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10mo ago

Following Firefox Terms of Use, are you switching to another browser?

74 comments

I still don't see Mozilla as a bad actor, especially in comparison with the villany that is google and microsoft. It's still a great alternative for privacy newbies and average users, although I personally made the switch to librewolf (desktop) and iceraven (mobile) a while ago. Both being forks of firefox, development for actual firefox is essential for either of these to survive, so Mozilla still has my support albeit indirectly
- Librewolf / IronFox for me, Mozilla can fuck right off with their cloud services, added value and hunger for telemetry. Their 2% userbase is about to shrink even further.
- Oh wow, I did that exact switch yesterday upon seeing the changes.
- Mozilla’s only reason of existence right now is so that Google can skirt an antitrust case.
  Edit: to be clear, that in itself makes it a bad actor.
  
  I don't subscribe to this theory.
  They don't need to keep firefox on life support to avoid an antitrust case. A chromium fork could serve the same purpose.
- i have ironfox on android, and you can use alternative to google play, apparently google has secretely downloaded an app" which scans your phones and sends it to google.

I've been using Firefox since it was Netscape, and I'm 'concerned' but not going anywhere yet.
- Exactly the same situation here. I'll wait for a while and see what happens.
- Yeah, same here... I'm cautiously worried, but more for other things that have happened than these last changes.

I'm mainly trying to work out how to get off windows.
- Nice. I've been there, and changing just a bit at a time has added up to my computing now being in a state I'm much happier with.
- Linux Mint. You'll get a thousand other recommendations which you can perhaps explore once you're more comfortable with Linux but for the easiest most Windows-like experience just get Mint.
  You don't even need to ditch Windows completely, if you're uncomfortable with that, because you can dual boot meaning when you turn your PC on it asks would you like to open Windows or Linux
  If you don't like it, well, at least you tried. I think you'll have a great time though exploring free software to do tasks you would have had to pay or subscribe to previously.
  Take your time, ask questions on forums if you need to, and most importantly, enjoy it. Enjoy the experience of learning how computers actually work, enjoy personalising your machine to truly be your machine.
  Good luck, and have fun!

This is probably a good opportunity to promote the Lemmy communitiy for LibreWolf: !librewolf@lemmy.ml

Librewolf. Mozilla will just keep enshittifying their browser. My biggest hope is that chrome is split off from Google and Mozilla loses their funding from google (500M/year). It's way more than they need and they refuse to actually compete with Chrome/Chromium. Instead, they are content being the excuse for Google not to be sued for being a monopoly.
Hopefully the charade will end before Trump leaves office. Either because the US courts force google to split or because the EU finally grows a pair and declares Google and their tech to be a liability. My bet is that a new browser like LadyBird will give Firefox a reason to actually improve, but it'll be too late.
Anti Commercial-AI license
- After a quick look at librewolf I may absolutely join you

Nope.
Not that I don't think it's a dumb move from Mozilla, but the options right now are:
Stay with Firefox
Move to a Firefox-based browser
Especially since I use Mozilla's services I'm sorta in their ecosystem right now. Maybe once I've moved passwords off I can consider moving, but even then on Android the only browser that supports uBlock is Firefox afaik, which makes it my YouTube client of choice.
- 100% recommend moving off firefox's password manager, as it's generally much more insecure than something like Bitwarden
  
  I gotta set up something on my home server fr
- a password manager is better.
- you don't need to move to a non-firefox based browser. Honestly what would you move to, chromium?
  
  I mean if Im on mozilla's code im on mozilla's code no matter what fork that is. Feels like decrying a policy in Arch Linux so you move to Manjaro.
  Of course there's no real alternative engines either. Either Chromium where they're shuttering Manifest V2 or Webkit which is under Apple so until Ladybird is up there I'm not sure about migrating to a fork.

Not yet, they're still the best option that doesn't use Chromium (I don't count Safari), but Servo is looking pretty promising

No, because I haven't used mainline Firefox in years.
I'm pretty happy with LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox (available on Accrescent btw!) on Android (GrapheneOS)
Unfortunately it's still much less secure than Chromium, but I want and need a proper adblocker to maintain my freedom online. And I'm definitely not using Brave...
The only kinda usable Chromium browsers are Ungoogled Chromium and Trivalent. I think I might try building Trivalent on macOS at some point. Maybe also gonna apply some patches from Thorium, as long as they don't compromise security.
- Any thoughts on Vivaldi?
  
  No thoughts on privacy, but I have been using Vivaldi for many years now and it's good. Pretty customizable if that's your thing.
  
  Well it's proprietary and in my opinion extremely bloated.
  
  I use Waterfox as my primary and Vivaldi as my secondary browser for when a site just really wants a Chromium based browser...it's great, Chrome minus Google, plus a few nice extras. For those old enough to remember when Opera was a popular alternative browser (before getting bought up and turned to garbage) -- Vivaldi is from the guy who made Opera.
- Unfortunately it's still much less secure than Chromium
  What does that mean?
  
  https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html

I'm staying on this side, but probably switching to a fork like Librewolf
I've previously used Floorp which is feature rich but not polished, and same goes for Zen

Yes.
Short term -- I'll probably be moving to LibreWolf, most likely. I'm planning to spend a good chunk of time this weekend reviewing what exactly their fork does. I've read their self-description already -- and like it -- but I want to look through the code and try to build it myself before I start depending on it.
Long term -- I'll be keeping my eye on Servo and Ladybird.

Well, I have been using Zen, a Firefox fork for the past 6 months, and they have yet to clarify their stance on the ToS update.
Anyway, I don't think I'll change anyway, we need Gecko in the browser engine landscape and I have been so used to Firefox'S UI and flexibility that I have a hard time imagining myself not using a Firefox-based browser.

Maybe, but I'll stay on the non-Chromium end of things. I'll definitely try out some competitors, such as:
Mullvad Browser
Zen
LadyBird
I still support engine diversity, but that doesn't have to be mainline Firefox.
That said, I don't think the TOS is as bad as people claim, so I'm in no rush.
- I was trying out Mullvad Browser and clicked on a Discord link and it launched the Discord app on my computer.
  I was shocked that a security-oriented browser would launch an external application without warning by default. Even Chrome prompts the user first.
  
  Hmm, that is odd.

Coincidentally, I just found out about Floorp yesterday, in no relation to this ToS change, and will take a look at it soon. Keep in mind I haven't looked at all yet, so I have no clue if they have a worse ToS or something.

Yep. I've switched to Waterfox, but I need a browser for my phone(I run iOS, yes I know), any suggestions?
- Probably Ironfox
  
  It seems like that's Android only?
- Brave is unfortunately still the best browser on iOS when it comes to privacy. I absolutely despise of the company and especially their homophobic CEO, but there aren't better alternatives available right now.
  
  That's very unfortunate :/

I'm going to stick to Firefox for the time being at least for the clients where I managed to get Firefox ESR accepted. For everything else, it might be the time to switch to Librewolf. Among other advantages, they have enabled jxl support.

On PC, I will look into switching to a fork. Not sure what to do on my phone

I've been inching towards Gnome Web (WebKit) for a while now. Every time I try using it I last a little longer than last time before I encounter some deal breaking issue and return to Firefox.
In the short term I'm considering sticking to Firefox for work, and using Gnome Web for all other kinds of distractions. I'm writing this in Gnome Web right now, and it's working great. :)
On mobile I'll probably stick to Firefox for a while. So they will still have all my data, and if I have to choose between Mozilla and Google it will still be Mozilla. But my god I wish they would stop acting like idiots.

If they're willing to lose their market share just to chase the AI dragon, I'm willing to be complicit. I know that Brave is pretty good on PC (aware of their crypto bollockery), and I'm taking Librewolf for a spin. As for mobile, I'm happy with Vanadium.
The real shame is Thunderbird getting caught in it. I'll have to look for a replacement both on PC and Android.
- I use fair mail on Android and I really like it. Evolution comes pre installed on Debian, it got the job done for me too. The mobile client is more important to me personally.

No, if I read that correctly the terms do not apply to me as I don't use the "Executable Code version of Firefox".

Played around with zen this afternoon - worried about what appears to be their stance of deferring to Firefox when it comes to privacy policy etc. (Also found what appears to be a weird glitch where the flatpak version crapped out when I tried to set up multiple profiles - appimage worked well.)
Installed waterfox instead. I have only used it for perhaps 2 hours so far, but I already feel like I like it better than default Firefox.
I think my main problem with these smaller browsers is that it's more work for me as a user to keep tabs of what happens around these projects. If the browser I pick has a usage rate of 0.03% instead of 3%, I expect that only 1/100 as many eyes are going to keep up with what this browser (developer) is doing, meaning that I will be much, much less likely to hear about any fuckups from the devs.

Already switched to Zen on PC and Fennec on Android.
Edit: Zen screwed up. I use Librewolf now. https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40522904

I’ve been using gnome web for a bit

Chromium for work and mulvad for home.

Yep, switched tot waterfox...

I tried to, but both Vivaldi and Brave had issues I couldn't get over and in the end I decided to have a time out by switching to Firefox ESR with custom policy and autoconfig.
Whatever happens in April will probably take time to land on ESR so I will hopefully have plenty of time to adopt about:config changes or actually switch to another browser.
I don't feel like switching back to LibreWolf, since I already used it ages ago and learnt to make my current setup with upstream Firefox, so it would be kind of pointless and what would I do at Chromium? Three months and ManifestV2 is permanently killed and what extension doesn't say to run better on Firefox? I have been observing at least uBlock Origin (manifest V2), Privacy Badger (v3 in Chrome) and NoScript (also v3) and I think at least GitHub discussions said they all have shortcomings on Chrome.

I've tried every now and then but could never switch to firefox fully. It was either big ram usage, slowness, or the inability to handle more than 2 tabs. On android. On pc its just the first 2.
Cromite.

74 comments