Waterfox is better, it’s open source, not based on chromium and has a split DNS resolution path through their own servers and cloudlfare. A few tweaks in about:config and it’s by far the best option out there.

the problem with Firefox AI implementation was more of a communication issue.

AI features should be opt in, not opt out. Every time it updates it also often turns those features back on (at least a couple times for me)

It’s a purity race to oblivion : people who know and care use Firefox. They switched away from the default and by that very action they are in the tiny minority who actually has a grasp at problems and dare try to do something about. They are vocal about it, put efforts into the process so they in general want “more” and “better” according to their own criteria. It doesn’t stop there though, once they have moved away for privacy or open source or sovereignty or whatever else, they want the other criteria and it won’t stop.

It is recursive though, people who care a lot about some criteria move away from Firefox, the now “mainstream” within that community, then use e.g. Waterfox or LibreWolf. You can see this in any community which moves away from the mainstream choice really. There is a vocal minority within the minority and they do have genuine reasons and concern.

Once you use LibreWolf I bet there are other forks, etc, etc.

For those people what Firefox is doing is actually very bad because it goes back to what they wanted to move away from.

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If you really need Chromium … just use Chromium?

It’s a private compnay, they don’t have to follow shareholders so it explains it

Basically they don’t have the manpower to maintain a whole Chromium fork that still supports manifest v2. Even if they kept it in for a while, every upstream change might break things on their end.

It sucks and it’s the main reason why I recently switched from Vivaldi to Floorp, at least on some of my machines. Vivaldi’s ad blocker just isn’t comparable to uBlock Origin.

That’s not hard to explain: it would require a ton of resources to maintain a fork with manifest v2, for a small usecase. Vivaldi is a small company compared to say Mozilla.

Plus the main usecase for v2, ad blockers, is already covered by their built in one.

Vivaldi is a proprietary Chromium reskin. Use Librewolf.

They have improved the UI quite a lot recently imo.

That being, it relies on the Chrome Web Store to install extensions. If Google themselves decided not to have something on that store and you’re using it on Vivaldi, well you’re SOL.

Note you can sideload extensions essentially. Google’s been fine afaik, but if they did suddenly go crazy it wouldn’t be that hard for Vivaldi and other chromium browsers to run their own store.

I’m the inverse. The amount of customization and power user features are what makes it my daily driver, though I agree the reliance on Google isn’t good. Also having their sync data stored e2e encrypted with my own private key is a nice touch. Though if a heavily customizable fork of Firefox with features like that was available I’d likely switch. I don’t have the time to maintain a highly customized userchrome.css that could break with every update, unfortunately

just as “most users” don’t want ai baked into their browser, “most users” probably don’t use any addons, or use only one–an adblocker. ad blocking (with configurable filter lists) is built into vivaldi already, no separate addon needed. works well-enough.

that said, the chromium base and its dependency on google to provide the ‘addon store’ is vivaldi’s main detractor, because google has been putting the screws to anything that threatens their business as a data harvesting advertising company.

vivaldi does have some features not found in other browsers or other chromium browsers (excepting some in common with opera). the one i appreciate the most is the configurable toolbars, both items and their positions… similar to how you can configure firefox’s main toolbar.

i do occasionally need a chromium browser for specific tasks. vivaldi is the one i use. usually as a ‘portable’ installation that is easiest to trash when i’m done. it’s also the one i use for a couple streaming sites because it does use chrome addons (but also is not chrome, either).

Some of us are stuck with Firefox despite their interestingly bad choices and historical lack of fulfilling promises on their own behalf. There are still key advantages with Firefox than most browsers.

That’s why I use Librewolf/Ironfox on my laptop/phone. All the benefits of Firefox and none of the half-baked promises or bad decisions!

I feel like I could have written this comment word for word. But luckily you already did so now I only have to write this short one.

Yeah, it’s a good Chromium browser. I used it for a few years before switching to Firefox browsers. If you have to use Chromium, I’d recommend it. If you can though Firefox has been far more enjoyable (I’m using Zen currently).

And for people like me with a problem closing tabs, the memory management is excellent, killing off anything that hasn’t been used in a while.

I’m on librewolf just now having used vivaldi for about three years as my daily. Great browser, I just fancied swapping the chromium problems for gecko problems for a while :D

It’s my secondary browser. Pretty much just for HDR on YouTube. Firefox still can’t do it.

Idk about not resource intensive but it does browser things happily.

The arrogance in this statement, lol. :)

I mean sure, I get it, but what I dont get is why a company would have paid engineers working on a product and give it away for free if that’s their only income stream? How will they pay their engineers? Pay for office space? Make a profit?

It’s funny that people expect free stuff but complain when their data is being sold to ad agencies. :)

Like, shit, why can’t I sit here on my throne and have companies give me free stuff and maybe I will decide to use it from the kindness of my heart. :)