Testing the Firefox alternatives

Firefox and Mozilla are in a bit of a state. Firefox and Mozilla are always in a bit of a state, but the recent release of Firefox 130 which includes an AI chatbot feature has prompted a lot of head scratching.

Yes, I get that some people want it, and you can turn it off. And, no, that is not the issue. The issue is Mozilla are spending a lot of time and effort on chasing the sort of silly AI hype that gets Tony Blair excited.¹ That’s rather disconcerting if you’d like Mozilla to focus on making a good browser instead of chasing the new and shiny because it is new and shiny.

(In their defence: I’ll note that some of the AI stuff Mozilla is pursing is reasonable. The translation feature uses a local model for translation, which is a great idea. It doesn’t support all the languages that Google Translate does, but it’s good.²)

Anyway, the rot just goes on. In July, it was the rollout of privacy-preserving attribution (having previously purchased Anonym). Before that, it was the rollout of the ghastly Proton UI, which necessitated (and still necessitates) setting up Lepton aka Firefox-UI-Fix. There’s plenty more things people are grumpy about—abandoning Servo, Solo (yet more AI hype), Pocket… there’s so many things, one begins to lose track.

You can totally still stick with Firefox… but remember to download userChrome.css from GitHub. And if you want vertical tabs, be sure to install Sidebery until Mozilla get around to implementing native vertical tabs. (You know, like Chromium-based browsers including Edge and Vivaldi already have.)

And then turn off a bunch of settings and install a bunch of extensions to tighten up privacy.

And then brace yourself for Mozilla to find new and exciting ways to disappoint you every six weeks with some new brand of nonsensical bullshit.

When the Privacy Preserving Ads stuff was rolled out, I pulled the trigger and switched to LibreWolf. The AI chat stuff has prompted a lot of people to look for Firefox but with less Mozilla nonsense.

Switching to what are essentially “Firefox distros” to collectively try and nudge Mozilla back to making more sensible decisions instead of AI hype chasing is an eminently reasonable one. There’s more reasons than just that. Part of the reason I use Firefox-based browsers rather than Chromium browsers is because I want to preserve some choice and diversity in browser engines. The existence of a choice of different Firefox derived browsers may allow space for experimentation in designing better browsers. In Chromium land, Arc has shown that there’s an opportunity for quite radically rethinking how browsers work. Same for Orion in Mac/iOS-land.

This isn’t a detailed review of the different browsers, just a few comments and observations having tried them.

LibreWolf

LibreWolf has been my daily driver for a few months now. It’s very close to Firefox, but with a bunch of privacy-focussed defaults.

Some of these are straightforward: uBlock Origin is pre-installed, for instance. Google is not set as a default search engine—DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Mojeek, and a public SearXNG instance are. HTTPS only is on by default. There’s no sponsored content on the home page, and there’s no telemetry.

LibreWolf’s commitment to good privacy defaults is simultaneously a feature and a problem. The “resist fingerprinting” (RFP) settings which are pulled in from the Tor Browser actively make using certain websites impossible. They trigger some kind of anti-abuse mechanisms on said websites which then require that I complete a CAPTCHA, and there is only so much of my life I wish to spend clicking squares containing fire hydrants, “crosswalks”, or yellow New York taxis or various other bits of American street furniture. If it were just on crappy websites, I wouldn’t mind but the main place I encounter this is actually JSTOR, along with a number of other academic/research databases. Hindering access to the few websites where the content is written by subject matter experts rather than AI-generated marketing slop is inconvenient enough that I turned RFP off via a trip to about:config.

What I’d really like is if RFP could be turned off on a per-site basis. Or if one could use the containers feature in Firefox (perhaps with Multi-Account Containers) to have RFP running on most sites, with special treatment for the websites that don’t like it.

Similarly, not storing history is a great privacy choice. It’s also an incredibly annoying choice for the average user who would quite like to be able to find that blog post they spent hours searching for again in their browser’s history section.³ And, yes, you can turn it off.

If you are the sort of person who has a YubiKey, has attended a GPG key signing party, or has opinions about elliptic curve cryptography, LibreWolf may be a great fit for your tastes. If you’re not, beware that security and usability are destined to have a rocky relationship—and you may have to go fumbling around to disable certain security features if certain websites get aggrieved at the hardened privacy choices in LibreWolf.

Floorp

Floorp is a Firefox-based browser built by Ablaze, “a group of creators primarily active in Japan. It is a community and not a company or a public organization” (according to their FAQ).

When you start, you can choose a “template”. The UI doesn’t really tell you what the templates are, but if you push the buttons, it’ll show you.

The “default” options gives you an Vivaldi/Edge style sidebar containing icons that open up sidebar tabs for bookmarks, history and a ‘notes’ feature, plus links to documentation, Google Translate (I’m home the Firefox local translation will come at some point), and passwords, settings and extensions. In addition, there’s a sidebar panel called the “browser manager” which is history, downloads, tags and bookmarks rolled into one. It has a menu bar at the top. Presumably, on Windows and Linux, this is the primary way to access the menu bar, but this is probably a bug that needs fixing on the Mac version.

The “basic” template disables this sidebar. The “advanced” template enables a status bar that contains a “full screen” button and a “take a screenshot” button, and not much else, though you can obviously put stuff on there. The “default” option is fine. You can remove items from the sidebar, but annoyingly. It’d be nice if you could move extension icons there, but that’s a limitation of Firefox.

In addition, Floorp allows you to choose from a variety of different Firefox UI designs including both Proton and Photon/Lepton. It has built-in vertical tabs, without the fuss (but also without the features) of Sidebery. If you’re intending to use vertical tabs, the Proton UI actually fits in aesthetically in both light and dark themes in a way it doesn’t in Firefox.

The sensible privacy defaults of LibreWolf aren’t there, so you’ll probably want to install uBlock Origin, change from Google to a search engine that doesn’t use text regurgitation software to advise users to “enjoy the crunchy texture of glass without worrying about it contributing to weight gain”, relax in a bath with a toaster and all the other stuff to turn the web from an absolute wreck into almost usable.

One feature I do like a lot in both Floorp and Zen: workspaces. These are very similar to both Arc’s profiles and spaces features, and “tab groups” in Safari and Orion, and are handy for separating out personal and work-related tabs, or dealing with the general irritation caused by having multiple logins for different Single Sign On (another tech industry lie).

Details on the website are a bit sparse, and quite a lot of the Japanese documentation hasn’t been translated into English. It’s decent though, and offers lots of customisability.

Zen

Zen is relatively new. The design is clearly very inspired by Arc (rounded corners galore). Vertical tabs by default (plans are afoot to add boring old-style tabs).

There’s lots to say about the layout. There’s a compact mode which makes everything slide away.

Like Floorp, there’s a sidebar feature. Given the tab bar is a sidebar, to distinguish it from the tab bar, the settings refer to it as “Web Side Panels”—while the UI calls it the “Zen Sidebar”. It’s like a browser-in-a-browser. It comes preloaded with links for Wikipedia, Twitter/X, YouTube, Google Translate and Todoist. I can see the use cases for all of them: quickly looking stuff up on the side in Wikipedia, tweeting (excreting?), watching videos, translating snippets of text, and marking off items on your to-do list… but there doesn’t seem to be the kind of coherence there as there is with using the sidebar to put browser features like bookmarks, history etc. I disabled the Web Side Panels/Zen Sidebar it in the settings as I don’t think I’ll use it.

Somewhat confusingly, in Keyboard Shortcuts, I can set shortcuts to open history and bookmarks in a traditional Firefox-style sidebar. And I can open these from the View menu. In the tab sidebar, there are buttons for opening the history and bookmarks. The bookmarks button opens the bookmarks in a sidebar, while the history opens up the equivalent of the recently closed tabs section.

If you really like sidebars, you could have a sidebar with your tabs, then click ‘bookmarks’ to open a bookmarks sidebar, then have a “Zen Sidebar” (aka a Web Side Panel). But you probably shouldn’t.

One small nitpick I did find—the icons for opening the bookmarks and history or sliding the tab sidebar over don’t have tooltips. The settings button has a tooltip which reads “Open settings ({$shortcut})” which presumably should contain a keyboard shortcut.

On macOS, another weird part—if you use a tab sidebar, the red/yellow/green buttons are no longer in the corner—they’re immediately above the content area. This looks a bit odd. It’s probably remediable by having the tab bar on the right… but the checkbox to move it to the right doesn’t work for me. You can fix it by switching on “Use legacy toolbar position”, or by enabling the title bar in the toolbar customisation menu.

One other slight annoyance: when I tried to log on to a site supporting Passkeys, it stated “This browser or device is reporting partial passkey support.”

The above complaints may sound like I dislike Zen—I very much don’t. It’s described as “alpha” on their website and release notes, and it’s remarkably good given the first alpha release came out less than two months ago, so this kind of UI nitpicks will almost certainly go away given how much progress they’re making in a very short time.

They’ve made a theme store to collect themes specifically for Zen, which is helpful given the significant distance it has travelled from stock Firefox in terms of UI design.

Like Floorp, there’s workspaces, which are very handy and integrate with containers. Also like Floop (but unlike LibreWolf out-of-the-box), you can use Firefox Sync.

The default search engine is DuckDuckGo, which is an improvement on Google. There’s also Google, (English) Wikipedia and eBay.

Again, the privacy defaults are pretty much like Firefox’s, so you’ll want to install uBlock Origin and any other privacy-related add-ons that you would in Firefox.

Onwards

There are a bunch of other Firefox-derived browsers like Waterfox, Pale Moon, Basilisk, IceCat. I haven’t tried them, and don’t know much about them.

One important thing to keep an eye on how quickly security fixes get pushed through from upstream Firefox to Firefox-derived browsers. For a long time, I stuck with Firefox precisely because of this. It’s a sign of how bad the rot has got at Mozilla that people are so keen on alternatives. I really hope Mozilla might learn something from this, but history suggests they’ll try literally anything else first, and the love-hate relationship will never end.