Is Firefox still the recommended browser of choice here?

It's mostly overblown. You can watch here or read here. The internet is overreacting again, but Mozilla has done fuck all to grasp why just yoinking understandable language and expecting people to understand legalese and draw lines to their Privacy Policy is making people upset or confused.

Imo, people jumping ship is justified, because a company that makes $37M just on investments should do better about being vocal and prescient champions of privacy. Even if their actual privacy policy is the same as it was a year ago, their failure to communicate with their supporters in a way they can understand should have consequences.

It may be overblown but I am seriously tired of the way Mozilla is being run. The CEO has a $7 million salary. Big red flags always appear each time they increase the salary also. May be a bit hyperbolic but that’s why I’m just using another fork after 20 years
- Yup. I’ve been using Firefox for 16 years and I just switched to LibreWolf the other day.
- Yeah, and while I don't have any technical qualms about the direction of Mozilla with regard to Firefox, I'm personally switching for peace of mind and because of the aforementioned inability to communicate well. I don't like working with or supporting people that can't just say what they mean. I mean, how hard would it have been to have a human-readable version for stupid people like me and have a legalese version for the lawyers?
  
  Regardless, as people make decisions, they deserve to be informed. It would be stupid to decide to leave Firefox if all you knew was the uninformed outrage of the internet.
- They're red flag, but even if their stayed purpose is correct at the moment, it sets the stage. All it takes now is a want to sell the data and there's nothing to slow them down or tell us. Nothing to make them keep the setting to not share telemetry. A little baked in ai, some hooks to monitor ...
  
  Jumping ship to a fork is our only recourse. It's that or ride it out and see if the gun is loaded.
That’s my take too - it’s probably not a big deal but damn Mozilla, do better in the rollout of a change like that.

I still recommend it with a little asterisk:

Disable a bunch of shit in it or download a privacy focused fork of it (like Librewolf)

That asterisk is a problem though, having to go through and make it secure is an issue. What if you miss a setting? What if you misunderstand a setting? None of it is particularly upfront and easy. It doesn't ask you when you first install it to set this stuff up, it encourages you to just get stuck in and start using it straight away.

It's not too complicated for a nerd whose hobby is computers or someone who has studied computers, but for the layperson it's too much.

That's why Librewolf is so good. It's secure by default, with all the settings toggled to privacy and you can ease that off if you wish, for convenience or whatever.

Firefox essentially can't seem to decide if they want to be FOSS or capitalist, that's an issue.
- The other fun part is when it updates and changes your privacy settings.
- And based on the behavior of other shitty applications and devices what if an update silently changes one of those settings back to a problematic state? If they aren’t there to begin with I don’t have to worry as much
  
  To be fair Mozilla doesn’t have precedent for this behavior but they also didn’t have precedent for this whole nonsense that started this drama a month ago. Things change
- It’s not too complicated for a nerd whose hobby is computers or someone who has studied computers, but for the layperson it’s too much.
  
  I'm not sure I buy this argument when there are videos visually walking you through every single step involved in hardening Firefox. Is that still too complex for your elderly parents or grandparents? Maybe. Is it too complex for Millenials and younger generations? Definitely not. The core problem here is just laziness. People are not willing to give up 10 minutes of their day to setup their browser for years of future use because "I don't have time for that".
- You're talking about security, but really, none of the privacy questions are about technical security of the product.
  
  "What if you miss a setting?" Then they'll give you article recommendations or send your search query to the search engine you're targeting in the first place. They're really a long way from what you can call a security issue, or sharing personal data with random third parties or data brokers.
  
  if they want to be FOSS or capitalist
  
  I really don't see any basis for this take. It's not about picking one of two extremes, and the most extreme niches in those.
  
  They create FOSS, and look for privacy respecting partnerships and investment so they can keep it going.
  
  They added ToS because they're integrating services, like their synced/backed up browser data and other respectful integration.
  
  That's all a long way from malice, or significant problematic behavior. And you still have more choice than on the other biggest alternatives.
  
  I don't think it is the best we could have, I would like it a bit different too, but the way you make it out to be is way overblown if not wrong.

I switched to https://librewolf.net/ on Desktop and https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox on Android.

Using this as an opportunity to promote the LibreWolf community on Lemmy: !librewolf@lemmy.ml as well as their new Mastodon account: @librewolf@chaos.social

I'm not affiliated with them btw
I've been trying ironfox but it crashes when i tap "customize homepage"

have you experienced this?
- I just tried now for the first time and no it doesn't crash when I press "customize homepage".
- Me too! I'm using graphene, are you?
Same, I’m done with Firefox / Mozilla…
Librewolf, Waterfox, Floorp seem like viable options.

and predictions saying Firefox is going downhill fast and that their forks won’t be maintained for much longer.

Possibly true, but abandoning ship is only bringing us closer to that timeline. People seem to be completely ignorant/delusional about how much work these forks will require to maintain if Mozilla's full time employees stop working on Firefox. If you have a practical reason to use another fork (like maybe a feature Firefox doesn't have) then I totally understand using that instead, but if you are simply making some kind of ethical protest change like all the new LibreWolf users who are so loudly virtue signalling at the moment then you need to think seriously about whether this course of action will ultimately end up hurting your ideals. Mozilla definitely has a big communication problem and I understand the desire to distance oneself from an organisation that repeatedly disrespects its supporters and never learns from its mistakes, as it is very fatiguing to endure their constant failures and the massive fall-outs from them, but ultimately I feel like switching away from Firefox is still an emotional decision rather than a rational one.

If Linux can be developed, then a public fork run the same way for browser can too. It’s possible just no interest yet.
- A huge chunk of Linux development is subsidized by the hundreds of corporations which depend on it and pay developers to maintain things. There is no corporate interest in developing and/or maintaining an alternative browser engine when chromium already exists and dominates the market.
What other problems has Firefox had? Everything I search sends me to this recent controversy
- One of the more recent examples from last year was Mozilla's announcement of PPA (Privacy-Preserving Attribution). Essentially the organisation is trying to create a new system for click-based advertising where an advertiser can be notified that you clicked on their ad, helping them and the websites which host their ads, without compromising your personal privacy. The way it has historically worked is you click on an ad and give away a ton of your personal data, or you straight up block all these ads and their trackers which makes a lot of the web unsustainable (because it is funded by advertising). Anyway, like with this latest controversy a lot of people didn't bother to read any of Mozilla's statements and instead based their entire opinion off clickbait headlines like 'Firefox's New 'Privacy' Feature Actually Gives Your Data to Advertisers' which made PPA sound like a reduction of consumer privacy, which it isn't. And again, like this current controversy, you also had a lot of privacy activists who do not live in reality claiming that anything other than a 100$ rejection of all advertising online equaled 100% complicity and that Mozilla had sold out on one of its core principles.

well Firefox may enshittify, it's still the best option imo, certainly better than chrome or anything chrome based. even better if you use a privacy focused fork like librewolf.

there are other options out there, you can look into qt browsers, those were the basis for webkit browsers. hopefully soon things like servo/verso become more useable.

I've never heard of qt browsers, or servo/verso. I'll give it a look, seems like I have a few rabbitholes to explore
- Servo is an experimental browser engine developed by Mozilla Research using Rust to enhance performance, safety, and parallel processing in modern web rendering. The project showcased features like a concurrent layout system and asynchronous JavaScript execution.
  
  Around 2017, Mozilla shifted focus to other projects and laid off several developers, leading to the gradual abandonment of Servo. However, a dedicated community later formed the Servo 501(c)(3) nonprofit to continue developing Servo’s technology and ideas.
  
  Verso is an experimental browser built on top of the Servo browser engine. Currently, both softwares are experimental and pre-alpha developer software at best.
The UX of Librewolf sucks ass though. Want to change this setting? Well you can't, too bad.
- How the UX of librewolf is different from the UX of Firefox?
- It doesn't suck, it's just not intended for casual users, which is why I chuckle when I see it recommended. That and Mullvad browser. I'd pretty much just recommend TOR over those, if you're really going for strict privacy.
  
  For something that strikes a good balance, I use Zen.
Sucks they're not close to as secure as chromium based browsers. Where's my privacy and security first browser ☹️ Vandium is the only thing close to that. Can't wait for desktop version.
- As @erotador@lemmy.blahaj.zone said, default Firefox is still more private than Chrome. Also, if you want security (and more privacy) on top of that, you should look into LibreWolf. I've been using it for a few years now and it's fantastic!
- Firefox is more private than chrome, chrome had more security updates, but Firefox is not far behind by any means.
- What about the Mullvad browser?

I like LibreWolf, it's a privacy and security focused fork of Firefox.

But I'm really looking forward to Servo, hopefully it becomes usable one day.

Servo and Ladybird both look like the future of the web.
- I'm skeptical about Ladybird, that's why I have such high hopes for Servo
- I doubt that would be the case for Ladybird if the devs keep being how they are.
as well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM

Do they just try to remove DRM from media as it comes down, or can you not watch any DRM media at all on it?
- They disable it by default, because it requires the execution of proprietary code, but you can reenable it.

I mean yeah. I'm not a fan of the changes but there's no way in hell anything Chromium based will fare any better... do they even have uBlock still???

Probably turn off the telemetry, try a fork like LibreWolf or maybe the Arkenfox user.js if you'd rather stay close to upstream.

I prefer betterfox because it can give you up to 30% more performance
I mean Chromium is an open source project, developers don't have to do whatever Google demands.

I know Brave still supports it alongside their own ad-blocker, but apparently the CEO is a dick so people don't want to use it for that reason.

i wasn't as plussed as everyone else over it, though i am concerned. i still donate to mozilla as, ultimately, i believe they're still good for those who champion an ethical, open, and not for profit internet.

i have switched to librefox, though, just because i like their developers and the fact that they've embraced mastodon and the fediverse. i also have firefox and nightly (though i use fennec on android because it comes through f droid)

Is Fennec trustable? They had that one vulnerability incident I can't name and that's when I first heard about them.
- it's basically just the latest firefox without the proprietary stuff, google services, and telemetry. i've never had an issue :)
- The "vulnerability" was only that F-Droid wasn't keeping up with their builds, leaving everyone who installed it from F-Droid out-of-date, during a period of known Firefox bugs being exploited.
- I recommend IronFox instead

I'm not interested in anything based off Chromium, and I don't really like the idea of going with a Firefox fork much either. You're not only trusting them to actually care about your privacy and security, and you're not even just trusting them to actually catch and fix all of Mozilla's shenanigans as well. You are also trusting them to constantly stay on top of all the latest security patches. There aren't really any Firefox forks I trust with all 3 of those things at once. Even if there was, there are certainly no forks of Firefox that have anything even remotely close to the capacity necessary to maintain a web engine on their own, so you're still trusting Mozilla to keep Firefox updated and secure for your fork of choice to even have a chance.

Until a new browser with a new engine comes along that actually lets me use the full uBlock Origin there's not really any other option besides Firefox that makes sense. At least to me.

Links2 is obviously the best browser. #links2gang

But librewolf is pretty neat.

Firefox with like 10 different settings checkboxes unticked through its settings to disable phoning home, prevent sponsored suggestions, prevent recommendations, etc. + ublock origin extension installed, obviously.

It used to be just an install and go ordeal. Now you have to have all these caveats. I used to send technical and interaction to Mozilla but given their terms changes I can’t be confident in them with even that much information anymore.

Final thought is I don’t see what Mozilla’s endgame is. It costs a lot of money to develop a competitive and impactful web browser, I understand that much. Where are they supposed to get their money from? Well. I don’t get paid millions a year to solve this problem, but it seems pretty obvious the current leadership have made their minds up to make Firefox yet another advertisement browser.

For example from me, because I like their relay function.
- You mean the Email relay? There are great alternatives like SimpleLogin or Addy.io. Both have their own browser extensions, but you can also connect them to Bitwarden and use that for browser integration.

I would say no. With the recent debacle the writing is on the wall. Mozilla is not taking our privacy seriously. So, I have switched away from vanilla Firefox.

I would recommend using a fork instead: LibreWolf, or Floorp, or Zen; and Ironfox on Android. Mullvad Browser is another option.

Floorp is kinda sketchy these days, it went closed source, then maybe reopen sourced. I would say Zen is the better pick. and on Android Fennec is a great Privacy fork of Firefox.
- Not maybe. It is open source. It never went close sourced, Dev made it source available till they figured out the future of the project.
  
  Also I won't recommend zen cause it's in beta. It's way too unstable and the dev is no better at handling situations like above. But if you dont mind stability, zen is definitely really good feature wise
How come I never see people recommending Waterfox? Is it just not popular or is there some major flaw?
- That's the one I'm using and it looks virtually the same to Firefox. I'm not sure if there's some issue with it either, I was scouring the comments for someone recommending it.
Ironfox breaks some things for me. I prefer fennec on Android...

Nope. LibreWolf & Waterfox are top-tier, Zen and Mullvad Browsers aren't bad at all

I will say as nice as Zen seems (I agree that it's not bad), I don't really like the whole "vertical tabs" shtick. I mean, I can see why some people would like that, but personally I never got into it. It just looks weird to me and I like seeing more of my tab names (weirdly enough that's exactly what a lot of pro-vertical users claim is good about them lol).

Also, from a privacy standpoint, not a huge fan personally of the fact that unlike LibreWolf, Zen Browser doesn't have ResistFingerprinting enabled by default (not sure if it's even in there tbh).
- Right? To me it’s the opposite of minimal.
- i agree with wanting see more of tab title. for people who regularly keep 50+ tabs open, that is a pipe dream.
  
  if tabs are so many that their iconized anyway, making the tab bar vertical and iconized isn't much difference.
  
  and if the bar would expand on hover (hopefully in near future), like in Brave (not sure if it's a Chrome feature), then it can be wide enough to see plenty of title without reducing the webpage size most of the time.

The browser project dedicated to open web standards steered by a compromised non-profit or the browser project dedicated to undermining the traditional web browsing experience steered by the largest advertising company on Earth ... Let me think ...

It's incredible unfunny to read people here on Lemmy (or in the Fediverse in general) talk about dropping Firefox for Chrome or a Chromium browser. it's like complaining that your country is going wrong by voting Trump.

All those people leaving Mozilla, I can only assume only read headlines and not the actual articles because they're just blowing a nothing burger out of proportion.

All that we've ever asked from Mozilla is three things:

Focus on the performance of your browser so that it is not a hog.

Upkeep privacy

Keep it secure

Out of all of those things, Mozilla fails at all except maybe the last thing. We didn't ask for AI implementation. We didn't ask for Firefox accounts. We didn't ask for whatever feature flavor of the month that Mozilla got a hair up their ass about that they just had to throw into the browser. We asked for simple things and Mozilla overshot them. How are any of these features meant to uphold the values once held by Mozilla?

If you want to talk about a nothing-burger, think of all of the reasons that Mozilla had danced around to excuse itself by throwing these things in. And the cherry on top was the Terms of Service. Truly, they are tone-deaf.
To be fair nobody asked Mozilla to serve a stupid and detached statement without contextualizing what they meant or try to achieve.

[Edit] it feels like they're asking for the outrage. You can't just drop assurances of not selling data without explaining if your crowd is privacy aware. You can't take broad licenses from your users if you don't explain for what they are for. Having plaintext comment next to the lawyer speak would have fixed all that and none of this had to be this shitty. [/Edit]
- And this is why I assume no-one read the articles; because they did explain themselves.

I still recommend it. I'm not fully happy with the situation but for now I consider it my best option.

I consider Chromium-based browsers out of the question as they give too much power to Google. This is already showing to be a problem with new APIs and "features" that Google is pushing into the web platform and the bigger the market share gets the more control they have.
Web browsers are the biggest attack surface that most people have. Displaying untrusted webpages and running untrusted code is incredibly difficult and vulnerabilities are regularly discovered. I don't yet know a Firefox fork that I trust enough to reliably respond to security vulnerabilities quickly and correctly.

So for now I am staying with raw Firefox. Not to mention that as a disto-built Firefox I have some insulation from Mozilla's ToS. But I am very much considering some of the forks, especially the ones that are very light with patches and are mostly configuration tweaks.

Yea sticking with firefox , but with arkenfox hardening.. bugfixes are more important than fear of some wordings , at least for now. Vanadium in GOS on the phone.

I am sticking with Firefox but looking at hardening with https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox

For privacy I recommend arkenfox
+1 I tried to apply betterfox even on mobile, I feel sort of improvement or could be placebo I'm not sure hehe...
I tested this some time ago and it benchmarked slightly better than default Firefox but also broke multiple sites

The whole firefox controversy was overblown. Hardened firefox is still the way to go.

Switched to Zen and Mullvad

I switched to Floorp about a month ago.

https://floorp.app/en

I've been using LW & Mull/IF before the outrage-TOU update and while they're great for me I wouldn't recommend them to everyone. I still keep FF as a backup and many ppl should continue to use FF for the time being as it was JUST A TOU update....for now.

this is the most balanced policy.

I'm not sure why it seems no one else is recommending this type of backup-for-rainy-day strategy.
- ppl are silly
I'd ditch Mull, and go IronFox. It's a fork of Mull that is actively maintained.
- i know i use IF.

Just switched to Floorp. Loving it.

I’ll put my vote in for LibreWolf. Happy to help anyone with a ‘i can’t get librewolf to…’ or ‘this site is broken on librewolf’, etc to help you tweak it.

But i keep both installed. Libre for my daily driver. FF if there’s a site that i absolutely need to be identifiable for.

I will gladly take you up on this, not sure if it’s possible: trying to get the Toonami Aftermath site to work on librewolf
- Interesting. I'm surprised it works on any browser.
  
  From what I can see, when www.toonamiaftermath.com loads, it gets a guest id from api.toonamiaftermath.com.
  
  www.toonamiaftermath.com has a well configured SSL chain per https://www.scyscan.com/check-ssl/result/www.toonamiaftermath.com.
  
  However, api.toonamiaftermath.com is missing an intermediary certificate authority per https://www.scyscan.com/check-ssl/result/api.toonamiaftermath.com. Note how there's only 1 record in the chain at the bottom of the page. It should resolve all the way upto ISRG Root X1 or X2 per https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/
  
  This is on the server admin to fix up.
  
  If however, you like to live dangerously, you can force LibreWolf to ignore the error (Keep in mind, this is the browser saying "We can't confirm that this server is who they say they are").
  
  In LibreWolf, open the dev tools panel. (Press F12) Click onto the Network tab. Then load https://www.toonamiaftermath.com/ In the Network panel, you should see one record in red for https://api.toonamiaftermath.com/ trying to load bundle.js with the error NS_ERROR_ blah blah SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER. Double click that record and it'll open a new tab showing you FF's/LibreWolf's "Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead" page.
  Click on Advanced, then "Accept the Risk and Continue". You might see the service response, you might only see the screen flicker. In any case, reload https://www.toonamiaftermath.com/ and repeat for any subsequent errors. It should challenge for every subdomain/package.
  Once done, the site should work for you. You might need to manually click play depending on your other browser settings.
  
  Good luck. You'll need to occasionally re-accept the SSL errors. As mentioned, there's a problem with the trust chain. The site owner likely hasn't set it up correctly, and should be causing it to fail on all browsers. You might have a cached chain somewhere that's allowing it to work on that particular browser.

It seems the alternatives are worse but I'm definitely trying out one of the Firefox forks

It's been pretty painless to switch to https://www.waterfox.net/ on desktop. There's also a Waterfox app for Android.

I'm really liking waterfox

Left them 4 years ago (after 20ish years), so...

What's a good alternative?

I am staying with FF until Orion is useable on linux. They just started development

Orion on MacOS is really good. Great protection and defaults, plus extensions from Firefox and Chrome work.

I would recommend using tor browser, since there are major known honeypots like YIFY out there. I've also seen IIS/.NET errors during downtime on watchsomuch just like YIFY, which NO non-corporate entity (or corporate entity founded after 2010) is going to pay a premium for over Linux for, basically guaranteeing it is also a honeypot. Watch yourself out there.

Sorry what’s the issue with YIFY?
- There are rumors that YTS.[whatever they are on now] is a honeypot, and I can confirm during outages I have seen IIS with ASP.NET 500 error pages. If you're not familiar with web dev, this is the setup a Fortune 500 company would have in 2008, not how a modern server run by random piracy bros on the internet would. It's clearly corporate bros overpaying a contractor to run the site if it's on Windows stack, especially in 2025.

Fuck Mozilla, is all I've got to say.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ and https://www.privacyguides.org/en/mobile-browsers/ will likely have documentation that is updated within a day of any relevant news being available

There is no benefit to using Firefox unless you really like uBlock Origin and will not consider another kind of adblocker.

Mozilla is just controlled opposition lead by the same greedy executives as Google anyway, using it won't make a difference. It's at best 3% market share won't stop Google from pushing their crap to everyone else either.

Problems of the modern web in general cannot be solved by just another browser engine. What it really needs is simplification. A way to make it do what it does now but faster and in a way that is easier to implement, but I don't see anyone doing that in the near future.