Comment by KingOfCoders
1 year ago
Windows user, 32 years FF user (Mosaic, Netscape, Firefox), what to do now?
Anyone forking? (I don't want a derivate which Mozilla controls)
[edit] Switched to Waterfox (Macos, Windows, Linux, Android), no fork but better than FF for now
Firefox forks:
* Waterfox
* Librewolf
* GNU IceCat
* Pale Moon
* Seamonkey
Chromium forks:
* Ungoogled-Chromium
* Thorium
* Iridium
You'll have to do your own due diligence as far as how trustworthy or suitable these are, but nominally privacy-respecting alternatives do exist.
Thorium is regularly 3 months behind on updates
Iridium brings me to a 404 when I try to download it for MacOS
Sadly, neither seem like good options.
Thorium is regularly 3 months behind on updates
Unfortunate, I suppose, but this is the kind of tradeoff that is to be expected when switching to something maintained by one guy in their bedroom instead of a megacorp.
Thanks didn't know, thought Waterfox etc. were just a new UI on top of Firefox rendering/HTTP/HTTPS/etc. engine and were depending on Firefox development. Didn't know they were forks like the Redis forks for example. Will take another look.
"Ungoogled-Chromium"
Can't be a fork? Don't they just patch Chromium?
I mean I guess that depends on what you mean by fork? Most of the above projects follow upstream Firefox/Chromium (Pale Moon, for example, doesn't -- but that also means less support for recent web standards) but they are forks in the sense that they maintain the codebase/patchset themselves. How much they actually diverge from upstream varies by project.
So you're right that they are dependent on Mozilla for now. With Mozilla circling the drain lately, maybe that could change. But right now, for the purposes of removing privacy-unfriendly antifeatures, I find them sufficiently independent for my purposes. Most Firefox code isn't evil.
If you want something like Firefox but you're adamant that Mozilla can exercise no control over it, Pale Moon is probably the one you want to look at.
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