No, Pleaso no, god no
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
58 points (96.8% liked)
Privacy
43804 readers
457 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Well it was fun while it lasted I guess
OK peeps, crowd sourcing time.
What other gecko (or non-webkit) browsers are out there?
If you want to sidestep firefox, all firefox descendants would eventually pose the same problem. So I think many options others provided are suboptimal. In that regard.
I'm keeping my eyes on ladybird: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird https://ladybird.org/
But it still is in its early stages.
Except that *Fox, *Fennec and *Wolf are downstream to Firefox, so if the main trunk goes shit, they will become outdated soon.
Aren’t these all soft forks of Firefox? What we need is a hard fork with the funding and team capable of sustaining it.
Not really. Mullvad Browser is a Tor Browser fork. WebLibre is a Gecko-engine based Flutter browser written from scratch.
Tor Browser is a modified Firefox ESR, which is just Firefox with less frequent releases.
Mullvad Browser is literally based on Firefox ESR. Which they clearly state.
For example: "Mullvad Browser 14.0, based on Firefox ESR 128"
There’s also Zen, which is Firefox based and will be disabling ai features!
Still in beta though
Another common mozilla L
So I'm not ready to burn it all to the ground just yet. Mostly because chromium is still so much worse but also because, at least so far, I can disable that and I understand that "ai is money" for fundraising.
But... anyone have any thoughts on the various forks like waterfox and the other one? I don't mind grabbing the extensions I need on a new install but I DO need a way to be able to send tabs between devices. In theory that is something I can selfhost but I am not aware of a good solution.
That's actually a decent take on it.
Ummmmm, what is an AI browser? I mean, other than something I don't want.
Does it browse AI generated content? Does it generate AI web pages for me? Does it just set chatgpt/copilot/grok/gemini as the homepage/default search? Does it use AI to customize content to your language/reading level? Does it flag non-AI content as potentially malicious like an http site?
I'm so lost.
You made me read the Comet browser review, as I did not have the courage to install it myself.
Seems useful if done privately and under supervision:
- has an AI chat sidebar that can interact with what you're viewing
- can fill out forms (eg. you can dump unstructured text and have it fill, instead of copying field by field)
- it can browse the internet for you - you ask it a question and watch it browse pages to find one with an answer
- it can summarize the currently watched page. Which at first I thought was ridiculous but sometimes you need to get information from shitty bloated articles with 10 paragraphs of introduction
As long as it's optional and done right (eg. It can fill the form but it's me who submits it, and the model is running locally), sounds very useful. Also no reason why it can't be a Firefox addon instead of built in.
It AI's the AIable content that AI hasn't already AI'd.
yo dawg, I heard you like AI 😆
Can they rename the browser to Fireslop?
Guess I'm using Links2 now...