Let’s try LibreWolf, Floorp and Zen until Mozilla decides they want to make a browser again
Zen is very good
Those are all Firefox based…
You currently only have three choices in web rendering engine, unless you want to go REALLY esoteric:
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Blink
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WebKit
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Gecko
Blink is Chromium, meaning Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc, Vivaldi, ug-c, Konqueror, etc. It is built, maintained, and controlled by Google, and currently has an approximately 81% market share on the internet.
WebKit is Safari, and is only really usable on Apple products (and is the only engine available on Apple’s mobile products outside the EU). It enjoys about a 9% market share as a result of its wide install base.
Gecko is developed by the Mozilla Foundation for Firefox, yes. But if you want any sort of web independence, you have to have a browsing engine that is not controlled by a major corporation. Otherwise, you’re just going to have a duopoly that can make whatever web decisions they want to.
I don’t really consider Firefox soft forks to be alternatives. I use librewolf but I consider myself a Firefox user. In reality you could make Firefox work exactly like all of these browsers with just config changes
Been using Floorp for about a year. Been good so far, though I’m definitely just a casual user.
If any of those would be available on iOS, I would.
It literally doesn’t matter what you use on iOS, as everything uses WebKit.
Only in EU, the rest of the world is still stuck with WebKit. Apple geo locked App Store, so it only works for EU users.
Forks are pretty valuable to Firefox development, and it’s helpful for Firefox marketshare too because they use the same UA as Firefox, so website must support Firefox.
Even Firefox devs said they observe Firefox forks to see their idea and bring back to Firefox, just compare recent new features of Firefox to Zen/Floorp, you would see that the idea of:
- Profile Manager is from Zen/Floorp
- Vertical Tab is from Zen/Floorp
- Sidebar is from Zen/Floorp
And many small things.
