cmon over to librewolf ff lovers! i been on it months and often forget it's not the 'fox.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
123 points (99.2% liked)
technology
24139 readers
169 users here now
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
- Ways to run Microsoft/Adobe and more on Linux
- The Ultimate FOSS Guide For Android
- Great libre software on Windows
- Hey you, the lib still using Chrome. Read this post!
Rules:
- 1. Obviously abide by the sitewide code of conduct. Bigotry will be met with an immediate ban
- 2. This community is about technology. Offtopic is permitted as long as it is kept in the comment sections
- 3. Although this is not /c/libre, FOSS related posting is tolerated, and even welcome in the case of effort posts
- 4. We believe technology should be liberating. As such, avoid promoting proprietary and/or bourgeois technology
- 5. Explanatory posts to correct the potential mistakes a comrade made in a post of their own are allowed, as long as they remain respectful
- 6. No crypto (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) speculation, unless it is purely informative and not too cringe
- 7. Absolutely no tech bro shit. If you have a good opinion of Silicon Valley billionaires please manifest yourself so we can ban you.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
well hey I guess maybe I'll just stop browsing the web
like LibreWolf and Floorp are about to become more popular.
These are not "forks" they are third-party reskins of Mozilla's product. They're the equivalent of downloading third party windows ISOs and then claiming that you're not really using Windows or that you're getting the last laugh. Don't use firefox "forks" just use Firefox and turn on the policy templates yourself (because that's what they're doing at the end of the day). Also, are you really trusting a small ring of either 1-3 people to make sure the most crucial program on your computer and in your life works properly?
Stop using Firefox "forks" they are not "forks" they are third-party mods. You will not escape
There is no "fork" of the web browser, it's a software scheme designed to be nigh irreplaceable by anyone who is not a multi-billion dollar capitalist. Ladybird? More like Cloudflare's next hottest investment as they diversify their business portfolio. Servo? Mozilla cuts their funding and they're years and years away from getting where we are right now. Webkit? Tell anyone not using safari to wait a few seconds for webpages to load, or the endless trove of legacy plugins built up from decades to be discarded.
The solution of course, is to reject over complicated web standards and create a base featureset, but with people's lives being dictated by capitalist owned infrastructure that can change and morph instantly at the behest of its owners, there is no solution under capitalism.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enzor-demeo
At some point, though, Enzor-DeMeo will have to tend to Mozilla’s own business. “I do think we need revenue diversification away from Google,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily believe we need revenue diversification away from the browser.” It seems he thinks a combination of subscription revenue, advertising, and maybe a few search and AI placement deals can get that done. He’s also bullish that things like built-in VPN and a privacy service called Monitor can get more people to pay for their browser. He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
I don't trust this CEO will not block ad blockers some day.
Woah cool.
Unironically installed Geopard on my laptop shortly after I saw this post. I've been curious about the Gemini protocol for a while.
Yay I'm glad you're giving it a spin!
Gemini may not be the answer per se, but I think it's not realistic for anyone to make a new web browser at this point. At least not without extremely deep pockets or being able to use somebody else's extremely deep pockets. Looking at you servo.
The the Web standard is just way too huge, and even servo's method of breaking the browser down into a bunch of libraries just spreads the massive complexity around, it doesn't really make it smaller.
The idea that somehow a sufficiently motivated open source community can just make a web browser is wishful thinking imo. Maybe Gemini is too limited, but it's an interesting experiment of a particular line that you could draw. And even at this minimal level of complexity, it's not trivial to write a Gemini browser. You can make really, really trivial clients, which is cool, but actually building up the whole browser interface is still a relatively challenging task.
I'm not too tech savvy so you'll have to excuse me, but something I've been thinking… The impossibility of making new web browsers from scratch that can follow the huuuuge Web standard is basically because people expect to be able to do "more or less everything" right in their browsers nowadays, right? So maybe the "solution" here is to have more of a culture around doing things offline, torrenting instead of streaming, and then when doing things over the Internet, just having more specialized programs (and protocols?) instead of having an Everything Program for the Everything Protocol.
Yes and no, but I do like your thinking here. Using more specialized apps is kinda moving the complexity around, but the way the browser standards work also makes the problem way worse.
There are other cross-platform toolkits that are waaaay cheaper to maintain. We are just stuck with the one that Google is using as a "moat" to keep other web platform competitors from cutting into their profits, while pretending to support an open platform. The standard grows so fast that not even Microsoft can stomach the cost of keeping up.
As always, the issue is capitalism. Like, you probably don't want to politically dictate technical standards, but we also don't have any democratic method for tech workers to build and implement a sustainable standard. People do try, but they're usually just trying to compete in the so-called marketplace of ideas and don't really have a political strategy for building a people's internet or whatever.
I feel very confused looking at the documents on how to access content. Can you give an example of what you would enter into Geopard to access one of its search engines or something like that? Your comment is the first I've heard of this and I'm interested.
After installing and launching Geopard, I just clicked on the address bar at the top of the window, typed in my search query, and hit enter, just like I would on Firefox or Chrome or any other modern browser. Geopard's default search engine is called TLGS ("Totally Legit" Gemini Search).
Oh shoot, I did that and was getting a socket connection error, so thought I was doing something wrong. Must be an issue on my end then.
I hope the FF forks are able to strip out this AI shit. I'm using Floorp and it has it in the sidebar.
Suicidal institution.
Forks like LibreWolf and Floorp are dead too if Mozilla completely goes to shit. They don't to development.
Just going to leave this here for people recommending the alternative forks:
https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox?tab=readme-ov-file#browser-integration
didn't librewolf also add some ai bullshit? pretty sure they did
You ever feel like an animal being backed into a corner? Maybe its just me.
Like a little rabbit being backed into a corner by a fox, perhaps? Perhaps even more specifically a fox that is on fire yet refuses to die? A fire fox, if you will?
I dunno is the little rabbit on the verge of crashing out and turning into the one from The Holy Grail? Cuz if so yeah exactly.
load more comments
(1 replies)
The rock: Firefox doubling down on ""AI"" shit
The hard place: Having to say "Floorp" without dying a little inside
load more comments
(5 replies)
Literally the least competent fucking company on earth, staggering how fucking wrong a management team can be so fucking consistently.
I thought so too but recently I've realised they're a very competent and highly tuned machine for turning good will into private wealth.
motherfuckers.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I refuse to use it until it also mines crypto from my browser and sends it to the most sexually harassy guy ever.
Support the little parasites!
load more comments
(1 replies)
I think browser companies see the impending doom of the web as we know it. With Sam Alman peddling the weird eye scanning orb that completely de-anonymized you from the internet (world.org). The bots that openai are championing will ruin the internet through sheer volume of garbage once they reach a commodifiable scale. Then you have openai making all sorts of backroom deals so their technology is the only technology that can run unencumbered, challenging cloudflare's market power of effectively middlemanning the internet, by moving it to a browser level. We already have new search engine optimization startups for businesses but its for LLMs which is inherently non-human. AI browsers won't improve our experience, we're getting them because the web is transitioning to something that isn't for humans, its for bots to navigate so you can buy a new airfrier with the least friction.
That shit is crashing
Mozilla has been controlled opposition for a long time. Sadly, we're stuck with Firefox forks like Librewolf and Zen until a viable non-Chrome non-Firefox web browser comes along.
Dont hold your breath on a nonfascist web browser, or even a new web browser at all.
The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html
Based on Ladybird’s sponsorship terms we can assume that [it] received on the order of $100,000 USD from Cloudflare. I find this odd for a few reasons, in particular because one thing that I know is that [ladybird is] run by fascists.
https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
Don't use bare bones Firefox people. Use a fork with all the dumb bullshit stripped out like Arkenfox, Betterfox, or Librewolf.
I refuse to use a product named Floorp on principle. I'm sorry, I have to draw the line somewhere with these stupid fucking naming conventions. Floorp, Ploopy, Dorfy, just fuck off already.
Floorp has it for you. You can browse it on floorp
Me making a fork of Floorp that's literally just the exact same code verbatim but with a different name
Though in Floorp's… :dying-inside: … defense… フロープ probably sounds at least slightly less embarrassing to monolingual Japanese ears who'd have different sound associations, more "flow" and "floor" than Floam Flubber Floop's Fooglies.
load more comments
(5 replies)
view more: next ›