3 ms·

I've switched to Waterfox (yet another Firefox fork) and so far I'm happy with that choice https://www.waterfox.net/ https://www.waterfox.net/

Valodim 2y ago
While these forks are nice and all, I'm not sure how meaningful it is in the bigger picture if 99% of the work done on it is still done (and paid) by the same people. Similarly, I don't get those "I use brave instead of Firefox", as if that wasn't 99% chromium. Don't get me wrong, I know there's not much choice. But that whole direction of "action" that people take just seems like a working marketing tarpit to me.
- okanat 2y ago
  At least Brave is a profitable company that employs multiple people and they can keep up with Chromium's changes (Some manifest v2 extensions are kept available or certain UI features are reverted). Most of the Firefox forks are 1-5 person gigs. They are not sustainable.
- saghm 2y ago
  At this point, "marketing tarpit" seems like a pretty accurate description of Mozilla's stewardship of Firefox as well, so if I'm going to get sucked one, I'd rather it be the one that's taking a maybe untenable stand for something that I agree than the one that's trying to gaslight me about whether "disseminating user data to a third party for valuable consideration" is what most people would consider "selling user data".
  - Valodim 2y ago
    That is an unreal standard to hold anyone to while using Microsoft or Google products, because this wouldn't even register compared to what these companies do on a regular basis. People are just less dependent on Mozilla so moral outage doesn't feel as pointless.
    - saghm 2y ago
      I'm not sure I understand your criticism. Are you arguing that I'm holding Mozilla to an unfair standard, or other users? I don't pretend to have any moral high ground about what I use versus other people; I just don't personally find the argument that using a fork of Firefox right now is a "marketing tarpit" to be compelling enough to convince me to change my mind about it.
saghm 2y ago
I spent some time yesterday getting it set up in the light of the recent debaucle, and overall I'm mostly positive on it. The vast majority of things worked pretty much exactly as I'm used to with Firefox (with most of the settings being the same, and even about:config working pretty much identically other than having some things I used to set manually as default, like allowing custom userChrome.css and turning off a lot of telemetry). I was intrigued with the built-in tree style tab support (which from what I can tell in this release notes seems like it's being developed in collaboration with the developer of the popular addon), and although right now it doesn't seem to easily support all of the customization from within the settings that the addon itself does, I still really like the idea of it being a first-class browser feature rather than an addon. Unfortunately I seem to be running into a bug that's already been filed as an issue where toggling it on or off causes my browser window to disappear briefly and then relaunch, which also seems to happen automatically if I last closed the browser with it toggled on, making it a bit too jarring for me to use yet, but given how recently it seems to have been added into the browser itself, I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up getting fixed in a reasonable amount of time (and if not, I can always just use the extension itself, which still seems like it would work). In a lot of ways, it seems like Waterfox is actually doing a better job of being the type of browser I want than Firefox is anymore; there are a lot more built-in UI customization settings that I'm much more interested in seeing development effort go towards (including some simpler but nice quality of life things like choosing whether to place the tab bar on the top or bottom, or aligning the contents of the URL bar and the tabs either either to the left or to the center, or even whether certain elements should have rounded or square corners) than whatever Mozilla seems to be interested in experimenting with nowadays. Obviously I'm pretty early in my usage, but compared to my expectation that switching over would be either a huge hassle or not really have any immediately obvious differences, I've noticed a number of small but nice changes from my experience with Firefox but not much hassle overall; the only sticking point I currently have is that so far I haven't been able to log into either Gitlab or the webmail site for my custom domain on Namecheap, but I think the former might just be my own error after hitting a limit on two-factor attempts after misunderstanding whether it was asking for my U2F key (which from further research doesn't seem to be supported yet) or an authenticator OTP code, and the latter seems to be getting an error from the server terminating the connection, which is frustrating but feels like it's mostly the fault of the server for apparently not trusting a browser it doesn't recognize (and even seeming to ignoring the user agent when I try to set it to something more "normal"). Given that my Gitlab usage is entirely personal (and mostly just consists of using it as a git server with repos I create using the CLI tool and then don't log into to look at much) and my email also forwards to Gmail (although admittedly with a sometimes annoying delay for stuff like confirmation emails for logins), using a different browser just to access those maybe a couple times a month isn't really going to bother me that much.
seqizz 2y ago
I was just checking their site. Not even mention of Firefox other than an external quote? Looked a bit shady tbh.

Valodim 2y ago

While these forks are nice and all, I'm not sure how meaningful it is in the bigger picture if 99% of the work done on it is still done (and paid) by the same people. Similarly, I don't get those "I use brave instead of Firefox", as if that wasn't 99% chromium. Don't get me wrong, I know there's not much choice. But that whole direction of "action" that people take just seems like a working marketing tarpit to me.

okanat 2y ago
At least Brave is a profitable company that employs multiple people and they can keep up with Chromium's changes (Some manifest v2 extensions are kept available or certain UI features are reverted). Most of the Firefox forks are 1-5 person gigs. They are not sustainable.
saghm 2y ago
At this point, "marketing tarpit" seems like a pretty accurate description of Mozilla's stewardship of Firefox as well, so if I'm going to get sucked one, I'd rather it be the one that's taking a maybe untenable stand for something that I agree than the one that's trying to gaslight me about whether "disseminating user data to a third party for valuable consideration" is what most people would consider "selling user data".
- Valodim 2y ago
  That is an unreal standard to hold anyone to while using Microsoft or Google products, because this wouldn't even register compared to what these companies do on a regular basis. People are just less dependent on Mozilla so moral outage doesn't feel as pointless.
  - saghm 2y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your criticism. Are you arguing that I'm holding Mozilla to an unfair standard, or other users? I don't pretend to have any moral high ground about what I use versus other people; I just don't personally find the argument that using a fork of Firefox right now is a "marketing tarpit" to be compelling enough to convince me to change my mind about it.

saghm 2y ago

I spent some time yesterday getting it set up in the light of the recent debaucle, and overall I'm mostly positive on it. The vast majority of things worked pretty much exactly as I'm used to with Firefox (with most of the settings being the same, and even about:config working pretty much identically other than having some things I used to set manually as default, like allowing custom userChrome.css and turning off a lot of telemetry). I was intrigued with the built-in tree style tab support (which from what I can tell in this release notes seems like it's being developed in collaboration with the developer of the popular addon), and although right now it doesn't seem to easily support all of the customization from within the settings that the addon itself does, I still really like the idea of it being a first-class browser feature rather than an addon. Unfortunately I seem to be running into a bug that's already been filed as an issue where toggling it on or off causes my browser window to disappear briefly and then relaunch, which also seems to happen automatically if I last closed the browser with it toggled on, making it a bit too jarring for me to use yet, but given how recently it seems to have been added into the browser itself, I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up getting fixed in a reasonable amount of time (and if not, I can always just use the extension itself, which still seems like it would work). In a lot of ways, it seems like Waterfox is actually doing a better job of being the type of browser I want than Firefox is anymore; there are a lot more built-in UI customization settings that I'm much more interested in seeing development effort go towards (including some simpler but nice quality of life things like choosing whether to place the tab bar on the top or bottom, or aligning the contents of the URL bar and the tabs either either to the left or to the center, or even whether certain elements should have rounded or square corners) than whatever Mozilla seems to be interested in experimenting with nowadays. Obviously I'm pretty early in my usage, but compared to my expectation that switching over would be either a huge hassle or not really have any immediately obvious differences, I've noticed a number of small but nice changes from my experience with Firefox but not much hassle overall; the only sticking point I currently have is that so far I haven't been able to log into either Gitlab or the webmail site for my custom domain on Namecheap, but I think the former might just be my own error after hitting a limit on two-factor attempts after misunderstanding whether it was asking for my U2F key (which from further research doesn't seem to be supported yet) or an authenticator OTP code, and the latter seems to be getting an error from the server terminating the connection, which is frustrating but feels like it's mostly the fault of the server for apparently not trusting a browser it doesn't recognize (and even seeming to ignoring the user agent when I try to set it to something more "normal"). Given that my Gitlab usage is entirely personal (and mostly just consists of using it as a git server with repos I create using the CLI tool and then don't log into to look at much) and my email also forwards to Gmail (although admittedly with a sometimes annoying delay for stuff like confirmation emails for logins), using a different browser just to access those maybe a couple times a month isn't really going to bother me that much.

seqizz 2y ago

I was just checking their site. Not even mention of Firefox other than an external quote? Looked a bit shady tbh.