Personally I find it far more important that it's not run by a company that will try its hardest to track your every movement on the web, but to each their own, I suppose.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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You never tried to listen for stock Firefox's traffic with Wireshark for sure.
People speak very good thing about Firefox but they like to hide and avoid the shady stuff. Let me give you the un-cesored version of what Firefox really is. Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances and they also do stuff like adding unique IDs to each installation.
Firefox does is a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings and config like the OP did.
I know other browsers do it as well, except for Ungoogled and because of that I’m sticking with it. I would like to avoid programs that need no snitch whenever I open them. ungoogled-chromium + ublock origin + decentraleyes + clearurls and a few others.
Now you’re free to go ahead and downvote this post as much as you would like. I’m sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox isn’t as good and private after all.
Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances
So I went ahead and read that article and goodness gracious, does anybody actually read these links??? Because that link is a complete nothingburger. It's a blog post from someone who never read a 990 before (standard nonprofit disclosure form) who thinks every other line of is proof of a scandal. But it's not, it's just a big word salad that is too long to read, so nobody will bother.
The most significant charge is (1) that the CEO makes too much and (2) the author doesn't like that they contract out work to consultants who think diversity is good. And everything after that is LESS significant.
Every point made, so far as I can tell:
- Have assets worth $1.1 billion as of 2021
- Mozilla spent less on "expenses" from 2021 relative to 2020
- Revenue went up over the same time
- A lot of revenue was from royalties (e.g. agreements for default search)
- They disagree with the wording on a donate form about whether Mozilla "relies" on individual donations
- The CEO made $5.6MM
- They pulled out one expense, which appears to have been training/education relating to social justice topics
- They pull out a few more individual expenses and weren't sure what they were.
This isn't secret documents being handed to Deep Throat in a dark parking lot. There's no smoking gun, no smoke, just a PDF with ordinary tables of expenses and revenue, and consultants who did diversity training. If that's shady then, get ready to be mad about every non-profit ever.
I think librewolf scrubs most of that stuff out. I'm basing that off of using burpsuite's proxy server though. On vanilla firefox it captures so much crap going out. I havent tried with wireshark though.
Librewolf is my second browser, but I don't see me using it everyday. I like chromium rendering more and the dev tools.
Chrome devtools are just bullshit. Firefox has the better implementation imo
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I am also pretty sure Firefox is equally if not more secure than Chromium. They just got some really bad reputation for not sandboxing everything.
The only issue they have with sandboxing is on Android, as they have yet to implement per-site process isolation despite it being present on desktop Firefox and Chromium Android for many years now. I've been tracking the development of Project Fission on Android (Firefox's per-site process isolation) for years now and it still isn't even ready for testing. Additionally, Firefox Android does not use Android's isolatedProcess flag for sandboxing, which is another area in which it is behind Chrome. For that reason, I cannot recommend Firefox on Android, and instead recommend Cromite (fork of Bromite after its development was abandoned) which is based on Chromium.
Yes very poorly true. The lack of any sync makes other mobile browsers hard to use for me though. Often start stuff on mobile, and continue on a real browser on Laptop.
I like my Firefox more: https://i.imgur.com/AWO9ss1.png .... got rid of the title bar
Did the same thing, though I'm handling the tabs with Sway
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Never heard of LibreWolf but they say on their website that features like DRM are disabled, what does that mean if I want to view DRM content in my browser? I may be confused but currently with Firefox I already have problems with DRM sometimes. For example on Dell's website I had difficulties viewing product videos on there, will they simply not play on LibreWolf or how does that work?
It means that any website which using drm for playing content will not work by default,but u can enable it a again by modyfing config file.
from my experience there will be a popup asking to enable drm for this site when it requests it. no need to modify a file.
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These are not the only two available browsers, you know?
Do you mean Safari?
Name one other browser that is not based on Chromium. If it is based on Chromium, it has to deal with what Google throws at them.
I say this as an enthusiastic Brave user. Brave is great at what it does currently, but the more terrible stuff Google builds into Chromium, the more patches they'll have to maintain. This can make it harder to maintain their fork.
Worse than that, most Chromium-derivative users aren't Brave users. Many web apps already don't work as well with Firefox' JavaScript Engine (Gecko) as they do with Chromium. This gives Google immense power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browsers_based_on_Chromium
Brave is extremely shady. Really, I used it and even created a script to install it on rpm-ostree distros, but damn that is shady.
That's a solid criticism. Firefox + uBlock Origin or Librewolf are good desktop alternatives. But what's the alternative on Android? Last time I checked, there wasn't any on privacyguides.
Btw I do always turn off all their rewards and wallet stuff and follow most of the https://privacyguides.org recommendations.
Thanks for your help in making privacy-focused software available on Linux btw!
Cromite has adblock. Vanadium too but it may break on on-GrapheneOS as it has security patches that break on regular android.
Mull is very fine for me, I use Vanadium and Mull, Vanadium for crappy sites (because mobile hardened firefox doesnt support as much sites as desktop for some reason). Vanadium is very likely more secure, unlike on Desktop where that is not easily said.
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Or just use multiple browsers? If one size fits all for you then good for you but there is no Firefox based browser that can replace Vivaldi for me. So I use both, one for my power user needs and other for private browsing (hardened Firefox, normal FF isn't great for privacy either)
Havent used Vivaldi in some time. Have a look at floorp but of course they dont have all the addons vivaldi has like notes and stuff.
And yes, regular FF is simply a "just works" browser but with lots of stupid bloat. Librewolf is actually great as they have a modern CI/CD build pipeline and do all the hardening for you, its more sustainable and secure to share effords.
And Waterfox looks even better also by virtue of preferences to change userChrome.css
Except Firefox’s bookmark system on android is absolute crap and looks hideous.
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I have no idea why people use #Chrome. #Firefox looks so much better,
Reason n1: Firefox's font rending sucks; Reasons n2: Chrome dev tools are better and way more supported by whatever ecosystem you develop in.
Chrome dev tools are better and way more supported by whatever ecosystem you develop in.
But what if you're not a web dev?
LibreWolf FTW! 👍
When I was running it every other website would break, switched over to Mullvad Browser instead.
Mullvad Browser is the same but worse.
If you have websites break without noscript, you visit some really shady websites.
Be happy they break and dont claim the browser.
For my websites nearly never cause problems, and if they do Firefox tells me that they want to read my canvas data, send push ads and more, so its obvious.
If you have websites break without noscript, you visit some really shady websites.
not necessarily shady... probably designed specifically for Chrome.
Bad websites then. Do you have examples? Thats really bad.
Google, for example, did many demo websites that only worked on chrome in the past... I've also seen government website that only worked in Chrome... but unfortunately I don't keep a list. A company I worked at in the past also had a training website that only worked in Chrome (I'm not revealing this one though...).
Edit: Just stumbled on this website: http://Thai5sushibar.com ... not sure if it's my extensions, but it doesn't load in Firefox and loads in Chrome. Good rainbow rolls.
Uhm that site has no https and redirects somewhere else, dont feel like enabling javascript for that one.
And Ublock blocks it too. So yeah not a positive example
I just came about it today... but still, it works in Chrome and not Firefox. I have seen many others in the past though.
Like, I am very sure this page is malware or something. What does it do?
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