I wish there’s more Mozilla forks.
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.
I have high hopes for ladybird
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.
And I’ve literally heard people say they view Chromium as a reference implementation of the living standard. 😭
Firefox FTW!
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.
Same… I know it’s better and worth supporting, I just don’t like using it for some reason.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there anything better about LibreWolf that can’t be achieved by altering Firefox settings?
It ships preconfigured without invading your privacy (like Firefox does). Just look up a comparison online.
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.
Can anyone explain how much control Google has over the Chromium project?
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.
Look into “Ungoogled Chromium” if you want the browser without all the Google crap.
