Skip Navigation
31 comments

  • Firefox does something else very important: provide another rendering engine for the web. When that landscape homogenizes, you get IE6 all over again. And we never want to go back there.

    • Also I'd rather there was a separate option for additional privacy than it be the default.

      People who want the extra privacy can usually figure out what they need and how to get it. The average person will just switch back to chrome when websites break. They wont be able to figure out which settings to toggle off in order to fix the site

      Keep Firefox useful for most people while also building more privacy friendly features.

      If it's something people SHOULD be using, have a popup explaining it and let people decide

      • This is the reason why people think privacy is hard. No, my mother should not need to find out how to set the correct settings.

        A simple switch, GUI, to completely harden the browser, this would be the thing. about:preferences can be changed while running.

    • Also Firefox disables website pinging by default, unlike nearly all cromium based browsers where you can't even disable it

    • It wouldn't be terrible, as long as it's based on an open source foundation. Although that depends on the specific open source license. As long as the engine can be forked, the worst of IE6 should be avoidable.

      But yes, with Opera moving to Blink, you've got really only two-ish browser engines. KHTML/WebKit/Blink and Gecko. WebKit/Blink are Open Source, but I think mostly BSD, so Apple/Google could migrate to a proprietary license easily.

      Gecko is MPL, which IIRC is somewhat Copyleft like the GPL, just a bit less stringent.

      With the Apple/Google impasse with WebKit/Blink, I think we should be able to avoid an IE6 situation, but I would feel better with a stronger Copyleft license.

      As much as I love Firefox, I think Firefox has less browser share than it did back in the IE6 days.

  • Use Tor Browser if you want it dialed up to eleven. You'll quickly find that it's way more of a hassle to use, and also still pretty easy to accidentally compromise the security measures.

    Of course Firefox isn't perfect; nothing is. But a 180 turn implies it's the opposite of perfect now, and it really isn't - especially in a world where basically every other browser is waaaay closer to that.

    • From this comment I suppose you never used Librewolf or Arkenfox. The Torbrowser is only a hassle because

      • it uses "private browsing" always, which completely hinders people from saving anything. This is not needed, as cache, session etc could simply be deleted via the settings.
      • it uses the Tor network, which is a huge thing. Cloudflare and all that BS block you 90% because of that. Its even worse than with VPN
      • The real difficulties just come when you use Noscript, or Ublock with hard settings. The hardened browser alone is unproblematic. But if you use Noscript, you dont want to not use it anymore. Sites are so bloated with third party javascript that is simply not needed.

      Firefox on Default is not stopping much tracking. It should teach users how to be private. Also work of course, but really. Other browsers will scream out way more data, thats for sure. But Firefox has all these features but nobody knows them.

      So, in the end there is no real usecase for Firefox. And people use any other "secure" Browser instead

      • I mean, you're just saying that if you don't dial it up to eleven, but just to nine, then you'll hit less breakage. Which, sure, but that's kinda my point: a usable browser needs to strike a balance, and that's exactly what Firefox is trying to do - which is really something different from "needing a 180-degree turn". Firefox by default is stopping way more tracking than e.g. Chrome, and guides users to installing e.g. uBO.

        Also note that most breakage isn't immediately obvious. For example, if you turn on privacy.resistFingerprinting, then Google Docs will become blurred. However, by the time you see that, you won't be able to link that to the flipped config. This is the kind of breakage that many "hardening guides" cause, and by that, they eventually lead people to switch to Chrome, which is the opposite of what they're supposed to achieve.

        And sure, Librewolf draws the line at a slightly different place than Firefox does. But the main difference is not sending data like hardware capabilities, crash stats, etc. to Mozilla - which don't threaten democracy or result in hyper-targeted ads, but do enable Mozilla to optimise the code for real-world use.

31 comments