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Thoughts on Firefox forks? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 3 days ago by ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml to c/technology@lemmygrad.ml

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Yesterday I accidentally wiped my Firefox profile. Upon creating a new one I was hit with the realisation of just how many shit defaults Firefox has. This made me consider using a fork which un-enshittifies Firefox.

There is only one that I know of, LibreWolf. Thankfully it seems actively maintained. So on Windows I have started using that for now. On Linux I still use Firefox because the enlightened repository maintainers don't allow any Firefox/Chromium forks and I don't wanna use Flatpak or pacakge it myself.

Are there any other forks worth considering?

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[–] Toes@ani.social 5 points 2 days ago

The official ESR branch. This version gets frozen in time and they only do security updates for it. Doesn't update often and works great.

[–] GrainEater@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

LibreWolf is good, just enable privacy.resistFingerprinting.letterboxing in about:config (they have binary repositories for Debian and some derivatives). There's also Arkenfox if you just want reasonable settings in Firefox

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I saw arkenfox a while back but I found the instructions confusing (there is no one line install command in the readm).

[–] rainn@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You can just move the user.js in your firefox profile, and read the wiki for tweaks

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 days ago

Thanks

[–] Kovpak@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Currently using the "Zen Browser", which is another Firefox fork. Uses BetterFox for its default settings, and has decent privacy features built in... At least compared to default Firefox.

It has tabs in the sidebar instead of the top (vertical tabs?). At first I didn't like it, but now I don't think I could live without it :). Feels a lot less cluttered.

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 days ago

Looks interesting. Thanks.

[–] multitotal@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

There's also GNU IceCat, which might be in your repo.

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Good suggestion but it's not in the repos. I might just change distro and try something like NixOS. https://voidlinux.org/packages/?arch=x86_64&q=icecat

[–] multitotal@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

the enlightened repository maintainers don’t allow any Firefox/Chromium forks

I thought you were talking about Void when you said that. I use it too. Someone packaged librewolf for void and maintainsa repo, it works: https://github.com/index-0/librewolf-void

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's good that this exists for now but I feel projects like this are a bit ephemeral. Often when the maintainer stops getting utility from these they abandon it. I would have preferred if they had created a librewolf-bin package from the precompiled binaries since those are easier to maintain and can often be updated via scheduled github actions. This project is missing several releases between the 129 and 130 ones.

I'll try it though. Worst case I will have to switch back to mainline Firefox.

[–] multitotal@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

He did all the heavy lifting though, writing the template and all that. Updating the package in the future shouldn't require much more than updating the source destination in the template file when a new version comes out.

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 days ago

I guess you are right. The patches seem to not have needed any updates in a month.