Moved from Firefox Dev Edition to Librewolf. No deal breakers yet.
Procedure to transfer over painlessly: Install and run Librewolf. On both browsers go Help > More troubleshooting information > profile folder > Open. Close both browsers. Delete everything inside the librewolf profile. Copy everything from Firefox Dev profile directory into Librewolf profile directory. Run Librewolf with "--allow-downgrade" once. First run was a tad slow with extensions doing some 'recombobulation'. You can now run Librewolf normally without the above allow downgrade option. Enjoy.
per-site zoom and auto-dark detection disabled unless about:config > privacy.resistFingerprinting set to false
When I installed LibreWolf via the Microsoft App Store (to easy auto updates) it would not let me into a profile file. It would state a directory in the dialog. I would try to then manually go to the directory and it would not exist. I don’t know if that was a result of a sandbox AppStore design or what. Anyway, I uninstalled and am trying Zen out. So far, so good and it has vertical tabs like I used Sidebery for in FF.
set privacy.fingerprintingProtection.overrides='+AllTargets,-CSSPrefersColorScheme',
set privacy.fingerprintingProtection='true', and
set privacy.resistFingerprinting='false'.
As far as I know, privacy.resistFingerprinting and privacy.fingerprintingProtection behave the same with these overrides (minus enforced light mode), but I haven't found much documentation on this, so please let me know if they don't.
Dark mode will be remembered if cookies are remembered.
Resist blocks the website from knowing if your OS is light/dark so auto-dark/light, will be disabled unless resist is disabled.
As a long-time Louis fan it's sad to me he basically just complains even after leaving New York City. Also, when I met Louis IRL at one of his meetups he was actually super rude.
I finally watched a Louis Rossmann video because he covered a topic I know a lot about.
I was surprised by how much he got wrong. He was mixing rumors, speculations, and facts as if they were all the same. He ignored some documentation the company released to counter the news stories, which he couldn’t have missed if he did any research at all.
By the end it felt like I had watched someone repeat the most uncharitable and speculative takes on the subject that had been collected from social media, all while ignoring any actual research.
It was weird to have it all presented in his faux fair and balanced demeanor, as if he was doing the company a favor by presenting both sides.
I don’t know if he’s always been this way or if this is a recent audience capture thing where he panders to people who want to be angry about things.
> As a long-time Louis fan it's sad to me he basically just complains even after leaving New York City. Also, when I met Louis IRL at one of his meetups he was actually super rude.
I've always gone out of my way to make people feel welcome at meetups. From asking a little about what they do, how their day is going, what their dreams are in life. I don't just do this as meetups. I do this when people recognize me on the street, when people recognize me if I'm on a date. I even took five minutes out to talk to a viewer while I was taking my girlfriend for treatment after she had a stroke.
The only person I've ever had a negative reaction from at a publi
meetup in person was the stalker that followed my girlfriend across the country after I physically removed from the event.
He’s just a kvetcher. I wish that kind of content didn’t do so well on YouTube/reddit - he’s rewarded handsomely for being like this, so he has no incentive to change.
If you are a fan for other reasons than the complaining it might be a problem for you if all his content, over time, has turned into complaining.
Personally, I have never seen anything other than complaining from him, so I'm not sure why you would be a fan and also have a problem with the amount of complaining (which afaik has always been close to 100% of the content).
> If somebody wants to have a YouTube channel where they just complain, why is that a problem?
Because the complaining isn’t as fair and balanced as he presents it. He likes the stir the pot and he spreads misinformation along the way.
It’s a problem because he has a wide audience of people who adopt the anger that he puts out and accept it as ground truth. It’s a smaller scale version of people who get their opinions from people like Joe Rogan, who fill their time with misinformed rants.
It's not that you can just install LibreWolf and forget about it forever. If everyone does this, Mozilla won't be able to monetize your data and they will fight back for their survival.
Someone needs to fund the actual browser development.. it's possible to avoid your data being used, but it only works because data of others is monetized.
As far as I know, Mozilla is funded primarily by Google. From their 2023 financial report[0]:
> Approximately 85% and 81% of Mozilla’s revenues from customers with contracts were derived from one customer for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated.
For me, the best option would be to be able to donate to Firefox engineers directly, but not to Mozilla, they do too many things, I don't stand for those, just the Firefox browser...
>Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated.
What should they do instead? Their "Program" (ie. non-management) salaries alone are $200M+ per year. That's not something you can replace with a Patreon.
Someone needs to dismantle the system that clings onto a standard that requires $^6+/mo to implement. This is much more realistic than playing chase me game with someone who makes the rules.
They managed to convince everyone that a browser is naturally a hypercomplex app which requires so much maintenance, support and whatever. But in fact, a browser is an app mostly for rendering text, images and videos, and an embedded scripting language, which all wastes lots of memory and crawls on moderate loads. You can make an app like this in a month, solo, you just can’t fit it to the standard. Before web was a thing, people regularly made much more complex software that “web” heavily sucked compared to. This has to be done. No $200M/mo org can exist without naturally destructive interests in it. The lesson should be recognized, learned and never “feature update”d again. We learned everything we needed in these 30+ years, time to rip it out of corp hands, revisit, settle and put it into maintenance.
Add: to be clear, this is not a tech problem. It must be recognized and done at the antimonopoly level, crushed by the law.
I wonder if this could be a "money where your mouth is" thing for the EU.
If controlling a browser engine was considered strategic-- and for the love of the darkness, anything that gathers that much information and is owned by American techbros should be-- then they could provide a fair bit of a backstop to finance a dev team.
EU backing could also provide general street cred for the project-- it's both "financially resourced enough to not go poof" and "backed by an authority that both has a strong history of privacy protections, and is in a geopolitical scenario where they can't afford insecurity".
No body wants to pay say 20$ a month for what they can have for free. I suspect you'd need a few hundred million in annual revenue to actually fund a full browser that doesn't rely on existing engines.
I think the question here is around how much money is actually needed to develop the browser features that people want without everything else that Mozilla does. At minimum, people would presumably want security fixes, new browser features that get standardized that websites will expect to be able to be used, and probably some amount of support/bugfixes for issues that people run into that aren't vulnerabilities but still might be annoying. It seems like a substantial amount of work, but I don't have a good sense of exactly how much would be needed for that. My understanding is that Mozilla makes its money primarily from deals to make certain search engines enabled by default, and secondarily from donations (with "selling user data" being somewhat of an unknown right now given that they seem to be claiming that they _don't_ make money from it because they're not "selling" it under what most people would consider to be selling, but it's not clear whether that's because they're claiming that "anonymized user data" isn't actually "user data" or whether they're not "selling" it).
The key factor to me is whether that poorly specified extra stuff is actually necessary as part of funding the development or not. As far as I can tell, getting a search engine deal is actually not out of the question for one of these forks; Waterfox's documentation[0] indicates that it has a deal like this (with Bing, from what I can tell from trying it out yesterday), and presumably a large migration of users to a fork could lead to an increase in the funding in the future, in addition to any individual donations. I don't know whether this would result in enough money in the long run to be able to continue developing a browser indefinitely, but Mozilla also is doing other things than just developing Firefox and has costs associated with that, and I don't think there's any other obvious revenue source, so the two most likely scenarios are that they're either making money off of selling user data (or something derived from it that they're claiming isn't user data but aren't willing to bet on the law agreeing with them) or they're actually incurring costs from those other things that could otherwise be spent on Firefox. If it's the former, I think that being vague and quibbling over semantics has lost them the presumption of good faith, and I'd reluctantly conclude that having browser focused on user privacy is no longer tenable and we might as well just all switch to Chrom{e,ium}. If it's the latter, then focusing solely on the browser would _reduce_ the incentive to sell user data for funding, and the fact that Mozilla doesn't seem able or willing to do this means that we're all better of moving to an alternative.
True, but I'd accept less "features" per year considering very often Mozilla features were not bringing me a lot. A more open, stable, secure browser is all I need.
I agree with your observations, but your comment gives the perfect context to understand why in my opinion, by rapidly expanding web standards, Google makes it harder for independent browsers to sustain themselves (deliberately or not - I don't know).
Web API surface is large, and if we see new features like:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113790
and developers start using it, then websites start to "look worse" in Firefox (or work slower if polyfills are used).. then in order to keep up, Mozilla might feel pressured to expand their engineering team to implement things, and this is expensive..
> If everyone does this, Mozilla won't be able to monetize your data and they will fight back for their survival.
So the whole thing is kinda weird, because the new terms of use _do not_ give Mozilla any ability to monetize your data. All they do is state that if you give the browser some data the browser can use that data to follow your instructions.
For example, I am using Firefox right now as I type this message in. Firefox will save what I type in my profile so that if my power goes out (or Firefox crashes, which is rare these days but wasn’t always) then it can recover this text when it restarts. It’s always done this but apparently Mozilla’s lawyers now think that this requires an explicit mention in the terms of use. I disagree, frankly, and I think the lawyers who forced this issue are milking it.
Your statements do not align with the reality of Firefox’s own words. They are trading/selling your data and they updated their ToS to reflect that.
“ In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar”
Typing on your own computer, and having the draft stored into local storage requires absolutely no policy at all. If anyone else's computer is involved with that, then it's a problem.
Also it makes no sense for a program that runs on your own computer to have "Terms of Use".
When did you request that firefox back up the content to your profile? Bear in mind that a nontechnical user has no idea it does this, and a technical user only realizes it does this after reading the code or experiencing a crash. You "requested" this behavior implicitly by using firefox. So any behavior firefox has, now, or in the future with data you input is implicitly something you requested.
If firefox starts backing up your profile to a mozilla server, encrypted, you requested it. If there is an additional encryption key that lets mozilla decrypt it and sell it to OpenAI, you requested it.
Also, I am requesting that firefox send this post to HN by pressing the reply button. By the terms of firefox's ToU, this gives Mozilla a license to this content. That license is not limited to the duration of the http call if other firefox behavior that I have "requested" uses that content later. Perhaps they will scrape my comments from HN and use their content in targeted ads that firefox will display to me later. All allowed by the ToU.
I've tried to watch Louis many times.. can't do it. He is just so whiny and annoying, it is really off putting to what might be otherwise interesting topics.
Procedure to transfer over painlessly: Install and run Librewolf. On both browsers go Help > More troubleshooting information > profile folder > Open. Close both browsers. Delete everything inside the librewolf profile. Copy everything from Firefox Dev profile directory into Librewolf profile directory. Run Librewolf with "--allow-downgrade" once. First run was a tad slow with extensions doing some 'recombobulation'. You can now run Librewolf normally without the above allow downgrade option. Enjoy.
per-site zoom and auto-dark detection disabled unless about:config > privacy.resistFingerprinting set to false
set privacy.fingerprintingProtection.overrides='+AllTargets,-CSSPrefersColorScheme',
set privacy.fingerprintingProtection='true', and
set privacy.resistFingerprinting='false'.
As far as I know, privacy.resistFingerprinting and privacy.fingerprintingProtection behave the same with these overrides (minus enforced light mode), but I haven't found much documentation on this, so please let me know if they don't.
It's all better explained at https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#what-are-the-most-common-dow...
Having a look at about:config and searching 'resist' exposes a few other interesting options to customise like whitelisting etc.
Hopefully he finds a way to be happy.
I was surprised by how much he got wrong. He was mixing rumors, speculations, and facts as if they were all the same. He ignored some documentation the company released to counter the news stories, which he couldn’t have missed if he did any research at all.
By the end it felt like I had watched someone repeat the most uncharitable and speculative takes on the subject that had been collected from social media, all while ignoring any actual research.
It was weird to have it all presented in his faux fair and balanced demeanor, as if he was doing the company a favor by presenting both sides.
I don’t know if he’s always been this way or if this is a recent audience capture thing where he panders to people who want to be angry about things.
Fact: Mozilla is collecting user data and selling it, while pretending to be a "privacy" oriented organization.
Rossman's hair, speaking style, color of clothing, and tone of voice is not relevant to the conversation.
If you want to talk about what he got wrong, you need to be specific.
I've always gone out of my way to make people feel welcome at meetups. From asking a little about what they do, how their day is going, what their dreams are in life. I don't just do this as meetups. I do this when people recognize me on the street, when people recognize me if I'm on a date. I even took five minutes out to talk to a viewer while I was taking my girlfriend for treatment after she had a stroke.
The only person I've ever had a negative reaction from at a publi meetup in person was the stalker that followed my girlfriend across the country after I physically removed from the event.
You're not somebody I've ever met.
Not being flippant, I'm serious. That's what I've heard.
In peesonal experience, I found New Yorkers to be far friendlier than 99% of Bay Area baristas, so there's that.
VERY accurate haha (also why I'm still single)
Personally, I have never seen anything other than complaining from him, so I'm not sure why you would be a fan and also have a problem with the amount of complaining (which afaik has always been close to 100% of the content).
Because the complaining isn’t as fair and balanced as he presents it. He likes the stir the pot and he spreads misinformation along the way.
It’s a problem because he has a wide audience of people who adopt the anger that he puts out and accept it as ground truth. It’s a smaller scale version of people who get their opinions from people like Joe Rogan, who fill their time with misinformed rants.
Someone needs to fund the actual browser development.. it's possible to avoid your data being used, but it only works because data of others is monetized.
> Approximately 85% and 81% of Mozilla’s revenues from customers with contracts were derived from one customer for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated.
[0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
What should they do instead? Their "Program" (ie. non-management) salaries alone are $200M+ per year. That's not something you can replace with a Patreon.
They managed to convince everyone that a browser is naturally a hypercomplex app which requires so much maintenance, support and whatever. But in fact, a browser is an app mostly for rendering text, images and videos, and an embedded scripting language, which all wastes lots of memory and crawls on moderate loads. You can make an app like this in a month, solo, you just can’t fit it to the standard. Before web was a thing, people regularly made much more complex software that “web” heavily sucked compared to. This has to be done. No $200M/mo org can exist without naturally destructive interests in it. The lesson should be recognized, learned and never “feature update”d again. We learned everything we needed in these 30+ years, time to rip it out of corp hands, revisit, settle and put it into maintenance.
Add: to be clear, this is not a tech problem. It must be recognized and done at the antimonopoly level, crushed by the law.
If controlling a browser engine was considered strategic-- and for the love of the darkness, anything that gathers that much information and is owned by American techbros should be-- then they could provide a fair bit of a backstop to finance a dev team.
EU backing could also provide general street cred for the project-- it's both "financially resourced enough to not go poof" and "backed by an authority that both has a strong history of privacy protections, and is in a geopolitical scenario where they can't afford insecurity".
No body wants to pay say 20$ a month for what they can have for free. I suspect you'd need a few hundred million in annual revenue to actually fund a full browser that doesn't rely on existing engines.
The key factor to me is whether that poorly specified extra stuff is actually necessary as part of funding the development or not. As far as I can tell, getting a search engine deal is actually not out of the question for one of these forks; Waterfox's documentation[0] indicates that it has a deal like this (with Bing, from what I can tell from trying it out yesterday), and presumably a large migration of users to a fork could lead to an increase in the funding in the future, in addition to any individual donations. I don't know whether this would result in enough money in the long run to be able to continue developing a browser indefinitely, but Mozilla also is doing other things than just developing Firefox and has costs associated with that, and I don't think there's any other obvious revenue source, so the two most likely scenarios are that they're either making money off of selling user data (or something derived from it that they're claiming isn't user data but aren't willing to bet on the law agreeing with them) or they're actually incurring costs from those other things that could otherwise be spent on Firefox. If it's the former, I think that being vague and quibbling over semantics has lost them the presumption of good faith, and I'd reluctantly conclude that having browser focused on user privacy is no longer tenable and we might as well just all switch to Chrom{e,ium}. If it's the latter, then focusing solely on the browser would _reduce_ the incentive to sell user data for funding, and the fact that Mozilla doesn't seem able or willing to do this means that we're all better of moving to an alternative.
[0]: https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq/#6-how-does-waterfox-make-...
Web API surface is large, and if we see new features like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113790 and developers start using it, then websites start to "look worse" in Firefox (or work slower if polyfills are used).. then in order to keep up, Mozilla might feel pressured to expand their engineering team to implement things, and this is expensive..
So the whole thing is kinda weird, because the new terms of use _do not_ give Mozilla any ability to monetize your data. All they do is state that if you give the browser some data the browser can use that data to follow your instructions.
For example, I am using Firefox right now as I type this message in. Firefox will save what I type in my profile so that if my power goes out (or Firefox crashes, which is rare these days but wasn’t always) then it can recover this text when it restarts. It’s always done this but apparently Mozilla’s lawyers now think that this requires an explicit mention in the terms of use. I disagree, frankly, and I think the lawyers who forced this issue are milking it.
“ In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar”
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...
This has been discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
Also it makes no sense for a program that runs on your own computer to have "Terms of Use".
If firefox starts backing up your profile to a mozilla server, encrypted, you requested it. If there is an additional encryption key that lets mozilla decrypt it and sell it to OpenAI, you requested it.
Also, I am requesting that firefox send this post to HN by pressing the reply button. By the terms of firefox's ToU, this gives Mozilla a license to this content. That license is not limited to the duration of the http call if other firefox behavior that I have "requested" uses that content later. Perhaps they will scrape my comments from HN and use their content in targeted ads that firefox will display to me later. All allowed by the ToU.
The ambiguous nature of the changes favor some shady self dealing. Sorry.
Deleted Comment
What are system requirements and time needed to compile
If it is easy then where is LibreWolf for Android