Comment by noirscape | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noirscape | Hacker News Reader

While I think the anger surrounding this is slightly overstated, is there any Desktop fork of Firefox that can essentially just act as a "we prevent Mozilla from doing anything harmful to it's users", while compromising on as little functionality as possible? There's only so many stories of Mozilla deliberately trying to reduce it's browser market share to zero you can put up with before you start looking elsewhere.

I'm thinking something in the same vein as Iceraven, which is a fork of the Android version of Firefox that aims to make the browser more usable for humans instead of servicing the overly restrictive mobile environment/tracking that's bog-standard in most mobile platforms.

I considered Librewolf, but it's willingness to break pages in the name of excessive anti-fingerprinting (the RFP mode breaks a lot of interactables) and ideology (blocking DRM) makes it kind of unacceptable for this purpose. I guess I'm not looking for a privacy fork, just a fork that protects me as a user from anti-features (with widevine in specific not being an anti-feature; I don't like widevine either, but it's kind of necessary for using a browser these days.)

Floorp may be what you're looking for. Pretty similar to native Firefox.

https://floorp.app/

Oh interesting, I'll check it out.

Searching around a bit, this fork does seem to meet the criteria I was looking for (plus a few hidden ones like project age; it's a couple years old and still being updated, which means the dev is willing to put the work in as opposed to abandoning it when they get bored). The blocker on widevine being Googles fault (while still supporting L3 out of the box) rather than deliberate "we're not even going to try" is much more acceptable than the Librewolf one.

> The blocker on widevine being Googles fault (while still supporting L3 out of the box) rather than deliberate "we're not even going to try" is much more acceptable than the Librewolf one.

I don't know, I think not caving in to support some proprietary BS is pretty justifiable.

Proprietary or non-proprietary isn't something I particularly care for (maybe 10 years ago I'd have cared, but I'm just a good deal more cynical these days I suppose). I just want a browser that works and doesn't actively try to screw me over.

There's nothing stopping Mozilla's current descent into stupidity just because Firefox is non-proprietary free software; they have enough engineers and manpower on their end to overtake any forks in development speed (which limits any forks to trying to stay in sync with either upstream or ESR.) Chromium is as a browser non-proprietary too, but that didn't stop Google from getting rid of declarativeNetRequest, leaving the forks mostly powerless to do anything about it because they can't hard fork Chromium.

Blocking DRM is the only sane stance. And if you are using a free OS it doesn't change much anyway as DRMed content is only available in resolutions that might have been acceptable decades ago. If you must consume that kind of content just use a dedicated device but better would be to ignore it or acquire copies with the DRM stripped.

DRM is absolutely not necessary for using a browser.

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