Firefoxes OSS Forks and Alternatives

General
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Hi!

Given the recent carfuffles, I think it id a good time to discuss the current state of Firefox forks and OSS builds.

I have been looking into these for a bit and have found the following:

Essentially, for Desktop use it seems to me that Librewolf is the best choice. I seems well maintained, gets quick updates from upstream and patches out any unwelcome code like telemetry, etc.

For desktop, Mullvad browser also exists, which seems great for privacy, but that makes if a bit too annoying for me to use as an everyday browser.

For mobile use, there are essentially F-Droids “Fennec” build and the Ironwolf project.

While Fennec seems trustworthy, there seem to be big delays between Firefox releases and their Fennec counterpart. (And it seems there are actually few reasons for those, since it essentially just a build without proprietary parts) - This is of course unfortunate, especially since most Firefox Releases also fix a lot of security problems…

On the other hand, Ironwolf seems much faster and also adds some hardening. However it is also a much smaller project, which makes me question its trustworthiness.

For these two I am very much undecided on what is ideal…

What are your opinions on this, have you been using one of these forks and what have your experiences been?

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What are “the recent carfuffles” referring to?

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I originally wanted to avoid that, since it has already discussed to bits on other platforms

Anyways, in short:

  • They removed the promise to never sell your data from their website;
  • They added TOS, containing a clause which gives them a (very loosly restricted) license to all data entered or uploaded into Firefox;

Just search “Mozilla TOS” and you’ll find the details on all of that.

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Personally data privacy is not as important for me but I have recently tested the Zen Browser. It has a nice UI :smiley: Also the Nyxt Browser now has an electron based version which makes it actually usable…

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I have been trying out LibreWolf which seems to work well. You can move over your firefox profile and get all your settings and stuff. One problem is that the Browsers browser redirector does not recognize it, I guess I have to add it manually to the config file, it should work.