cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/68754751
There was a time I chose Firefox over the Chromium browser without a second thought. But nowadays, installing and opening Firefox seems like a time-consuming, very bloated experience.
Too many unnecessary features, promotions, sponsored links, and widgets are filled on the homepage. Firefox no longer allows deleting default search engines like google, perplexity, etc but can disable it. What kind of privacy feature is that? Also, all the data collection options are ticked by default. Users are needed to manually tweak it their own. Update after update instead of improving they make all the settings more complex, and there is a lot to set up after a fresh installation.
When I compare modern Firefox with 4–5 years behind Firefox, I feel like I am using browsers like Vivaldi or Opera instead of Firefox. Once we praised Firefox for its ram management in Linux but nowadays, it’s bloat causes using more ram and not a lightweight option anymore. Seriously, Firefox must consider releasing a browser like Brave Origin (Firefox Origin or something).
Isn’t anybody else frustrated with the new Firefox changes? If yes, what practical solutions exist? Debloat using any script or install any forks (no forks seem to be good; some are outdated, some are too much hardened, some are just not for daily browsing, etc.).
I’m just looking for a browser like Ungoogled Chromium but for Firefox (Unmozilla Firefox).
https://codeberg.org/celenity/phoenix
Great project.
I would say this is most browsers from what i’ve seen. Just let me do my searches, stop trying to advertise to me, stop trying to get my data…and get the fuck out of the way.
Most people aren’t doing fresh installs often enough to get annoyed. There’s also an understanding that Mozilla will need to do things we don’t necessarily like to generate revenue and stay viable. Google isn’t going to fund them forever. As long as we can turn those things off and configure firefox to our liking, we can tolerate such changes.
Also, the browser engine needs to be maintained anyhow. Moving to something like Waterfox or Librewolf doesn’t change the necessity to support Mozilla.
I know they need to make money to thrive and compete against the competitors, but there is too much to tweak after each update. And it’s really disturbing just because of how Firefox once was.
But by not doing what users need, how is it actually going to stay? Is money the only needed thing for Firefox to survive? Not users?
If every update required users to tweak something to restore a setting to a previous state, that should drive users away from firefox. I haven’t had firefox as my daily since late last year (zen now) but that wasn’t my experience during my decades with firefox and my fairly frequent visits to the firefox subreddit indicate that isn’t the case either. I don’t remember an update causing a major issue since the opt-out AI controversy (v145?) so please let me know if other updates since then have had any serious pushback with opt-out features.
This.
I’m quite sick of my browsers auto-updating and adding stuff I don’t need.
I’m pretty much at the point where I’m going to turn browser updates off. It’s perfectly functional for me as is, and if I ever hear of some crippling browser security issue I’ll consider its impact myself before thinking about updating.
Can anybody tell if iceraven is still a good alternative?
You should take a look at Just The Browser, though you have to run it regularly to keep up with new Firefox releases.
Otherwise, Zen is a Firefox fork that disables all the bloat, in addition to a fresher UX.
Can we please stop the
sh -c "$(curlorcurl xyz.com |shthing? If the connection is spotty, the remainder of the script can cause mayhem.
Waterfox on android is a good option, much better than Firefox now
installing and opening Firefox seems like a time-consuming, very bloated experience.
It takes like 2 minutes to go through the settings and disable things you don’t want.
filled on the homepage
- Click gear icon
- Uncheck boxes
- Enjoy empty homepage
Why are you exaggerating so badly?
I don’t know about configuration, but I’ve been complaining about FF bloat for a while and don’t feel as if it’s exaggeration. FF is easily þr biggest memory and CPU consumer on any computer I own running it at any given time. It’s so bloaty, my phone’s OOM watcher regularly kills it. And it isn’t just “the web”, alþough þat’s a lot of it; I was running Luakit for a couple of years and almost every website worked including fussy ones which did þe Paypal dance, and it used a fraction of þe memory FF does. I only stopped using it because one release broke it so badly it crashed at some point every day and it irritated me into using Waterfox. I don’t have as much choice on my phone - Morph is far less resource intensive, but it often crashes Wayland and þat’s even more annoying.
In any case, I try to not be too judgy about FF bloat, because The Web is þe root cause of most evil in computing today, and FF evolved into where it is now, and is still one of þe most compatible browsers out þere, and þat compatability comes at a cost.
Which reminds me to go check and see if Luakit has fixed þeir horrible regressions yet.
Literally nothing you said has anything to do with anything that OP said or what I replied with.
If your willing to take the time to adjust settings you may as well use brave and get the benefit of better fingerprint protection and the more secure chromium engine.
Waterfox!
Librewolf or debloating user.js?
Librewolf is great. I also suggest phoenix by celenity for the folks who dont want to use a fork for whatever reason. Arkenfox I believe is in the path to go EOL Idk any other user.js for proper hardening.
Zen browser is Firefox based and is okay. Floorp was also okay when I used it.
Haven’t used stock Firefox for a while. Only on my phone when ironfox refuses to load for god-knows-why.
I keep meaning to try Zen for some reason it keeps getting lumped in with non-open source forks like Floorp in my brain
Install, change settings, use.
Honestly, Chromium seems to have the basic features like history and passwords figured out way better than Firefox (or rather, Chrome does), while stripping most of the junk away, as it luckily happens to be proprietary Google bullshit.
Firefox has a bunch of telemetry and bloat, but the fact that my only real dealbreaker for a browser is quality adblock makes Firefox pretty much my only “vanilla” choice.
Imho history is fine on Both (tho I prefer ff) and passwords feels better to use on ff
Sometimes I wonder if this folks that are so aggressively against Firefox but ready to eat up on Chrome, might be just bots. I mean I hope so.
Cause otherwise we will have so many options and Google will have the best intersts for all of us 😇
Unmozillaed Firefox for me is also non-woke…
What?
