• Ephera@lemmy.ml
          16·
          4 months ago

          I guess, this is most of the changes they do: https://librewolf.net/docs/features/

          There’s maybe a handful where I’m not sure, if you can do them via settings.
          One where it’s technically the case, is that they remove Pocket at compile time. But to my knowledge, Pocket integration is pretty much a glorified bookmark. There’s not much code to remove. And it can be disabled via about:config by setting extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

          I guess, to be fair to LibreWolf, Mozilla has been helping out the Tor Browser devs since forever, so most things needed for Tor Browser are just a toggle in the Firefox settings.
          As a result, though, there’s also lots of settings, which partially need expert knowledge. So, there is definitely room for different presets. But yeah, still leaves the question, whether one really needs a different executable to adjust these settings.

        • EherNicht@feddit.orgEnglish
          237·
          4 months ago

          It ships preconfigured without invading your privacy (like Firefox does). Just look up a comparison online.

            • EherNicht@feddit.orgEnglish
              111·
              4 months ago

              Sadly, with default settings that’s the case. Partly due to Telemetry being active and Google being the default search engine.

              • corbin@infosec.pub
                93·
                4 months ago

                Telemetry is not privacy-invading, it’s pretty well anonymized. It’s also a lot easier to change the search engine than it is to download a completely different web browser.

                • EherNicht@feddit.orgEnglish
                  22·
                  4 months ago

                  You should inform yourself before writing. And I say that without any harmful intent. To get a true privacy focused Browser you need to harden Firefox (and may download some scripts from github to do so). Or just use LibreWolf as it has a lot of tracking preventative stuff built in similarly to Mullvad Browser or Tor Browser. Those two are however of course still way better. The latter being the best with regards of anonymity if you know what you are doing. I can just encourage you to inform yourself about the Firefox browser which is better than Chrome of course, but still compromises your privacy in the default shipped state.

              • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
                62·
                4 months ago

                What telemetry options are enabled by default that are invasive? I’m not saying they aren’t there, it’s just been forever since I installed it and I sync my settings. Also, if our bar for saying something is invading our privacy is so low that we say having a default search browser selection as Google then I think we’re going to far.

    • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2580·
      4 months ago

      Yes, but only begrudgingly.

      (edit) oh no, I’ve said something bad about the lesser evil, and the people who have made it their identity to violently cum all over the first thing that isn’t owned by Google are after me. I hope the pipe bomb hitman is at least polite.

        • atocci@lemmy.world
          243·
          4 months ago

          I just wish Firefox updates weren’t so intrusive. Having it hit me with “Firefox updated in the background, restart to continue using Firefox” while I’m trying to use QuickBooks for my job is so disruptive when QuickBooks doesn’t save automatically and never opens back up to where I left it off. I won’t go back to Chrome, but I never had it pull that sort of forced restart on me.

          • Altima NEO@lemmy.zipEnglish
            591·
            4 months ago

            You can disable that. I have mine set to notify me when updates are available

          • Ephera@lemmy.ml
            19·
            4 months ago

            From what I understand, Chrome doesn’t need to do this, because when you close it, it keeps running in the background and does its upgrades then, which is also pretty intrusive.

            If you’re updating Firefox via the built-in auto-updater, you can tell it in the settings that it should only install updates when you tell it to do so.

          • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
            13·
            4 months ago

            Ah. I guess I don’t notice that since I’m on Linux and just update Firefox whenever I want.

            If you go to Hamburger menu > Settings > General > Check for updates but let you choose to install them, you won’t auto update anymore. I agree that would be annoying.

            • atocci@lemmy.world
              9·
              4 months ago

              When it happens, it doesn’t let me do anything other than stay on the already loaded webpage without restarting.

              Open a new tab > “Restart to continue…”
              Click a link > “Restart to continue…”
              Type a URL > “Restart to continue…”
              and etc

              • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                5·
                4 months ago

                What OS? I almost never close out of Firefox on my Macs at home and I’ve never seen that message there. FF on Windows seems to be the same. It’s been ages though since I’ve left FF open for months on end on Linux though.

                • rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio
                  4·
                  4 months ago

                  I’ve had this same experience on Linux Mint. I’ll run apt update & apt upgrade and, occasionally, if Firefox is one of the things being updated, new tabs and new pages won’t load and will tell me I need to do a system restart to continue browsing.

                  I always update manually, so it never happens without me initiating the update first. But sometimes I’m like, “Dangit, didn’t realize this update would require a restart to keep using Firefox.”

            • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
              1·
              4 months ago

              It happens on Linux – after your package manager has updated Firefox. Which typically means that you told it to. So it’s not really a surprise.

        • Einar@lemm.ee
          143·
          4 months ago

          I wish this blanket statement were true. Firefox is better in some respects, but surely not all. Tab and session management - just to name two examples - are just handled better by the Chromium crowd, as much as it pains me to say that.

          That said, I still use Firefox in most cases.

        • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          8·
          4 months ago

          Different profiles on Firefox are nowhere near Chrome.

          I’m still going to use FF, but there are areas it lags behind Chrome. That’s the only big one for me.

        • Empricorn@feddit.nlEnglish
          171·
          4 months ago

          Back in the day, Firefox was literally not as good as Chrome. I personally think that has reversed and it’s now much better than Chrome. Leagues better, now that Chrome is banning UBlock Origin. I do wish we had more competition than just Chrome, Safari, and Firefox though…

          • casmael@lemm.ee
            4·
            4 months ago

            Yeah any other alternatives? There’s arc, but I think that’s just chromium underneath (see above, meme)

              • mke@lemmy.world
                3·
                4 months ago

                And to make matters more complicated,

                • Servo, as far I know, has no plans to be a browser. Instead, they want to offer an alternative to Blink (the Chrome rendering engine), so that other software can be made with it. This seems to be a common misconception.
                • Ladybird’s project lead and main developer, Andreas Kling, may or may not hold controversial views that some would prefer to avoid supporting.

                I really want there to be more options in the browser market that aren’t Blink based (or WebKit, sorry Apple), but the situation’s tough.

        • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          14·
          4 months ago

          I’m an advocate for Firefox, but it is slowly, slowly entering enshittification.

          The addition of AI, dark patterns to enable “sponsored bookmarks” upon reinstall, ads (albeit subtle) when using the address bar for search…

          All of these can be disabled, some easily, some with feature flags.

          Sure the enshittification isn’t anywhere near the pace as Chrome but it’s happening. And again, this is coming from a maybe 10 year financial donor to Mozilla.

          Firefox is better than Chrome, no question but there is an opportunity for a new browser to challenge the field.

          • ours@lemmy.world
            92·
            4 months ago

            You make good points but some people are knew jerking on Firefox’s AI. One of them is client side translation which is really neat as I don’t need to send the content to some Google ad data vacuum.

            Another AI model helps differently abled people to have websites described to them using, again, a local model.

            There is also Libtefox which uses the same rendering engine without the other stuff if you don’t want it.

            I consider it an important act to use non Chromium browsers as not to completely hand over the power of rendering web content to Google.

  • edinbruh@feddit.it
    56·
    4 months ago

    Download Firefox/ Look inside/ Still Firefox.

    Download thunderbird/ Look inside/ Older Firefox.

  • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
    391·
    4 months ago

    It’s a shame the web got so complex that it has become unfeasible to make a browser engine anywhere near full compliance for anyone that isn’t a large company.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      And I’ve literally heard people say they view Chromium as a reference implementation of the living standard. 😭

      • MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
        24·
        4 months ago

        Chromium is to the modern internet what Internet Explorer was in the mid 2000s. It’s not as stagnant (thankfully), but as far as market share and giving one oversized tech giant arguably too much power over the internet, we’ve basically come full circle.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
      6·
      4 months ago

      There’s no “full compliance”. There’s a set of a hundred or so features and everey major browser supports the most important +/- a few dotzend.

  • xavier666@lemm.eeEnglish
    221·
    4 months ago

    Can anyone explain how much control Google has over the Chromium project?

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      352·
      4 months ago

      It’s unfortunately a relatively complex thing to answer.

      First off, there’s the license. The source code is published under a BSD-3 license, which is very permissive, meaning in theory, anyone could fork the repository and be completely free from any control of Google.

      However, this is not really a thing in reality.

      First of all, for your fork to have any meaning at all, you need people to use it. They’re not going to use your fork, if it’s unclear whether you’re trustworthy and in particular, you need to offer something better than Google and do so for a while, so that people feel like they can rely on you.

      Google is also not bound by its license to make future updates available under the same license. If your fork would become too successful, they could re-license and then it would genuinely just become a competition for who has more dev power.
      But with the additional caveat that if you don’t also re-license, then Google can continue taking your work and provide theirs on top.

      Google also has a load of tracking infrastructure and an ad business, which makes Chrome a valuable investment for them.
      There’s very few other organizations for which it would make sense to invest similarly much into Chromium development (and those organizations will then have similarly awful motivations).
      Which means a hard fork, i.e. without dependence on future updates from Google, is pretty much not going to happen.

      Additionally, you’d need a solid number of users in your fork, if you want to have any say in terms of web standards. So long as Google Chrome has a majority of users, Google can easily introduce proprietary standards, which webdevs will gladly lap up.

      So, all in all, Google does have a pretty tight grip.
      Presumably, they don’t put any incriminating stuff into Chromium, so that they steer clear of even faint attempts to fork (and because they can just put those into Google Chrome instead).
      But there’s plenty room for interpretation in most web standards, so they can implement them in their interest, and then the forks have to stick to that implement, if they want to remain compatible with the web.

      • rdri@lemmy.world
        6·
        4 months ago

        Basically, a corporation owning such an open source project removes almost all positive things associated with “open source”. They’re using it for “look we are good” much more than for “we actually care about open source community”.

    • brillotti@lemmy.world
      71·
      4 months ago

      Look into “Ungoogled Chromium” if you want the browser without all the Google crap.

      • EddoWagt@feddit.nl
        101·
        4 months ago

        That’s still not free from Google’s control of the chromium web engine

  • Vespair@lemm.ee
    14·
    4 months ago

    Yeah I wish Vivaldi wasn’t Chromium-based, because I love all the bells and whistles of Vivaldi so much. But like, at the end of the day it’s still partly contributing to the Chromium dominance of the web, so I still have to default to Firefox as my primary.

    • kamen@lemmy.world
      8·
      4 months ago

      Same sentiment here. Coming from Opera (in the days it had its own engine) and having been using Vivaldi as my daily since its first public preview, native mouse gestures is the thing I miss the most from Firefox.

      I know that the folks at Vivaldi are pretty strongly against the manifest v3 thing, but seems like at one point they’ll have to fold.

    • Makeshift@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      4 months ago

      Sentiment shared.

      I went from Firefox, to Chrome (came as default, didn’t swap because browser was fine), to Vivaldi which was really neat when I started learning Chrome was going to become suck, then back to good old Firefox when I learned that Vivaldi is Chromium.

    • Chakravanti@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      4 months ago

      Icefox I’ve heard about and LIbrewolf I use actively.

      The latter has frustrations with Video Downloadheper. IDK WTF to do to make it work. Sticks me to fucking Firefox to rip. Icefox recommender said it should work with VDH but they don’t really know and I ain’t had a chance to work with it.

      • Arfman@aussie.zone
        1·
        4 months ago

        Have you asked the Video Download helper team? I had an issue before where it wasn’t picking up a media after an update and asked them and they fixed it by the next update. They’re really good with support.

        • Chakravanti@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          I can’t figure out how to post on github yet. I have little time that isn’t bothered with other things first. I’m missing a bunch of shit I already stole from yt but keeps getting fried cuz im lazy and don’t book it to my vault

          • Arfman@aussie.zone
            1·
            4 months ago

            If you’re logged on to GitHub and go under discussions for this dev, you can just post a discussion or add to an existing thread with a similar issue.