- Firefox is a privacy-friendly alternative to Chrome, using its own browser engine (Gecko) and offering strong privacy protections compared to Chromium-based browsers.
- Despite its benefits, Firefox relies on Google for funding, raising concerns about its future, and some recent privacy decisions have drawn criticism.
- Switching from Chrome to Firefox is simple, and alternatives like Mullvad Browser offer even stronger privacy for those seeking more protection.
There’s also arkenfox or librewolf
I use librewolf (and have for a while) the extra privacy really isn’t intrusive, there are some sites that don’t work correctly, on it, but I just open up regular Firefox and throw the URL there if that’s the case.
The only thing I don’t like is how long it takes to build whenever there’s an update. I only update it 1-2 times a month but it’s still a 20-30 minute process each time
I switched to arkenfox since the librewolf package lagged a bit on arch and I didn’t want to build myself. If sites really break bad (usually I can get around it by disabling some ublock settings), I just open a blank firefox profile
Just out of interest, how do those browsers, and other forks, get funding? All voluntarily development or donations?
See this relevant article on Firefox and Mozilla’s funding.
https://slrpnk.net/post/12621021
They just patch Firefox
That’s…not really an answer to the question asked.
Arkenfox is a set of Firefox flags.
Librewolf/mule is essentially pre-packaged Firefox w/arkenfox and some things stripped out.
The devs work informally on it which is why some releases lag. Like the jump to v128 lagged on mule because Firefox switched the way their repo worked and mull is based off of the Firefox source with some build scripts to change the logo, branding and add arkenfox settings by default.
The flags used by Arkenfox are largely funded by the tor project as they work to upstream many of the tor browser changes back into Firefox which enables efficiency for future tor builds.
This benefits everyone as the privacy preserving features of tor can be used off of the tor network too.
True but they don’t need a ton of funding
Librewolf explicitly reject donations.
That’s great. Want to tell us more than their names?
No
arken what?
Oh, I see.