Forks.

I finally switched from Firefox to librewolf, which is a privacy focused fork of it. It’s basically Firefox with some of the iffy stuff ripped out, and with good default settings.

Firefox with proper settings is probably “fine” still, but the transition is super easy since it’s basically the same thing.

Creating a browser from scratch is a monumental task, ladybird is such a project which has been in progress since ~2022, and will probably take another couple before it's at beta. Optimistic release is 2028, or ~6 years of development.

I've moved to schizofox (NixOS) but there are plenty of other forks available which remove telemetry and other default behaviours from Firefox.

Chromium forks are another alternative however due to chromiums dominance in the browser space I'm reluctant to shoutout any forks.

Only other alternatives I know are either Safari if you're on an apple device or something like Links/Links2/Lynx if you don't mind text based browsers. Neither are convenient for their own reasons, but it's not like we have any other choices. At least not that I'm aware of.