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Not sure what you mean by Zen being a skin. Its a fork in the same way Librewolf and Waterfox are forks.
Firefox because I don’t fuck around. ublock origin, betterfox, and nextdns. My config ensures there is that one site I need to use ungoogled-chromium for, once a month.
Firefox. Equally concerned as well.
Looking into Librewolf and Waterfox now!
Long time Firefox user. Installed Librewolf today and so far so good. I used Firefox sync to get all my settings, bookmarks, open tabs, etc. back. At some point I will probably find an alternative yo Firefox sync but it’ll do for the time being.
The only thing that sucks about it is some sites just flat out don’t work well. For example, in Librewolf I cannot login to my banks website. The site loads, but the login just hangs. Firefox it works immediately.
I believe Librawolf defaults to “strict” fingerprinting blocking. Try setting it to moderate and see if that works with your bank
OK! You’ve had 1 hour to check them out. :D What’s the difference between the two? They’re both Firefox forks, right?
I found a decent answer here https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/18g8tez/what_am_i_gaining_if_i_switch_from_librewolf_to/
That mod sums up a lot that I found. I don’t know the answer because they both have odd downsides.
Yes they’re both forks!
Didn’t Waterfox get bought out by an ad company?
yes and then sold and FOSS again!
My issue is that while i am concerned about privacy, i’m more concerned with security patching. And none of these smaller browsers have the resources to turn around security fixes as quickly as firefox or chrome.
Firefox is the least of the concerns as long as we have the config options to disable anything deemed not privacy-respecting.
This is the only good critique in this entire thread (thank you) BUT librewolf is on the exact same version as Firefox. It appears their updates are pretty fast.
Would you have config recommendations beyond the obvious?
I’m probably not the best person to talk to about Firefox hardening. Because… I don’t. I only go as far as using firefox containers.
My threat model is to counter:-
- ISP data logging
- government filters
- region blocking
- hyper-personalised marketing
I use a VPN for the first three, and I use Ublock, and don’t use google/meta/twitter/amazon/ebay for last.
I personally believe it is impossible to escape fingerprinting unless you’re on Tor Browser, but using Tor paints you as a target in my country per the first item above.
I also work in financial services, and am a user of my company’s product. We do significant ‘device intelligence’ and ‘behavioral intelligence’ on client devices, auth attempts, and actions taken in sessions. Log in too many times from too many different (seemingly) devices, user agents, IP addresses, regions, etc and it increases our customer risk assessment of you. Tick over a threshold and your account falls under enhanced customer due diligence. Tick over another threshold, and we’ll set auto-blocks until we can investigate. I assume that any other financial services provider worth their salt would do the same to counter fraud, money laundering, and meeting sanctions.
I basically use a split tunnel VPN. VPN traffic for general browsing, email, etc. And looking as much as a regular user as possible when accessing financial services, government websites, etc.
And yeah, agree LibreWolf is great. Only downside for the average user is the lack of an auto-updater. So the only tweak i’d do with LibreWolf would be to set up a cron/systemd timer to update it nightly.
Firefox. And Thunderbird. And donate to Mozilla.
Don’t really see the point in using a fork that, by the time you boil it down, just takes Firefox’s work and then releases it later.
I want a Google and Apple alternative and I’d rather support it at the top of the chain.
Using a firefox derivative I dont think is a good option as it will always be behind on security updates… I guess I am going to wait until the Orion Beta / software comes to Linux which was announced recently. Orion is a WebKit based browser that is on iphone / mac
I still use firefox despite their questionable leadership, for one major reason: it prevents Google from setting whatever web standards they want. Sites that aren’t standards compliant will usually still work in Chromium-based browsers, but they will break in Firefox, and then I can report the bugs.
Firefox. Google removed a valuable addon from their store without justifiable reason and kept it removed because there’s not sufficient backlash.
The addon is AdNauseam. It’s an improvement on uBlock Origin that clicks adds in addition to hiding them.
Ubo prevents ad resources from being loaded, not loading / rendering ads at all makes a major difference in battery and bandwidth usage in my experience. Most notably bandwidth usage drops by %90 in most extreme cases.
I use Mullvad Browser. It’s maintained in coordination with the Tor Project, and is essentially the Tor Browser with Tor itself stripped out. Same browser fingerprinting protections, however, among other things.
This is my lead contender now that Firefox is shitting the bed. Any downsides?
Mull browser is deprecated, Ironfox is the community fork
Mull Browser != Mullvad Browser. Just to be clear. I’m adding this context because your reply was regarding a thread on Mullvad Browser, and you replied with details about Mull.
For anyone else reading this comment: Mull browser is from DivestOS and deprecated. Firefox fork. Mull was forked by the community into IronFox.
Mullvad Browser is still alive and kicking, developed by Mullvad the VPN provider. Developed in partnership with Tor Browser, also a fork of Firefox.
You are absolutely correct, I apologize.
No prob at all dude! I just wanted to add the additional context in case some other persons stumbled upon these comments, were confused, and so they can get some more information on different browser options out there. Candidly, I only learned about Mull vs Mullvad Browser this week when I was researching what non-chromium browser to switch to next.
Well, the hardening, just as with Tor Browser, does break some sites. It comes preinstalled with NoScript and uBlock Origin, the former of which you will either have to learn how to use or disable, depending on your wants for privacy. While it doesn’t include some of the anti-features of base Firefox, it is still based on Firefox so it will have similar performance for similar tasks.
Personally, I use Mullvad for most of my browsing, and Firefox for a few specific things (like staying logged into site long-term and such).
It’s available as a flatpak via Flathub for an easy installation, otherwise you can check https://mullvad.net/en/browser/linux for distro-specific installation instructions.
Firefox, while I dislike their new FAQ and TOS I build it from source and the TOS does not apply.
I wish they would make Firefox Sync a self hostable product that they also host for you for like 5 bucks a month. I would pay for it (or any other way to directly give money to FX instead of Mozilla) like I do for Bitwarden.
Aren’t their services you can use to sync bookmarks and such like Floccus?
Yes, but I actually would pay them for their services if they guarantee me that they will use that money to improve Firefox and Firefox services. I want to be a premium user of Firefox, but instead of trying to monetize their core userbase they annihilate them.
I actually like their advertising business idea and their other services and I understand that they need money but is whay they are doing right now really the best way?
Librewolf mainly because that’s the Firefox-type browser that comes with my distro (IceCat is there too, but it’s based on ESR and not frequently updated).
I was thinking of switching to one of the Firefox forks but have only tried Waterfox so far and not super impressed. I guess Firefox is the best out of the bad bunch until I find an alternative I like.
Librewolf looks exactly the same to me
Librewolf is pretty much standard hardened Firefox. So you should feel right at home with that one
Interesting. What did you dislike about waterfox?
The UI and dialogue boxes look a bit dated, not sure why
Ah fair enough, can’t argue with personal preference.
You sure you weren’t using waterfox classic though? That has a more dated UI than the current version.I personally use librewolf anyway, but waterfox is still a pretty decent step up from Firefox, privacy-wise.
Ungoogled chromium. It’s faster then firefox in nearly everything I test, doesn’t have stupid issues like not rendering gradients properly.
I use firefox on my desktop for one single reason, and that’s because there is literally nothing for chromium, that is remotely close to simple tab groups.
Vivaldi. Edge for testing. FF dev edition is garbage. Glitchy, inconsistent, and blunt.
Fx*
I use Floorp, it’s balanced well between looks and privacy, you can’t even enable data collection if you wanted to
