Lately? Firefox…
It’s Mozilla that’s slowly enshittifying, Firefox itself is theoretically insulated from the worst decisions they could make, but those safeguards are going to be put to the test real soon I bet.
Well to that end chromium is still around and I’m sure there’s deshittified builds of that floating around too but it is going to quickly become harder to find not shitty browsers the way things are going over at Mozilla.
The big problem is the browser engine at the heart of all browsers, all the FF or Chromium forks very rarely modify the core. When they do, it’s minor stuff. That’s why AFAIK not a single chromium fork is maintaining manifest v2 in defiance of Google.
If Mozilla goes full tilt enshittification, all the FF forks will suffer a similar fate, they’ll make changes all over, custom interface, cool little features here and there etc; but they’ll never make major changes to the core and that’s assuming they keep the core open source. If they take the core closed source and the forks can no longer get upstream updates for it they’ll wither and die
A browser engine is kinda like the Linux kernel, it’s large, complex and takes a lot of time and effort to make and keep it usable. I’ve seen estimates that if we needed to start from scratch on the Linux kernel it’d take 2-4 years just to get something decently usable.
Browser engines are similar, Ladybird for example, is a new open source browser AND engine from scratch that’s been in development for about 2 years, they’re estimating to have something “generally usable” in 2026
Any good alternatives that use the same engine, but aren’t just “Firefox after rustling the about:config a bit”?
GNOME spawning 3 new DEs every time they have a major version update
Emby
Here’s a comment about it I made a few weeks back in the context of why Jellyfin came to be and why I only ever recommend Plex or Jellyfin
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don’t know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that’s why I’m generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn’t even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it…yea. fuck em
There are many examples of this, but one that comes immediately to mind is the evolution of my favourite LDAP-enabled music player, airsonic-advanced
Subsonic begat libresonic
Libresonic begat airsonic as well as a whole bunch of other projects.
Airsonic begat airsonic-advanced
Airsonic-advanced begat kagemomiji/airsonic-advanced, however the maintainer of the parent codebase, randomnicode, wants to do the right thing and get their code up to snuff with the opensubsonic API (not sure where that fits in to thr history) so kagemomji can take over.
They all have their quirks, but until airsonic-advanced catches up with the latest opensubsonic API, I’ve been trying out Audinaut, DSub, and Ultrasonic. I had to reorganize my whole library, though.
I’m not a fan of these album-based apps. most of my music falls under “Various Artists”. As such, I’ve been playing around with Musicbrainz Picard to try different tagging in an attempt to try to find something that works across both at the server and client end.
Subsonic doesn’t work for me, I’m guessing because it refuses to fall back to earlier versions of their API. I could be wrong.
OpenOffice was a really solid Microsoft Office rival, and FOSS to boot. Made by Sun Microsystems, of course, and then ruined by Oracle (of course).
Thankfully LibreOffice was forked from it and is still going strong as a very capable suite of document tools. And OpenOffice is basically dead, womp womp.
Recently tried MS Office apps for the first time in 8 or so years. Somehow they made them less intuitive than even ribbon days. They use a dark pattern save dialog that makes it easy to accidentally save to OneDrive, and if you have OneDrive disabled or uninstalled, there’s an always present icon in the title bar of the main edit window that says “autosave off” even though autosave is on.
Went right back to LibreOffice after one document and one spreadsheet.
