I’ll repeat my comment from yesterday on another Firefox thread:
In terms of open source there are really only Chromium- and Firefox-derived browsers (I’m disregarding projects like the still pre-alpha Ladybird here). With Chromium browsers, you’re still subject to Google’s whims in the long term, such as removal of V3 extension support. (I.e. a conceivable fork with V3 compatibility will inevitably become too difficult to keep up to date with the mainline.) If Mozilla dies, Firefox and derivatives will in all likelihood wither away as well. IMO there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, and also keeping them accountable and criticizing them where criticism is due. They are still roughly the good guys, even if sometimes misguided.
> IMO there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, and also keeping them accountable and criticizing them where criticism is due.
If there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, how do we keep them accountable? If they know that they're the only hope for a cross-platform browser that isn't developed by Google, then they know that any outrage is a bluff that can't have teeth because they're indispensable.
> They are still roughly the good guys, even if sometimes misguided.
There aren't any good guys here, there are just people doing people things.
Mozilla is more than sometimes misguided, they've been essentially permanently distracted from Firefox as the core mission for more than ten years now. Their organization is designed in a way that makes funding Firefox directly impossible, and they haven't made any moves to fix it. Instead they set up failed side project after failed side project and repeatedly alienate their core with ads, while insisting that donations couldn't possibly work in spite of the fact that Thunderbird clearly shows that they can—as long as the project is unshackled from the mess that is Mozilla.
It might well be that the best thing that could happen for Firefox would be for it to get evicted from Mozilla like Thunderbird was.
Do note that Thunderbird can afford to keep a relatively tiny team (compared to Firefox) because it stands on the shoulder of giants (Firefox) for its UI and HTML renderer. That Thunderbird is able to cover its expenses with donations really doesn't prove that Firefox will also be able to do so, but that doesn't excuse Mozilla from not even trying.
> failed side project after failed side project
Rust and MDN have been huge successes. Their mobile OS is still alive and kicking, although other people are making money from that now. They also put in a ton of resources into decreasing FF memory footprint as part of the failed mobile OS effort, which benefits all of us.
> If there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, how do we keep them accountable? If they know that they're the only hope for a cross-platform browser that isn't developed by Google, then they know that any outrage is a bluff that can't have teeth because they're indispensable.
Except they're not indispensable. They're now the fourth place browser in terms of market share on a good day, and dwindling. They need all the good will they can get, and this sort of discussion amongst their most hardcore audience is exactly what keeps them accountable.
You keep them accountable by calling them out in public, as with the recent ToS change, where it made them clarify and improve the new wording. Keep calling them out on stuff that isn’t acceptable.
> Firefox and derivatives will in all likelihood wither away as well
No, they won't. The community will pick them up and maintain them sensibly because there will be a need. The best thing that could happen to Firefox would be Mozilla dying.
If you disagree, you can look at decades of Linux being successful despite endless bellowing about how it couldn't survive until it did. It did because it fit a sorely needed open source operating system niche. BSD failed to meet that exactly because it was controlled at the time by selfish garbage organizations.
Linux is majorly being developed and maintained by paid company employees. What interest would companies have in maintaining Firefox? They don’t seem to be very interested in contributing to Firefox development today. Another data point is that Microsoft gave up on their original Edge browser engine because using Chromium was ultimately easier than chasing Chrome compatibility. Who will defend Firefox’s interests in WHATWG? In the best case, it would result in something akin to today’s Mozilla Foundation.
At the time of early Linux, BSD was still a UC Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group project, though the CSRG would disband after 4.4BSD was released sometime in 1994-1995. BSD had a user base even in the days when using BSD required an AT&T Unix license. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was an effort to replace the AT&T bits with open source bits. This reached a breakthrough in 1991 when all that was remaining was six kernel files, which 386BSD was able to fill in that gap. 1991 was the year Linux 0.01 was released.
Unfortunately, BSD’s growth was stunted due to the lawsuit between AT&T (USL) and BSDi, where there were allegations over the open source code:
By the time the lawsuit was settled, Linux had already captured the attention of those wanting a FOSS Unix-like operating system. However, it’s quite remarkable how FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD found niches in the 1990s and are still around today. They may lack Linux’s market share, and admittedly they don’t have the same levels of driver and application support as Linux, but they are excellent operating systems that serve their niches well.
> The community will pick them up and maintain them sensibly because there will be a need.
The community can't offer the resources and competence necessary for maintaining a Browser on the same high level as Mozilla is doing now. The community would likely also not be able to influence, or even just follow, the workgroups for web-standards. Ultimately, they would be left out and have to play a game of catch.
Of course, how much of that would be necessary is a different question, but long term, in a world without Mozilla, any Firefox-fork would become slowly useless, or even fast if Google decides to abandon the free web and go down a different route. If you want to see how useful this will end, look at all the other browser out there which are not Blink-based, a Firefox-fork or Safari. They do exist, and they all are pretty awful for general usage.
> IMO there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla
If open source is your ride or die, sure. My unfortunate takeaway is non profit, open source and free isn’t a good fit for browser development.
Kagi’s Orion [1] is a solid WebKit browser and to where I’m shifting my support. (I’ve been a medium-sized fundraiser for Mozilla. They’re going to see seven-figure chargebacks from a variety of directions over the coming weeks.)
> One alternative recommended by the present article, Brave, is dabbling in ads as well
Have you considered outright donating to Apple instead? Seems like a more direct way to put your money and support behind Kagi's upstream rendering engine developers.
And seriously, threatening chargebacks, which can and often do cost the recipient money beyond just the loss of an original payment/donation, against a nonprofit over an (all things considered) minor change in direction is pretty despicable.
I could get behind it if this was actual non-profit fraud, but none of these points of criticisms against Mozilla seem new. You knew what you were donating to.
> In terms of open source there are really only Chromium- and Firefox-derived browsers (I’m disregarding projects like the still pre-alpha Ladybird here).
Kagi’s browser is based on WebKit, but currently macOS only and non-opensource. I’m perfectly willing to pay for a browser but not sure if closed source is viable no matter how much you trust the company today.
I don't understand articles discussing “trust” and throwing in Brave. Are you unclear what trust means?
A proper trustworthy Chromium-based alternative would be Vivaldi. Even more, as a company based mainly in the EU, they've managed to create a fantastic browser while also following all consumer protection mechanisms typical for the region.
In the latest Ladybird update the graphs show servo is quite a bit behind Flow and Ladybird itself.
Right now ladybird is the closest to getting past the mark and has the most momentum by a long shot.
As great as having another option would be, Servo is not a browser, if people were going to build a browser on a different engine then webkit is perfectly viable right now, but people don't.
FWIW, webkit's github [1] links directly to the "Epiphany Technology Preview" at gnome.org as a supported project. I have no idea if that leads to a full-featured modern browser for Linux, but I'm pretty sure if it doesn't, there should be a fork that does or creating one might be worth considering, and should be even fun and relatively easy to get kicked off. Also, since Webkit is based on KHTML, there might be re-integrations into KDE worth exploring. Ages ago there used to be Safari builds for Windows Apple created to get Safari into the hand of web developers that weren't using Macs, but it doesn't look like there's anything left to pickup.
Epiphany is a webkit browser for linux and due webkit architecture, gtkwebkit uses alot of gnome components such as libsoup and gstreamer. The biggest flaw is the webrtc support is missing so not online meetings.
maybe unpopular opinion, but I would be happy to pay small yearly subscription so they could focus on development instead of harvesting money from my data
That's what most of us want but can't: your only option is to donate to Mozilla, which will then do whatever it wants with your money.
Mozilla could allow for donation/services exclusively bound to develop Firefox, but at this point they have absolutely no incentive to do so and unsurprisingly have always refused to do it.
> One alternative recommended by the present article, Brave, is dabbling in ads as well
It blocks ads by default. It also doesn’t indicate it would sell my data. So, I’m using Brave or anything that doesn’t sell my data until Ladybird is available.
"If Mozilla dies, Firefox and derivatives will in all likelihood wither away [..]"
There once was a company with the second most popular browser but it could not survive against the monopoly. People got together and their browser rose as open source like phoenix from the ashes.
Initially they even called it Phoenix but switched to Firebird, for reasons I don't remember. Since this was also the name of a database they changed the name again this time to Firefox.
Microsoft was a major contributor to IE's downfall, through their incompetence. Google is doing a much better job of not shooting themselves in the foot with Chrome.
I definitely agree. Much more if you need support for screen readers, then you can't use the slowly emerging alternatives even for a test drive, because either the a1y stack is not a priority, or the supporting libraries are not featureful enough.
- Leaving my smartphone in the car in case I must MFA for work or have for safety... I’d love to use a flip phone or minimal smartphone that only had camera, FaceTime, maps and an authenticator; I could just delete apps, but I don’t want to be able to install anything that wastes my life.
- If others are watching streaming video, could go somewhere else to read.
But, I may not have adequate willpower, and I struggle to read.
> They haven't had the best interests of there users in mind for a long time
Mozilla are a non-profit. They don’t work for their users. I’m honestly convinced a non-profit open-source model isn’t a good fit for browser development.
Kagi’s Orion [1] has the right idea. If the users pay you’re accountable to them.
Although I think they have the right incentives, a browser is too big an investment for each of these privacy-focused companies to make their own. I suspect what needs to happen is that Kagi, Mullvad, Proton etc should to start a common org in which they sit on the board. That way they can each hold the others to account, but there would still be one pool of money funding browser development, with some chance of getting big enough to take over from mozilla.
Right idea, but it doesn't really seem usable right now. It crashed six times on me in an hour, including twice when I was trying to submit a bug report about the crashes. Multiple other users are reporting similar issues.
Growing pains, I hope, but it doesn't bode well...
> I’m honestly convinced a non-profit open-source model isn’t a good fit for browser development.
You think the freedoms granted by Free and Open Source licenses are a problem? How's that?
I see little value in the 'Kagi' browser, it looks like just another WebKit distribution. It promises to be free of telemetry, but refusing to even release your source is a death-knell for a privacy-oriented browser.
Most non-profits are accountable to somebody, usually whoever grants them money. In this case Google just pays Mozilla oodles of cash every year as cheap insurance against monopoly regulations and doesn't really care what they do. The worse Firefox is, the better it is for Chrome.
So the board and the org are accountable to nobody (else) and can do whatever they want. As long as they keep getting millions from Google, there's no real incentive for them to change. And there's a very real disincentive... if they actually do anything significant, they risk alienating their primary funder and the entire org goes bankrupt the next day.
If you’re looking for alternate browsers, at least consider a Firefox fork (LibreWolf, Floorp, etc.) Moving to a Chromium derivative seems completely counterproductive in the big picture and feeds the Chrome beast.
While I am no fan of Mozilla’s moves here, I think people are transferring their anger and distrust at the worst offenders in the market to Mozilla, and I worry that the end result will be much worse if we just abandon Mozilla.
A bunch of Firefox and Chromium derivatives are not a long term solution. The good news is that both Chromium and Firefox are open source. The bad news is that Google is funding these (and Safari too) via advertisement revenue. So, Google holds a lot of power here. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The core of the issue is that Google pays directly or indirectly for the salaries of most of those working on Chrome/Chromium, Firefox, and Safari. Their money is funding the whole thing.
Alternatives like Ladybird that lack this funding and commercial backing don't stand much of a chance to catch up technically. Unless they nail a sustainable funding model that isn't Google bribing them into submission.
Both Chromium and Firefox are fixable and there's plenty left to salvage. Firefox has loads of regular contributors. Mozilla employs many of them of course but not all. Aside from the drama at Mozilla, it's a pretty well run and healthy open source project. Same with Chromium probably. Though most developers are likely Google employed currently.
The solution isn't moving the problem to some new project but actually addressing the core issue. Which would be funding them properly.
I wonder if I'm in the minority in not caring about Firefox's privacy subtleties, as long as I get good extension support. I just want a different browser vendor than my ad and video vendor (Google).
I don't even want that. I just want Chrome with adblock :( If Google would just let me pay for Chrome and Search without ads, the way YouTube does, I'd happily pay for both. They can still have my data as long as they don't show me ads.
I'd like to ask if there is a bookmark sync function and plugin sync function in any of these alternatives.
It does seem to me that Mozilla corporation management has become corrupted, and will only get worse; so I'd like to move off Mozilla Firefox and onto something else.
But I really like that when I wipe a machine and install a new OS, first I install the Bitwarden plugin, then that lets me log in to the Mozilla account, and then that syncs down all my plugins and bookmarks into Firefox. I really like my Temporary Containers plugin in Firefox, for example, in addition to uBlock Origin. But all of them, really: the GNU Terry Pratchet plugin is fun.
The Mozilla Firefox solution does also work both on Linux and Windows.
If there is some other form of sync for plugins and bookmarks, then I'd leap at Librewolf or Waterfox or Icecat. But I am unaware of a sync solution that would work.
Anyone have something they like? I can self-host if that is an option.
Brave has sync which does not rely on a centralized server — it's peer to peer between your machines only. I encourage you to do your own research on it because the hivemind's opinion was solidified long ago and results in repeating lots of nonsense that has little connection to reality.
(I don't use it except for web development, but I also despise FUD.)
> Brave has sync which does not rely on a centralized server
Didn't they change that to some more centralized solution in the past couple of years, citing difficulties with peer-to-peer syncing?
> Sync v1 was a completely custom sync system, built as part of the old “Muon” browser. Sync v1 stored all data into an encrypted log on S3. New browsers joining the sync chain had to download all the logs and re-assemble the events in order. The browsers were also responsible for cleaning up out of date data records.
> Sync v2 was rebuilt to be more directly compatible with the Chromium sync system (Chromium is the same open source base of Google’s Chrome and Brave). Brave built a sync server that more directly followed Chromium’s sync protocol, but defaulting instead to use encrypted data records. Sync v2 more easily supports more sync data types, while still keeping the client side data encrypted, so only you can see your data.
Free computing can’t really exist in an ecosystem where only multimillion dollar projects can survive and be adequately secure. We need to drastically reduce the complexity of computing if we want it on our terms and without total dependency on megacorporations and capital. Expecting the state to fund it is also unrealistic.
This is rough: There are many types of popular software that aren't that big of a deal to re-implement. You could look at examples of popular software and think "This blows, I'll re-invent it". With care, dedication, and careful management, you could do it. This doesn't mean people will switch from the popular established software, but you could do it.
Web browsers are not one of these. Way too complicated, largely due to the complicated and changing DOM and JS specs.
I think it would be a good idea to define a subset of the current web technologies and make all important sites like banks, tax office etc. to adhere to this standard basic functionality. It also needs a logo which can be used on these sites.
We used to have such a thing: it was called HTML. Sites were supposed to have their content in the HTML, and if JS wasn't enabled, you'd still get the semantic hypertext. A vast majority of web pages are text and images, and don't actually require fancy CSS/JS. But the ship of progressive enhancement has long sailed,[0] and tons of static sites have JS, and all the hundreds of APIs that entails, baked into their functionality. Hell, there are many sites nowadays that will use JS to stream the HTML to your device for some reason.
[0]: JQuery/AJAX were probably the beginning of the end. But even without those, you had developers doing things like putting main images in CSS using the background property, overloading text with icon fonts, loading videos using "blob:" crap, or other abuse of semantics. Once it became possible to push more state to the browser instead of the server, the floodgates opened. I remember in the dial-up days, you could take a browser offline, and webpages would function perfectly, yet now, even hitting the back button can be a gamble. Now, hitting File > Save fails 95% of the time for me.
Readit News
In terms of open source there are really only Chromium- and Firefox-derived browsers (I’m disregarding projects like the still pre-alpha Ladybird here). With Chromium browsers, you’re still subject to Google’s whims in the long term, such as removal of V3 extension support. (I.e. a conceivable fork with V3 compatibility will inevitably become too difficult to keep up to date with the mainline.) If Mozilla dies, Firefox and derivatives will in all likelihood wither away as well. IMO there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, and also keeping them accountable and criticizing them where criticism is due. They are still roughly the good guys, even if sometimes misguided.
The topic of Firefox and ads is nothing new:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783381
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351322
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-adverti...
One alternative recommended by the present article, Brave, is dabbling in ads as well: https://brave.com/brave-ads/
If there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, how do we keep them accountable? If they know that they're the only hope for a cross-platform browser that isn't developed by Google, then they know that any outrage is a bluff that can't have teeth because they're indispensable.
> They are still roughly the good guys, even if sometimes misguided.
There aren't any good guys here, there are just people doing people things.
Mozilla is more than sometimes misguided, they've been essentially permanently distracted from Firefox as the core mission for more than ten years now. Their organization is designed in a way that makes funding Firefox directly impossible, and they haven't made any moves to fix it. Instead they set up failed side project after failed side project and repeatedly alienate their core with ads, while insisting that donations couldn't possibly work in spite of the fact that Thunderbird clearly shows that they can—as long as the project is unshackled from the mess that is Mozilla.
It might well be that the best thing that could happen for Firefox would be for it to get evicted from Mozilla like Thunderbird was.
> failed side project after failed side project
Rust and MDN have been huge successes. Their mobile OS is still alive and kicking, although other people are making money from that now. They also put in a ton of resources into decreasing FF memory footprint as part of the failed mobile OS effort, which benefits all of us.
Except they're not indispensable. They're now the fourth place browser in terms of market share on a good day, and dwindling. They need all the good will they can get, and this sort of discussion amongst their most hardcore audience is exactly what keeps them accountable.
No, they won't. The community will pick them up and maintain them sensibly because there will be a need. The best thing that could happen to Firefox would be Mozilla dying.
If you disagree, you can look at decades of Linux being successful despite endless bellowing about how it couldn't survive until it did. It did because it fit a sorely needed open source operating system niche. BSD failed to meet that exactly because it was controlled at the time by selfish garbage organizations.
Unfortunately, BSD’s growth was stunted due to the lawsuit between AT&T (USL) and BSDi, where there were allegations over the open source code:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_In....
By the time the lawsuit was settled, Linux had already captured the attention of those wanting a FOSS Unix-like operating system. However, it’s quite remarkable how FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD found niches in the 1990s and are still around today. They may lack Linux’s market share, and admittedly they don’t have the same levels of driver and application support as Linux, but they are excellent operating systems that serve their niches well.
The community can't offer the resources and competence necessary for maintaining a Browser on the same high level as Mozilla is doing now. The community would likely also not be able to influence, or even just follow, the workgroups for web-standards. Ultimately, they would be left out and have to play a game of catch.
Of course, how much of that would be necessary is a different question, but long term, in a world without Mozilla, any Firefox-fork would become slowly useless, or even fast if Google decides to abandon the free web and go down a different route. If you want to see how useful this will end, look at all the other browser out there which are not Blink-based, a Firefox-fork or Safari. They do exist, and they all are pretty awful for general usage.
If open source is your ride or die, sure. My unfortunate takeaway is non profit, open source and free isn’t a good fit for browser development.
Kagi’s Orion [1] is a solid WebKit browser and to where I’m shifting my support. (I’ve been a medium-sized fundraiser for Mozilla. They’re going to see seven-figure chargebacks from a variety of directions over the coming weeks.)
> One alternative recommended by the present article, Brave, is dabbling in ads as well
And crypto. Hard pass.
[1] https://kagi.com/orion/
You donated a seven-figure sum to Mozilla that you are going to chargeback? Sorry i didn't understand this part.
And seriously, threatening chargebacks, which can and often do cost the recipient money beyond just the loss of an original payment/donation, against a nonprofit over an (all things considered) minor change in direction is pretty despicable.
I could get behind it if this was actual non-profit fraud, but none of these points of criticisms against Mozilla seem new. You knew what you were donating to.
isn’t webkit open source?
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit
or maybe are you referring to something else?
Is it roughly comparable to safari, functionality-wise?
Also, is there a non-gnome version? Gtk’s fine; containerized gnome, not so much.
A proper trustworthy Chromium-based alternative would be Vivaldi. Even more, as a company based mainly in the EU, they've managed to create a fantastic browser while also following all consumer protection mechanisms typical for the region.
What am I missing that I should be considering?
Right now ladybird is the closest to getting past the mark and has the most momentum by a long shot.
As great as having another option would be, Servo is not a browser, if people were going to build a browser on a different engine then webkit is perfectly viable right now, but people don't.
FWIW, webkit's github [1] links directly to the "Epiphany Technology Preview" at gnome.org as a supported project. I have no idea if that leads to a full-featured modern browser for Linux, but I'm pretty sure if it doesn't, there should be a fork that does or creating one might be worth considering, and should be even fun and relatively easy to get kicked off. Also, since Webkit is based on KHTML, there might be re-integrations into KDE worth exploring. Ages ago there used to be Safari builds for Windows Apple created to get Safari into the hand of web developers that weren't using Macs, but it doesn't look like there's anything left to pickup.
[1]: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit
Mozilla could allow for donation/services exclusively bound to develop Firefox, but at this point they have absolutely no incentive to do so and unsurprisingly have always refused to do it.
It blocks ads by default. It also doesn’t indicate it would sell my data. So, I’m using Brave or anything that doesn’t sell my data until Ladybird is available.
Moving to Brave is just supporting a Chrome monoculture in the long run, and the problems with Chrome are far worse than the problems with Firefox.
It's not "dabbling", their whole model is ad-funded and crypto-funded.
There once was a company with the second most popular browser but it could not survive against the monopoly. People got together and their browser rose as open source like phoenix from the ashes.
Initially they even called it Phoenix but switched to Firebird, for reasons I don't remember. Since this was also the name of a database they changed the name again this time to Firefox.
Don't you think history could repeat?
Mozilla just can't stop f**ing up, and half of the websites I use don't work well with Brave.
- Leaving my smartphone in the car in case I must MFA for work or have for safety... I’d love to use a flip phone or minimal smartphone that only had camera, FaceTime, maps and an authenticator; I could just delete apps, but I don’t want to be able to install anything that wastes my life.
- If others are watching streaming video, could go somewhere else to read.
But, I may not have adequate willpower, and I struggle to read.
They are not. They are the bad guys. This is just telling people to go back to their abusers. Shame on your morals. Shame on your lack of vision.
Mozilla are a non-profit. They don’t work for their users. I’m honestly convinced a non-profit open-source model isn’t a good fit for browser development.
Kagi’s Orion [1] has the right idea. If the users pay you’re accountable to them.
[1] https://kagi.com/orion/
Except, apparently, the paying users that don't use Apple hardware.
Growing pains, I hope, but it doesn't bode well...
You think the freedoms granted by Free and Open Source licenses are a problem? How's that?
I see little value in the 'Kagi' browser, it looks like just another WebKit distribution. It promises to be free of telemetry, but refusing to even release your source is a death-knell for a privacy-oriented browser.
So the board and the org are accountable to nobody (else) and can do whatever they want. As long as they keep getting millions from Google, there's no real incentive for them to change. And there's a very real disincentive... if they actually do anything significant, they risk alienating their primary funder and the entire org goes bankrupt the next day.
It's an inherent conflict of interest.
Deleted Comment
While I am no fan of Mozilla’s moves here, I think people are transferring their anger and distrust at the worst offenders in the market to Mozilla, and I worry that the end result will be much worse if we just abandon Mozilla.
The core of the issue is that Google pays directly or indirectly for the salaries of most of those working on Chrome/Chromium, Firefox, and Safari. Their money is funding the whole thing.
Alternatives like Ladybird that lack this funding and commercial backing don't stand much of a chance to catch up technically. Unless they nail a sustainable funding model that isn't Google bribing them into submission.
Both Chromium and Firefox are fixable and there's plenty left to salvage. Firefox has loads of regular contributors. Mozilla employs many of them of course but not all. Aside from the drama at Mozilla, it's a pretty well run and healthy open source project. Same with Chromium probably. Though most developers are likely Google employed currently.
The solution isn't moving the problem to some new project but actually addressing the core issue. Which would be funding them properly.
Edit: Yeah, about $20 billion to be the default search: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-se...
It does seem to me that Mozilla corporation management has become corrupted, and will only get worse; so I'd like to move off Mozilla Firefox and onto something else.
But I really like that when I wipe a machine and install a new OS, first I install the Bitwarden plugin, then that lets me log in to the Mozilla account, and then that syncs down all my plugins and bookmarks into Firefox. I really like my Temporary Containers plugin in Firefox, for example, in addition to uBlock Origin. But all of them, really: the GNU Terry Pratchet plugin is fun.
The Mozilla Firefox solution does also work both on Linux and Windows.
If there is some other form of sync for plugins and bookmarks, then I'd leap at Librewolf or Waterfox or Icecat. But I am unaware of a sync solution that would work.
Anyone have something they like? I can self-host if that is an option.
(I don't use it except for web development, but I also despise FUD.)
Didn't they change that to some more centralized solution in the past couple of years, citing difficulties with peer-to-peer syncing?
> Sync v1 was a completely custom sync system, built as part of the old “Muon” browser. Sync v1 stored all data into an encrypted log on S3. New browsers joining the sync chain had to download all the logs and re-assemble the events in order. The browsers were also responsible for cleaning up out of date data records.
> Sync v2 was rebuilt to be more directly compatible with the Chromium sync system (Chromium is the same open source base of Google’s Chrome and Brave). Brave built a sync server that more directly followed Chromium’s sync protocol, but defaulting instead to use encrypted data records. Sync v2 more easily supports more sync data types, while still keeping the client side data encrypted, so only you can see your data.
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047642371-Syn...
I have vetoed it at several organisations on the basis of its crypto tie in. Has that changed?
Web browsers are not one of these. Way too complicated, largely due to the complicated and changing DOM and JS specs.
[0]: JQuery/AJAX were probably the beginning of the end. But even without those, you had developers doing things like putting main images in CSS using the background property, overloading text with icon fonts, loading videos using "blob:" crap, or other abuse of semantics. Once it became possible to push more state to the browser instead of the server, the floodgates opened. I remember in the dial-up days, you could take a browser offline, and webpages would function perfectly, yet now, even hitting the back button can be a gamble. Now, hitting File > Save fails 95% of the time for me.