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Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

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Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#151

Post by intelVISA »

guraf wrote: post #149
Cyder wrote: post #37

i gave up on firefox when i couldn't stop it from connecting to Google on a network device i was working on. Removing all the links from the advanced settings made it fail to start. That's when I realized how hypocritical they are. ( arm64 firefox-esr.) Even the latest chromium on arm64 connects to Google almost daily. i use epiphany-browser for that project now. no unwanted internet traffic from epiphany.

Yeah when my DNS went sporty I noticed Firefox got very slow to load even local ips and investigated. Turns out it does two dozen queries on every start. Mostly to unknown Mozilla services but also a few from Google and others I couldn't identify (IP on either AWS or CloudFlare, likely just more Mozilla). And when it can't resolve those hosts it seems to continually retry every few seconds... Before the apologists ar…

Unfortunately normal for the mainstream ones, you can even see similar with Brave.

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#152

Post by horeszko »

I suppose now is a good time to ask if there are any good _non-corporate_ open source browsers out there?

Seems to me that businesses operate within an incentive structure that will always encourage them to take maximum advantage of users and do anti-user things no matter what their original goals were. The non-corporate part is key imo (see Canonical, Mozilla now etc.)

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#153

Post by LeoPanthera »

horeszko wrote: post #152

I suppose now is a good time to ask if there are any good _non-corporate_ open source browsers out there? Seems to me that businesses operate within an incentive structure that will always encourage them to take maximum advantage of users and do anti-user things no matter what their original goals were. The non-corporate part is key imo (see Canonical, Mozilla now etc.)

On KDE, Falkon.

On Gnome, "Web".

On macOS, Safari may not pass your "non-corporate" requirement, but it's spiritually non-corporate, and functionally "just a browser". It's also wicked fast and extremely light on your resources.

On many platforms, "ungoogled-chromium" may satisfy your needs. It's under the name "eloston-chromium" in many repos. https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#154

Post by bombcar »

horeszko wrote: post #152

I suppose now is a good time to ask if there are any good _non-corporate_ open source browsers out there? Seems to me that businesses operate within an incentive structure that will always encourage them to take maximum advantage of users and do anti-user things no matter what their original goals were. The non-corporate part is key imo (see Canonical, Mozilla now etc.)

You have to keep moving; Brave has been relatively good to me for now but I assume it will slump into the melt at some point.

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#155

Post by vinay_ys »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #153
horeszko wrote: post #152

I suppose now is a good time to ask if there are any good _non-corporate_ open source browsers out there? Seems to me that businesses operate within an incentive structure that will always encourage them to take maximum advantage of users and do anti-user things no matter what their original goals were. The non-corporate part is key imo (see Canonical, Mozilla now etc.)

On KDE, Falkon. On Gnome, "Web". On macOS, Safari may not pass your "non-corporate" requirement, but it's spiritually non-corporate, and functionally "just a browser". It's also wicked fast and extremely light on your resources. On many platforms, "ungoogled-chromium" may satisfy your needs. It's under the name "eloston-chromium" in many repos. https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Safari – such a pleasure to use it.

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#156

Post by bordercases »

bombcar wrote: post #154
horeszko wrote: post #152

I suppose now is a good time to ask if there are any good _non-corporate_ open source browsers out there? Seems to me that businesses operate within an incentive structure that will always encourage them to take maximum advantage of users and do anti-user things no matter what their original goals were. The non-corporate part is key imo (see Canonical, Mozilla now etc.)

You have to keep moving; Brave has been relatively good to me for now but I assume it will slump into the melt at some point.

To burst your bubble: https://digdeeper.neocities.org/articles/browsers#brave

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#157

Post by hcal »

horeszko wrote: post #152

I suppose now is a good time to ask if there are any good _non-corporate_ open source browsers out there? Seems to me that businesses operate within an incentive structure that will always encourage them to take maximum advantage of users and do anti-user things no matter what their original goals were. The non-corporate part is key imo (see Canonical, Mozilla now etc.)

Gnome-Web if you're on linux and it is fine. It is a little light on features, but it does the basics. Falkon is another for the QT/KDE crowd. There are several forks of chrome and firefox, if that's your thing.

I'm trying to ungoogle and switched to Vivaldi without enough research. Its a really nice browser and I really like the community around it (like their Mastodon service), but I basically jumped from one corporation's browser to another.

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#159

Post by jonas21 »

warkdarrior wrote: post #105
mozman wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct answer

Why would Google try to prop up Firefox as a competitor? Both Safari and Edge on desktop are twice the market share of Firefox, so the browser market is competitive enough without Firefox. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

Google would probably prefer if Safari and Edge did not gain market share. They're both developed by large corporations that pose a major threat to Google. Firefox, not so much.

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#160

Post by pessimizer »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #146
dehrmann wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Th other conspiracy I've heard is Google subsidizes Mozilla so they have a credible claim there's competition in the market.

If true, it really backfired on them as buying Mozilla's default search is currently being used against them in a search engine antitrust suit.

According to a weird definition of "really backfired," because they would without question have been hit a long time ago with credible antitrust if they hadn't kept Firefox afloat (though user-hostile enough to keep people on Chrome.)

There's such a marginal difference between the quality of the two browsers, and Chrome is held back in what it can be by the necessity of furthering Google's commercial interests. The only limit Firefox has had is that they can't abuse the trust of their users. Firefox had to voluntarily (and often aggressively) inflict a huge amount of reputational and functional damage on itself to reduce its market share to the place that it has.

edit: it's important to say that they didn't really backslide technically; it's user-hostile (management) decisions that have hurt the browser, not anything to do with the skill of Firefox developers.

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