Is there a fork of firefox where you have all the same core functionality and support for extensions but with all the mozilla services (pocket, safe browsing, forced crap on the new tab page, any AI service, etc...) removed?
Is there a fork of firefox where you have all the same core functionality and support for extensions but with all the mozilla services (pocket, safe browsing, forced crap on the new tab page, any AI service, etc...) removed?
Zen, Waterfox, Librewolf, Floorp.. For android there's Fennec, Iceraven.
There are more, those are just the ones I can recall.
Zen and Floorp are not obvious improvements from a privacy and control perspective.
Waterfox, Librewolf and Mullvad Browser are worth considering.
Why is that? I remember seeing that Zen strips out the Firefox telemetry.
Librewolf is nice but breaks a lot of stuff, sites that use webrtc or canvas related things, lots of banking sites refuse to load, and some other issues I can't remember.
I think it's a good idea to mitm yourself and look at what exactly your browser is up to. We should be careful about just accepting and repeating hearsay when such claims are pretty easy to verify yourself.
https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/
As for webapps breaking in Librewolf, IME those can be fixed by selectively unblocking canvas (or whatever) for the site in question.
For Android, Ironfox is currently the best option IMO.
My preference is Zen (https://zen-browser.app/), but there's also LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) if you want a less customized fork.
I moved to Zen but have subsequently moved to Glide [0] which I find to have less UI fluff and the keyboard shortcuts and scriptability are excellent.
0. https://glide-browser.app/
Pocket has been gone for awhile now. Is it really that hard to uncheck some boxes to turn this all off?
Tor Browser, Mullvad Browser and PaleMoon browser (a modern browser, though it doesn't support webextensions).