And the hits just keep on coming. After buying an ad tech company and working with Facebook to weaken Firefox’ privacy features, Mozilla is now integrating AI chatbots straight into Firefox with the recent release of Firefox 130. People are understandably big mad about this, and as such the calls for switching to alternatives is growing stronger. Considering the only true alternative to Firefox is Chrome and its various skins, those of us looking to send Mozilla a message are kind of relegated to trying out Firefox skins instead.
Switching to what are essentially “Firefox distros” to collectively try and nudge Mozilla back to making more sensible decisions instead of AI hype chasing is an eminently reasonable one. There’s more reasons than just that. Part of the reason I use Firefox-based browsers rather than Chromium browsers is because I want to preserve some choice and diversity in browser engines. The existence of a choice of different Firefox derived browsers may allow space for experimentation in designing better browsers. In Chromium land, Arc has shown that there’s an opportunity for quite radically rethinking how browsers work. Same for Orion in Mac/iOS-land.
This isn’t a detailed review of the different browsers, just a few comments and observations having tried them.
↫ Tom Morris
I have my reservations about using Firefox skins, mostly because no matter what you do, you’re still entirely dependent on the choices Mozilla makes during the development of the venerable browser. If Mozilla keeps deviating from the traditional goals more and more, the amount of work these Firefox skins need to perform to reign the browser back in will start to increase, and who knows if they have the manpower, experience, and skills to do so? More worryingly, will they be able to keep up with Mozilla’s release schedule, including important bugfixes and security patches?
My worries go beyond those basic things, though. Considerably fewer eyes will be going over any code changes these Firefox-based browsers make, and as recent history has shown us, infiltrating a small, understaffed open source project for nefarious purposes is a thing that happens. Another issue to consider is nebulous ownership of such Firefox versions, as are questions around who financially supports such efforts. Your browser is a massively important and crucial piece of software that holds and has access to a lot of your personal data, and you should be particularly careful about who owns your browser.
This is not to say each and every one of them is bad – just that you have to be careful about who you trust. Several Chrome skins, like Brave and Opera, have time and time again shown to be shady, untrustworthy companies pushing crypto bullshit, ripping off websites, have shady owners, and more – don’t use Brave, don’t use Opera – and there’s no guarantees the same won’t happen with Firefox skins riding the wave of unhappiness with Mozilla. Please be mindful.
I don’t have an answer for this issue, either – I just want to caution against throwing the browser out with the bath water and switching to a project you might not know a lot about.
You know what is shady… bloggers that that have political bias when talking about the applications their readers should or should not use rather than features and quality.
I live in the Arctic, so yes, soon I will be shady for several months.
Especially when its OPEN SOURCE and code is available under a free license.
Thom, I respect your work, but seriously: Stop whining. Pull up the sleeves, clone the repo and work on it — even when it’s just about ripping out the parts you don’t like.
I am running/providing a few OS projects myself and honestly I am tired of people demanding or even telling me what to do without contributing.
That position holds water when it’s a small project, but falls apart completely when it’s one of the three major web browsers the world uses, and consequently is too complex and critical to be maintained by one person who isn’t being paid to do it. It’s a full time paid job for the entire FF developer team at Mozilla, a single non-programmer simply cannot do it and I’m sure you know that.
That’s great and I am genuinely amazed when anyone can manage more than one FOSS project on their own, so kudos for being a talented and hard working developer! I am curious though, if any of those projects you manage are even a fraction of the size and complexity of Firefox?
Morgan,
> I am curious though, if any of those projects you manage are even a fraction of the size and complexity of Firefox?
Thank you for the opportunity to promote my stuff here:
1) https://github.com/JSQLParser/JSqlParser — a RDBMS agnostic SQL Parser
2) https://github.com/manticore-projects/jsqlformatter — the matching formatter, because real formatting depends on the AST
3) https://github.com/manticore-projects/JDBCParquetWriter — a ResultSet to Parquet writer
All those are used by DBeaver too, which is not a small thing when you work in Data Analytics.
But this should not turn into a pissing contest and we are missing my point here: Nobody asked Thom to rewrite Mozilla from scratch or even to maintain it. Instead I pointed out that the source is there (which is a great gift and courtesy on my book) and he can easily take it and switch off any features he does not like. Or at least help the various FireFox spin-offs to maintain their fork.
Only complaining about AI and having demands to the FireFox developers is a bit too cheap in my opinion.
Can you point to where I demand Mozilla do anything, and what I’m supposedly demanding they do?
Hi Thom,
thank you for your response and also the clarification. You indeed did not demand anything in your article although you have shown a certain sentiment about FireFox development in the past. So to make it crystal clear: “demanding” was pointed on a general observation, that OS users have high expectation on the developers, often without contributing something.
This was not directly related to you and I should have separated both aspects better.
I would like to maintain my point that all OS does not owe anyone anything and if anyone had concerns, then contribution was the best way to address those.
One more: https://github.com/starlake-ai/jsqltranspiler — which has a RDBMS independent Column and Lineage Resolver. At least in my sphere this is fairly complex and I am actually proud of it 😀
No, they are not, they will just disable the feature and go on their merry way. You have a passionate hate against AI chatbots because they made your job obsolete, most people either use the feature or don’t care.
Nah, I was a translator for almost 15 years. I was bored of it anyway, and this was all the nudge I needed to call it quits.
I’m skeptical about useless AI because it wastes boatloads of energy, consistently generates bullshit, is used for horrible shit like generating nudes and CSAM, doesn’t respect the rights of creators/licenses of developers, and so much more.
Useful AI exists, too, and I’ve highlighted such useful cases here on OSNews, as well. As usual, though, people like you are blinded by rage and hatred and only see the posts that fit in your world view. I’m used to it, and it’s fine. Thanks for the engagement!
I mean, of all the things Mozilla has changed, you seem to be enraged the most about an AI chatbot feature that can be disabled.
Yes, Mozilla is chasing trends, they are a for-profit company now.
Sorry Thom, but kurkosdr is not alone with his impression.
When you see too many incoming cars, it does not necessarily mean that they are all driving the wrong side.
Your house, your rules but at least I want to let you know that any AI related articles are less interesting to me because they fall behind your usually great quality content. Cheers!
I use the AI Chat feature of the duckduckgo.com search engine to ask quite difficult questions about operating systems, graphics systems etc, and find that it does try hard to get at answers and allows me to develop or abandon projects. Sometime it needs prompting for more complete answers, and gets some things wrong. At least “it” says sorry when it gets things wrong.
AI is likely to do better translations anyway; at least it understands the difference between “rein” and “reign”.
If you can disable those AI functions then I don`t understand why this hate hype is all about. :-/
For the last 20 years I used Phoenix, Firebird and then Firefox as my main browser. Basically for all the common reasons and the brilliant extensions. But since FF 128 I switched to LibreWolf. Indeed some sites don’t work anymore because of the Fingerprint Resistance settings. But I can’t stand the sneaky and deceitful acting of Mozilla anymore. Especially considering how difficult it is to change the settings on the mobile Android version of Firefox (no better alternative yet).
Also, I never understood why 3rd party cookies weren’t disabled by default in FF but since more has come to light of how Google operates, it doesn’t surprise me anymore.
Probably it’s all too late now for Mozilla, they have lived too large on Google money and paid their top brass too much (and don’t forget the apparently very good salaries of the dev staff too) and they can’t go back to leaner.
I really hope Klingers browser is going to be significant, as it is the only not for profit independent code base left.
Considering that Thom won’t even report on it here due to politics why would you hold out hope for that?
Lucky for me, Thom not reporting on Ladybird and development of that said browser aren’t related, it won’t stop anything or anybody. Thom can of course think what he wants, but I’m hoping for more Voltaire in the world.
Why wouldn’t it be possible to have larger forks ? Like between openoffice and libreoffice ?
To repy to my own question, although both projects (firefox and libreoffice) appear to have same order of number of users and lines of code, firefox seem to have much more paid developers and its annual budget is much higher. Perhaps pace and competition is much more tense on the web than it is in office space. All these new shiny web standards and features may make it costly to compete, especially against a 100% free and well funded alternative..
This isn`t “big forks”. People left OpenOffice and joined LibreOffice, that`s all. OpenOffice is dead.
Don’t use Firefox 128 or later. Stick to 115 ESR as long as possible.
I’m a FF user and I’m not worried about this one. Heck, I use the chatbot built into whatsapp to help me with CSS just because it’s convenient.
These trade-offs are hard! Making ethical choices tend to mean fewer features or incompatibilities (or higher price if it’s a paid thing). I guess for web browsers that means living with the fact that some websites won’t work perfectly? I think I can live with that though.
I’ve used Mullvad Browser before and it was mostly great – the Tor project worked on it and it includes Tor Browser’s privacy features (but without the Tor connection). Most relevantly to this article, I like how it’s backed by a known and trusted organization. https://rt.torproject.org/mullvad-browser/what-is-mullvad-browser/
I appreciate Thom pointing out (repeatedly!) how important web browsers are… and how these issues should be taken seriously (if you happen to care about open-source ethics). Browsers are massive and foundational.
This link diverts to a login page without further information; I will look elsewhere on torproject site.
Oh, you’re right… my bad. Does this work? https://support.torproject.org/mullvad-browser/what-is-mullvad-browser/
Just use Pale Moon. Works great, frequent security updates, healthy add-ons ecosystem. And zero Google Chrome/chromium/anything under the hood. What’s not to love?
Palemoon breaks with a lot of sites. Though it has many extensions, most of them seem like downgraded versions of their FF counterparts. For eg, the Adblocker ‘Adblock Latitude’ can’t block individual elements of a page like uBlock Origin can.
When people suggest ditch Firefox and move to Chrome, due to Firefox violating user privacy, then you start to realize that modern tech oriented people are basically idiots.
No to chome.
I wish there’s still were Safari for Windows. The WebKit2 engine makes it a very good browser.
Wow, so they’re at 2.5% market share and dying and seem to want to keep digging their own grave. I stopped using FF a decade plus ago as Mozilla Corp seems to want to keep inflicting so much damage upon itself as an entity and it’s respective projects.
I have been using Vivaldi for a long time, but for the past few months I have been testing Floorp. It’s basically a Firefox ESR based Vivaldi like skin developed in Japan.
I don’t know anything about them, and I don’t really care since I don’t use the browser for anything important. Also if they bring shame upon themselves as developers I know they will commit seppuku anyway.