Comment by nonrandomstring
1 year ago
Firefox is open source. You can take the source code and strip out all of the malware, spying, telemetry and corporate harm leaving a safe and private browser (to the extent any modern browser can be).
There are multiple forks that do that. Download one of them instead. Mozilla Corporation has no control over those, so if you don't like what Mozilla make, exercise your software freedom.
The problem with Mozilla, as far as I can see, is not the the compromises they make for obtaining money (everyone suffers that), its that they're deceptive and underhand about it. That makes them unethical. I wrote plenty regarding that here [0]
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
The problem with these privacy-first Firefox forks is none have the resources to match FF.
If Firefox dies, eventually so will they, as the code stagnates relative to better-funded browsers.
Saying "switch to a privacy-first fork" is not a long-term solution.
The internet doesn’t actually need any more new features anyway, and most sites reflect this and just serve HTML.
Some sites will need new features. But I guess it is fine to have a data-collecting version of Firefox or even some moderately well behaved malware like Chrome, as long as most browsing doesn’t happen through it. So, I guess I’ll look at moving most of my browsing to a privacy respecting form and keeping the a browser around for faulty sites…
[dead]
> Saying "switch to a privacy-first fork" is not a long-term solution.
You're 100% right while operating in an environment that is hostile to privacy. In these conditions security/privacy remains mostly tactical, not strategic. In fact, against a predominant tyranny it is insurrectional. Free Software will have to learn to adapt with more intelligence-sharing and opportunistic manoeuvres.
As an aside though, one might generalise to say there are no long term solutions in tech, period. And therefore advocates of freedom and privacy are at no particular disadvantage relative to any opponents.
Anyone can fork. However you need to keep your fork updated as firefox does new releases which means repeating that work often. Either that you are need to support all the security fixes yourself.
Rather than downloading random binaries from random forks (or clamour for governance at the sidelines), you can take back more control by building your own fork.
Librewolf and Waterfox are two fine choices to use for upstream sincr they have saner defaults and make the forking and building easier to wire up.
Ive been running my own FF fork for a few years like this now.