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Is there a better alternative to Firefox? Of all the browsers it seems like the "least bad" choice (above Chromium, and other proprietary browsers) and I use it, but is there something safer, simpler, and more secure?
Is there a better alternative to Firefox? Of all the browsers it seems like the "least bad" choice (above Chromium, and other proprietary browsers) and I use it, but is there something safer, simpler, and more secure?
It's basically a lightweight interface to webkit. There's only so light one can go, however; a browser basically ships an entire rendering stack and big chunks of an OS, and with all the weird features and backwards compatibility issues that have accumulated, one can only go so small.
Is there a better alternative to Firefox? Of all the browsers it seems like the "least bad" choice (above Chromium, and other proprietary browsers) and I use it, but is there something safer, simpler, and more secure?
GNOME has "GNOME Web", previously known as Epiphany. KDE has "Falkon". Both are quite good.
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Waterfox (with Web Extensions) or Pale Moon (with XUL/UXP extensions)
If security is something you’re looking for, “Firefox plus some ancient, unmaintained legacy code and patches jammed in by random third parties” is not substantially more appealing than just Firefox by itself.
Pale Moon and the like aren't just ancient Firefox code. And without all the 'features' Firefox keeps adding in that are irrelevant to a browser that renders html and executes JS they're just as secure.
I am arguing about this on FreeBSD forums - from an end user perspective. I think the benefits of saving disk space by sharing libraries do not justify the inconveniences we, desktop BSD and Linux users, obtain from being forced to disrupt and upgrade hundreds of installed software packages, just because one single desired upgrade requires to pull its dependencies. The whole ecosystem falls down like a card house - o…
You may want to check out Nix. It's a package manager which isolates each program's dependencies; so you can have multiple versions of the same package.
> or a security fix
having a centralized repository like this helps in case a it's a library that needs a security fix, because you only need a single update to apply the fix to all applications. Applications that bundle their own deps (including Docker images) will need to publish their own update with the updated version of the lib.
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> they don't really improve upon anything meaningful both of those have had more issues than Firefox in the past. Please, prove it.
From looking at the commit history of Pale Moon, it is maintained by essentially three people. Their maintenance strategy is to freeze at an old version of Firefox, and randomly backport patches purely to try to keep somewhat up-to-date on JS or DOM features. Given the sheer size of the codebase, its inherent complexity (a JIT compiler is going to be very ripe for potential security vulnerabilities), and the utter la…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they don't really improve upon anything meaningful both of those have had more issues than Firefox in the past. Please, prove it.
From looking at the commit history of Pale Moon, it is maintained by essentially three people. Their maintenance strategy is to freeze at an old version of Firefox, and randomly backport patches purely to try to keep somewhat up-to-date on JS or DOM features. Given the sheer size of the codebase, its inherent complexity (a JIT compiler is going to be very ripe for potential security vulnerabilities), and the utter la…
And here's where you show you're making it up and haven't even looked at a Pale Moon release notes, http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml
Is there a better alternative to Firefox? Of all the browsers it seems like the "least bad" choice (above Chromium, and other proprietary browsers) and I use it, but is there something safer, simpler, and more secure?
Yes. Firefox forks that forked before Mozilla jumped the shark (v37, then multiprocess, then rust) that evolved into their own thing without all the features/attack surfaces that aren't strictly required for a browser to just render html and execute JS.
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It's only pure pain if you want bleeding edge AND stability. Non-rolling releases are just fine if you only need new features once a year.
Non-rolling releases might work with smaller software where your distro maintainers can backport security bugfixes easily, but as soon as your software gets too big and complicated the distro maintainers won't be able to backport fixes themselves and will have to just resort to packaging the latest version of certain packages (like Debian had to do with Chromium and Firefox). Also, for the most part, the "Arch is uns…
This is 100% is on mozilla, given: - it's much bigger and resourceful than openbsd maintainers. - it decided to adopt this fancy update policy, and instead of making it easy/seamless, left it up to the whole open source community to play catch up. Well played.