> Stick with Mozilla Firefox
Brendan Eich is CEO of Brave browser. He is not listed as being part of vivaldi browser, which this phrase implies.
> forced out of Mozilla.
Brendan Eich was not fired nor forced out by Mozilla. Mozilla themselves report these statements: [0]
1. Q: Was Brendan Eich fired? A: No
2. Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board? A: No
3. Q: Was Brendan Eich forced out by employee pressure? A: No
4. Q: Did Board members resign over Brendan’s Prop 8 donation? A: No
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
(Edit: formatting & more info)
I for one think that modern web standards are used by most web site authors not in users interests. Therefore implementing those standards in good faith not necessarily mean implementing an _user_ agent. Firefox is great, but web as it is mostly served is increasingly not. I just would like to see an user agent dedicated to users, not standards. Even if it would mean omitting JS and most of CSS. I would use it for information seeking and Firefox for necessary web apps.
"wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation" is the more important part here, because the Foundation is nonprofit and eventually has authority over the corporation, so the latter can't decide on its own to sell out.
The corporation needs to be able to make a profit not as an end in itself but to make strategic savings in case things get more rough with Google.
There's no other browser developer that's focused on user rights online other than Mozilla. These days it can't be just features and performance, though Firefox does not need any help in that respect either. Current version are simply brilliant.
> Net income: US$103.8 million (2016)
I wonder how rough things must be.
Have you checked Mozilla's expenses too? It has around 1200 employees, I think, and a few offices around the world, data center costs etc.. If you want to be able to independently keep that going for a few years, you need a big war chest.
Look at Dillo and Netsurf.
So if I go to Google docs, I can toggle spidermonkey (or whatever Firefox's JS compiler is called nowadays), but if I go to $randomwebsite, I'll get a secure and usable web.
> This means that for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit.
Acid test: can I build it myself and expect to see identical binaries to what they ship?
Hadn't heard about extra user-hostile stuff in this release? What things are the Waterfox guys having trouble with?
Waterfox also allows users to continue using "classic" extensions that Mozilla completely abandoned, and the developer has committed to staying with Firefox ESR until he feels Quantum has reached a point where he can switch to that codebase (i.e. maintain older extensions while allowing new features).
Ironically I'd be far more interested in switching to Waterfox if it switched to Quantum. Not only is the new extension's API far nicer than the previous one for new developers starting new extensions (yes porting old extensions is a pain, and sometimes impossible due to lack of feature-parity) but it's much more secure, which should be a priority for something focused on protecting a user's privacy. Furthermore, I wasn't aware until reading your linked list, but it appears Waterfox allows installing unsigned extensions by default: is this true? The unsigned config value is already very easy to set in Firefox, but having it set by default is just asking for users to shoot themselves in the foot in terms of leaking private data to extensions.
The porting effort from Mozilla's side can hardly be described as "developer-hostile" either; they've continuously added APIs for specific 3rd-party extensions on-request, and had a 2+ year compatibility roll out with plenty of shouty warning.
Yep and that's one of the reasons I say Waterfox is 99% there. I actually set that back to the Firefox default.
My biggest gripe with Firefox is its tendency towards making privacy hostile telemetry opt-out instead of opt-in, while still claiming they are the most privacy focused browser. They should either switch to opt-in, or remove language from their promotional materials and blog claiming to be privacy focused.
They mentioned user-hostile in their first sentence and then went on to say the Waterfox devs were having difficulty with Quantum, so I'm really just asking about either.
I am generally just curious, as a user of Firefox. I currently trust it more than Chrome but I'm concerned if there's a trend of disimprovement.
I've commented on HN before about my concerns with some Mozilla initiatives (mainly Test Flight, but others too), but I was under the impression that Firefox core work was of a better standard.
The browser that's has Google Analytics integrated, comes with pre-installed third-party tracking app, and that reports home every UI interaction you have? No, thanks, I'll stick with Iridium.
...which was last updated may 2018.
As long as there are no missing security updates, I don't see how it's a deal breaker.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...
German-specific: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-de/2017/10/06/ein-neues-cliqz...
Oh, yes, they were deeply sorry about it. I'm sure that Google would be as well.
... not to mention Brendan Eich’s divisive and controversial behavior befor he was forced out of Mozilla.