Pale Moon has spoiled us for other browsers

[moonbat]

It is now horribly painful to use Brave (the least bad out of the Chrome clone army) let alone anything else. Especially when it comes to extensions. I wanted to find the Chrome equivalent of my first (forked) extension, Pure URL. What I found was so primitive and broken as to be completely useless.

I've seen people here suggest features that are best suited to extensions, one being a built in adblocker. Brave's own adblocker shows why this is a bad idea. Using uBlock Origin for comparison, their adblocker is totally primitive and lacks even a logger to show what URLs were blocked. So when you see defenders of Chromezilla browsers in the face of Google removing their adblocker friendly APIs point to built in adblocking, sorry to say but there is a long way to go before they can match a fraction of what established adblocking extensions do.
As for the rest - they're all glorified user-scripts to tweak behavior of different websites, no more. When it comes to UI customization, you get to have a button, a context menu entry or a separate tab to see the extension's content. That's it. Forget the elegant XUL overlay system that (shameless plug) makes extensions like AutoPageColor or PermissionsPlus neatly integrate themselves into the color preferences and page properties dialogs, respectively, or sidebars, dialog boxes and other XUL UI elements that are available. Or look at the WebExtension versions of old popular Firefox extensions compared to their XUL counterparts (that have been forked for or will now again run directly here) - they are awkward and crippled to use compared to what they used to be.

And I don't even want to touch Firefox with a barge pole, what with having to 'harden' the most privacy respecting browser with 50 different settings changes out of the box.

[Eduardo Lucas]

Every single time i'm forced to use something other than PM on the default skin with the "firefox" button removed or with the netscape skin, or which tries to babyseat me on what i do or browse, i feel like i'm headed to a ignorance illiterate narnia. It's software made for people who aren't able to understand a simplified historical article from a teenager school site, or even read ribbon menus with their 1 second attention span and strong attraction to tiktok and instagram showboating.

[andyprough]

Also the memory usage of the chrome-ium/firefox browsers is outrageous. And if you switch to a WebKit browser to avoid the high memory usage then the CPU usage is much higher and you get to enjoy the sound of fans running to read the simplest sites.

Pale Moon’s memory use is quite low, and it has a Suspender extension to put tabs to sleep, which can make the memory usage even lower. I set the timer on Suspender to a low level like 10-15 minutes and I can stay online all day with Pale Moon using less than 400mb of memory and with it sitting at basically 0% CPU usage when idle.

[gepus]

And I don't even want to touch Firefox with a barge pole, what with having to 'harden' the most privacy respecting browser with 50 different settings changes out of the box.

Nevertheless, IMHO you can tweak for privacy a decent fork based on actual Firefox better then you'll ever be able with any browser based on Chrome.

[Moonchild]

IMHO you can tweak for privacy a decent fork based on actual Firefox better then you'll ever be able with any browser based on Chrome.

Not really. There are plenty of things you cannot switch off in Firefox.

[gepus]

IMHO you can tweak for privacy a decent fork based on actual Firefox better then you'll ever be able with any browser based on Chrome.

Not really. There are plenty of things you cannot switch off in Firefox.

Would you please name some examples compared to Chrome or its forks?

[Moonchild]

Would you please name some examples compared to Chrome or its forks?

For starters the telemetry. Maybe reporting can be toned down but telemetry itself is hard-coded.
There's plenty of data Mozilla collects from all its end-users. While touting privacy, you're still dealing with advanced data sharing with Mozilla itself (and it's not entirely clear to what level that data is shared with others) and Firefox is very tightly integrated with Mozilla's infrastructure (down to remote preference control); a fork would be subject to exactly the same, or requiring that the fork run the same infra themselves (but then you're dealing still with the same issues, just with a different "server side owner").
I also didn't keep track recently to what level Firefox configurability has been reduced but it's been common practice to phase out use options by first making them raw prefs only, then eventually removing the prefs. And I don't use Chrome, so I don't know what "flags" it does or doesn't have these days.

Either way it's not trivial to "de-fang" Firefox.

[gepus]

For starters the telemetry.

No telemetry with a decent fork.
No outbound connections without user action and definitive none to Mozilla or a third party infrastructure.

You can easily convince yourself by sniffing the traffic as long as you wish.

[moonbat]

The only Firefox fork I use is Iceraven on Android, since it supports extensions. Can't do without uBlock on any platform. I had Firefox for a while to run Netflix on Linux, then switched to Waterfox Classic, but I cant' standard the bastardized UI of even that, let alone the Photon introduced crap. Now I keep Brave as a backup browser.

[Eduardo Lucas]

For starters the telemetry.

No telemetry with a decent fork.
No outbound connections without user action and definitive none to Mozilla or a third party infrastructure.

You can easily convince yourself by sniffing the traffic as long as you wish.

You could do that with a personally compiled ungoogled chromium binary as well or roll the dice and use a binary from someone else. Not that i feel it would significantly improve the usability of that, as i think chromium has its own issues as a browser.

[gepus]

You could do that with a personally compiled ungoogled chromium binary as well or roll the dice and use a binary from someone else.

IMHO the problem with Chrome and it's forks is the lack of prefs one might tweak for privacy.
It's by design and no-one has the resource to inspect millions lines of code and make some modifications to it.

Not that i feel it would significantly improve the usability of that, as i think chromium has its own issues as a browser.

Agreed but my remark was concerning privacy and not usability.