#firefox is open source

[charlottemadison42]

Hey guess what? Firefox's creator, Mozilla, is considering whether to integrate an AI button/feature into their browser. If you, like me, use Firefox and wish to offer feedback, here is the thread: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedback-on-the-ai-services-experiment-in-nightly/td-p/60519

Pass it on.

[msilverstar]

XKit Rewritten is amazing, my Tumblr experience is so elegantly simple!

not me realizing that with tumblr moving the icons to the side, it eliminates xkit, which was situated at the top. what a scumbag move

[fedora-official]

Install Floorp. You can do it with Floorp. You can use Floorp and browse it. Download Floorp right now. Install Floorp. Dive into Floorp. You can Floorp it. It's on Floorp. Floorp has it for you. Floorp has it for you.

[errorid-mt7lt7k7unfr9ttfua5]

me when companies try to force you to use their proprietary software

anyway

Layperson resources:

firefox is an open source browser by Mozilla that makes privacy and software independence much easier. it is very easy to transfer all your chrome data to Firefox

ublock origin is The highest quality adblock atm. it is a free browser extension, and though last i checked it is available on Chrome google is trying very hard to crack down on its use

Thunderbird mail is an open source email client also by mozilla and shares many of the same advantages as firefox (it has some other cool features as well)

libreOffice is an open source office suite similar to microsoft office or Google Suite, simple enough

Risky:

VPNs (virtual private networks) essentially do a number of things, but most commonly they are used to prevent people from tracking your IP address. i would suggest doing more research. i use proton vpn, as it has a decent free version, and the paid version is powerful

note: some applications, websites, and other entities do not tolerate the use of VPNs. you may not be able to access certain secure sites while using a VPN, and logging into your personal account with some services while using a vpn *may* get you PERMANENTLY BLACKLISTED from the service on that account, ymmv

IF YOU HAVE A DECENT VPN, ANTIVIRUS, AND ADBLOCK, you can start learning about piracy, though i will not be providing any resources, as Loose Lips Sink Ships. if you want to be very safe, start with streaming sites and never download any files, though you Can learn how to discern between safe, unsafe, and risky content.

note: DO NOT SHARE LINKS TO OR NAMES OF PIRACY SITES IN PUBLIC PLACES, ESPECIALLY SOCAL MEDIA

the only time you should share these things are either in person or in (preferably peer-to-peer encrypted) PRIVATE messages

when pirated media becomes well-known and circulated on the wider, public internet, it gets taken down, because it is illegal to distribute pirated media and software

if you need an antivirus i like bitdefender. it has a free version, and is very good, though if youre using windows, windows defender is also very good and it comes with the OS

Advanced:

linux is great if you REALLY know what you're doing. you have to know a decent amount of computer science and be comfortable using the Terminal/Command Prompt to get/use linux. "Linux" refers to a large array of related open source Operating Systems. do research and pick one that suits your needs. im still experimenting with various dispos, but im leaning towards either Ubuntu Cinnamon or Debian.

[ogrishtoonz]

*fan noise* *motherboard beep*

[autolenaphilia]

Why enshittification happens and how to stop it.

The enshittification of the internet and increasingly the software we use to access it is driven by profit. It happens because corporations are machines for making profits from end users, the users and customers are only seen as sources of profits. Their interests are only considered if it can help the bottom line. It's capitalism.

For social media it's users are mainly seen by the companies that run the sites as a way for getting advertisers to pay money that can profit the shareholders. And social media is in a bit of death spiral right now, since they have seldom or never been profitable and investor money is drying up as they realize this.

So the social media companies. are getting more and more desperate for money. That's why they are getting more aggressive with getting you to watch ads or pay for the privilege of not watching ads. It won't work and tumblr and all the other sites will die eventually.

But it's not just social media companies, it's everything tech-related. It gets worse the more monopolistic a tech giant is. Google is abusing its chrome-based near monopoly over the web, nerfing adblockers, trying to drm the web, you name it. And Microsoft is famously a terrible company, spying on Windows users and selling their data. Again, there is so much money being poured into advertising, at least 493 billion globally, the tech giants want a slice of that massive pie. It's all about making profits for shareholders, people be damned.

And the only insurance against this death spiral is not being run by a corporation. If the software is being developed by a non-profit entity, and it's open source, there is no incentive for the developers to fuck over the users for the sake of profits for shareholders, because there aren't any profits, and no shareholders.

Free and Open source software is an important part of why such software development can stay non-corporate. It allows for volunteers to contribute to the code and makes it harder for users to be secretly be fucked over by hidden code.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are good examples of this. There is a Mozilla corporation, but it exists only for legal reasons and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla foundation. There are no shareholders. That means the Mozilla corporation is not really a corporation in the sense that Google is, and as an organization has entirely different incentives. If someone tells you that Mozilla is just another corporation, (which people have said in the notes of posts about firefox on this very site) they are spreading misinformation.

That's why Firefox has resisted the enshittification of the internet so well, it's not profit driven. And people who develop useful plugins that deshitify the web like Ublock origin and Xkit are as a rule not profit-driven corporations.

And you can go on with other examples of non-profit software like Libreoffice and VLC media player, both of which you should use.

And you can go further, use Linux as your computer's operating system.. It's the only way to resist the enshitification that the corporate duopoly of Microsoft and Apple has brought to their operating system. The plethora of community-run non-profit Linux distributions like Debian, Mint and Arch are the way to counteract that, and they will stay resistant to the same forces (creating profit for shareholders) that drove Microsoft to create Windows 11.

Of course not all Linux distributions are non-profits. There are corporate created distros like Red Hat's various distros, Canonical's Ubuntu and Suse's Opensuse, and they prove the point I'm making. There has some degree of enshittification going on with those, red hat going closed source and Canonical with the snap store for example. Mint is by now a succesful community-driven response to deshitify Ubuntu by removing snaps for example, and even they have a back-up plan to use Debian as a base in case Canonical makes Ubuntu unuseable.

As for social media, which I started with, I'm going to stay on tumblr for now, but it will definitely die. The closest thing to a community run non-profit replacement I can see is Mastodon, which I'm on as @autolenaphilia@chaosfem.tw.

You don't have to keep using corporate software, and have it inevitably decline because the corporations that develop it cares more about its profits than you as an end user.

The process of enshittification proves that corporations being profit-driven don't mean they will create a better product, and in fact may cause them to do the opposite. And the existence of great free and open source software, created entirely without the motivation of corporate profits, proves that people don't need to profit in order to help their fellow human beings. It kinda makes you question capitalism.

[rustyscreech]

open source software is literally one of the most amazing things in the world and it can save us I'm not kidding. steeping your work into mostly open source software feels freeing and like you're actually connected to people like the fucking purpose of the internet. every time I look up blender addons and come across a new github repo I feel like I've reached nirvana

[posevr]

If you’re pissed at Mozilla

[ecrivainsolitaire]

We need to open more conversations about software, intellectual property and tech literacy because every time something new happens on the internet everyone enters into crisis mode without actually knowing what to do about it. A lot of the moral panic over AI is this: nitpicking about names and scaremongering about art theft without really understanding any of the technology or legal frameworks they're discussing. (This is not to say AI is without its criticisms but people have been dropping the ball on this because they're focused on the wrong part of the equation.) A lot of the talk about NFTs and Twitter has been the same: dunking on technological changes without really understanding the root of the problem, mostly for clout and virtue signalling. We need to bring back the discussions of the early internet: freedom of information, privacy rights, right to repair, open source and public domain sustainability. Tumblr is mostly worried about moral righteousness and support, and those are all good things, but in this cyberpunk dystopia it's more important than ever to have a handle on the way technology influences our lives and how we can control it. Freedom of information is mutual aid. Digital autonomy is fighting the tech monopolies. Data gathering is the first step of capitalist propaganda. We can only crush our oppressors if we learn how to stop depending on them.

[punk-in-metal-detector]

Begging Tumblr users to finally discover Linux

Everyone keeps complaining about Google and advising to use Firefox etc while still using OS produced by Microsoft which is just like Google maybe worse. Linux is literally free and out there, there are so many different distributions produced in different countries and so much free open source software. Go grab yourself a flashdisk and do yourself a favour. Tbh if you get Ubuntu it is very easy to set up(seriously if you managed to download firefox and add Ublock you probably are very much capable of installing Ubuntu), has shit ton of support online, comes with many useful programs preinstalled and you can even get an add-on to make it look more like windows. Nothing is stopping you

Edit: people are also recommending Linux Mint a lot so you can give that a try! (Personally I have never used it but it looks very windows-like at least when it comes to the UI layout)

[instantpansies]

deep sigh... i need to stop streaming music on my phone and dig up my old ipod. i need to get a cassette digitizer to preserve my grandfather's recordings of him singing and playing the guitar before they get too damaged to play. i need to back up my spotify playlists on mp3. i need to delete my instagram. i need to stop using face id on my phone (i need to get something that isn't apple, for that matter. something with a headphone jack, ideally). i need to buy an external hard drive so i can actually play games. i need to figure out why i can't download the sims. i need to start living my life not dependent on streaming and the cloud and ready-made disposables and planned obsolescence!!!

i'm doing a decent job already, ive got my favorite albums and movies downloaded and i try to get my games not from steam and i have a cd drive and a record player and an aux cord for my computer and i share my streaming passwords with as many people as i can and i don't pay for spotify and i clear my cookies and block trackers and ads and notifications. i make coffee at home when i can and use libreoffice and waterfox and buy secondhand. i do what i can but i want to do more !

[ctk411]

guys now that firefox is being fucked up with weird TOS so they can feed our data to ai companies

What browser do we use now? I used to use Pale Moon due to using a celeron laptop and core 2 duo desktop but then they actually fixed firefox quantum

What the fuck do we do now?

[lukewarmguayoyo]

Am I fucking cursed or something why is it that the second I switch to Firefox, Mozilla decides to become evil

what the fuck

[opensuse-official]

My Somewhat Complex Thoughts on Chromium

Chromium and Firefox are both free and open source, as are both of their browser engines. Blink is the engine for Chromium, and Gecko is the engine for Firefox.

Mozilla's products lack basic sandboxing in almost every OS. The sandboxing for Firefox in Android and Linux, the two OSs I use, is quite honestly God AWFUL.

Gecko based browsers are significantly more vulnerable to exploitation, both internally and externally.

Gecko has a much more attack surface than Blink does.

No Gecko based browser has per-site process isolation.

Gecko's fingerprint protection is not great at best, bordering on a bit useless at worst. Both Tor and Mulvad fix this issues.

Gecko also is less resource efficient. While the discrepancy of resources efficiency between Gecko and Blink is getting smaller by the year, the gap is still pretty large.

The monopoly that Blink has on the browser market is fucking despicable, and has been one of the large reason the web as we know it is getting worse.

There are many websites that simply do not retain full functionality when used with Gecko based browsers.

Having to use a Chromium browser is an unfortunate reality for a lot of people. A lot more than you think.

Further Reading

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/

https://divestos.org/pages/browsers

https://www.cisecurity.org/benchmark/mozilla_firefox

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/

https://nvd.nist.gov/

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-452/product_id-3264/cvssscoremin-7/cvssscoremax-7.99/Mozilla-Firefox.html

[apocalyptic-mailman]

You know what's crazy?

I've been meaning to jump to Firefox for years, but what finally got me to do it was getting around newspaper paywalls.

[koolcatzblog]

I tried using brave browser for a week but I can not in good faith use a browser which thinks it's a good idea to spam you with web3 ads using push notifications in exchange for 0.0001 made up money.