I’ve been seeing a lot of information lately about mozilla, and a lot of questionable claims being made about their “direction.” The bulk of their revenue comes from google, and I have been working very hard to de-google everything I can. I have moved away from drive, gmail, search, etc.
I am using Fedora on all my computers, and am logged into firefox on each of them so I have complete sync with all my devices. Are the posts I am seeing blown out of proportion, or should I be looking for another browser?
Thanks in advance!
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Well, all your alternative major browser engines are from Google’s Chrome. If your concern is degree of tight association with Google, you probably don’t have preferable realistic alternatives.
I’d also add that I’m not particularly worried about Firefox. Maybe one day, but as things stand, I’m fine with 'em.
WebKit based browsers like GNOME Web do still exist and do a reasonable job. That’s funded by Apple though so…
KDE also has a WebKit browser. Heck it’d be weird if they didn’t since WebKit is a fork of KHTML
problem is that there really isn’t much alternative currently:
- you can switch to a Firefox fork like LibreWolf or Mullvad
- or Tor Browser and live with no cookies, no saved logins, etc.
- you can go through trying to maintain Firefox + arkenfox if you want fine grain control
- you can switch to any of the Chromium forks which puts you back at the starting point
- and then you have to deal with lack of ad-blocking once Manifest V3 goes mainstream
- there’s a huge pile of smaller, independent, or specialty browsers out there
- but ad-blocking is hit-or-miss and plugin support is often non-existent
- hold out hope for one of the up-and-comers
- Servo – just the engine at this point, who knows how long until a full browser is ready
- Ladybird – if you want to be associated with the “problematic” opinions of the developers …
Such a shame about ladybird, sounds very promising but opinions like that do real damage to the image of a project
Why do their opinions matter?
As much as it seems that they shouldn’t, they do. Those people are leading and if they let their personal opinions hang over into their work, it matters. People will not want to contribute or be associated with people with those opinions and views and some people that would have been contributers will feel persecuted.
How does code reflect opinions on politics? I would understand that some people might feel threatened in interacting with them but other than that I do not follow the problem, especially in using their software. It is in everybody’s best interest that a new browser comes up to challenge the existing choices.
I guess that is the point, you are saying you don’t understand why it should be a problem, but other people do think it is a problem, thus there is a problem. You thinking it shouldn’t be a problem does not negate the problem. Problem.
All I’m saying is I’d like the reasoning behind people considering it a problem. Polictical opinions are fine but they should never come in the way of technical innovation (except that governments adhere to breaking this rule more often than not, but that’s for another time)
The reason is that it is an opinion that incites hatred. In theory these things should not get in the way of innovation but in practice that is not how it works, people are people and we have feelings about things.
- you can switch to a Firefox fork like LibreWolf or Mullvad
Librewolf is a good fork and Ladybird might become a thing eventually.
I’ve been using Librewolf for quite some time now and am genuinely very happy with it. All the big distros package it, so it’s not hard to install. You can scale up/down how private you want your experience and then see how that breaks sites if that’s a concern for you.
