A Bad Breakup with Firefox

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen 

This is somewhat depressing. I feel like an old friend betrayed me, having used Firefox off and on for several years, and now this. It has made many improvements in speed, reliability, and security, but the Mozilla company has taken the bit of leftist politics into its teeth and jumped the corral fence.

It was disappointing to learn that Mozilla, makers of Firefox, are promoting internet censorship. This is unacceptable, and there are other options.
This derivative image was further modified at PhotoFunia.

Shouldn't web browser companies focus on keeping us secure from tracking, spyware, hacking, and such? The expression "stay in your lane" comes to mind. I was dismayed to learn that Mozilla, makers of Firefox, have called for deplatforming and punishment of President Trump and others. So they are in favor of censorship.

I am not uninstalling Firefox because I'm leaping onto the bandwagon and saying, "Me too!" or to look good to folks who call themselves patriots. This was unpleasant news to me, and I didn't know about it until the night before I wrote this article. Unfortunately, it has some features that really don't want to live without.

Despite some negative reviews, I've saddled up the FFX-derived Pale Moon browser for a test ride. It's reasonably safe, but I can tell right now that it probably won't become my default browser. For one thing, it made writing this article difficult by refusing the "paste unformatted text" function of CTRL+SHIFT+V, and launched some of that web inspection stuff — how many people need that, really?. I moved over to the Brave browser to finish this. Also, some add-ons/extensions upon which I rely are not available in Pale Moon. Still, I can use it as a stand-by and a utility. Great name, too.

EDIT: I uninstalled Pale Moon and installed Waterfox. It has the advantages of Firefox and even allows add-ons, and seems to be working well. 

Firefox, I'll be a fool for your lovin' no more.

While writing this, I saw an article about FFX banning a "Dissenter" plugin. I don't know about it. They should be dropping plugins/extensions/add-ons that are not safe, but this was apparently a slap in the face to free speech. I wonder if the Dissenter browser is any good? Well, I do have quite a few installed now, so I'm only curious.

Now I have to find an alternative to Mozilla's "Thunderbird" desktop email client.

Comments

O'keefe said…
I've been using duckduckgo recently. It's very good and doesn't track.
1/28/2021 05:20:00 PM
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