turn off the promoted shortcuts, remove the unwanted default pins. takes just a few seconds, and firefox will remember your choices, unlike some browsers.

You can use forks if you want, but you can also turn that stuff off altogether.

Most famously TOR is a Firefox fork.

Yes, Chromium flavours vs Firefox flavours is not healthy.

It's less unhealthy than a defacto Google monopoly though.

It's impossible to build a new web browser... At least until someone proves otherwise.

There have been a few bad signs over the years.

Most striking was the "Looking Glass" plugin. This was a Mr. Robot (popular TV show at the time) promotional plugin that would alter the behavior of a few tie-in websites as part of an ARG. Besides that it was "harmless", though had a vague description rather than saying what it was.

It was pushed by default to users using their user study framework. It was launched quietly enough and without going through the normal process. Even a lot of firefox devs didn't realize it until the press blew up.

And one of the responses to the push back was:

we heard from some of our users that the experience we created caused confusion

Despite Firefox leadership and marketing being the ones who were confused about the proper way to use their own user study framework, or avoid launching bad changes.

Aside: Mozilla also only just stopped accepting cryptocurrency donations in 2022, despite ostensibly caring about the environment and the internet.

Overall Firefox is still pretty good, despite being under-invested in by Mozilla, but if you use it you should recommend that at the end of the day there's a lot of corporate influence in it right now.

Well, you do get Firefox flavours. There are a ton of forks available, many which are very privacy-centric, such as Fennec or Mull on mobile.

Except that it uses chromium which contributes to the Google dominance of web standards

🙄

the only reasonable way to interact with the web is to write a shell script that mails the source to each page you try to view to the 2001 laptop you insist on using even in spite of freer modern options, I said, reaching for delicious foot skin to chew

@swlabr @dgerard curl? Coward. I wrote my own client using awk, head and date

Can you give me 10 mormillion iq in exchange for 10 morbillion cents ?

Nope. Vivaldi is an excellent chromium-based browser with a ton of features built in that would be extensions on chrome or FF.

It's made by devs who left Opera after it started getting scummy.