If you’re using a fork anyways, use LibreWolf rather than Waterfox. Actually does a lot more stuff to harden the browser, and isn’t as slow to update (despite the aversion people seem to have to LibreWolf here, it usually updates within a day or so of upstream releases). There really isn’t any need to use Waterfox over anything else, especially when LibreWolf exists as the best FireFox fork for privacy and security by far.
More bad news:
They now also start collecting search data of users based in the USA:
3 Likes
Disappointing, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world if you read into their implementation.
From the Firefox Privacy Notice:
Search categories: In the US, Firefox sends Mozilla the high-level categories of things you search for (e.g. sports, travel, food, etc.) but not your actual search terms, unless you specifically agree to send us that information. Where this occurs, the search category is not shared with our partners and Mozilla is not able to associate the search category with an individual user once the search results have been served. You can opt out of search category data collection at any time.
Mozilla is also using OHTTP to further anonymize the data, and it still meets the 4 points I outlined above:
- Easy to disable
- Very transparent (Through about:telemetry, you can see everything being sent)
- Properly anonymized
- Not sold or shared to 3rd parties or used for advertising/tracking (i.e. Google and Microsoft)
So, eh, I won’t lie that I am disappointed, I feel like we should be seeing less telemetry instead of more, but it doesn’t seem much worse or more invasive than the telemetry Firefox already has.
4 Likes
FF has container tabs and no other feature even comes close.
3 Likes
I love librewolf. But I wont recommend it to “normal” people yet as it breaks some functionality sometimes
I highly doubt that will happen. The amount of expertise and work needed to maintain a modern internet browser is IMO not able to be financed solely through donations, unfortunately.
3 Likes
Chromium
Perhaps it’s just what I use it for, but i experience breakage only one a month at most—practically none at all.
Plus, breakage can be further reduced by disabling rfp or re enabling webGL, which is easy to do in librewolf settings.
At the end of the day, it won’t break any more than a similarly configured Firefox installation. Most breakage comes from content blockers anyway I find, and ublock origin makes that easy to deal with.
I haven’t had to set up a browser for someone new in a while, but from what I’ve seen with others, I’d still definitely go with Librewolf if I was strictly sticking to FF forks or configs—this goes for “normal” people too.
Is it open source? Yes. Is Google – as the main contributor – very much in control of its development? Also yes.
So no, Chromium is not really an alternative in this sense.
What’s your reference to show that Google controls Firefox development? Google would have to be telling the Mozilla devs what to work on and what to do, which is not the case as I understand.
The guy you responded to was talking about Chromium, not Firefox. A chromium fork would be easier to maintain and existing projects like Thorium operate on donations.
2 Likes