Posts tagged browser
Firefox began as the first open source browser to live through the browser wars, overcoming Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and continues to deliver competition-smashing technology to this day.
Chromium code
The only advantages of Chromium are that it was adopted by Electron and spread partially because of a more liberal license and Google’s own efforts.
Google will never be able to cope with the worst imaginable code base of Chromium.
Chromium is near-impossible to compile
On a 4cores/8threads Ryzen CPU Chromium compiles in ~12h and requires at least 20GB of disk space for build. At the same time Firefox compiles in ~1.5h and requires ~8GB for disk space.
Programming language adoption
Additionally Firefox team was able to rewrite a very large portion of Firefox codebase in Rust which improved the browser’s safety. There were attempts to add rust to Chromium but they all are in more of a addon-like fashion.
Porting to UNIXes
Because Chromium is extremely large it’s very hard to port and maintain for Linux and BSD based systems. There were numerous bugs with Chromium’s UI on Linux that cause crashes on pressing random controls. I believe Google has no Linux testers beside the “free software freeloaders” (wink, wink, IBM :P).
Anti-competition
This days Google has to result to dirty tactics where certain Google-owned websites would either refuse to work on Firefox or give a fake performance hit that is entirely caused by malicious JavaScript code.
Several popular FOSS-related sources have covered this news recently, check them out on the WWW.
How it should be?
I imagine that a web browser should have been a "window" to the Internet world that provides easy and efficient way to graphically access resources exposed by multiple protocols: HTTP(S), (S)FTP, Gopher, Gemini, etc…
How it is?
Only few protocols are supported!
Recently FTP support got "deprecated" in Firefox. It can still be enabled in by setting network.ftp.enabled to true.
FTP support is announced to be completely gone in FF 90.
Chrome dropped FTP some time ago.
BUT!
Luckily we have Emacs!
GNU Emacs has packages to support all kinds of protocols.
eww which is a simple HTTP(S) browser like w3m (also renders images)tramp allows you to access files by SSHelpher allows you to access Gemini and Gopher sites (graphically)ange-ftp allows you to connect to FTP servers- and finally
net-utils which wraps around system utilities to provide interactive mode for many protocols, ie.: gopher, irc, ntp, pop3, www
Time in Firefox
I love Firefox, it's reasonably secure, private, customizable, and most importantly it's different. In the world of Google's reign this is a big plus. You can be sure that the one spying on you will be at most Mozilla "anonymous data collection" ;P Recently with upgrade to version 68.8.0 I have experienced weird image artifacts: some favicons on tabs were replaced with white squares and random images would have artifacts on them. The whole YouTube website had pink & green distorted thumbnails. I have experienced this behavior on my T440 Thinkpad (Intel GPU) laptop and my desktop with Nvidia. I had posted this under a bug report of another user who experienced weird behavior on some websites with the 68.8.0 version of Firefox here. With update to 76.0.1 I was logged off from all the websites and my stylus themes got deleted (luckily i had a backup). The 76.0.1 searchabr is absolutely hideous, it feels like something made for a Windows tablet. The artifacts still remained on 76.0.1. So i decided to give Waterfox a shot.
Experience part 0
Lest talk about pre-experience; keep in mind that this is really not a good comparison. Waterfox in not available in the main gentoo repository, but using "eix -R Waterfox" I was able to find it in the poly-c overlay (overlays are similar to AUR in Arch). The only hiccup i had during compilation was to be expected. There is a problem with the "-fno-common" flag being turned on by default in GCC 10, so for some builds you have to turn "-fcommon" on. Other than that the compilation went smoothly, it took 37 minutes 43 seconds on first run which is ridiculous compared to Firefox which takes approximately 1 hour on my 4-core development machine.
Spyware?
I only want you to think of Chrome or Chromium - they are produced by the biggest advertising company in the world. So yes, Waterfox seems like a lesser evil, but you can always dive in and block any or all malicious connections with /etc/hosts and packet filters (yes i know this is not ideal). Lets confront some statements on spyware watchdog
Waterfox connects to spyware services when it is first run
Same as Firefox. It may not do that if you import your own profile (haven't tested that though).
Waterfox has a communication problem
I wanted to read the "policy" - link doesn't work - https://www.waterfox.net/en-US/privacy/waterfox/ Contents of the linked webpage:
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<?xml version="1.0"?><updates></updates>
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Cool.
Quoting: "According to its privacy policy, Waterfox collects the following information by default:" "by default" is a important wording here.
Waterfox offers spyware search engines to its users and uses Bing as its default search engine
That is literally the first change I do on my browsers.
Waterfox sends all website notifications through Mozilla's servers
So does Firefox…
You don't have to use it. With Waterfox I stopped to.
Waterfox is self updating software
It is not as much as Discord is. Discord as a example will refuse to connect to the server if its version is too low. You can still run outdated Waterfox if you wish to. Also those updates will be disabled if you use the ebuilds. This is mostly used only on Windows… and if you use your Windows you probably know what you signed up for.
So what?
I do not question the legitimacy of Spyware Watchdog's statements. I just compare them with my own habits and thoughts. For me Waterfox == Firefox spyware level. Keep in mind that Firefox introduced more questionable integrated services in new releases.
Small things that make me happy
I was very impressed to find some cool features in Waterfox:
- it's menu is compatible "global menu" on KDE Plasma - i was very surprised by this; this thing is mostly sound on chromium-based applications (the damned electron) and QT applications
- better theming - Waterfox uses the old Firefox theme by default with "smooth" tabs
- most addons just work - uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes, Plasma Integration, Smart HTTPS, SpanTree - GitLab Tree and Stylus work fine
- it's Firefox as you knew it; I missed the good old Firefox ;)
- back-ported security settings - container tabs work!
Is this worth it?
Absolutely. In my opinion Waterfox is a great browser that I can live in. Maybe consider giving Waterfox a shot if you are not as much into security as Spyware Watchdog people are and want reasonable compromise.
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