so long as it's optional, local, and private.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Privacy
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I'm sorry, but it's not going to be. Mozilla set the stage of this when they changed from FOSS to source available.
The article quotes him as saying:
AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.
No big deal. If it turns out to be unethical it will be switched off in Librewolf.
No, Pleaso no, god no
Well it was fun while it lasted I guess
Another common mozilla L
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Except that *Fox, *Fennec and *Wolf are downstream to Firefox, so if the main trunk goes shit, they will become outdated soon.
You kinda want it to be based on Firefox, as the only other option is chrome. The forks already strip out all the mozilla bullshit, it'll just be more work to strip out all the AI nonsense.
I'm mainly familiar with librewolf, it's not just stripped of nonsense but also hardened by default. Actually so much so that I stayed on Firefox as it was too much effort (so far) to "unharden" all the aspects I didn't want or need.
We'll cross that bridge when and if we come to it. Or rather we won't, but the devs behind these projects will.
FOSS to thrive needs people who can afford to spend time and energy on it. With the recent enshittification of workers collective power, developers have less of both, and the trend is pessimistic.
The answer is, and always has been, unions and strikes.
Do your part.
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
It's in beta but I daily drive it and I would say is basically as functional as Firefox already
I've played enough perpetually Early Access / beta vudeo games, beta web browser is just another software to me 😅
Looks nice. First thing I noticed is that their homepage works without JS. However I am surprised that they didn't remove the account syncing stuff, which could also be achieved with an extension.
Can't access it with vanadium browser ?
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 😆
Weird Al Yankovic
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.
Mostly because Mozilla is terrible at achieving its goals, so this will probably result in nothing
Tldr: Zen is Arc Browser before they went AI brain worm but firefox based.
I like Zen browser because of their workspace thing. There's pinned tabs, but with zen each workspace can have its own pinned tabs. I still van set a global pinned tabs for all workspaces. And they work great with firefox containers. Each workspace can have a default container. So that way my work workspace can have only my work google account signed in, and my personal only with ny personal etc.
But ine of the major bugs though is that sometimes your tabs can just go poof. Had it happened to me earlier in the year, managed to restore my tabs somehow. Reported the bug but I don't see progress on the issue tracker as far as I ca understand.
If syncing netween desktop and monile is a concern, zen still uses firefox sync.
That's actually a decent take on it.
Can they rename the browser to Fireslop?
Guess I'm using Links2 now...
Try Dillo. It is what web browsers should have been.