this news of them being shady came out like a week later and I just had to point that out to my SO as a crazy coincidence that we were just talking about it!
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*through sponsorships, genuine advice is fine
Yesterday I was installing some cracked software on my laptop and accidentally installed a straight up virus as I clicked the wrong download link.
I’m gonna need to re image the machine, but as far as I can tell all it actually did was install Opera…
It's Opera with a secret sauce.
!(The secret sauce is a keylogger)!<
I was wondering why they had an office in ZA*, with a designer and a couple of people that seemed like project and business managers
but that almost certainly explains it.
(* it's in Green Point, CPT. I'm struggling to find an address listed online, "cape town opera" is a not-lightly overloaded term)
I tried Vivaldi but sadly it still wasn't the opera alternative I was looking for.
I feel like this is a classical music joke but I’m not sure if you meant it as one.
Nope. Vivaldi is an excellent chromium-based browser with a ton of features built in that would be extensions on chrome or FF.
It's made by devs who left Opera after it started getting scummy.
Use Firefox or one of its forks/alternatives, Google has defacto control of the web standards. As the vast majority of browsers use it's engine.
Firefox is the only way to stop this control over the web and keep it open. Safari is also an option for some, but Chrome is based on a forked version of Safaris engine and Google is able to wag the tail to control the dog.
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