A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox.
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No, I prefer default Firefox. The product is sound and doesn’t raise any actually security or privacy issues for me. A little bloated? Sure. But doesn’t really affect me to be honest.
I’ve played the custom fork game for a few years with Chrome - I’m not interested in lagging versions or random bugs any more, and because of that experience I now simply want things to work as expected and be updated frequently.
I was also looking for a fork. Major concern of such fork is, if I can trust the developers and package maintainers (in Linux), and if its up to date very close to original Firefox. That eliminates almost all forks. Librewolf was a candidate I would have installed and tried, but its missing a feature: it does not have builtin support for passwords. I know why its excluded and understand that. I know how to use KeePass application to store my passwords. But I personally want it in the browser builtin without any additional applications.
BTW no, my reply is not a request for alternatives. I just wanted to point out a missing feature in Librewolf.
I use Librewolf but have enabled firefox sync on it. Just don’t like the AI features in Firefox 150 and don’t need an in browser VPN. So far it’s been usable. I also use helium browser for when I’m feeling minimalist or a site doesn’t play nice with something that isn’t chromium.
If you already use Mullvad VPN, I strongly recommend using Mullvad Browser for any task that doesn't require signing into an account to do like quick web searches.
For everything else, I recommend Librewolf if you care about privacy. I heard Zen Browser is good, but I never got the appeal of using vertical tabs since I already have years upon years of muscle memory of having tabs be layed out normally. Maybe there's another niche of Zen I'm not aware of? Not sure.
vertical tabs have been a life changer, but you don't need zen for that anymore, firefox has it natively (thank allah). but i also use a 1440p monitor so im perfectly fine with losing a little screen real estate, but that + removing the bookmarks bar makes it look so slick and imho is way more intuitive since the horizontal tabs eventually clump up and you lose track of what tab is what whereas the vertical one is always clear but you can also indent groupings. highly recommend giving it an honest shot but obv you do you
I have been using Zen as my main for over a year, and it has some random things beyond defaulting to vertical tabs (which was one of the reasons I tried it out since all of the extensions for them always felt wonky to me). Even lets you drag the window around like you do with horizontal tab bar (much easier to find free space to grab without accidentally pulling a tab into a new window for me). Some Chromium browsers also do this. So that does mess with my muscle memory when I switch over to FF and need to move the window and can't.
One kind of nice thing they have is that their version of "Peek" called "glance" kind of loads a page on top of a page without opening a whole new tab. It is kind of wonky in some links work fine, while others will just continue to the page in the original tab and need to press alt when clicking. Might be kind of a "it's just a new tab with extra steps" thing for some folks, but has been something that I have found nice to have.
Also had split tabs before they were added to FF if I remember correctly. Along with having "workspaces" that can have their own pinned tabs and and extra higher layer of pinned tabs above those. They look kind of like the boxes that are present if pinning tabs on current FF but did it first.
Outside of that, I think they managed to make the "look" of the browser better (another personal taste thing). Though FF has gotten some of the "look" closer to Zen.
Nothing "ground breaking" if you are already happy with FF. Just a pretty solid fork for people that aren't looking for something super hardened like Librewolf or even Mullvad. Early days updates had a chance of borking your GUI layout on big releases, but haven't had any issues with it in like 8 or 9 months. Overall the updates when I first started using it kind of reminded me of how early days of FF would actually excite me with obvious changes (not just GUI/UX) that felt like upgrades. This might be a non-starter for folks that prioritize GUI/UX staying more rigidly the same. Which is very valid.
Librewolf, it’s got better anti-fingerprinting, still lets you define your own search engines, and never implemented AI (at least last I checked).
I still use Firefox for when certain sites have a hissy fit with Librewolf’s safeguards (banking, health insurance, etc.) but otherwise it’s my standard.
I hope I get to keep using Firefox in a world where chrome becomes the defacto browser on all mainstream platforms like ie once was.
in a world where chrome becomes the defacto browser
This is already the case.
its also fast .its a 10/10 browsing experiance for sure .
Yes. Zen Browser. Its fantastic once your brain adjusts to vertical tabs.
Vertical tabs are fine, but they went full retard with the tab syncing update. They totally destroyed my trust in the project by enforcing that workflow on everyone at first and made multiple windows totally pointless.
I prefer vertical tabs. Don't kill me!
No. I just use the default. The forks are typically far behind... I tend to use the nightly builds. Cuz I like to find bugs and document them. :)
Hey you're willing to help out so I have nothing bad to say about you using vanilla Firefox.
I haven't had a good enough reason to move to a fork. Most things I don't like can be changed in about:config.
Librewolf on desktop and tablet, and Iceraven on Android.
I changed Ironfox for Iceraven as it has better compatibility and personalization.
I do use Floorp.
It is, by far, the most customizable and power-user friendly Firefox fork, and it has zero telemetry by default, so I do prefer it over vanilla Firefox because of that.
I also value its focus in performance.
What's performance like? I found it to be very slow the last time I tried it.
I'm in the market for one