I'm grateful for FF, but they also annoy me at times. Just little stuff probably not worth bitching about in detail. But also a peek at the potential for problems that you're talking about.
So of course I'll bitch about it.
I call it the "stop whatever you think you'd rather do right now and pay attention to our product" type shit.
Imagine you have a combination wrench and whenever you take it out of the toolbox it starts yammering at you about how great of a wrench it is and all if its shiny features. Fucking ridiculous, right?
So why do we tolerate software that does that?
Way too much software does this pushy shit. Just stay outta my face and do your actual job, software.
Because people have the attention span of a goldfish and if you aren't reminding them every 5 seconds of the features they have available they'll forget they do in fact use them and then complain to support because they can't spend 5 seconds on the help page.
I say this, not in defense of mozilla, but in frustration at having to deal daily with these kinds of issues. You can put giant screen-size arrows on where to go / what single "do the thing" button to press and people will still forget 5 seconds later.
Good point. That's true, there is definitely that side of it. I think what you're talking about is less obnoxious than the stuff that feels forced and make-the-boss-happy promotional. Push notifcations for no reason, etc. It's a spectrum from necessary to uneccessary, and there's too much of the latter IMO.
Yeah, it's strange just how readily the blinders go up wherever Mozilla is concerned. They're a corp, just like any other; if they had the money and leverage, they'd be just as aggressive as Google. Have people already forgotten that time they laid off 200+ employees and then gave all the execs bonuses?
E: Apparently y'all have forgotten. In 2021, Mozilla laid off a few hundred employees. CEO's salary doubled that year. Fuck Mozilla, they're no more your friends than Google or Microsoft; they're the same evil, just smaller-scaled evil, is all.
Absolutely, but Mozilla is pretty much owned by Google anyway, and falling in love with these companies as wide eyed fanboys never looks good when they eventually turn.
I'm not shilling for anyone. If you want to discuss actual technical details I'm happy to do so. If you're here just to share your feelings absent facts then I don't care what you have to say.
A summary from its site and known technical details:
no telemetry by default
includes uBlock Origin
has sane privacy-respecting defaults
prepackages arkenfox user.js
relatively well-maintained fork of Firefox that keeps up with upstream
No major controversies AFAIK
As for Windows 7, nobody should really need to install Librewolf anyway on such a device. No device running Windows 7 should have access to the internet at this point. If you are asking about compatibility intending this use case, you have bigger problems to worry about than your choice of browser. If you just need to view HTML files graphically, even Internet Explorer or an older firefox ESR will do.
Main features:
...
Continued support for NPAPI plugins like Silverlight, Adobe Flash and Java
Picture this in your minds eye: a Windows 7 machine running a browser with still working Flash and Java plugins, connected to the internet in 2024.
what do you see?
i see a flourishing ecosystem of worms, viruses and rootkits, all trying to be the one species to get to be the one who does the most damage to the prey species, the common user.
You're overreacting. Firefox knows their users. I am a huge "stan" for Firefox, but I will delete it like a time traveller if they make it impossible to ignore ads. I will salt the earth and poop on Firefox's grave and actively avoid it everywhere... However. If I'm wrong, there will be a Next Thing...
Yeah I'm using Fennec, which doesn't have that. But as long as it's a flick of a switch to disable, I don't really mind. Still a million times better than manifest v3.
If you use a DNS solutions you can block all the telemetry shit. Frankly FF has been phoning home in a lot of undesirable ways for many years even before this, like most browsers.
Firefox is no longer an adversary to Google for the browser market, if it ever was. FF has become a vassal of Google that with its tyranny is dictating the course of the internet, such as WEI that as far as I know it was abandoned at least for now.
Anyone else been having issues of not being able to load YouTube videos past the first few seconds on Firefox using ublock? I couldn't find any recent information online. I don't know if this is part of the war on ad blockers, or unrelated.