FIREFOX ▀ YET ANOTHER CHROME CLONE?

Yeah, i’m 108% confident

Nowadays people don’t have much choice in terms of choosing their web browser. google chrome is a choice of almost all common people.

I choose not to choose it. Because of it’s invasive philosophy to collect every possible thing it can dig up and then send back to it’s Master. I can’t even call it a browser any more. It is data-collecting platform, with very high privileges. Just look how many services from google are running in the background of your computer. Every single action is dialed back to google services. I don’t want to discuss this spying platform, better get back to the main topic.

Firefox was always pretty good alternative. But you know that things are changing pretty fast these days. And there is no place for “stable” word in any aspects of life. Recently, Firefox degrading very quickly. People who are hiding behind these malicious acts want to make another chrome clone, no doubt. They are doing everything to make this happen. Breaking principles of basic ergonomics, implementing chrome-like GUI, dropping support of older standards, dismissing useful features. For those of you who want details here is [very neat article] on how things are doing.

After release of Firefox 81.1.1 where [more telemetry was introduced] and after release of Firefox 89 where they [braked down interface and dropped “unneeded” FTP-protocol] i decided not to follow mozilla corporation and had chosen my own way. Firefox 80.0.1 x64 will be my last Firefox version. Because i can’t take it anymore. They just ruining glorious name of [Netscape Navigator] and making another chrome clone. Maybe it is a sponsored action, who knows. But one thing is a fact: Firefox is for sure a sinking ship.

DISABLE INVASIVE AUTO-UPDATE

To prevent invasive auto-updating create a file policies.json here: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\distribution

Content of the file should be:

{
 "policies":
    {
    "DisableAppUpdate": true
         }
}

Appointed trick also works with email client Thunderbird.

I’m warning you that poisonous Firefox will try to update as soon as it gets internet connection.Also, make sure to mark file as read only.

ALTERNATIVES

Palemoon was another very-very good alternative. But spoiled recently too. Last sane version is [29.1.1] . For “marvelous” details [read on here] .

On the bright side, we still have multiple Firefox-based alternatives.
[IceCat] . Official builds stuck around version 60.x. But we are in luck, because [enthusiast 78 ESR builds by muslayev] are available at our disposal.
[SeaMonkey] Haven’t tried it yet. But recommendation is coming from very [cool guy at Razorback95] .

Some day i’ll tell how to configure your Firefox-based browser appropriately in terms of security and privacy.

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