Mozilla isn't doing anything to Firefox. The Anonym purchase you linked to was literally to acquire a technology they developed which would, if implemented web-wide, end the dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion that is the current paradigm where a few dozen large companies track everything everyone does on the internet all the time. "Privacy preserving" isn't just a buzzword in that article - privacy is actually preserved, and the companies involved (including Mozilla) learn nothing at all about you - not your name, not an "anonymous" identifier, not your behavior, nothing. Moreso, Anonym didn't just create this technology, the entire company was purpose-founded to create this technology.

There's a lot of misinformation floating around about Mozilla in particular at the moment. Very little of the animosity they receive is truly deserved once you dig past the narrative and find out what Mozilla's actually up to, and why.

There are two choices, Chrome/Chromium and Firefox. Firefox is the good one.

Using a Chromium-based browser when you're bother by ad tech makes no sense whatsoever. Chromium is mostly developed by an ad company.

Vivaldi is a no go, it is proprietary software and also based in chromium. I've had similar thought process to yours and I am also using Floorp. Librewolf is great but too privacy hardened for the common lay user. These forks are cleaning the s*** out of firefox so no need to worry.

JPEG XL support in Waterfox is nice.

Floorp is just Firefox with some extensions, Vivaldi iirc is still chromium underneath etc etc

Your best option is just plain old Firefox configured the way you like it

There are a couple of new "from the ground up" browsers being developed at the moment but they aren't ready from what I understand

Floorp and Zen are to Firefox what Vivaldi is to Chrome.

They provide a better UI and other features and strip out a lot of the bad stuff from the parent browser.

But fundamentally, Floorp and Zen and Vivaldi would not continue very long if the upstream decided to suddenly stop producing code, or altered their codebase in a significant manner. (This is what killed Palemoon and Seamonkey). This is always a threat.

So really, it's a shit situation for browsers right now. Just choose a browser engine and then pick whatever UI you like the most on top of it.

I'm optimistic that Servo turns out to be the new Mozilla without repeating its mistakes. It should be the reference implementation browser upon which everything will rebase and it should remain non-profit. This was the original goal of open source Mozilla 25 years ago but then the techbro crew rolled in and started grifting.

(I'm also aware that WebKit still exists but Gnome Web is seemingly the only browser built with it and there are no extensions).

Today the Mozilla Corporation is just a place for the already wealthy to funnel money into their golden parachutes. It's a grift. Personally I think it's time to move on. Last week I pulled the plug, deleted my ~/.mozilla directory, so for the first time in a quarter century I don't have anything Mozilla-related installed.

None of the forks are immune to Mozilla enshittifing the engine itself.

Browser engines are complicated beasts, the w3c specifications are thousands of pages and a proper engine would have to implement it all.

It's the reason why not a single chromium fork is able to maintain manifest v2 in defiance of Google, because they would have to then maintain the engine themselves for the most part

Using a Firefox clone saves you the hassle of manually remove all the stupid annoyances and user tracking Mozilla enables by default. But that’s basically it. Except a preconfigured setup and a new name and logo pretty much nothing is different.

Vivaldi is just Chromium with a non-free UI.

Mullvad or librewolf both have ublock, add noscript, shelter, privacy badger

That's some clean internet but does require some skills using esp noscript

Nothing questionable that Mozilla does can affect the forks, as long as the forks have enough manpower to sustain themselves. There are, in fact, a few examples of projects with questionable leadership getting abandoned by their userbase, as everyone migrates to the fork.

I think what you need to worry about is whether the fork you're using has enough momentum and developer time that it's going to stay alive. That's a concern whether or not you have a concern that the central leadership is going to do something obscene.

I've tried many but waterfox has been my home since earlier this year. it comes configured out of the box with about the privacy settings I'd normally use, as well as my preferred userchrome built in.

So I'm considering switching browsers for the third (Is it the third?) time.

I don't think switching browsers is a big deal. Obviously switching every day would be a burden and being forced to switch is annoying, but I don't think the switch has to be a big all or nothing.

I do think Firefox or one of it's derivatives are probably the best choice, but I'd say be flexible. I use Firefox for the majority of my mobile browsing, but Chime sneaks in depending on the task. On my laptop I use Chrome most of the time, but I've also got Firefox open for others. Perhaps that's insane, but it works for me.

If you like Firefox, keep using Firefox. If you want to try a derivative, test them out. If they suck in 6 months, try something new. Try a bunch of new things.

At the end of the day the best option is the browser experience you like best.

Since the discussion has come up, let me ask this here.

I have been using Mull for sometime now. It's all good but are there any forks of Firefox that are like chromium forks eg Cromite? Cromite is really good as it offers a ton of extra features too. Mull is great as far as privacy is concerned but I want few features as well. Especially if I could change the app logo and launch animation to stock Firefox that'd be great.