Kev wants to leave Firefox, and I don’t blame him. His post has quick links to a bunch of good resources explaining the decline of the once privacy and user-first client. For many people, my partner included, the latest AI sheningans is the last straw1.

Personally, I haven’t touched Firefox in a long time. My browser of choice on the Mac is Orion, which is kind of Safari on steroids with some nice additions (but also some annoying bugs), and on Linux, it’s Librewolf, which is a fork of Firefox. While reading Kev’s post and the others he pointed at, I learned of Waterfox, and even more polished fork of Firefox that comes with a mobile app. I tried it out, and it seems fine, but for some reason, it doesn’t work well with KeePassXC, which I use daily. I’m still checking why (I followed different solutions online, but no go so far).

Librewolf also has a few problems that I’m learning to work around. There’s an annoying font issue that seems to happen only in Kubuntu, my current distro. The way it blocks everything that seems to spy on me can break websites completely and prevent them from working, so using it for everyday errands on my Linux machine, which is also behind a VPN, is a horrible experience I don’t even bother with. For these things, I just give up and use the Mac and act like a “normal” human being who doesn’t care about privacy, because that’s the world we live in. I know there are some options in between. I could try a Chromium-based browser like Vivaldi or Brave, which do work better… and maybe I’ll resort to that.

Meanwhile, I use Edge for work on my Linux computer (as well as on the Mac), and I’m overall happy with how it handles syncing my bookmarks, history, and some saved passwords between the devices. I don’t like Microsoft products, but I think Edge is one of the least messed-up ones, and I have to use it for work. It is Chromium-based, which makes me think that something like Brave might just be the compromise for me, since both Librewolf and Waterfox are broken for me in their own individual ways.

And then there’s the Zen browser, of course. It looks a lot like Arc, which I did like for a brief period, before I gave up on it. I like the idea of a non-Chromium browser, though with what Firefox’s doing, I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore. I am hoping that because it’s free and open source, it will stick around for longer and stick to its core values. All in all, that’s usually the case for FOSS software, though longer-term support and compatibility tend to be more of an issue.

Footnotes

1 Everyone is intrucing AI into everything under the sun, but Firefox, as once the “browser of the people” could have gained more popularity and traction if they went the opposite way. Instead, as Kev point out, it seems like the leadership overthere is trying really hard to do the opposite of what’s good for them and their users. It’s worth following up some of Kev’s links and do a bit of research to see just how much this has been their mantra for the last couple of years.