Every time I reinstall #Firefox I'm reminded that #Mozilla deliberately fails to sync my default search engine from my other browsers. I will probably continue to use Firefox until Mozilla dies, but honestly their death can't come soon enough.
(For those of you just joining, the reason I want them to die despite using Firefox is because I think Firefox is "just good enough" that it stops people from working on truly free, usable browsers, and because they help Google pretend not to be a monopoly.)
@expert No interest in a proprietary browser that's just another wrapper on top of Chromium, nor a fork of Firefox that's unable to keep up with security updates at all. Librewolf might be interesting, but honestly I'm not sure it's worth even the amount of delay for librewolf releases for the relatively minor annoyance of having to update my default search engine periodically when they're still fully dependent on Mozilla.
The problem is that mere mortals can't keep up with how fast Google changes the web, plus sites that can't be bothered to test with anything but Chrome. I use Firefox mainly because it's not from Google, and it lets me use an effective adblocker and some other extensions that make the web somewhat tolerable.
@expert Can't keep up with security updates unfortunately. Multiple unpatched vulnerabilities. The non-"classic" version keeps up better, but it's still completely dependent on Mozilla.
@expert That's great that you trust them. But I don't want a browser that ultimately has one person calling the shots. It needs to have a healthy community behind it. One that's preferably incapable of selling it to an adtech company in the first place.
The fundamental problem with any #Gecko based browser that's not #Firefox or any #Chromium based browser that's not #Chrome (or Chromium itself) is that they're always chasing a moving target. Neither has a stable API, because neither has embedding as a primary use case; their respective browsers are their primary use case. For a security update to reach a fork, it first has to hit the open source repo, then it has to get merged into the fork, and then the fork has to be released. This means there will always be some additional delay.
This might be fine if you have other concerns besides timeliness of fixes that the fork address. But unlike many on here I don't have privacy concerns about #Mozilla. By far my biggest concern about them is their dependence on funding from #Google. My second biggest concern is that their attempts to gain independence from that funding lead to things like #Pocket and ads in the browser. Which is why I say "die" rather than "gain independence from Google". I don't like what their vision of independence looks like. It's like they learned nothing from #Netscape.
Here's an article from 2018 saying basically the same thing, with data. With as complicated as browsers are, and as big of a target as they are for bad guys, you want security fixes as fast as you can get them. The forks can't keep up. There is no solution that doesn't involve remaking the Web.
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