š¼š©š¦š¤ššInvasive Species
Ep1cFac3pa1mFirefox FTW!
rtxnYes, but only begrudgingly.
(edit) oh no, Iāve said something bad about the lesser evil, and the people who have made it their identity to violently cum all over the first thing that isnāt owned by Google are after me. I hope the pipe bomb hitman is at least polite.
TheTechnician27Nah, Firefox is way better.
I wish this blanket statement were true. Firefox is better in some respects, but surely not all. Tab and session management - just to name two examples - are just handled better by the Chromium crowd, as much as it pains me to say that.
That said, I still use Firefox in most cases.
I just wish Firefox updates werenāt so intrusive. Having it hit me with āFirefox updated in the background, restart to continue using Firefoxā while Iām trying to use QuickBooks for my job is so disruptive when QuickBooks doesnāt save automatically and never opens back up to where I left it off. I wonāt go back to Chrome, but I never had it pull that sort of forced restart on me.
Altima NEOYou can disable that. I have mine set to notify me when updates are available
Amazing, Iāll give that a shot
Iām happy that they give an option but goddamn would it kill them to have the safe option as the default for once?
BarbarianThere are lots of people who will never update if asked to update at their leisure. I think itās far better for user security to have updates be forced by default, with the option to schedule them yourself.
Or batch update some of your apps
Patch My PC Home Updater
Looks like it didnāt work unfortunately š Thank you for the suggestion though!
Ah. I guess I donāt notice that since Iām on Linux and just update Firefox whenever I want.
If you go to Hamburger menu > Settings > General > Check for updates but let you choose to install them, you wonāt auto update anymore. I agree that would be annoying.
Thanks! I had no idea this setting existed and it will make Firefox so much more practical for me to use.
I legitimately forgot this used to happen to me on Windows, itās so convenient being able to update all the software on my system with the click of a button
From what I understand, Chrome doesnāt need to do this, because when you close it, it keeps running in the background and does its upgrades then, which is also pretty intrusive.
If youāre updating Firefox via the built-in auto-updater, you can tell it in the settings that it should only install updates when you tell it to do so.
Restart Firefox to let it finish updating. I donāt think Iāve ever seen a screen that says you HAVE to restart right now at this very moment.
When it happens, it doesnāt let me do anything other than stay on the already loaded webpage without restarting.
Open a new tab > āRestart to continueā¦ā
Click a link > āRestart to continueā¦ā
Type a URL > āRestart to continueā¦ā
and etc
What OS? I almost never close out of Firefox on my Macs at home and Iāve never seen that message there. FF on Windows seems to be the same. Itās been ages though since Iāve left FF open for months on end on Linux though.
Windows 10
Same on MacOS
rudyharrelsonIāve had this same experience on Linux Mint. Iāll run apt update & apt upgrade and, occasionally, if Firefox is one of the things being updated, new tabs and new pages wonāt load and will tell me I need to do a system restart to continue browsing.
I always update manually, so it never happens without me initiating the update first. But sometimes Iām like, āDangit, didnāt realize this update would require a restart to keep using Firefox.ā
It happens on Linux ā after your package manager has updated Firefox. Which typically means that you told it to. So itās not really a surprise.
JackbyDevThey said at work, perhaps it is a corporate thingy that forces them to be on the mandated version.
I got it again unfortunately, hereās a screenshot of what it looks like
I found this. superuser.com/ā¦/how-can-i-make-firefox-stop-forciā¦
On Linux, disabling Firefox updates in Firefox itself will not fix this issue, because Firefoxās own updater doesnāt actually have this bug! You get this warning when the Linux package manager has already replaced the files underneath the running program.
You say itās windows, but I think you said itās a work machine so maybe theyāre updating firefox from under you?
Different profiles on Firefox are nowhere near Chrome.
Iām still going to use FF, but there are areas it lags behind Chrome. Thatās the only big one for me.
Naturally, the browser that receives way less funding has less Dev work available.
Sameā¦ I know itās better and worth supporting, I just donāt like using it for some reason.
Back in the day, Firefox was literally not as good as Chrome. I personally think that has reversed and itās now much better than Chrome. Leagues better, now that Chrome is banning UBlock Origin. I do wish we had more competition than just Chrome, Safari, and Firefox thoughā¦
Yeah any other alternatives? Thereās arc, but I think thatās just chromium underneath (see above, meme)
eatham š¦šŗThereās ladybird and servo, but neither are near a release and ladybird wonāt even have an alpha til 2026.
And to make things even more difficult,
- Servo, as far I know, has no intention to be an actual browser. Instead, they want to offer an alternative to Blink (the Chromium engine), so that other software (such as browsers) can be made using it.
- Ladybirdās project lead and main developer, Andreas Kling, may or may not hold controversial views that many would prefer to avoid supporting.
I really want there to be more options in the browser market that arenāt Blink based (or WebKit, sorry Apple), but the situationās tough.
CosmicTurtle0 [he/him]Iām an advocate for Firefox, but it is slowly, slowly entering enshittification.
The addition of AI, dark patterns to enable āsponsored bookmarksā upon reinstall, ads (albeit subtle) when using the address bar for searchā¦
All of these can be disabled, some easily, some with feature flags.
Sure the enshittification isnāt anywhere near the pace as Chrome but itās happening. And again, this is coming from a maybe 10 year financial donor to Mozilla.
Firefox is better than Chrome, no question but there is an opportunity for a new browser to challenge the field.
You make good points but some people are knew jerking on Firefoxās AI. One of them is client side translation which is really neat as I donāt need to send the content to some Google ad data vacuum.
Another AI model helps differently abled people to have websites described to them using, again, a local model.
There is also Libtefox which uses the same rendering engine without the other stuff if you donāt want it.
I consider it an important act to use non Chromium browsers as not to completely hand over the power of rendering web content to Google.
LibreWolf
Is there anything better about LibreWolf that canāt be achieved by altering Firefox settings?
It ships preconfigured without invading your privacy (like Firefox does).
Just look up a comparison online.
Firefox doesnāt invade anyoneās privacy.
Sadly, with default settings thatās the case. Partly due to Telemetry being active and Google being the default search engine.
What telemetry options are enabled by default that are invasive? Iām not saying they arenāt there, itās just been forever since I installed it and I sync my settings. Also, if our bar for saying something is invading our privacy is so low that we say having a default search browser selection as Google then I think weāre going to far.
Thereās a lot of people on here that see literally any telemetry or analytics as evil, even though itās a necessary component for any software at the scale of Firefox (especially automated bug reports). Mozilla makes it clear they collect as little data as possible: support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
Why then not use Chrome if you are fine with Google?!
Chromium is deprecating manifest v2 and the newer v3 has neutered ad blocking capabilities. In Alphabetās SEC fillings they list ad blocking as a challenge to their revenue. End users canāt just flip v2 back on (unless the devs of their browser put work to let them). End users can change their default search engine though. Very easily. Trivially so. Who knows, maybe as a result of that court ruling weāll see browsers forced to have no default search engine in the future. I think thatās better, yes, but I really donāt think having Google Search as the default is that massive of a concern compared to much of the other shit theyāre doing.
Telemetry is not privacy-invading, itās pretty well anonymized. Itās also a lot easier to change the search engine than it is to download a completely different web browser.
You should inform yourself before writing. And I say that without any harmful intent. To get a true privacy focused Browser you need to harden Firefox (and may download some scripts from github to do so). Or just use LibreWolf as it has a lot of tracking preventative stuff built in similarly to Mullvad Browser or Tor Browser. Those two are however of course still way better. The latter being the best with regards of anonymity if you know what you are doing.
I can just encourage you to inform yourself about the Firefox browser which is better than Chrome of course, but still compromises your privacy in the default shipped state.
There is nothing personally-identifiable in the data Mozilla collects in Firefox: support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
Technical data includes information about your Firefox version and language, device operating system and hardware configuration, memory, basic information about crashes and errors, outcome of automated processes like updates and safebrowsing. When Firefox sends data to us, your IP address is temporarily collected as part of our server logs. IP addresses are deleted every 14 days.
This seems like and IS personally identifiable informationā¦.
You seem to ignore information collected about you is collected information about you.
I guess, this is most of the changes they do: librewolf.net/docs/features/
Thereās maybe a handful where Iām not sure, if you can do them via settings.
One where itās technically the case, is that they remove Pocket at compile time. But to my knowledge, Pocket integration is pretty much a glorified bookmark. Thereās not much code to remove. And it can be disabled via about:config by setting extensions.pocket.enabled to false.
I guess, to be fair to LibreWolf, Mozilla has been helping out the Tor Browser devs since forever, so most things needed for Tor Browser are just a toggle in the Firefox settings.
As a result, though, thereās also lots of settings, which partially need expert knowledge. So, there is definitely room for different presets. But yeah, still leaves the question, whether one really needs a different executable to adjust these settings.
Safari
xavier666Can anyone explain how much control Google has over the Chromium project?
Look into āUngoogled Chromiumā if you want the browser without all the Google crap.
Thatās still not free from Googleās control of the chromium web engine
Itās unfortunately a relatively complex thing to answer.
First off, thereās the license. The source code is published under a BSD-3 license, which is very permissive, meaning in theory, anyone could fork the repository and be completely free from any control of Google.
However, this is not really a thing in reality.
First of all, for your fork to have any meaning at all, you need people to use it. Theyāre not going to use your fork, if itās unclear whether youāre trustworthy and in particular, you need to offer something better than Google and do so for a while, so that people feel like they can rely on you.
In particular, Google is not bound by its license to make future updates available under the same license. If your fork would become too successful, they could re-license and then it would genuinely just become a competition for who has more dev power.
But with the caveat that if you donāt also re-license, then Google can continue taking your work and provide theirs on top.
In particular, Google also has a load of tracking infrastructure and an ad business, which makes Chrome a valuable investment for them.
Thereās very few other organizations for which it would make sense to invest similarly much into Chromium development (and those organizations will then have similarly awful motivations).
Which means a hard fork, i.e. without dependence on future updates from Google, is pretty much not going to happen.
You also need a solid number of users in your fork, if you want to have any say in terms of web standards. So long as Google Chrome has a majority of users, Google can easily introduce proprietary standards, which webdevs will gladly lap up.
So, all in all, Google does have a pretty tight grip. Presumably, they donāt put any incriminating stuff into Chromium, so that they steer clear of even faint attempts to fork (and because they can just put those into Google Chrome instead). But thereās plenty room for interpretation in most web standards, so they can implement them in their interest, and then the forks have to stick to that implement, if they want to remain compatible with the web.
Basically, a corporation owning such an open source project removes almost all positive things associated with āopen sourceā. Theyāre using it for ālook we are goodā much more than for āwe actually care about open source communityā.
bruhduh@Download vscodium
@look inside
@chromium
sparkleThereās a Discord client that uses Firefox instead of Chromium, fun fact.
Codium is closer to degoogled chromium. āCode - OSSā is the unmodified version of Code and Codium.
edinbruhDownload Firefox/ Look inside/ Still Firefox.
Download thunderbird/ Look inside/ Older Firefox.
I mean modern corporate emails are basically just webpages