Delete This Post

This action will delete this post on this instance and on all federated instances, and it cannot be undone. Are you certain you want to delete this post?

No
Yes
Block This Actor

This action will block this actor and hide all of their past and future posts. Are you certain you want to block this actor?

No
Yes
Block This Object

This action will block this object. Are you certain you want to block this object?

No
Yes
Delete OAuth Client

Are you sure you want to delete the OAuth client [Client Name]? This action cannot be undone and will revoke all access tokens for this client.

No
Yes
Revoke OAuth Token

Are you sure you want to revoke the OAuth token [Token ID]? This action cannot be undone and will immediately revoke access for this token.

No
Yes

#opensource 1 hashtag

Todd Sundsted
Todd Sundsted posted Dec 25, 2025
Firefox Forks: What's Available?

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:

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