Sometimes I wonder if this folks that are so aggressively against Firefox but ready to eat up on Chrome, might be just bots. I mean I hope so.

Cause otherwise we will have so many options and Google will have the best intersts for all of us 😇

Honestly, Chromium seems to have the basic features like history and passwords figured out way better than Firefox (or rather, Chrome does), while stripping most of the junk away, as it luckily happens to be proprietary Google bullshit.

Firefox has a bunch of telemetry and bloat, but the fact that my only real dealbreaker for a browser is quality adblock makes Firefox pretty much my only “vanilla” choice.

Unmozillaed Firefox for me is also non-woke…

Ironfox seems to take a fair bit of RAM and spin up my fans. Even if it’s one tab doing nothing.

I do have some addons and sync setup though (with the adjust canvas setting on as recommended).

Ungoogled chrome dosnt seem to have an issue. And like another commenter said so many sites break in IronFox I need backup anyway.

But maybe waterfox or zen is better for my use.

This is nonsense

I regularly set up Firefox because I distro hop and like to buy cheap thinkpads. It takes like 30 seconds to do some quick toggles in the settings. Half of them are regular shit like tab behavior because I don’t like the defaults, and that’s okay. 15 seconds to install ublock. Couple minutes in about:config

Would it be kinda nice if all the defaults just happened to align with my specific wants and needs? Sure, I guess. But I’m an adult with agency and am happy to click some toggles.

If maintaining and updating a codebase didn’t take so much labor then it’d be cool to use obscure single-maintainer forks. But up-to-date security and non-google alternatives are orders of magnitude more important to me than having to click a few toggles once.

how active?
thats a deep question
first: honest and worthy question. but potentially* freeloading type question.
one area where it definitely matters: POLITICS . if u feel that your contrarian vote is relatively less effective than publishing political commentary. ok cool. But… how many people (Exactly) are going to read and think about it. thats a critical question.

answer:
surprisingly… relatively active (if we thought it was absolute totally 100% dead.)
https://reddit.com/r/geminiprotocol/new
2+1(my own) subs on lemmy.
maybe (estimated 200 posts dated for this year (YTD). very quick estimated guess(kennedy search for “2016” … ~80% of first sample of results are links to aggregator posts.))
tangentially related: i can honestly say that lagrange is a pretty darn good client(not perfect. but quite usable after you customize it to your liking)

negatives:
i think fediverse posting is lowering. dont know why. maybe AI use increasing. i think that should be a proxy metric for challenges ahead. another question: in the age of AI data mining… do ppl really want to post on the web. furthermore… why would anyone want to post ANYWHERE. :potentially another challenge. the loss of some key sites(“assets”) is unfortunate. but i think they are open source… so anyone could theoretically… do the work… and spin up, more refined/improved, versions of those assets.

• and they were not totally irreplacable services. but its still unfortunate.

other resources: https://codeberg.org/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini/commits/branch/main
and github mirror : https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
github active projects: https://github.com/search?q=%23gemini-protocol&type=repositories&s=updated&o=desc
gemini://station.martinrue.com/
gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/

Absolutely agree on every point. I felt this for the last few years, not just with the latest updates. I haven’t updated Firefox for months (a year?), and when I decided to do it after convincing my friend to switch to it because he said he couldn’t find the option in settings I told him about, I was basically ~10 versions behind. So updating it and seeing the redesigned settings that looked less intuitive and completely unnecessary, I felt really frustrated.

There’s a new browser in the making called Ladybird, I don’t know if it’s going to be available on Windows (they say the alpha is for Linux and macOS). Yeah, I am on Windows, sadly, and I don’t plan on switching to Linux, yet. Mozilla was praised for being a non-profit “good guys”, but they’ve been really annoying, perhaps trying to appeal to the mainstream. Truth is, the mainstream does NOT care about Firefox. You need to spend all your funds on marketing it, not making it uglier with each update.

So many websites don’t seem to work on Firefox or Librewolf, always have to keep Chrome handy somewhere

Try out Brave. AFAIK, Morphe has a patch where it unlocks the Brave Origin features for free, so you can turn off all the bloat like Brave News, Wallet etc.

https://codeberg.org/celenity/phoenix

Great project.

Can anybody tell if iceraven is still a good alternative?

I’ll never switch to Chromium no matter what happens, not on an ideological basis, but because Firefox is the only browser that allows me to create duplicate bookmarks without manually copying and pasting it.

If they need to do stiff to make money to stay afloat, that’s mostly capitalism’s fault. As log as it can be turned off, unlike things in Chrome or Edge or some others, then it’s not huge. And as long as they keep it open sourced, then forks can be made. Chromium based browsers still have too much reliance on Google stuff and use way too many resources. Gecko based browsers have been my preference for ages.

Librewolf, Waterfox and GNU IceCat are all Firefox forks.

For what you’re asking for, GNU IceCat is probably the best fit - the project syncs up with Firefox ESR but removes all proprietary stuff and maintains it’s own extensions. It has some privacy improvements too but is otherwise set up as a standard browser. It’s basically Ungoogled Chromium for Firefox. The downside is the project doesn’t release project binaries; you have to look for binaries in your distro (and many don’t provide them) or use GNU Guix - the package manager from the GNU project (which can be installed on any system; it’s a bit like NIX). Or build them yourself from Github. Details are here: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

Librewolf and Waterfox are both excellent but by default are very privacy focused and locked down, so you may need to make config changes to get them back to a more “standard” default browser set up (sacrificing the privacy benefits in the process).

Personally I use Firefox; I understand what you’re saying but the steps you talk about are at first install and that’s not something I do often so can tolerate it.

EDIT: Just checked, IceCat isn’t in OpenSuSE’s default repos (disappointingly) but I did find it in Fedora’s repos (both standard and it’s Flatpak store). So it’s a bit hit and miss. Guix is universal but it’s a bit of a bloaty way to do it if you only want one item from it’s repos. Fedora Flatpaks can of course be installed on pretty much any X86/AMD64 system by adding registry.fedoraproject.org as a flatpak remote (alongside Flathub).

I think the sponsored links, promotions and Ai efforts come from their crisis trying to make money and to depend less on Googles money. While trying to focus on privacy and not sell user data. That’s a tricky situation to be in, if the browser isn’t making money. I wouldn’t call Firefox bloatware, as it is bloated like any other modern browser.

And it’s not like I wouldn’t have an issue with Firefox either. For long time I am looking for an alternative, and almost switched over to Librewolf. But unfortunately Librewolf have removed the internal password manager of Firefox, and they recommend to use an external manager. Which is the deal breaker for me. So even if Firefox is flawed, I’ll stay with it and do the customization and settings myself, which is a lot.