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submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Crumpled6273@lemmy.ca to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/68754751

There was a time I chose Firefox over the Chromium browser without a second thought. But nowadays, installing and opening Firefox seems like a time-consuming, very bloated experience.

Too many unnecessary features, promotions, sponsored links, and widgets are filled on the homepage. Firefox no longer allows deleting default search engines like google, perplexity, etc but can disable it. What kind of privacy feature is that? Also, all the data collection options are ticked by default. Users are needed to manually tweak it their own. Update after update instead of improving they make all the settings more complex, and there is a lot to set up after a fresh installation.

When I compare modern Firefox with 4–5 years behind Firefox, I feel like I am using browsers like Vivaldi or Opera instead of Firefox. Once we praised Firefox for its ram management in Linux but nowadays, it's bloat causes using more ram and not a lightweight option anymore. Seriously, Firefox must consider releasing a browser like Brave Origin (Firefox Origin or something).

Isn't anybody else frustrated with the new Firefox changes? If yes, what practical solutions exist? Debloat using any script or install any forks (no forks seem to be good; some are outdated, some are too much hardened, some are just not for daily browsing, etc.).

I'm just looking for a browser like Ungoogled Chromium but for Firefox (Unmozilla Firefox).

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[-] Crumpled6273@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 days ago

I know they need to make money to thrive and compete against the competitors, but there is too much to tweak after each update. And it's really disturbing just because of how Firefox once was.

But by not doing what users need, how is it actually going to stay? Is money the only needed thing for Firefox to survive? Not users?

[-] darcmage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 days ago

If every update required users to tweak something to restore a setting to a previous state, that should drive users away from firefox. I haven't had firefox as my daily since late last year (zen now) but that wasn't my experience during my decades with firefox and my fairly frequent visits to the firefox subreddit indicate that isn't the case either. I don't remember an update causing a major issue since the opt-out AI controversy (v145?) so please let me know if other updates since then have had any serious pushback with opt-out features.

this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
64 points (100.0% liked)

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