- cross-posted to:
- firefox@fedia.io
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@fedia.io
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/26136291
Mozilla has just deleted the following:
“Does Firefox sell your personal data?”
“Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. "
Source: Lundke journal.
So if you don’t want to use a chromium based browser but also care about privacy, you’re now fucked?
Firefox is open-source. Certainly, you’re out of options in terms of “name-brand” browsers, but there’s a number of Firefox forks. On desktop, LibreWolf is the closest thing to mainline and on Android, IronFox is the equivalent.
If you want something more than just “Firefox minus the branding and tracking”, some of the deeper forks are Zen Browser and Floorp.
What happened to Fennec and PaleMoon? Are they no bueno these days?
I can’t speak to PaleMoon, but I use Fennec on my phone. My understanding is that they try to track as closely as they can to Firefox main, but with enough changes to be a separate thing.
I’ve heard nothing negative about PaleMoon either, as far as privacy. I do think it’s a bit tougher to recommend to the average user due to its single-process architecture.
The memory footprint is great, but everybody is kind of used to the performance and stability gains from multi-process browsers. I would feel weird recommending somebody coming off Firefox jump to PaleMoon.
I feel weird recommending any Firefox fork other than Iceweasel/Fennec (name change only, pretty much) or Tor/Mullvad Browser. Everything else runs a risk of poor maintenance, which could lead to security vulnerabilities.
If you don’t want to use Gecko nor Chromium, I am aware of the following alternatives:
WebKit
Though associated with Apple and Safari, WebKit (@webkit@front-end.social) has its origins in KDE and its Konqueror browser. KDE developed its own web engine called KHTML, which was forked into WebKit. It’s therefore fully open source, despite the Apple connection.
On Linux you can use WebKit in GNOME Web (formerly Epiphany) or Konqueror. If you’re on Mac, Safari is probably your best bet. Windows users appear to be out of luck.
Servo
Servo (@servo@floss.social) is a brand new Rust-based engine which was originally developed by Mozilla, but which was abandoned by them like good things often are. Thankfully the Linux foundation took over developments. It’s still in development, but from their download page you can take it for a spin within seconds on all three major operating systems. It’s looking pretty good.
They maintain a list of things made with Servo. The most promising project so far appears to be a browser named Verso.
Ladybird
Ladybird is another development to follow. Unlike WebKit and Servo, Ladybird is being developed as a web browser in its own right, but this browser will come with a completely original rendering engine. It aims to have an alpha released next year, and is largely written in C++.
As someone who has been closely following the development of Servo, today I still learned that Verso and Servoshell are not the only things using Servo.
Funnily enough WebKit was Chromium’s original engine.
Librewolf
I just wish it worked on Apple Silicon.
Your wish has been granted. 😁
It’s on the GitHub release page.
I ran it recently on the latest iMac with no issues.
Labybird is currently in development and it’s separate from both Chromium and Firefox
yea buts backed by shopify.
Right but it’s not even something one can use or download right now or in the short term so it’s kind of not even worth considering at the moment.