7 ms·

This seems like an a slightly more complete version of Firefox Profilemaker (https://ffprofile.com/ https://ffprofile.com/). I personally use a fairly vanilla

This seems like an a slightly more complete version of Firefox Profilemaker (https://ffprofile.com/ https://ffprofile.com/). I personally use a fairly vanilla Firefox with a few addons and try to keep customization as default as possible. How will further differentiating yourself from the masses (especially since Firefox is already a minority browser) help with privacy, tracking, and fingerprinting? Why not at that point just change your user agent to Chrome/Win7 and run everything in a virtual machine? edit: To that end, does anyone use browser forks (like Waterfox and Palemoon, or things like unGoogled Chromium) and seriously think they're better than the mainline browser? I see a lot of fair criticism for what Mozilla has done with Firefox (deprecating old extensions, Mr. Robot addons, Cliqz, etc) but it's pretty much the most trustworthy Internet company as far as I'm aware. They seem to genuinely have good will and Open Source at their core, and these forks claiming that Mozilla is this monstrous organization looking to invade your privacy (along the lines of what Google does) seem a little silly to me.

worble 8y ago
>and these forks claiming that Mozilla is this monstrous organization looking to invade your privacy Do they claim that? I felt like most of the forks were made in good feeling, appreciating the work that Mozilla has done, but customising it in their own way/aligning vanilla FireFox with their views.
OrgNet 8y ago
I do not use a Firefox fork but customizing Firefox with add-ons can improve privacy even if it makes you more unique when looking at your fingerprint only.
JoshuaRLi 8y ago
Forked software is usually reasonable, but for me, the sheer complexity of the graphical, interactive web sadly begets an exception for modern browsers. Even if much of the work is offloaded to the corporations backing modern free/libre browsers (e.g. keeping up with new web standards and technologies), it certainly goes without saying that rebasing with upstream or even just applying the latest security fixes is no trivial task I would entrust any browser fork with minimal developer backing with. This problem is especially worsened with the kind of user base that firefox forks tend to attract, from what I have seen. These users tend to ask very high-level questions e.g. "is waterfox more secure than pale moon" and will usually blindly switch from one fork to the next based on poorly-backed, unsubstantial crowd opinion. No userbase means waning support + maintenance. If you ask me, I think in the very special case of browser technologies, it would be more beneficial if the developers and users of firefox forks directed their energies towards making generally desirable changes in upstream.
- elagost 8y ago
  Not just the weird habits of the users, either. I have way more confidence that Mozilla will fix issues in a timely manner than the one developer behind Waterfox, or the several behind Palemoon. Especially when the forks are depending on upstream to fix things for them. A few years ago there was a build of Waterfox that was substantially late because the one developer had exams.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    It seems like the solution to this would be to have the build system reproducible from a base image with everything other than the code repo required to successfully kick off a build other than the code repo itself. Uploaded (or made available to upload yourself) to any of the cloud providers (or run locally in a VM), it would allow you to sync the repo and kick off a build for any supported architecture. Dev not available to integrate a pull request and start a build? Download the appropriate build arch image, fire up VirtualBox, sync the repo (and apply a pull request if the dev hasn't had a chance to do that yet) and start the build script. This doesn't entirely solve the problem, if nobody has submitted a fix yet, and you don't know enough to pull in the upstream fix and merge it yourself, you're at the mercy of some other user having that knowledge and making a pull request. It does close the gap somewhat though. Are there existing projects to help get to this level of build reproducibility that can serve as a base to use? It would be awesome to know people are already working on making this easy to adopt.
    - JetSpiegel 8y ago
      THis is not the issue, I think. See: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/firefox https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/P... The problem is that it is a giant codebase, you need to compile C++, Rust for hours. Even pulling the latest code is an ordeal. It's not feasible on lowly workstations and garden variety cheap cloud VM builders, the performance is just crap.
      - elagost 8y ago
Havoc 8y ago
>How will further differentiating yourself from the masses (especially since Firefox is already a minority browser) help with privacy, tracking, and fingerprinting? I don't think that's what fingerprinting is about. Whether you're 1 in 50k or 1 in 500k - it's not usable from a marketing/data perspective. Stuff like cookie retention & IP addr seem much more dangerous on this front than browser choice - both of those are more like 1 in 1 or 1 in say 20 depending on NAT.
enturn 8y ago
I've been using Waterfox since Mozilla changed their extension format and it's been incredibly stable. I used it for the Tree Style Tab extension. There's probably less reason to use it just for that anymore but vertical tabs in Firefox still isn't the best experience. I use Firefox with Tree Tabs at work with the extra user UI modification required to hide the top tabs and the sidebar headings. Only allowing one sidebar means when I accidentally open the bookmarks I need to mess around to get my tabs back.
- sciurus 8y ago
  No nee to switch to a fork for that. Tree Style Tab 2.x supports Firefox even after the switch to webextensions. (Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla but not directly on the browser)
chromeaway 8y ago
I used to do web dev in chrome but installed ungoogled-chromium after that scandalous update where they forced you to login; in fact, after installing said update, I suddenly found myself "logged in" with a gmail address that I never even created in the first place (something like mycompanyname[at]gmail[dot]com). My trust in Google was already crumbling, this creepy move was the final blow. So far, my experience with ungoogled-chromium has been great, but I must admit I'm not really following up on the project (devs, userbase, security updates, etc).

worble 8y ago

>and these forks claiming that Mozilla is this monstrous organization looking to invade your privacy Do they claim that? I felt like most of the forks were made in good feeling, appreciating the work that Mozilla has done, but customising it in their own way/aligning vanilla FireFox with their views.

OrgNet 8y ago

I do not use a Firefox fork but customizing Firefox with add-ons can improve privacy even if it makes you more unique when looking at your fingerprint only.

JoshuaRLi 8y ago

Forked software is usually reasonable, but for me, the sheer complexity of the graphical, interactive web sadly begets an exception for modern browsers. Even if much of the work is offloaded to the corporations backing modern free/libre browsers (e.g. keeping up with new web standards and technologies), it certainly goes without saying that rebasing with upstream or even just applying the latest security fixes is no trivial task I would entrust any browser fork with minimal developer backing with. This problem is especially worsened with the kind of user base that firefox forks tend to attract, from what I have seen. These users tend to ask very high-level questions e.g. "is waterfox more secure than pale moon" and will usually blindly switch from one fork to the next based on poorly-backed, unsubstantial crowd opinion. No userbase means waning support + maintenance. If you ask me, I think in the very special case of browser technologies, it would be more beneficial if the developers and users of firefox forks directed their energies towards making generally desirable changes in upstream.

elagost 8y ago
Not just the weird habits of the users, either. I have way more confidence that Mozilla will fix issues in a timely manner than the one developer behind Waterfox, or the several behind Palemoon. Especially when the forks are depending on upstream to fix things for them. A few years ago there was a build of Waterfox that was substantially late because the one developer had exams.
- kbenson 8y ago
  It seems like the solution to this would be to have the build system reproducible from a base image with everything other than the code repo required to successfully kick off a build other than the code repo itself. Uploaded (or made available to upload yourself) to any of the cloud providers (or run locally in a VM), it would allow you to sync the repo and kick off a build for any supported architecture. Dev not available to integrate a pull request and start a build? Download the appropriate build arch image, fire up VirtualBox, sync the repo (and apply a pull request if the dev hasn't had a chance to do that yet) and start the build script. This doesn't entirely solve the problem, if nobody has submitted a fix yet, and you don't know enough to pull in the upstream fix and merge it yourself, you're at the mercy of some other user having that knowledge and making a pull request. It does close the gap somewhat though. Are there existing projects to help get to this level of build reproducibility that can serve as a base to use? It would be awesome to know people are already working on making this easy to adopt.
  - JetSpiegel 8y ago
    THis is not the issue, I think. See: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/firefox https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/P... The problem is that it is a giant codebase, you need to compile C++, Rust for hours. Even pulling the latest code is an ordeal. It's not feasible on lowly workstations and garden variety cheap cloud VM builders, the performance is just crap.
    - elagost 8y ago

Havoc 8y ago

>How will further differentiating yourself from the masses (especially since Firefox is already a minority browser) help with privacy, tracking, and fingerprinting? I don't think that's what fingerprinting is about. Whether you're 1 in 50k or 1 in 500k - it's not usable from a marketing/data perspective. Stuff like cookie retention & IP addr seem much more dangerous on this front than browser choice - both of those are more like 1 in 1 or 1 in say 20 depending on NAT.

enturn 8y ago

I've been using Waterfox since Mozilla changed their extension format and it's been incredibly stable. I used it for the Tree Style Tab extension. There's probably less reason to use it just for that anymore but vertical tabs in Firefox still isn't the best experience. I use Firefox with Tree Tabs at work with the extra user UI modification required to hide the top tabs and the sidebar headings. Only allowing one sidebar means when I accidentally open the bookmarks I need to mess around to get my tabs back.

sciurus 8y ago
No nee to switch to a fork for that. Tree Style Tab 2.x supports Firefox even after the switch to webextensions. (Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla but not directly on the browser)

chromeaway 8y ago

I used to do web dev in chrome but installed ungoogled-chromium after that scandalous update where they forced you to login; in fact, after installing said update, I suddenly found myself "logged in" with a gmail address that I never even created in the first place (something like mycompanyname[at]gmail[dot]com). My trust in Google was already crumbling, this creepy move was the final blow. So far, my experience with ungoogled-chromium has been great, but I must admit I'm not really following up on the project (devs, userbase, security updates, etc).