And a Pi Hole for good measure.

White list firewall. Because this is the real reason everyone has a right to ad block. Ads are hidden links to other websites. It’s like walking through a gauntlet of pick pockets bribing the credit card company just to make it to the checkout at your local grocery store, or some asshole you invite into your home that goes to the bathroom, opens a window, and lets a dozen random people in your home if they pay a dollar for the access. The entire system is based on stalking people. It is criminal.

Librewolf

What does Arkenfox do? I’ll definitely add it if it’s beneficial.

Why not add Snowflake while we’re at it?

What about Privacy Badger? Is uBlock better?

Is this applicable for Firefox mobile?

The only reason I haven’t switched to Firefox from Chrome fully is because for some reason Firefox for Android still doesn’t have tabs for large screen devices. Mozilla says it’s not a priority. 🤷

I used Brave for a few years but recently switched to LibreFox. I really enjoyed Brave as a browser but couldn’t handle all the sketchy shit that seems to keep coming up

Same. I had no idea about brave and I started using it full time on all my devices like a month ago. Guess I’m going back to Firefox. Which was fine.

Yup got the same thing. Annoying as hell. The loading bar always goes to like quarter of the way and stays there for a couple of seconds and the continues. After that it’s fine, but it is always the first page you load after closing Firefox.

I’ve never encountered this, which makes me realise I’ve been running Firefox beta for ages (with zero issues). Perhaps try that just in case it helps?

Same issue here! I thought I was alone. It annoys me to no end and weirder still, issue doesn’t present itself with Firefox for Windows running behind the same IP.

Firefox Focus also doesn’t seem to present the issue. Just the primary Firefox browser for Android. And honestly, often enough that it’s nearly unusable.

If you ever figure it out, please let me know.

You’re not alone, I’ve been using Firefox on Android for two years now, and I’ve had this problem from the beginning. The first time I launch Firefox and load a page it stops a quarter of the progression bar for ten seconds, and then loads fine. Once pas that everything works perfectly. It’s very annoying and I don’t know why this happens.

I think those existed on Reddit too. It’s just that you could never actually confirm they existed.

I downvoted because it was a lazy comment not providing further elaboration. If anything, the fact that such a comment is highly upvoted shows that this community is not mature yet.

That I’m not engaging in online discussion doesn’t automatically mean this is a bot or “dedicated reducing” account. Please restrain yourself from judging strangers on the internet.

Might as well take shits with the door unlocked; same level of exposing yourself.

In a way yes. You’re giving Google (via an increased browser market share) the power to decide the direction of the web. Their interests as a corporate organization are not aligned with yours, so they will make decisions to your detriment if they have to.

Just use Firefox. Mozilla isn’t good but it’s not evil

I don’t know how people browse the web on mobile with ads taking half of the screen.

It’s not really bad per se, it’s the default on most Android devices these days. The problem is that almost all modern browsers are Chromium-based which give Google a lot of power to implement changes (see manifest v3 & web DRM). Personally, I’m trying to slowly reduce my usage of Google products. I’m using Firefox on desktop and a mix of DDG+Fennec on my phone.

Orion

Thanks for the tip! Do you know any similar solution like this for iOS? I’m struggling to find a fully featured browser with decent ad-blocking capacity.

Every now and then, you’ll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.

Some examples:

• Mozilla use Google Analytics! → Yes, but they have a special contract with Google to protect user data: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
• Mozilla uses Google Safebrowsing! → Yes, but they have technical measures in place to limit user identification (on top of Google stating that they do not use Google Safebrowsing data for tracking): https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/
• Mozilla has privacy-invading ads on the new-tab-page! → Again, they have technical measures in place to avoid privacy issues: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared

And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing “about:telemetry” into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.

Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.

Any ‘evil’ shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.

You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can’t possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.

But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.

The fact that they have (at least for now) foregone implementing Manifest v3 should be reason enough to use Firefox. Turn their telemetry off and use ublock origin, call it a day well spent.

If you’re inclined to, use Librewolf with ublock, NoScript, decentraleyes, and chameleon.

Copy the bypasspaywalls sites into ublock, add a redirect extension to avoid all the idiot megacorps, and use duckduckgo lite and learn to use shebangs for very fast web searching.

Yeah it’s not perfect out of the box but after turning off telemetry and adding some add-ons like ublock origin and such it’s one of the best short of going full on tor/mullvad. And still less fanaticism than brave lol

They don’t need to be my friend to be better than the chromium browsers though, so I don’t know what this has to do with anything

What’s the alternative though, we have Chrome and Firefox as choices. Chrome is far worse than some issues with Firefox around CEO pay.

Which websites exactly do you still see ads on with ublock and not with Brave? Because I’ve not seen any ads in years with ublock.

I don’t know why you’re getting ads… I run Firefox + uBlock just fine.

But I also run NoScript and AdBlockPlus. Maybe try those?

(Yes I know NoScript with uBlock is pretty redundant. Doesn’t really bother me to allow scripts on both to unbreak things. I like the double lock.)

No ads on YT with Firefox + uBlock, not sure why your setup isn’t working.

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What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?

My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world

That’s gonna be quite difficult, unfortunately

What if the apps aren’t for online use?

The more market share chrome based browsers have, the easier it is for google to inflict their agenda for the internet on everyone. If firefox didnt exist, every web developer would be optimizing their sites only for chrome, and responding quickly to any change google wants to make.

When I need a Chromium browser I use Vivaldi. I quite like it!

Ungoogled Chromium is a great option for a back up. It’s lightweight and works well

Why not use NewPipe?

Vivaldi can do that, there is an option in settings. Firefox mobile does that with an addon.

I would bet my left nut they astroturf

How exactly does one accidentally insert affiliate data on links? At some point someone wrote that code, which is malicious in itself, even if the activation was accidental.

It’s without your consent.

Why the fuck should your browser get a share from your amazon shopping? It’s doubly galling since they pretend to care about user privacy.