You know the problem I have with Librewolf? -- Fuckall nobody knows how to spell it.

The beauty of Firefox is that even the densest idiot knows how to spell those two words. And with attention spans the equivalent of a gnat, people need to have things simplified for them as much as humanly possible.

Fortunately enough, Firefox is about the only one with a renderer that isn't controlled by Google, but - even now they're shifting to a pro-advertising stance and backing off of the privacy orientation that they took just a year or two ago.

Almost 20 years and I've never needed a Chromium browser for anything. I'm sorry you were forced to use such garbage ass software.

As if installing and using something else means you can't have Chrome lying around for that one stupid website.

In what situation do you need one?

I've been using Firefox for over a decade and have literally never once needed to open a different web browser. For anything, ever. This is a very common complaint that tons of people seem to have that I have never seen happen even once out in the wild.

There's still Vivali which is Chromium based and still supporting V2 extension (like uBlock) until June 2025. Its not a full fix, but its a stay of execution. That said, I'm a FF primary user.

Chromium isn't as problematic as Chrome.

If people used other browsers, then the market share would change and this would become less and less of a problem.

I've had that once, as well as some websites running inexplicably slow on FF.

I changed my user agent to a recent Chrome one and that solved it issue.
Moral of the story? Websites are discriminating.

constantly, to be honest

I use firefox but I have to change my useragent string to chrome with an extension to get YouTube working.

Might be worth having a look to see if it fixes your issues

Yeah, I have noticed it too. I sometimes just use mpv instead to play YouTube videos instead, but that also has its limitations

Oh? I noticed that issue last couple of days using invidious on librewolf, and thought it was YT doing invidious shenanigans again.

This is my experience. They are just taking your default agent and throwing up a message because they can’t be assed to do minimal testing in FF.

Some of the older stuff is indeed that way, but there are more and more features which Firefox can’t support. Web-based custom keyboard configuration tools, tools to flash phone firmware, and one niche MiniDisc tool all are chrome-only things I’ve had to open Chrome to use

Yep. There are plenty of other ways to do something that don't require selling out.

What about ad blocking services where you would need them, such as browsing into an ad farm of a website?

Teams works in Firefox, I sadly have to use it almost every day interacting with clients who use teams for comms.

Yeah, but that’s my point, not everything works in Firefox now - even though admittedly it’s relatively niche stuff - and my prediction is that if we continue on our current course Firefox will either have to compromise their commitment to privacy and security or will become more and more unusable.

Some of us switched to Chrome when it was legitimately better, but are back now.

Uh-huh. Which uses Mozilla's renderer. So, all those upstream commits in Libewolf's code base are coming from where, exactly?

That's because the OG visionaries of tech are gone, and have been replaced by MBAs and techbros.

Yeah I work in tech and I'm the only one that cares enough to use Firefox. All my colleagues use chrome or chrome with makeup.
Maybe ad blocking will be what broke the camel's back, but I doubt more than a few will care enough to switch.

when you ask them, don't only mention ublock, but the privacy aspects of only allowing the browser of the largest data collection fueled ad company

I have a similar issue at my school as well. Chrome is the only allowed browser, and each of us have to use our own school email as our login session in chrome, so we get that much of user space, and that actually works quite decently. I had ublock installed on my user account so far, but if it breaks, I'll just have to suffer. Although, the real problem is that the school I work in uses some digital books that only work 100% in Chrome, and all show some form of weird behaviour in non-chromiun based browsers. And there's a 0 chance they are changing it.

And the only place I can think of where uBlock is not getting neutered anytime soon is in LibreWolf.

this is something i cannot understand. my brain would fking die from the seizures the modern, ad infested web induces.

Most people are stupid, myopic imbeciles that arent bothered by anything until it personally affects them.

Then they'll howl like wolves at the moon about the great injustice of it all, and how could anyone allow this to happen.

I know people who I thought brilliant until they said they were voting for trump. Way to shatter my opinion of you, jagoff.

blocked? that sounds weird, can you give a few examples?

as a chromium browser user - i've been meaning to switch to firefox, and i know it'll take me maybe a day, but it feels like so much workkkk. In a similar fashion i've been meaning to switch to Linux for ages too. I guess it just hasn't gotten bad enough for me to take action

as long as my adblockers & script blockers work, i'm not forced to upgrade to win11, and win10 still has security updates i don't think it's pushing on my discomfort buttons strong enough. I know the day will come, but like with a lot of things in my life - why do something today when i can do it tomorrow?

Chrome devtools and debugger are awesome

Not for mine, they couldn’t make the switch even though everything was the same

I even changed the icon to Chrome’s

Same

It's fine, there are open source projects underway. If any one of them gains traction, it could happen to Mozilla what happened to Unity with Godot. Here's to hoping they get their act straight sooner tan later.

How to improve online advertising: Step 1: remove all online advertising

People completely misunderstand this feature (which is only a temporary prototype anyways), and I think that’s entirely Mozilla’s fault. They do a really poor job explaining it.

Usually ad networks implement sophisticated tracking, which works in a highly invasive way. They need the telemetry to watch their campaigns. Firefox now offers the option to collect a minimal amount of data for them and inform the network indirectly.

This is a good thing for the end user. The trackers are not needed, you gain privacy. Disabling the option makes it so you’re instantly tracked MORE.

Mozilla shouldn’t have staged this as an opt-out of the new system. You actually OPT-IN to networks running their old scripts on your machine to collect your telemetry:

[ ] Allow ad networks to run their own telemetry

(Beta functionality, some advertisers may still run their own trackers, even when this option is disabled.)

That would be the same thing, but communicate what it’s doing.

The fact that advertisers like Meta might be on board with this should be exciting to people. That they are even considering giving up so much data and now only receive a single number of impressions per campaign is very unexpected.

Also, none of this matters if you block ads anyways. If you don’t load the ad, neither the networks script runs its telemetry, nor does Firefox increase the counter for the campaign id.

If you're wondering what's every involved party's gain in this, an interesting read is the IPA white paper, where the overall design targets for the system are stated: Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA), 2022

In particular:

In designing IPA, we set out to find a win-win-win solution for cross platform attribution measurement that met our goals across privacy, utility, and competition.

• ⁠Privacy: data collected about the user is minimized, protecting the end-users privacy. • ⁠Utility: the telemetry process is unified and simplified across all platforms, reducing the costs • ⁠Competition: it will be an open, standardized system, accessible to everyone

Just to be clear, I dislike the way Mozilla rolled this out. They already have a "Studies" checkmark that people can enable if they wish to participate in stuff like this. That Mozilla treats this prototype differently is actually not ok, and breaks trust with their users. But as far as I'm concerned, this is a completely separate topic from the update content, which I wish to be successful.

Opera ditched their browser engine. They use chromium now.

My biggest gripe with Firefox is that if I'm too fast and start typing into the address bar when it first launches, it'll clear the auto text selection and start prepending my input onto the URL.

Same for me. Cool my commonly used Websites load 0.05ms faster - idc. Still gonna use firefox

theres seal on android, ive used it on waydroid but thats pretty silly

There's like 20 guis

Hell yeah. Another vote for Seal!

The downloading on freetube is so bad as to be functionally broken, and based on what reading I did to try to get it good, it sounds like it's gonna stay how it is forever.

Basically it should be considered a lie to advertise freetube as having a working download function, even if it can technically do it. I wish it were better because it's a neat little program for viewing without mucking up recommendations!

Nah, man. I point a Betamax camcorder on a tripod at my 4K, 16bpp graphics workstation monitor to make sure I really capture all those pixels.

Why would I use multiple browsers if I can achieve nearly everything in one? I would much rather use Edge or Safari for everything than Firefox plus another browser.

Ad block lite does a good enough job without me changing to be honest, again the point being is that there are more problems with me using Firefox as a primary browser than ad blocking benefits.

I guess, but the comment is a direct assertion against Firefox growing from this change. You sort of prove my point by suggestion another sub variant of the chrome ecosystem.

it's not literally just an analogy how a single browser guided by private corporate interests is treated as the only standard

Chromium based era is what I think we had around 2012 and today. But lately Chromium is not exactly equal to Google Chrome now they been getting divergent.

AdGuard is not a DNS blocker

I was talking about AdGuard, not AdGuard Home.

No, you're wrong.

That's true, Mozilla's vision of ads is much better than Google's. But is there any reasons it will be one or the other? Is there any reason to believe that Mozilla's ads will displace Google's ads? Or are we just going to end up with more ads: Google's very bad ads plus Mozilla's less bad ads.

[edit] Just to be clear - I don't want to sound any Mozilla. Mozilla hasn't actually acted on this yet. Firefox is still good right now, and will continue to be good at least in the short term. It's just that Mozilla have stated their intention to work on making ad systems. So when that actually happens, it will be bad.

I'd be really, really surprised if a bunch don't bother doing anything. Maybe most.

Chromebook won’t let you get browser Firefox unless you switch to Linux but not all Chromebook’s are able to get Linux because of hardware. I was one of those people.

I think they are wondering if one extension can use both v2 and v3 APIs at once? As in whether v3 APIs will be "backported" to allow v2 extensions to use them

Yeah I was being obtuse

I would wager that at least some of them do not confuse effect for cause.

aka the "extinguish" phase I believe

I relate to your Windows comment. There was a point where I was that person with a bunch of different tools to modify my OS exactly how I like it, and then I realize I’m just doing more work. If I’m willing to do that work anyway, I might as well have an OS that is more malleable.

How dare anyone suggest that there's a way to accomplish something!

I've seen countless of those tweaks throughout the years. You can harangue the people using them all you want, but at the end of the day they're hooked on a powerful drug. And they'll do anything to keep their supply.

No, enterprises would use the Google admin console as described here.

The above is for a single machine, applied locally.

Only until June 2025 apparently, leave chromium behind already guys.

IIRC Mozilla doubled down on their v2 support when Chrome announced the shift to v3. But then the Chrome monopoly judgment came down and with it a lot of speculation on Google dropping their funding of Mozilla, so maybe Mozilla could be changing its tune to either protect or find a replacement for that funding? Nothing of substance is happening yet, it's still all speculation, but I do hope nothing like that does happen.

Yeah, the "lite" version should only be in the Chromium Store and its for support of the garbage better know as manifest v3 that is better off going to the scrapheap.

@Amir @scout yes!

Seems like others in my world think similar as me so I'm good with my choice. You do you though. I was simply just recommending that maybe people should look beyond Firefox. If you don't it doesn't bother me. I'll still sleep fine tonight.

https://blog.mozilla.org/...