I Still Haven’t Found a New Browser, and That’s Ok
Back in December I wrote about whether Firefox is firefucked, and I ended that post by saying the following:
Firefox won't be changing to a modern AI browser any time soon, so there's no rush for me to jump right now. So I'm planning to continue testing alternatives and just hope that the Mozilla leadership team have a course correction. But if the last few years have taught me anything, it's that a course correction is unlikely to happen.
Since then I've continued to try other browsers, but nothing has stuck. I've tried Vivaldi, Brave, Waterfox, Gnome Web, Zen, and goodness knows what else. But all have been lacking in some way compared to Firefox. Of all the browsers I've tried, Vivaldi comes the closest, but there are some frustrations I'd prefer not to deal with:
- The little "tabs" down-arrow next to the window controls isn't aligned.
- The top/bottom margin of tabs isn't aligned correctly.
- Won't switch to dark theme when I select "Dark Style" in Gnome.
- Two-finger swiping to go back/forward doesn't work.
- There's too many options, it's a little overwhelming.
- It tries to do too much - I don't need a mail and RSS client in my browser.
I do really like their business model though, and I do feel like they're the good guys in the browser wars. So I continue to have Vivaldi installed on all my devices, and I threw them a £50 donation too - as it's important to support these kind of projects, I think.
Anyway, back to Firefox...
A couple weeks ago they announced that their AI killswitch will be coming in version 148, which is great to hear as it means I no longer have to try and find an alternative browser.
Credit: Mozilla
If the killswitch is as straightforward as it's shown in the image above, I'll be a very happy camper indeed.
For the record, I don't hate AI and LLMs. Far from it, in fact, I think they have a lot of utility. I just don't want them embedded into my browser.
What about the Google $$
The Google cash cow still really concerns me - Firefox is effectively being propped up by one of their main competitors, but it's been that way for so long now, I'm not sure it will change. Especially since Google is no longer required to sell Chrome.
If it was to happen, and the arse immediately fell out of Mozilla's funding model, then I'd probably just switch to Vivaldi and learn to live with the frustrations I have with it.
For now though, I hope to remain a happy Firefox user for another 20 years.