Firefox does something else very important: provide another rendering engine for the web. When that landscape homogenizes, you get IE6 all over again. And we never want to go back there.
Also I’d rather there was a separate option for additional privacy than it be the default.
People who want the extra privacy can usually figure out what they need and how to get it. The average person will just switch back to chrome when websites break. They wont be able to figure out which settings to toggle off in order to fix the site
Keep Firefox useful for most people while also building more privacy friendly features.
If it’s something people SHOULD be using, have a popup explaining it and let people decide
This is the reason why people think privacy is hard. No, my mother should not need to find out how to set the correct settings.
A simple switch, GUI, to completely harden the browser, this would be the thing. about:preferences can be changed while running.
Also Firefox disables website pinging by default, unlike nearly all cromium based browsers where you can’t even disable it
It wouldn’t be terrible, as long as it’s based on an open source foundation. Although that depends on the specific open source license. As long as the engine can be forked, the worst of IE6 should be avoidable.
But yes, with Opera moving to Blink, you’ve got really only two-ish browser engines. KHTML/WebKit/Blink and Gecko. WebKit/Blink are Open Source, but I think mostly BSD, so Apple/Google could migrate to a proprietary license easily.
Gecko is MPL, which IIRC is somewhat Copyleft like the GPL, just a bit less stringent.
With the Apple/Google impasse with WebKit/Blink, I think we should be able to avoid an IE6 situation, but I would feel better with a stronger Copyleft license.
As much as I love Firefox, I think Firefox has less browser share than it did back in the IE6 days.
servo (already partially in Firefox) is a very interesting project.
Not to be pedantic, but wouldn’t it need to be a 180? 360 would put them right back in the same spot XD
Turn around, evolve and go again. But yeah oops bad metaphor lol
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This is about DRM, an entirely different topic.
DRM is loaded on purpose, which is great.
But good point, there would need to be a “security” switch or else, that you select and that actually hardens the browser.
Vanilla should always work, and I agree I sometimes need a vanilla profile.
Firefox profiles are also horribly integrated into firefox. Like there is no GUI way to switch them, without entering “about config”. People think Firefox has no profiles and think thats a Chrome thing, which is fucked up as Chrome copied that
There is a profile GUI but it’s true that it isn’t integrated into Firefox. You have to start it with
firefox -ProfileManager. On Windows I recall it used to add a start menu entry for it but not on Linux.Firefox Flatpak, RPM, and Windows have this entry.
firefox -pis enough and works cross platform.But it is no button so people dont think it exists. I heard tech people say “Chromes profiles are better than Firefox containers” as they literally didnt know this core feature.
Thunderbird has profiles too, Element web also. Both have no GUI at all.
use librewolf if you want privacy that much
But also keep in mind that it couldn’t exist without Firefox/Mozilla existing. A world in which more people use Firefox over Chromium-based browsers is a better world.
ehhh debatable, mozilla still gets a lot of funding from google so they’re not as independent as you think. A better world wpuld be one where qtwebkit based browsers, chromium based browsers and firefox based browsers have the same market share.
Unfortunately Apple stole qtwebkit and drove it into the grave so there’s little chance of that actually happening :(
I still hold out hope though, and try to use Falkon whenever possible
A Mozilla dependent on Google seeing value in Firefox sending searches their way is at minimum as good as one in which Mozilla doesn’t exist and everybody uses Chromium-based browsers, by definition - and in practice, way better.
But yes, more non-Blink engines in use in general would also be a better world. Alas, that, too, isn’t the world we live in.
I still don’t understand why Microsoft dropped Blink. Surely there’s nothing for them in letting Google own the browser engine, and it’s not like they cannot afford to keep developing their own. Weird.
I did. But why should I need to? Firefox is the product, if nobody uses Firefox mozilla uses marketshare. Why do we need Librewolf, which really is the only Firefox you should use out of the box? The same with Mull for Android, where damn “Firefox Focus” is their privacy option which is pretty useless.
If Firefox is so bad you need to use Librewolf, Firefox as a product is useless for many people.
I now use Firefox again and harden it myself. But I dont expect ANYONE to do that, as its even a bit too inconvenient for me
because the default Firefox is either more convenient for most normal users or gets them more funding because of corporate sponsors
privacy and convenience is always a tradeoff so you can’t just make firefox really private like librewolf and expect mass adoption
Use Tor Browser if you want it dialed up to eleven. You’ll quickly find that it’s way more of a hassle to use, and also still pretty easy to accidentally compromise the security measures.
Of course Firefox isn’t perfect; nothing is. But a 180 turn implies it’s the opposite of perfect now, and it really isn’t - especially in a world where basically every other browser is waaaay closer to that.
From this comment I suppose you never used Librewolf or Arkenfox. The Torbrowser is only a hassle because
- it uses “private browsing” always, which completely hinders people from saving anything. This is not needed, as cache, session etc could simply be deleted via the settings.
- it uses the Tor network, which is a huge thing. Cloudflare and all that BS block you 90% because of that. Its even worse than with VPN
- The real difficulties just come when you use Noscript, or Ublock with hard settings. The hardened browser alone is unproblematic. But if you use Noscript, you dont want to not use it anymore. Sites are so bloated with third party javascript that is simply not needed.
Firefox on Default is not stopping much tracking. It should teach users how to be private. Also work of course, but really. Other browsers will scream out way more data, thats for sure. But Firefox has all these features but nobody knows them.
So, in the end there is no real usecase for Firefox. And people use any other “secure” Browser instead
I mean, you’re just saying that if you don’t dial it up to eleven, but just to nine, then you’ll hit less breakage. Which, sure, but that’s kinda my point: a usable browser needs to strike a balance, and that’s exactly what Firefox is trying to do - which is really something different from “needing a 180-degree turn”. Firefox by default is stopping way more tracking than e.g. Chrome, and guides users to installing e.g. uBO.
Also note that most breakage isn’t immediately obvious. For example, if you turn on
privacy.resistFingerprinting, then Google Docs will become blurred. However, by the time you see that, you won’t be able to link that to the flipped config. This is the kind of breakage that many “hardening guides” cause, and by that, they eventually lead people to switch to Chrome, which is the opposite of what they’re supposed to achieve.And sure, Librewolf draws the line at a slightly different place than Firefox does. But the main difference is not sending data like hardware capabilities, crash stats, etc. to Mozilla - which don’t threaten democracy or result in hyper-targeted ads, but do enable Mozilla to optimise the code for real-world use.
Agree. But again, as this hardening is not accessible via GUI, it is mysterious as it is. With a switch similarly places like the brush in torbrowser or the shield in FF this could be easily dealt with.
More fancy would be whitelisting sites via gui.
No, Librewolf doesnt only limit data sent to mozilla, but its basically as hardened as Arkenfox/Torbrowser.
Yes, but as soon as it is accessible via the GUI, more and more people will start getting blurred Google Docs (and similar weird issues) without knowing how that happened - because that’s already happening even with people who know enough to make changes in
about:config.Add a long readme, with a “yes I understand possible consequences”. If this is so well known, it could be easily integrated. I never used that stuff.
Ah yes, people are indeed known for always reading long readmes and fully grasping the consequences of their actions, especially if those occur long after said actions :P
Okay, so a button in the URL bar with 2 scentences of the possible consequences.
I did a 360 and walked out the theater.
I’m much happier to install one of the dozens of adblock addons, than to disable the built in one and still install an addon. Cuz that would mean bloat. I want to have the options to choose the adblock I have installed, and not only which one I use.
Builtin adblockers of other browsers, especially more commercial ones, have proven to be buyable by ad companies. They also fail, and have failed, on YouTube, where some addons still succeed.
One could argue Mozilla could encourage the users to actively choose an adblocker, but that would mean annoying popups and basically ads for adblockers.Default FF with a few settings and addons is fine.
Okay I just saw firefox advertises nice Collections now! But their privacy selection is… veeery lacking. But its a start
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