My last word, as I don't want to derail the thread any further: it is not the job of technology companies in one country to interfere with the workings of a sovereign government elsewhere, and it is certainly not your entitlement to call me a totalitarian for holding this view.

4 members found this post helpful.

Nevermind.

It implies trust and privacy issues, it doesn't mean they are present. This question comes up a lot with Vivaldi. I point you to my post on the matter here, which explains the situation in more detail.

1 members found this post helpful.

I use...

1. dillo where it works (not so well here on LQ but perfect for most free software project websites and many news sites)
2. eww - similar limitations to dillo. I use this when running Gnus within emacs and a mail or usenet post has a url. Quite nice how seamlessly it brings web pages into the emacs environment.
3. tor-browser (based on firefox) or plain firefox. On Slackware, which runs on my beefier laptop (circa 2010 instead of 2006) I'll use tor-browser. But it's not fun because to avoid looking distinct from other Tor user agents I don't have extra add-ons so most of sites' javascript gets to run. On this laptop (OpenBSD, 2006 Asus, only 1.5GiB) I run regular firefox through Tor with some extensions to tame websites.

Other than for banking and ecommerce, if a site makes me pull out tor-browser/firefox I'm less likely to visit them often. E.g. I check the slackware usenet group much more often than LQ. I haven't bothered to compare the big javascript running browsers to see if some run faster. Maybe a Cadillac Seville is a better car than a Pontiac Lemans, but I guess I'll avoid driving either one as much as possible.

Since you asked, I download Firefox from https://download.mozilla.org/?produc...x64&lang=en-US, extract it and copy the firefox folder to /usr/lib64. The icon and desktop files I installed long ago don't need changing with new versions. I have to have https-everwhere and privacy badger from eff.org as well as ad-block plus.

I am truly frightened. I know my own government are bad at the moment but to know that worse governments are defended is horrific. I am not sorry to derail this. Companies not wanting to support human right violations is somehow not something we're supposed to talk about?

1 members found this post helpful.

Take it to General.

2 members found this post helpful.

Brave Browser https://brave.com/

I use Pale Moon for all of my browsing. It is very stable and keeps up with the latest web standards. It works well on javascript-intensive websites like Facebook, MeWe, GitHub, Google tools and the Atlassian tools (JIRA, BitBucket, Confluence).

I used Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape since the days of Netscape Navigator v2, but around 2010 the project started to go off the rails.

The browser became progressively buggier, leaked memory faster and faster, and offered shorter and shorter uptimes. It would get "sick" (slow down, misrender pages) and eventually crash.

The developers seemed more interested in adding new features (some of them quite frivolous) than fixing bugs. The feature churn accelerated while uptimes grew shorter.

I adopted the habit of trying a half-dozen or so different releases to find the most stable one (longest uptime, least severe memory leaks) and used that version for as long as possible. Eventually I would be forced to switch to a newer release as critical security vulnerabilities came to light, or when websites started using new HTML/CSS/JS features which the browser didn't support. So I'd line up another half-dozen newer releases and look for the least unacceptable of those to use next.

Along the way, support for helper applications deteriorated and Firefox incorporated more and more functionality into the browser, which seemed like the wrong direction. I'd rather they focused on core browser features (keeping up with web standards) and maybe fixing a bug or two, and letting me use helper applications (which do a better job at fulfilling these ancillary functions anyway).

I observed that the team was treating ESR releases as a dumping ground for experimental new features. Everyone wanted their pet feature in the ESR release, so they rushed those features into production before they were ready. ESR releases are supposed to be more stable than non-ESR releases, but this achieved the opposite result.

The situation was growing intolerable, and then in 2014 they switched to the new Australis interface and started "managing" plugins on the user's behalf in intrusive and heavy-handed ways.

At that point I had been using Firefox 16.0.1 for quite a while, despite a couple of critical security vulnerabilities I had worked around as best I could. That version would stay up for between twenty and forty days at a time before becoming "sick" and needing to be restarted. I really, really didn't want to continue my forward migration. Firefox's latest offerings just seemed like a horrible mess.

I started looking at other browsers. I didn't like Chromium at all. Most of the Firefox forks had followed Firefox's development path straight into the pit of chaos, and were no better than the original for stability.

Then someone (I think it might have been orbea?) pointed me at Pale Moon, which was a very different kind of fork. Instead of following Firefox development in lockstep, it took Firefox 24 in a totally different direction.

Every Pale Moon release saw modest changes, mostly updates to web standards compliance, and several bugfixes and security fixes. Pale Moon avoided frivolous churn, and the team fixed more bugs than they put in, which was the exact opposite of what the Firefox project had done.

Pale Moon kept the FF24 user interface, they kept the old rendering engine (forking Gecko into Goanna), and they worked patiently on fixing the backlog of problems Firefox had neglected for so long.

Their efforts have paid off. Every Pale Moon release has been more stable. Every Pale Moon release has slowed the memory leaks. When I most recently had to restart Pale Moon on my workstation, the same browser process had been running continuously for 77 days, nearly twice the best uptime of FF16.0.2.

They haven't been reversing the neglect of the Helper Applications functionality, but I don't think many people care about that anymore, and at least it's not working any worse than it did in FF16.0.2. It works tolerably -- when I click on a pdf, it opens it in xpdf, etc.

Every now and then I hear about the Firefox project doing some horrible thing that upsets their users, like most recently the DoH/Cloudflare privacy scandal, or introducing these Rust dependencies.

I don't have to worry about that. I don't have to worry about any of the horrible decisions the Firefox team makes, because the Pale Moon project doesn't do those kinds of things.

If I wanted pointless churn and crashy applications, I wouldn't be a Slackware user. Pale Moon is like Slackware itself -- safe and sane, with no drama.

It's the boring browser, and that's exactly what I want.

4 members found this post helpful.

I used Firefox a long time then switched to chromium. For several months I switched to Vivaldi, especially for work. It works well with my workflow and across win (work device) and Slackware (personal device).
For my personal browsing I like luakit but last release is almost a year old. It's light and efficient but a little bit hard to master.

Mozilla has too much power, and I don't like what they do with it.

I used it before Firefox was a thing. I still prefer to anything Google. But it used to be respectable, and though I didn't like Eich, the browser is worse without him.

I neither trust it, its makers, or its features. I don't feel like it's my web browser at all. It's theirs. And that's not a great feeling. But for years I felt differently. Not in love with the changes.

2 members found this post helpful.

Honestly I stopped looking at Palemoon after reading the nonesense that went on with Eric(Aleinbob) regarding the SlackBuild. That really put me off their team and product.

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If anyone wants to know a little more, here is a link for the uninitiated:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...de-4175637630/

1 members found this post helpful.

Just downloaded and extracted the palemoon .bz2 archive. Palemoon is delightful.

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Me too. It's not just the fact that the were so disrespectful towards Slackware, but that their behavior in that and other instances has ruined any trust I otherwise may have had in their work.

2 members found this post helpful.