Ah, here's a great summary of the whole #Mozilla issue in one video. Absolutely worth watching!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugnOM2mzgNU

@southernwolf For those of us who embraced Mozilla during it's inception and heydays, it's difficult to accept that they have accepted practices that are contrary to what made them so initially attractive and well received.

Fortunately, today there are options like #librewolf and #mullvad which do a good job of recapturing what the essence of what made #firefox so popular back in the day.

Edit: #Linux distros need to stop shipping FF as their default browser.

@jaxwxboss Yeah, Mozilla really has fallen a long way from its heydays. It really does seem that (whether you agree, disagree, or flat out hate him) Mozilla never truly recovered from firing Brendan Eich. They should have been able to, yet instead they've gone down a pretty terrible path since then. Heck, Brave is already at ~60 million MAU's, so it's not impossible that eventually Firefox will dip below the MAU's for Brave.

But yes, for the FIrefox ecosystem, I'd definitely recommend Librewolf. It's significantly faster than regular Firefox, and actually has the privacy and security features that FIrefox *should* have by default. Mullvad is definitely a good Chromium option, as is Brave too. Vivaldi isn't terrible either, great UI, but it's less open than either Mullvad or Brave, and lacks privacy features by default.

And yes, they should have already stopped, honestly. But as it is, Librewolf should be the goto now for distros to ship with.

@southernwolf Agreed. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the truth about FF's current state of affairs is obfuscated by its history and devoted user base that either doesn't know or is unwilling to admit to its current state of affairs.

I like Brave, and used it for quite some time. It was only recently that I decided to make Librewolf my default, but I still have Brave installed. Too many people dislike it simply because it is a fork of Chromium, but I don't see an issue with Brave overall.

@tealnova @jaxwxboss Heh, you found the article that I'm 90% positive was shadow written by a Vivaldi dev. They really do spend way too much time and energy claiming moral superiority over Brave, when their browser isn't even open sourced, and repeatedly fails privacy test metrics compared to Brave (and even default Firefox...). Which made the recommendation to choose Vivaldi over Brave laughable at best.

And no, I'm not saying it should be shipped as a default browser, although I'd love to see a distro do so. I would definitely support ungoogled chromium becoming the default go-to for distros though. That seems like it's a smart move, and would absolutely be a better choice over default Firefox. Librewolf is of course another good alternative to Firefox.

@tealnova @jaxwxboss Lol, it's he's not then he's obviously very Ill informed, as their is no legitimate reason to choose Vivaldi over Brave based on any of the assessments he made.

He opens with a personal attack on Eich. Which while I don't agree with Eich on the sentiments he held back then, it's also obvious that his firing from Mozilla is what started their downward spiral they haven't recovered from.

Next is one of the core parts of Brave. Some people won't like the advertising nature of BAT, and that's fine. It can be disabled with a single click, without interfering with the privacy nature of the browser. It was and is an attempt to provide a meaningful alternative to the revenue drop caused by blocking ads. Maybe it'll eventually succeed, maybe not. But it recognizes that universal ad blocking isn't sustainable for the open web we know today.

Lastly, the final points are old, washed up, and simply conjecture. Even the URL affiliate bug, which was just that, a bug. The article is simply FUD.

@tealnova @jaxwxboss Lol, I already gave my answers to the supposed "issues" which are in fact non-issue. I also already gave my answer about whether it should be in distros by default. No, it shouldn't ship by default, although I'd love it if it did. It's also a moot point, given you can now just download the flatpak from flathub by default anyways, and it works just fine as well. And I'm sure many Linux users wouldn't care about BAT, but if they care about it "being in the package to begin with" then I have some very bad news for them about both default Firefox and Vivaldi...

The article is FUD, it's potentially related back to Vivaldi, it's designed as a hit piece, and that is it.