Weekly Journal 58 - Firefox, Vivaldi

tl;dr

Mozilla announces a partnership with Facebook, and I think that makes it time to dump the Firefox browser.

Firefox

In a somewhat surprising move, Mozilla announced that they are partnering with Meta/Facebook to work on “privacy friendly” tracking, aka attribution, system for advertisers. At this point I don’t see any reason to trust anything Meta is involved with. Facebook has repeatedly shown themselves to be a bad actor, and I see no reason to give them any more changes. The only tracking that is respectful of privacy is no tracking.

Sadly, this means it’s probably time for me to give up on Firefox as a browser. This smells a little like desperation as Firefox continues its slide into irrelevancy. Plus, Firefox’s performance has been in steady decline as the Gecko engine continues to age. This is the latest in a number of missteps over the past few years and it feels like a good time to get out.

Vivaldi

Out of the browsers I have been trying out, Vivaldi seems to be the best choice out there currently. I’ve also tried Brave and Bromite as other alternate Chromium-based browsers. Brave has some sort of stupid cryptocurrency thing going on, and Bromite is only available on Android devices. That makes it hard for me to use either of these as a primary browser.

The only thing I dislike about Vivaldi is that it isn’t 100% open source. For better or worse, they are keeping the UI changes that they’ve made to Chromium under a proprietary license. Otherwise though, it’s been a fantastic browser both on my desktop and on my mobile devices. So far I am really enjoying the tab grouping and the out of the box ad and tracker blocking. Out of the available options it seems like the most pragmatic one to support.

What’s Next?

Maybe a little Python scripting this coming week, if I have time.