Do you use any forks instead of default Firefox? If yes, which ones and why?
Waterfox. All FF features, no telemetry or AI, no “opt out”.
Fennec on mobile.
No, I prefer default Firefox. The product is sound and doesn’t raise any actually security or privacy issues for me. A little bloated? Sure. But doesn’t really affect me to be honest.
I’ve played the custom fork game for a few years with Chrome - I’m not interested in lagging versions or random bugs any more, and because of that experience I now simply want things to work as expected and be updated frequently.
Librewolf, it’s got better anti-fingerprinting, still lets you define your own search engines, and never implemented AI (at least last I checked).
I still use Firefox for when certain sites have a hissy fit with Librewolf’s safeguards (banking, health insurance, etc.) but otherwise it’s my standard.
Have you used the containers? I find using the banking container mitigates it for my banks. Its usually my VPN that causes issues now.
I hope I get to keep using Firefox in a world where chrome becomes the defacto browser on all mainstream platforms like ie once was.
in a world where chrome becomes the defacto browser
This is already the case.
Nowhere close to the >95% market share IE had in the early 2000s.
Too bad it is
its also fast .its a 10/10 browsing experiance for sure .
Either LibreWolf or IceCat.
No. I just use the default. The forks are typically far behind… I tend to use the nightly builds. Cuz I like to find bugs and document them. :)
Hey you’re willing to help out so I have nothing bad to say about you using vanilla Firefox.
I do use Floorp.
It is, by far, the most customizable and power-user friendly Firefox fork, and it has zero telemetry by default, so I do prefer it over vanilla Firefox because of that.
I also value its focus in performance.
What’s performance like? I found it to be very slow the last time I tried it.
I use it daily on my desktop. Works fine. Except yesterday where they published a broken release… Oopsy
Yes. Zen Browser. Its fantastic once your brain adjusts to vertical tabs.
I prefer vertical tabs. Don’t kill me!
I do now. It just took a while to realize it.
Removed by mod
I use Zen with multiple windows and love the way it works? It’s far from pointless, this is better than it used to be, especially combined with workspaces
I use multiple windows specifically because I want different tabs in them. With this “feature”, we have the clutter of all tabs in all windows which makes it harder to find the one you’re looking for. Screen sharing can leak tabs you didn’t mean to show during presentations; videos playing on another screen would switch screens as you try to find the right tab; and those of us who never cared about workspaces were forced to use them.
But again, the main issue is this was an extremely opinionated change that forces people to change their workflow and was pushed to all users with no way to disable it. I had been using Zen for almost a year at that point, and, what was supposed to be a minor update made it extremely frustrating to use.
Use different workspaces in different windows and your problem is gone. You only see the shared tabs if your windows are on the same workspace.
see, that’s the thing, I don’t care about workspaces and I don’t want yet another concept to manage when basic windows already do that job.
Tab syncing + workspaces force a different workflow to solve problems I don’t have.
You can either take ten seconds to make a “window 1” and “window 2” workspace and then never touch the feature again, or you’re better off not using Zen. It’s not just about vertical tabs, workspaces are pretty core to how you’re supposed to interact with it and are incredibly powerful once you embrace them.
I keep reading this argument that “it’s incredibly powerful” with no concrete examples. I don’t want a powerful browser, I want it to get out of my way.
I use Librewolf but have enabled firefox sync on it. Just don’t like the AI features in Firefox 150 and don’t need an in browser VPN. So far it’s been usable. I also use helium browser for when I’m feeling minimalist or a site doesn’t play nice with something that isn’t chromium.
I was also looking for a fork. Major concern of such fork is, if I can trust the developers and package maintainers (in Linux), and if its up to date very close to original Firefox. That eliminates almost all forks. Librewolf was a candidate I would have installed and tried, but its missing a feature: it does not have builtin support for passwords. I know why its excluded and understand that. I know how to use KeePass application to store my passwords. But I personally want it in the browser builtin without any additional applications.
BTW no, my reply is not a request for alternatives. I just wanted to point out a missing feature in Librewolf.
Librewolf was a candidate I would have installed and tried, but its missing a feature: it does not have builtin support for passwords.
I always disable password management by Firefox, but I noped out of LibreWolf because it doesn’t allow users to block all cookies and then whitelist domains for cookies.
I suspect what a lot of people want is a custom version of Firefox with the garbage surgically removed before compile; where the opt-in options still exist for:
- browser-kept passwords,
- browser-kept payment details,
- blocking cookies,
- whitelisting cookie domains,
- crash reports,
- remote changes between updates,
- scanning everything you download for danger,
- scanning every site you go to for danger,
- etc. .
I tried Librewolf too, and I just disliked the design, and it was also very slow for no reason.
I use floorp. But they just released a broken version 🙈
I switched to Waterfox some time back. Switching was quite painless.
And I use waterfox as well on mobile.
Absolutely same, but I’ve been switching from Opera. I was kind-of veteran Firefox user but my primary browser for many years was Opera. By 2025, Firefox became slow and bloated as hell, even it’s visual design (on mobile at least). I’ve tried a couple of forks, but they were either slow or ugly in my opinion. But Waterfox was not slow and it’s look is exactly what I need: modern but not bloated. So I switched immediately.
Librewolf on desktop and tablet, and Iceraven on Android.
I changed Ironfox for Iceraven as it has better compatibility and personalization.
If you already use Mullvad VPN, I strongly recommend using Mullvad Browser for any task that doesn’t require signing into an account to do like quick web searches.
For everything else, I recommend Librewolf if you care about privacy. I heard Zen Browser is good, but I never got the appeal of using vertical tabs since I already have years upon years of muscle memory of having tabs be layed out normally. Maybe there’s another niche of Zen I’m not aware of? Not sure.
vertical tabs have been a life changer, but you don’t need zen for that anymore, firefox has it natively (thank allah). but i also use a 1440p monitor so im perfectly fine with losing a little screen real estate, but that + removing the bookmarks bar makes it look so slick and imho is way more intuitive since the horizontal tabs eventually clump up and you lose track of what tab is what whereas the vertical one is always clear but you can also indent groupings. highly recommend giving it an honest shot but obv you do you
I have been using Zen as my main for over a year, and it has some random things beyond defaulting to vertical tabs (which was one of the reasons I tried it out since all of the extensions for them always felt wonky to me). Even lets you drag the window around like you do with horizontal tab bar (much easier to find free space to grab without accidentally pulling a tab into a new window for me). Some Chromium browsers also do this. So that does mess with my muscle memory when I switch over to FF and need to move the window and can’t.
One kind of nice thing they have is that their version of “Peek” called “glance” kind of loads a page on top of a page without opening a whole new tab. It is kind of wonky in some links work fine, while others will just continue to the page in the original tab and need to press alt when clicking. Might be kind of a “it’s just a new tab with extra steps” thing for some folks, but has been something that I have found nice to have.
Also had split tabs before they were added to FF if I remember correctly. Along with having “workspaces” that can have their own pinned tabs and and extra higher layer of pinned tabs above those. They look kind of like the boxes that are present if pinning tabs on current FF but did it first.
Outside of that, I think they managed to make the “look” of the browser better (another personal taste thing). Though FF has gotten some of the “look” closer to Zen.
Nothing “ground breaking” if you are already happy with FF. Just a pretty solid fork for people that aren’t looking for something super hardened like Librewolf or even Mullvad. Early days updates had a chance of borking your GUI layout on big releases, but haven’t had any issues with it in like 8 or 9 months. Overall the updates when I first started using it kind of reminded me of how early days of FF would actually excite me with obvious changes (not just GUI/UX) that felt like upgrades. This might be a non-starter for folks that prioritize GUI/UX staying more rigidly the same. Which is very valid.
I haven’t had a good enough reason to move to a fork. Most things I don’t like can be changed in about:config.
