Alternative Firefox rebuilds

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Moonchild
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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by Moonchild » 2023-01-17, 10:47

Looks like if I want to do this I'll have to sink a lot more time into it than I initially estimated, because Mozilla has moved away from any semblance of modular/selectable setup for its browser. To do this properly, it would require a lot of front-end work to remove integrated bits of spyware which would ultimately be much more of a drain on resources than I can afford at the moment. It would also no longer be a rebuild but a new fork -- I'm really not feeling that that is worth the effort here.

If someone else wants to have a poke at this, go right ahead. I'm available to compare notes with re: what I have so far in terms of build environment and research.
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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by grey_rat » 2023-01-17, 20:53

NPAPI plugins worked to Firefox 84. I launched VLC and Sumatrapdf plugins in Firefox 68 - 84. In Firefox 91 about:config, all the settings were left from the plugins, but they do not work.
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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by jobbautista9 » 2023-01-18, 02:48

How is this relevant to the topic..?
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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by grey_rat » 2023-01-18, 16:00

jobbautista9
viewtopic.php?f=65&t=29064&start=20#p235498
In Firefox NPAPI plugins are not removed, but disabled
hardware acceleration also

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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by jobbautista9 » 2023-01-18, 16:13

jobbautista9 wrote:
2023-01-18, 02:48
How is this relevant to the topic..?
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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by grey_rat » 2023-01-18, 17:02

If LibreWolf = Alternative rebuilds Pale Moon
What is the alternative?

plugins.disabled - true , and hardware acceleration - false default
why can't it be done ?

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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by Moonchild » 2023-01-18, 23:53

grey_rat wrote:
2023-01-18, 17:02
plugins.disabled - true , and hardware acceleration - false default
why can't it be done ?
jobbautista9 wrote:
2023-01-18, 02:48
How is this relevant to the topic..?

grey_rat wrote:
2023-01-18, 17:02
If LibreWolf = Alternative rebuilds Pale Moon
I suggest you turn off the output faucet and go read the start of this thread.
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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by grey_rat » 2023-01-19, 17:05

Alternative rebuilds Firefox (PaleMoon teams) = LibreWolf

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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by jobbautista9 » 2023-04-22, 07:04

The developer of the Thorium browser (a fork of Chromium) released a stable release of their Firefox fork called Mercury 3 weeks ago. It doesn't fit with the "rebuilding Firefox as-is" ideal though, as it has intentionally axed support for processors which doesn't have AVX instructions, and is superfluous with its code optimization (O3 everywhere). Otherwise it seems to look fine.

I wonder if it can be used as a base...
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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by hujan86 » 2023-04-22, 15:30

jobbautista9 wrote:
2023-04-22, 07:04
O3 everywhere
What does O3 stand for?
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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by vannilla » 2023-04-22, 18:37

hujan86 wrote:
2023-04-22, 15:30
What does O3 stand for?
Optimization level 3, which is usually the highest.
It might seem a good idea to optimize aggressively, but practical experience has shown that after a certain size threshold, compiler optimizations actually cause harms and any attempt at performance improvement has to be done some other way, so usually programs are compiled with O2 and use other techniques to reach the missing level.

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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by andyprough » 2023-04-22, 20:22

What we should do here is list out the .mozconfig options and other changes that would be required to achieve this desired alternative Firefox. I've compiled Firefox lots of times - that's not the problem. It's knowing what changes to make in order to make it a decent privacy & security browser without overkill - that's the question. If we wrote out a recipe that anyone could follow, probably someone would start to make packages for it and share them.

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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by gepus » 2023-04-23, 18:34

Off-topic:
It's futile to strive for security using a browser with a rabbit release circle. With each release some bugs get patched while new ones get introduced.
Therefore the only decent choice is the ESR branch. However no many forks of this branch if any at all. For Windows AFAIK none.

Regarding privacy, I'm still waiting for a fork that doesn't try to call home no matter how the user tweaks (internal settings, policies) the beast. :)
Ice Cat (available only for Linux) was the only exception when last tested.

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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by puppyX » 2023-04-24, 09:11

How privacy concious is the 'Abrowser' version of Firefox for GNU/Linux Trisquel ?

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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by LuftWafflePilot » 2023-04-27, 10:08

So where are the alternative builds anyway? The first post is confusing, looks like some are missing at the beginning.

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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by Mæstro » 2023-04-27, 15:04

It looks as though posts were missing, for this thread had been split from another one after going off topic.
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Re: Alternative Firefox rebuilds

Unread post by Sajadi » 2023-06-19, 12:08

Why not taking for example this as base, rebranding it, remove phone back features?

https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp

While I hate official Mozilla Firefox - this ESR based variant is not THAT bad - sidebar, side tabs, toolbar location can be changed - there exists much worse.

The only downside is losing XUL add-ons. But for a quick fork it actually sounds not that of a bad idea, just saying 😁 While it is not Pale Moon quality standard - it would be a quick option to test out and see if more can be done with recent ESR based code.

Also Waterfox can be forked and spy features removed, it also is much more customizable out of the box. Point is a quick alternative fork with features is only a valid option with one of that 2 projects as base.

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