Submitted 2 weeks ago by ekZepp@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7c586fbc-eee8-4b14-964d-5d26ded77567.jpeg
Just pick one - All the Fox functionality without bloatware
Librewolf - librewolf.net
Waterfox - www.waterfox.com
Zen Browser - zen-browser.app
More browsers here - alternativeto.net/category/…/firefox-based/
Also you can use this add to disable the shitload ai function in many search engines in one go
addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/…/disable-ai/
GitHub page - github.com/jruns/disable-ai
You can find all the links on Mastodon<
Impressive how management can blindly ignore their own core pricipals.
I was ignoring everything Waterfox back when I realize they were bought by an advertising company, System1, which also owns StartPage.
BUT, I recently read from Wikipedia that Waterfox has gone independent again since 2023.
As someone who uses waterfox but hadn’t heard any of this news, that was a rollercoaster. But consider me relieved.
I also just installed Waterfox for the first time after reading the Wikipedia page. I use it to replace Firefox to be used when I need webgl or webrtc/voice call. my main browser is still Librewolf
Zen ♥️
Been using it for awhile now and it’s getting better with each release!
Am I the only one that zen is laggy and buggy for?
I’m using it on Linux Mint on an old hp laptop. So far good performance and medium/low CPU usage. Try to set the cache and history to clean after the close.
As a heads up, Librewolf last I checked had issues with media involving DRM. Ergo, streaming services will throw a fit if you try using them on it. Not an issue if you don’t use any of course, and there may be ways around it, but worth knowing that it doesn’t work out of the box at least.
it’s in settings > general
"screenshot of librewolf's play drm-controlled content setting"
Easier of a solution than I had found when I tried… I remember looking it up basically being told it wasn’t possible without a lot of fiddling. Strange. Good to know it’s actually simple!
Yeah, you have to enable a setting. I think it links you to it when you run into it. Much more of a turn off to me is not being able to use my camera in it, so I have to use a different browser for video calls.
how, what’s happening when you try? didn’t you check the “never ask this permission” box for the camera permission on settings?
I refuse to use any services that make use of DRM on principle. They’re defective by design.
And at some point someone will tell me what is so horrifying about these new features? Mozilla might be the only company trying to provide privacy first AI features. What exactly is so bad here? You can even disable these features if you do not like them at all.
The problem is that they’re pushing it without any way for those of us who really don’t want that crap to strip it out of the browser. Sure, one can disable it, but I’ve already had some of it reenabled in updates. I don’t want it, and don’t plan on wanting it. At best, these functionalities should be opt-in and presented as addons that can be installed, rather than being a core part of the browser that cannot be removed.
It is opt in. Or will be. And they’re adding an AI switch.
Not disagreeing with you, just adding context.
The bigger problem is that they’re wasting their finite resources on this crap instead of adding actually cool features like their forks are doing.
I do not want the dev tools and neither the Extension framework, can I get rid of those? No? Being able to completely disable the features is not enough how? How does the code laying bare on your harddisk get in your way of using FX? They already promised a kill-switch. And you saying it turned on after an update is but an anecdote.
I’ll try to give an out-of-the-loop answer to this, if that helps. Concerning “AI” tools, I think the chunk of people who don’t want it included in the browser on any level come in one or both of two forms. One is a moral opposition – for example, a pro-environmental or pro-artist stance. I don’t think those need much explanation, but feel free to say otherwise.
The other is in my opinion is in response to exhaustion. Pro-“AI” features have proven themselves to be untrustworthy at nearly every turn with thoughtless or downright irresponsible implementations. A worthwhile use-case is the exception rather than the norm and It’s tiring to have to constantly check if this time I want it on or not. As a result of opt-in-by-default changes to privacy policies or account settings, my trust in any site or app publishing an “AI” implementation has been broken and it’s nice to have options I don’t have to worry about wherever I can get them. I found it irritatingly tone-deaf that Mozilla wasn’t considering a kill-switch with their first swing at this.
If it seems unreasonable or hard-to-understand, I think taking a step back and looking at the broader software industry rather than just Mozilla will help.
These are all valid reasons. I’ll also add that I personally desire manual control over my computing experience. A huge part of the reason I run Linux is that it does exactly what I tell it to and nothing more. When you start introducing other agents to my user agent, it ceases to be a user agent. Something else is arranging my tabs. Something is popping info up into in my face that I didn’t ask to see (and which might be incorrect). I just want these things to go away so my browser can be my browser again and not be under the control of a random word guesser.
Yes, I have turned these features off, but I don’t even want them installed. They’ve been force-installed onto my system through software that didn’t used to do that. If I lose my config, I have to go turn it all back off again. I’d rather just not have the feature anywhere in the software. I’d rather Firefox just not smuggle AI features onto my PC at all.
Mozilla is still the only company maintaining an alternative to Chromium. Without Firefox you can’t have Librewolf or other alternatives.
Mozilla is not perfect but people really need to stop treating them in a purely binary fashion (you are either horrible or are perfect).
I don’t know others but for me, it’s the constant bugging with their users. I’ve used Firefox since the beginning, and they have made bad choices before, but this is the last straw. I’m tired of circumventing these choices, sometimes doing so is not even that transparent as a “kill switch” and users had to find strings in a cryptic about::config page, for example.
More important, I don’t want so-called AI in my life. I couldn’t care less about it. I won’t use it unless it helps me to find some scientific conclusion that advances our culture, and I’m not talking something huge, I’m not saying it shouldn’t be used at all. However, any use of AI for cotidian achievable tasks is morally unacceptable for me, and I’d ask for everyone a space for reflection on whether it is something filling a necessity in their lives. So, I guess it’s a rupture for me with Mozilla. I can’t use their product because I find it fundamentally wrong to support the massive use of technologies that barely do any good to society, and none to the planet. It’s not about another little discrepancy on features and settings, it’s about not giving people like me the platform to shout “fuck it, I don’t want it, stop it now”.
I’m still mad at them for forcing that useless Pocket icon in the toolbar.
There is no such thing as a privacy first AI, unless you’ve the hardware to run the model yourself (and, you don’t).
There different kinds of AI and some run just fine locally or even on mobile. Not everything is a big LLM.
You can even disable these features if you do not like them at all
As a smart person said:
BETTER IT NOT EXIST AT ALL
If I went to a restaurant, they placed a hot steaming stinky turd sandwich on my table and then went “oh, but you don’t have to have it”, I still wouldn’t fucking eat there.
Why should we be okay with the Turd Sandwich that is
crypto being served by BraveLLM features served by Mozilla being opt-in???
Firefox is not the devil, but “ideologies aside”, the basic idea is:
(Just like microsoft), They’ve could just decide to put it in one of the “many” variant of product, name it FoxAI, let the users decide and call a day. Instead, they’ve decided to force a very heavy component like that on the main version out of blue.
Switched or not. Now, you will have ‘way’ more bloat on a browser, which should be focused on speed and performance.
The whole thing about AI on free stuff is getting as much data as possible to train. You have to trust them to switch it off completely.
Mozilla might be the only company trying to provide privacy first AI features.
They are not. There are boatloads of privacy friendly “AI” implementations, they just aren’t very high profile.
But I do think people are over-reacting. This is a less bad approach. And if you can turn it off and leave it off, what’s the big deal?
Considering Windows is basically saying “we’re going to switch what we’ve always been and become an agenic OS, you will just talk to it and Microsoft Cloud will interpret your will (only $89 a month!)”, people are rightly scared about having all technology rug-pulled from under us.
Mozilla was one of the shining beacons of FOSS that allowed users choice and stability against corporate greed. Are you surprised that people are angry that they’re caving to the same toxic greedy behavior?
The big deal is that development time is put into these… Uh… “features”.
I’m not particularly horrified about the availability of AI features, but I’d rather see Mozilla focus most of its resources on core competencies. Firefox lags behind Chrome in web standards feature support, e.g. the browser scores on caniuse.com. It’s also prone to making my laptop fan spin more than Chromium browser do, and people often complain about speed.
They should make the core browser better, and maybe task a couple developers to build some LLM support as an extension.
Yeah, the AI- free Firefox browser is normal firefox with the AI slider set to “off”
A sports car is a van where you weld the back doors shut.
The other day I watched this video and I think it makes a very good case. subscribeto.me/w/7qSsYEPM2aC3D6stdZ54nq (the website is the author’s peertube instance)
Does librewolf or water fox have a mobile version that syncs tabs to desktop like official Firefox ?
All Geckos can sync if Mozilla Sync is enabled with an account. So you can sync say LibreWokf or WarwrFox on desktop to any mobile version, such as IronFoz. They do not have to “match”.
Oh cool, I didn’t know that and it was the main fear I had from swapping. I really should have just looked it up by now, but oh well.
Waterfox does, I use it.
No, but you can use Ironfox or another Android Firefox fork and have working sync.
IronFox
I use Librewolf everywhere but android where I use Firefox. The sync feature works perfectly between the different brands. Librewolf does not currently offer a mobile browser.
I use fennec, but librewolf proposes using IronFox
Hell yeah shoutout to alternativeto.net! Fucking great site.
Any recommendations for iOS? I switched to Librewolf on my Linux pc and Fennec on my Android phone, but still have Firefox on my iPad. Looking for good alternatives.
All browsers on iPhone are reskinned Safari as far as I’m aware. I don’t think it matters much what you pick.
I could be wrong though.
I believe you are correct
You’re right, expect in the European Union where Apple is forced to let people install non-Safari browsers.
didn’t that change some time ago?
…leave iOS?
True, I really hate iOS. I only got this iPad for the Apple Pencil and Procreate. I usually try to keep hardware until it dies, but I may need to dump this iPad for my sanity.
Haven’t used iOS in a while, but I remember Orion being really good. It can install chrome extensions and Firefox add-ons.
Vivaldi has been my pick for a bit. It can install Chrome add-ons but not Firefox.
They also have taken a stance not to include genAI:
Currently using Orion, it works well though I haven’t thoroughly paid attention to scrutinize it thoroughly.
Right now the hold up for me is session sharing and password syncing better mobile and Linux.
Passwords I have a clear path forward, with either offline mgr + manual sync, or self-hosted online. But I it’s weirdly hard to walk away from session sharing.
Last I used librewolf/waterfox they lagged behind a few days on security updates, so I switched to regular Firefox with arkenfox user.js
if you install arkenfox yourself, likely you’ll never remember to update it. if you use librewolf or such, the maintainers will take care of it for you
If you use fennec on android, I think you can even just copy your config to your phone and have it working the same there.
and where do you copy it on your phone? I think it’s not that simple but maybe I missed something
Are there any plans to make a mobile browser?
I use Floorp on desktop. Since I got used to it, I just can’t live without that advanced sidebar. Being able to open the mobile versions of web pages right on the side is just too useful.
I use Fennec in Android and Librewolf in Linux.
Libre wolf needs a bit of tweaking at the begining but then works like charm.
I use Iceraven for my phone
Here is a github link for the android app github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
Mullvad Browser for the win!
I’m hopeful that firefox will get better, but I will switch to librewolf if it doesn’t linkedin.com/…/rkrikorian_youre-not-an-owner-your…
djvinniev77@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Really hate how iOS has zero alternatives. Thanks apple for your stupid WebKit.
zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Could be worse, seriously. Safari is not a bad browser and WebKit is the only engine since years that can keep up with chromium. I get that it is annoying to have leas freedom on iOS, but I also appreciate the increased security[1] and quality of life that comes with it.
[1] yes, I am aware that open source software tends to be more secure, as it can be reviewed by all. However, Android by default is way less secure than iOS, unless you use GraphiteOS or similar.
Ledivin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This hasn’t been true for a long, long time. Mac was only ever more secure than windows because not enough people used them to make them worthwhile attack vectors. Nowadays, iOS sees just as many vulnerabilities as every other popular OS.
Kevlar21@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Safari on iOS is especially tolerable since they allowed uBlock Origin Lite onto the App Store recently.
mmmac@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
To be honest I don’t use Firefox on android anyways because it’s noticeably slower than chromium. Since I’m on graphene is I just stick to vanadium + DNS level adblocking.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are some good iOS browsers, they’re just out of the way.
At the moment, I use Orion (from Kagi) and Narrow32. Quiche Browser is good, DuckDuckGo is fine.
4am@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
At the moment, iOS doesn’t not allow any other browser engines. Every browser on iOS is just reskinned Safari.
nil@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
I bought an old Pixel 3a with (new) case for less than $179 USD and put Graphene OS on it. Definitely cheaper than buying youself a new iPhone, and installation is easy af.
redwattlebird@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
Yep. I really really want Waterfox on IOS but I’ve settled for Qwant. It’s not bad.
Scrollone@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
Yeah but the problem with iOS is that all browsers must use the Safari rendering engine under the hood (except in the EU, but not many developers create a browser for just the EU)