> Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1].
I'm still not convinced that Firefox is The Actual Devil for potentially appearing to perform .000001% of the bad behavior that is fully-baked into popular Chromium browsers.
But for the sake of argument, lets say that .0000001% > 99.99999%. What is the browser I can install+configure right now, that will perform what Firefox does every day. For ex:
natively support containers,
provide fully uncrippled element control,
provide reader mode when *I* want it,
locally save and sync windows,
provide granular redirection control,
and the other functions that are mostly unique to Firefox ecosystem
?
> We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so I want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice. We’ve added this note to our blog to clarify, so thank you for your feedback.[1]
That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that.
Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.
By that logic, and with some hyperbole, a text editor would need a license from the user to be able to turn their keystrokes into visible text display.
It smells really bad of privacy violation, data hoarding, targeted psychological manipulation (also known as advertisements), and behaviour analysis. That is why people are reacting so furiously.
> That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that.
Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.
Every browser I’ve used in the past decade does “search as you type” by default. That does require local access to your browser and your key strokes.
Normal people wouldn’t use a browser that didn’t do search as you type.
But at no point does any of what you type need to be sent to Mozilla. That only needs to be between the browser and the configured search engine and nothing in between.
> We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible
wow, that's scary.
So either
a) the current license doesn't allow some current basic functionality or
b) the basic functionality of firefox is about to change
I can't imagine how a) can be true. So b) must be true and quote implies, that firefox's basic functionality is about to change. And I do not see how it can change for the better regarding the context of the quote.
And the US DoJ ruling last year that Google had an illegal monopoly on web search, and one of the mooted remedies was to bar Google paying to be the default search engine in other browsers... and about 90% of Mozilla's income is Google paying to be the default search engine.
But sure, "why now", maybe someone reported a typo or something.
Have you tested the waters with a request for the devs to remove whatever you consider suspicious in that list?
I believe the current issue regarding Firefox is it's new terms of use, which are not presently in Zen browser. Other than that is a pretty close copy of Firefox, which is the point, and why I suggested it to parent as an option.
I did not. However considering that they have advertised themselves as "privacy-focused" Firefox alternative and can't be bothered to do the most superficial of tests, I don't think they care or are competent[1] enough to change it.
If you want an actual private Firefox alternative there are already multiple long standing and competent projects such as arkenfox, librewolf, mullvad and tor browser.
The website looks good, but as I scroll down in mobile Safari the page starts glitching until it fully crashes and Safari says an error repeatedly occurred. It doesn’t inspire much confidence when the web page for a web browser is broken.
> Can I backup my container configuration to a json file on disk or do I still need to sync it to the cloud to save it?
I will guess the ability to save containers locally must be possible, based on this: Every night, my desktop ffx profiles are copied over to a VM. The VM hosts firefox as a remote app.
That remote app instance of ffx has all of my sessions and saved passwords. I can access it from anywhere over VPN and they never leave the house. I'm typing on it now.
Included in that are all of my containers - so in theory they're transportable. I've never thought to try to isolate them from the profile - but my gut says it should be possible.
I'm still not convinced that Firefox is The Actual Devil for potentially appearing to perform .000001% of the bad behavior that is fully-baked into popular Chromium browsers.
But for the sake of argument, lets say that .0000001% > 99.99999%. What is the browser I can install+configure right now, that will perform what Firefox does every day. For ex: