I've been using Firefox for two decades. Some of Mozilla's recent choices gave me a reason to look at alternative browsers. There's no way I'm using Chrome, but it turns out that there are more than a few capable Firefox forks. With no real requirements in mind, I started researching. Here are the forks I found in no particular order:

• LibreWolf (site) (repo)
• GNU IceCat (site) (repo)
• Mullvad Browser (site) (repo)
• Waterfox (site) (repo)
• Zen Browser (site) (repo)
• Floorp (site) (repo)
• Mercury Browser (site) (repo)
• Pale Moon (site) (repo)
• Basilisk (site) (repo)
• Firefox ESR (site) (download)
• Tor Browser (site) (repo)
• SeaMonkey (site)
• K-Meleon (site) (repo)

I started with LibreWolf since it kept coming up in recommendations. It strips out all the telemetry, bundles uBlock Origin, and apparently tracks Firefox stable releases within 24-72 hours. The catches I found: no auto-updates on Windows (not a problem for me), streaming services need workarounds because it disables Widevine (not a problem for me), and on macOS you have to run terminal commands to bypass Gatekeeper warnings (a negative). It also looks like it might stop working on macOS late next year altogether (definitely a problem).

Zen Browser surprised me—it's accumulated 38,000+ GitHub stars since launching in July 2024. It's inspired by the maybe defunct Arc Browser: vertical tabs, split-view, workspaces. It releases weekly. The downside is no horizontal tabs option. I'm not sold on it but I can see the appeal.

There's a whole category of forks that preserve "old" Firefox. Pale Moon uses its own rendering engine (Goanna) and keeps the classic Firefox interface. It still supports legacy XUL extensions and NPAPI plugins. It uses fewer resources than modern browsers because it's single-process. The trade-off is that modern JavaScript-heavy sites struggle and some things like CloudFlare challenges fail.

Waterfox caught my attention because of its privacy-first stance and support for older extensions. It seems to be mostly one developer, which might make others a bit nervous, but it's not an issue for me. Sometimes less is more.

One thing I learned that seems important: frequency of updates varies wildly. LibreWolf, Zen, and Floorp seem to track Firefox releases within days. Pale Moon and GNU IceCat lag weeks or months. That matters for security patches.

Honestly, while I continue to research alternatives, I'm staying on Firefox. Hardened with the right extensions and configured the right way, it still meets my needs. But it's good to know options exist, and I'm hopeful that something will show up that captures lightning in a bottle the same way Firefox did 20 years ago!

#firefox #browser #privacy #opensource

I rolled out a lot of features over the last several weeks and created a lot of bugs in the process. Release v3.2.5 of Ktistec is mostly about fixing those bugs. I did implement two requested features, however: support for editing posts in Markdown and support for Open Graph metadata. Here's the full list of new features:

Added

• Support for editing posts in Markdown. (fixes #25)
• Support for Open Graph metadata on actors and objects. (fixes #71)
• Support for uploading a site image.
• Internal table of contents page.
• Poll expiry notifications.

🎄 I'm working on support for poll creation and management now. It's also time for a performance improvement pass or two.

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse

the only thing more annoying than a test failure in a test suite that only occurs when you randomize the order of the test suite, is a test failure that also only happens occasionally despite running the randomized suite with the same seed! 😡

I wonder if you could use/abuse Mastodon polls (FEP-9967) to distribute posts that provide near-real-time status updates (I'm thinking about severe weather alerts but I'm sure there are other use cases)?

Create a poll with an expiry far in the future and a token set of options (ideally just one—"Do you opt in?"—but poll implementations seem to require at least two).

Nothing seems to prevent the content of a poll from changing—and this is the key insight. The FEP says, "The type of a poll (single choice / multiple choices) and its options might be changed at any time. In that case the author of the poll MUST reset the vote counts." So broadcast updates via the content.

It would be a lightweight way to follow a single item without following the actor, built on top of implementations that already exist. 

#ActivityPub #Fep9967

i'm "pretty sure" i have litestream backing up my epiktistes sqlite database, but getting it running was surprisingly fiddly...

The big feature in release v3.2.4 of Ktistec is support for viewing and voting on Mastodon polls (AKA FEP-9967: Polls). This feature took a surprising amount of work. Some of the effort was due to my struggles with visual design, but getting the behavior right was also tricky. For example, a "vote" is just an ActivityPub Note, but unlike other notes, it shouldn't appear in a poll's replies (it could, but that would be redundant and confusing). So I had to add exceptions throughout the code to deal with this. A custom Vote object type would have been nice in the original implementation.

Added

• Support for viewing and voting on polls. (fixes #49)
• Added tooltip to notifications menu item summarizing new notifications.

Fixed

• Improved wrapping of actor panel follow/refresh information. (fixes #130)
• Autocomplete now works correctly when adjacent to a Trix attachment.
• Image title attributes are now preserved.

Changed

• Moved avatars to the bottom of the object detail view.

Thank you @jayvii for the build fix!

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse