Mozilla’s actions have been rubbing many Firefox fans the wrong way as of late, and inspiring them to look for alternatives. There are many choices for users who are looking for a browser that isn’t part of the Chrome monoculture but is full-featured and suitable for day-to-day use. For those who are willing to stay in the Firefox “family” there are a number of good options that have taken vastly different approaches. This includes GNU IceCat, Floorp, LibreWolf, and Zen.
↫ Joe Brockmeier
It’s a tough situation, as we’re all aware. We don’t want the Chrome monoculture to get any worse, but with Mozilla’s ever-increasing number of dubious decisions some people have been warning about for years, it’s only natural for people to look elsewhere. Once you decide to drop Firefox, there’s really nowhere else to go but Chrome and Chrome skins, or the various Firefox skins. As an aside, I really don’t think these browsers should be called Firefox “forks”; all they really do is change some default settings, add in an extension or two, and make some small UI tweaks. They may qualify as forks in a technical sense, but I think that overstates the differentiation they offer.
Late last year, I tried my best to switch to KDE’s Falkon web browser, but after a few months the issues, niggles, and shortcomings just started to get under my skin. I switched back to Firefox for a little while, contemplating where to go from there. Recently, I decided to hop onto the Firefox skin train just to get rid of some of the Mozilla telemetry and useless ‘features’ they’ve been adding to Firefox, and after some careful consideration I decided to go with Waterfox.
Waterfox strikes a nice balance between the strict choices of LibreWolf – which most users of LibreWolf seem to undo, if my timeline is anything to go by – and the choices Mozilla itself makes. On top of that, Waterfox enables a few very nice KDE integrations Firefox itself and the other Firefox skins don’t have, making it a perfect choice for KDE users. Sadly, Waterfox isn’t packaged for most Linux distributions, so you’ll have to resort to a third-party packager.
In the end, none of the Firefox skins really address the core problem, as they’re all still just Firefox. The problem with Firefox is Mozilla, and no amount of skins is going to change that.
Its Go-OO time, We need the big Linux distros to pick one of these and support it. Could we donate enough to these forks so that they could start hiring disgruntled mozilla developers.
This is still a hardly better choice than Falkon. There are no AArch64 builds of Waterfox. Any other notable Firefox fork already has them.
I love Falkon. However, it now uses QtWebEngine. QtWebEngine is just chromium. So, it is really not even much of an alternative to Chrome as far as diversity is concerned.
And, as far as I’m concerned, Falkon isn’t quite ready for prime time. Some real support might fix that quickly enough, but not there yet.
I see Palemoon as an important alternative to Firefox, it’s based on a very old Firefox fork and diverged from Firefox quite a lot.
I’ve been calling the skins Thom mentioned “soft forks”, as they are still dependent on upstream Firefox for security and feature updates, but maybe “skins” is a better term. On the other hand, Pale Moon is a true fork as it diverged long ago and is independent of Mozilla at this point. Unfortunately all the toxicity in their developer community turned me off from the project years ago. I’ll have to look into it to see if that situation has resolved itself.
Edit: and then there’s this situation that likely affects all Firefox derivatives and forks:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_niche_browsers/
Morgan,
Sometimes I am targeted by cloudflare’s captcha tests but I’ve never been denied access in FF so far. It’s concerning if Cloudflare are blocking smaller alternatives given that they provide firewall services for millions of websites on the internet (including osnews)…
Cloudflare might not even care about FF in the future if market share keeps dropping.
I think that google and microsoft dropping manifest v2 is going to have a bigger impact than people realize as major websites start to leave manifest v2 browsers behind. They’re not going to fight to save niche browser users who don’t want ads and there wouldn’t be much to stop them cutting off alternatives. Washington is a cesspool of corruption right now and companies can grease trump to put an end to DOJ antitrust cases.
It could be a tough road ahead for alternative browsers.
The cloudflare captchas are more often than not triggered by CGNAT. If you’re hitting a site from a shared legacy IP it considers you more suspicious for obvious reasons, but it will let you through if it can track you as a legitimate user. As most of the forks are privacy focused they tend not to allow the various forms of tracking so you get into the shit list.
If you’re browsing without NAT (ie mostly IPv6 these days) and you’re the only user originating from a given source address then you don’t get any issues even with the niche browsers.
It’s a mechanism to prevent various forms of abuse. If they did nothing, then sites would get even more flooded by junk and botnets.
bert64,
I don’t know what triggers it, you could be right but with IPv4 space exhausted, it seems a bit discriminatory. It makes me wonder if there’s noticeable difference between IPv4 and IPv6. Alas, neither my home connection nor mobile connection have IPv6 and my phone IP is always shared.
Their technology can fingerprint a browser, but it’s certainly not foolproof since legitimate browsers can be turned into bots. I am not convinced that captchas work against sophisticated adversaries any more. All heuristics end up making a determination based on such subtle details that you’ll inevitably get false positives and false negatives.
I don’t see many cloudflare captchas considering how much I block using FF, but like you said the heuristics could change a lot if I used a shared IP. There was one point when google’s recaptcha became so aggressive for me that I had days where I couldn’t pass it at all, including websites that required passing a captcha to place orders. I complained to newegg (at that time were using recapthca) and within a week newegg fired google recaptcha…I think recaptcha must have lost them a lot of legitimate business. IMHO it isn’t a good idea to use captchas for registered & paying customers unless there’s an awful lot of suspicious traffic detected.
After Opera switched to using Chromium, Waterfox became my browser of choice until it was sold to an advertising company, System1. When Waterfox became independent again, I stayed with Vivaldi and Firefox, so maybe it’s time to look into Waterfox again.
I wish Opera (now Vivaldi, not the crypto con that took the name) would release a commercial (paid) version again. I’ll happily pay $30 and know i have a product that is capable of sustained development without need to rely on another companies search results (or crypto cons)
Adurbe,
Some people would, but I think the reason there isn’t a bigger market is that it’s notoriously hard to compete against free Not just browsers, but email clients, operating systems, news sources, etc. Some may be able to find a niche who are willing to pay, but there are many that struggle or even fail because It’s difficult to sell a product when a competing product already comes free/bundled.
Hypothetically if apple/ms/google stopped bundling their browsers for free, there would be a spike in demand for other browsers including paid…but this doesn’t seem like very realistic scenario from where I stand.
I use Pale Moon as my everyday browser, which can handle about 99% of my sites. And it seems to be improving pretty rapidly in terms of overall web compatibility. I don’t play online games or do online animation work, if you do things like that then YMMV.