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[–] 111 points 8 months ago (25 children)

sadly I’ll likely support them through any shitty decisions they make as they are the only viable non-chromium alternative these days.

I get they’re chasing the buck and trying to stay relevant, but uhhhh… if they could be less Steve Buscemi-teen about it, that’d be great.

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  • [–] 81 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    I strongly believe that the EU should fund Mozilla, or a fork of Firefox.

    Gecko is the only viable competitor to Blink/WebKit, and it is needed

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  • [–] 23 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Funding FF? Maybe. Funding Mozilla? No way, not with my money.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago

    Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox's users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I'd be down to donate to Firefox's development directly, but I wouldn't want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.

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  • [–] 39 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    This is probably common knowledge to you and many others, but it bears repeating: You cannot donate to fund the development of Mozilla Firefox.

    Google can, unfortunately.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I'm pretty sure you can donate to Mozilla, are you saying that donations to Mozilla don't accomplish what we might want? I only know a little about how much Mozilla sucks so I'm ready to learn more.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    There are two interlinked Mozillas: the Mozilla Foundation is what you can donate to, but the Mozilla Corporation is what develops Firefox. No matter how much you donate, that money cannot (or will not) be transferred to Firefox development.

    Mozilla's recent history includes privacy flub after financial management misstep, so here's a few links in no particular order of severity or chronology:

    Each of these are a little rabbit hole on their own.

    Would you like to know more?

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

    I recommend Waterfox

    They have pledged to not fill their browser with AI slop features.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago* (5 children)

    Last time I tried Waterfox some sites like Twitch that actively block usage on old browsers, refused to work because the latest Waterfox release was based on a Firefox like 20+ builds behind.

    Firefox was on like version 142 and the latest Waterfox download was based on build 128.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Waterfox right now is built on ESR 148, which is on par with the latest Firefox release! ESR releases will lag several versions behind, but that's normal (even on Mozilla's side), and I'd be kind of shocked if it was such a big gap

    Edit: there was a big gap. 128 to 140 was the right jump, but Waterfox non-betas took a little less than two months to implement the change after Mozilla released it.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I have used it for twitch for years without issue. I also have ublock origin with twitch adblock.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    Well you clearly haven't used the standard available download (non-beta/nightly release) consistently through last year. Waterfox was using ESR 128 since October 2024, kept that base until finally upgrading to ESR 140 last August. So that's nearly a year of its base being out of date. So the user agent reported that number... sites really don't like that since they're looking at that for support.

    https://www.waterfox.com/releases/6.5.0/ https://www.waterfox.com/releases/6.6.0/

    Twitch only supports the last TWO versions of Firefox officially and will actively block logging in from older versions. So while you might be able to watch Twitch, if you aren't already logged in, you won't be able to login.

    https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/supported-browsers?language=en_US

    There are thousands of posts about it online for Waterfox other forks.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    It was outdated, but only for a couple months. Firefox ESR is built to last about a year, and it was maintained with security patches up-to-date alongside Firefox Production versions 129, 130, 131, 132... all the way to 139. Only then did ESR 140 come out.

    But if Twitch only supports the two most recent Firefox production versions, I guess ESR wouldn't cut it after FF 131 came out.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago*

    Yeah ofc they are chasing the buck.

    It's either they find alternatives revenue streams or we no longer have Firefox as a viable alternative anymore.

    Browsers development is crazy engineering heavy, and thus, expensive.

    It's a shitty situation all around.

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  • [–] -5 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    Ladybird browser looks promising!

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    The ladybird devs are currently in the process of switching language again from Swift to Rust, using LLMs.

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Yup. Don’t use or support Ladybird, especially since it’s made by anti-inclusivity “keep your ‘political’ gender-neutral pronouns out of our READMEs” nerdbros.

    On the other hand, Servo is coming along nicely.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)