A discussion about Firefox and browsers in general

Thus far Firefox is still the less shady of the lot.
A turd in a bucket of the skitters.

 

I'd extend that out to "any software, services or tech products" tbh. Tech is cooked.

 

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_niche_browsers/

 

Think I am just Chromium based these days, couldn’t even tell you really, when things just work I don’t look for others.

For Work and play I use Edge and having just moved to a Windows 11 tablet it surprises me how much better Edge is as a browsing experience than our iPad, shame the hardware I am using is not very comfortable as a tablet, a bit too small at 11” and thick with hard edges.

On the phone I used to use the Samsung Internet Browse, this was Chromium with Samsung additions, this seemed great, everything worked but I made the mistake of moving to one of these Chinese alternative folding phones where the hardware is better but the software is shocking, this has forced me to use Opera, horrid browser but it at least works in desktop mode where the likes of Chrome do not on this phone.

 

I think there’s still hope.

I read the article you linked to a page or so ago, and I do largely agree. And much of it wasn’t news to me, either.

But I still don’t think it’s all doom and gloom when it comes to technology.

As tech-savvy enthusiasts, there’s a lot we can do to prevent the creeping enshittification, and not all of it has to be “drop all social media; refuse any hardware or software that isn’t fully open source, even as far as firmware blobs”.

Browsers are an easy start: use privacy and ad-blocking plugins. It’s also relatively easy to take that a step further: set up a PiHole on your home network. Browsers can’t phone home with your browsing activity if they can’t reach their servers.

Mobile devices are a bit more of an issue, especially on iOS. If you have network-level blocking however, software limitations on one or two devices are a moot point. But what about when you’re not at home? Well that’s where Tailscale or a similarly lightweight VPN platform can help: funnel all your mobile traffic through your ad-blocked home network.

Operating systems are the elephant in the room. An easy way to avoid Windows’ rot is to switch to some form of Linux. Thanks to the advances in Proton, that’s not a death-knell for gaming these days.

The real question is how much you value these issues, and how much time and energy you’re prepared to invest in fighting them. In recent years, something that’s really hit home to me is just how precious my time is. Maybe this is just middle-age existential crisis, but I’m already more than half-way through my expected lifespan, I don’t have a lifetime ahead of me. I am hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with these battles, I am outnumbered and outgunned; how much of the time that is left to me do I want to spend in a losing battle?

Technology has shaped my life. As soon as I could read I was copying games out of those hefty programming manuals you used to get with 80s home micros, and tweaking various different bits of code to see what it did. I’ve been in front of one kind of computer or another ever since. It’s the reason I’m in a comfortable and well-paid job, one which has allowed me to pay off a frankly insane amount of debt inside of 18 months.

So the issues around privacy and data collection are important to me. But there’s only so much I can do. I’ll put in place the relatively easy and unobtrusive measures to protect myself against the commoditisation of the intimate details of my life. And I’ll shout from the rooftops about how terrible this all is and how you can easily fight back against it. But when those measures stop me from doing what I want to do, I’ve got a choice to make. Do I put in the time and effort to build the systems that allow me to do what I want to do while retaining my privacy, which will likely come with the burden of ongoing maintenance; or do I accept that I can’t win them all.

To put that in concrete terms… gaming. I’m sick to the back teeth of Microsoft’s nonsense with Windows, and I’m almost ready to pull the plug and go to Linux full time. But I know that the performance and feature set for gaming on Linux via Proton isn’t always quite there yet. It’s very good, don’t get me wrong, but I haven’t got time to keep on top of hacks, workarounds, manual configurations, etc, every time a game gets an update and wipes out a config/setup that used to work. I even see it on the Steam Deck. Games that I know were previously working start failing when new versions of Proton get pushed out, and now I’ve got to spend time jumping through previous versions of Proton to find something that works. After I’ve already waited a while for the game to download & install. So I still hold back on going to Linux full-time and keep putting up with Microsoft’s latest round of horseshit, whatever it might be this time.

Browsers are another example. Even despite the recent changes to ToS, I still think that Firefox is (currently) the best of a bad bunch. But every now and then I come across a site I need to use that just doesn’t work in Firefox. Rather than dig through exactly what’s going on, try to find a fix or workaround, try different user agent strings, etc, I just fire up Edge (much as it pains me) and do what I need to do.

But at the same time, it is getting easier and easier to escape the clutches of “Big Tech”. 5 years ago the idea of gaming on Linux was, largely, laughable, then Valve changed everything when the Steam Deck came out (arguably Valve are “big tech”, but that’s a debate for elsewhere). Awareness is growing of just how much data is being vacuumed up by ad networks or platform holders, and easy-to-use solutions like PiHole are incredibly accessible. Awareness of creeping rot and enshittification is growing. Computers and computing devices like smartphones are incredibly cheap and accessible, and while the platforms those devices use can be problematic in many ways, for about £50 I can buy a touchscreen computer that has access to a global communications network that allows me to access almost the entire repository of human knowledge and history. My watch has a dual core CPU which packs approx. 5,600,000,000 transistors into its minuscule die area. That’s in my freakin’ watch!

I realise I speak from a position of privilege because I understand the technology and I recognise the negative aspects & impacts, but that lens is the only one I can look through. For good or for ill, technology has had a massive influence on my life and our collective way of life. The progress I’ve seen in my lifetime is staggering. Yes, there are myriad problems, but at the same time it’s impossible for me to even try and understand how much it has benefitted both me personally and our wider society. That privilege I mentioned does, in my opinion, come with the moral obligation to try and inform others of the problems technology has created; I try to do that wherever it’s possible or wherever I think it will have even the smallest impact. But eventually I will have no choice other than to leave the fight to others: sooner or later my time will be up, and that might happen a hell of a lot sooner than I could ever anticipate. Meanwhile, I’m going to try to make the most of the time I have left and try to enjoy the ways in which technology has improved my life.

That… that got a little more philosophical than I’d anticipated…!

 

very much agree on all your points byron

 

As long as all the data collection and AI integration can still be opted out i'll stick with vanilla Firefox.

I'm not fussed about finger printing.

 

Thanks Gareth, i didn't realise about the android version.

 

In Firefox on Android, type "chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml" in the browser.

The setting for "privacy preserving ad measurement" is "dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled" and should be set to "false". Mine already was when I checked.

 

Thanks for that.

 

Didn't know this was possible. It's also where you enable about:config
Thanks for that!

 

Back to Firefox for most then, I wonder if it will get forked.

I know the GUI is not important on a new project but the early preview builds on youtube look like something from the 1990s.

 

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/03/kag-orion-web-browser-coming-to-linux

I've never heard of the company or the browser.

 

The more i look at the company the more i dislike it, i'm not surprised it spams being a pay to search model.

 

I have tried it however, and it did not impress:

 

Thanks Gareth and Byron, think i'll give it a miss.