Here’s what I use to get them back and I’ve been pretty happy with it.

I switched a while back before all the Ai and “privacy preserving” telemetry stuff.

Every update note I see for Firefox now just reinforces my decision.

Ladybird is slowly being worked on but I doubt we’ll see people daily driving it for a few years yet.

I wouldn’t worry too much about Mozilla when it comes to Firefox at least. As long as they keep up with the backend then forks can clean the crud off.

You would hope so but some chromium forks still try maintain their own ad blockers. And I’ve seen people just jump between what ones still work, or those few who just give up on ad-blocking all together.

Been using LibreWolf for a few months and before that just regular Firefox with the ArkenFox user.js.

Basically the exact same experience just with the peace of mind I won’t end up with some weird Ai crap after an update.

As long as they keep supporting the framework for Firefox we’ll still get working forks like LibreWolf.

Hopefully Ladybird starts picking up more in the next few years…

:V

Pretty sure LibreWolf will ship without the Ai. They normally remove invasive stuff before compiling rather than disabling it in a config later.

Pretty sure they do? Unless you’re talking about a different DRM thing.

I’m gonna keep using and recommending LibreWolf for the foreseeable future.

But I wonder what other alternative web engines do we have with both Chromium and Gecko being run by advertisers now?

I know Palemoon runs a fork of a really old version of a Gecko and I used it for a bit back when Firefox 58 broke most add-ons. But I’m a bit iffy of it’s security these days.

I switched a few months back after using Firefox /w ArkenWolf for years.

It’s great having an out the box product I don’t have to immediately tweak settings or install 3rd party tweaks & plugins to have a decent experience with.

As much as I appreciate Mozilla halting Chromiums complete stranglehold on the web. I even used to donate what I could to the project a while back, But they’ve also been fucking up so much lately I can’t even in good faith recommend vanilla Firefox anymore.

But forks like LibreWolf still require Mozilla to stay afloat as they’re not maintaining the back end only scraping the crud off the top.

So it’s really starting to feel like a lose/lose situation.

I dunno if LibreWolf has this pop up, But I’ve also never even seen this screen in over a decade of using regular Firefox either.

Easiest solution would probably be adding the meta refresh setting to a custom user.js file you can use on new installs.

As a LibreWolf user I found the serpEventTelemetryCategorization to be disabled by default

But serpEventTelemetry was still enabled

Is this just me or can anyone else back me up?

(update) It’s been fixed and will be pushed next update

I dunno if I should be honored or terrified to know such people walk amongst us mortals.

Firefox might be the “lesser evil” but that don’t mean they’re a saint.

If you’re concerned about privacy you’re gonna have to do abit of the legwork yourself. Arkenfox Is probably the quickest way to harden standard Firefox and I’ve used it for years without issue.

If you want a more out of the box solution then then Librewolf is a privacy focused fork with much better defaults and most of the questionable crap just ripped straight out of the code.

User agent switcher has fixed those issues 9/10 times for me.

I’ve also had times websites like Outlook or Youtube just run faster after lying to them about using Edge/Chrome…

One of my friends is the worse tab hoarder I’ve ever seen.

Dude even had a script on his PC to actively backup his tabs for the inevitable moment his browser or PC would crash

I know someone’s gonna say ‘doesn’t Firefox backup tabs automatically in the event of a crash anyway?’ and you’d be correct

But ONE TIME it didn’t and left my buddy distraught which is why he has multiple fail-safes now.

So I started using Firefox in my early teens around 2010, I didn’t know/care about online privacy etc and had no idea what open source was, I just picked it because I liked the look and theming options more than Chrome at the time.

I then kept using it because it’s what I knew and I can be stubborn to change sometimes. Around 2016 was when I started looking more into online privacy and FOSS stuff it kinda just reinforced my existing use of Firefox.

Recent actions by Google with their anti-adblocking campaign and Manifestv3 have just made me dig in my heels more.

Is that not a thing in other browsers? I haven’t used Chrome since 2010 maybe, but I still remember it being a thing back then?