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afronaut@lemmy.cafe 1 year agoDo Firefox forks allow us to avoid this enshittification or will they also be affected as well?
In theory yes. But remember that Chrome is based on Chromium which is open source. But nobody has stepped up to do a viable hard fork to take power away from Google.
Maintaining a modern browser is a huge undertaking which is why almost nobody except Google, Mozilla, and Apple are really even trying. Even Microsoft threw in the towel.
The more bad stuff is added to Firefox the harder it will be for any forks to keep up removing it while also keeping it up to date. Will anyone step up?
There are at least two projects trying. Ladybird is one and will make a splash next year. In addition, since the Servo project was adopted by the Linux Foundation it is again under active development.
Because it hasn’t been needed. Alternatives like vivaldi and brave do make some changes to allow you to disable Google services. Ungoogled chromium is also a thing.
For all the hate, Google has mostly done fine beyond a few boneheaded decisions.
Yes, they allow full avoidance of any potential data collection through the browser, if they remove the collection features.
Mozilla would need to change their licensing terms to prevent forks from being able to remove things like that, and forks could just use the last version of the code before the license change and just backport new features.
Also Firefox is fully open source, unlike chromium which relies on a closed source binary blob in the middle. Some chromium forks have replaced the binary blob with open source code, but the default is for chromium forks to have a nice chunk in them controlled by google that no one can deeply inveatigate what it does. Firefox does not have this issue.
Mozilla can’t hide any potential data collection in Firefox due to the full open source nature (unlike chrome forks). They also can’t stop fork devs from stripping out any data collection functions. And as of today, they have not introduced any data collection that is not supremely anonymized, and they have not introduced any data collection that cannot be opted out of through the browser settings (and about:config).
Lem453@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Is librewolf a good alternative? Most plugins seem compatible
zecg@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s just Firefox but you trust some nerds they’ve weeded all of Mozilla out. It comes with ublock origin installed and a simple searchbar homepage. It’s great because Firefox is great and the nerds who added value by stripping bullshit did a good job, but if Putin replaced them with some blyat and pushed an update I’m not sure I’d notice on time.