most people know that in the Linux world Firefox is the defacto standard of a Webbrowser. Just recently Mozilla bought an Advertising Company and enabled by default Advertising data collection with Firefox 128.
When I updated my system I got the following settings without changing any of them:
In the end Mozillaas a company gains their revenue mostly thru advertising deals and one of their biggest sponsor is Google. In 2018, around 95% of their revenue was from search deals. A big chunk of this comes from Google, a company whose browser is the biggest competitor for Mozillaâs flagship product.
So what now?
Well, you can keep Firefox and opt-out from this âexperimentalâ new feature of Firefox 128 and go on with your beloved web-browsing as you always did.
Despite or beyond any discussion around the tech itselfâŚ
(which is actually supposed to be a more anonymous alternative to user trackingâŚ)
The thing itself is an option.
Easily selectable ⌠and of course with an associated about:config entry.
I just checked (as it does not seem to be documented anywhere) and it is
Which could always be included as an option in a js config file without the need to change ff packaging or to bother Arch.
(ex: make manjaro-browser-settings more than just a nuisance)
Undecided as yet. Iâd keep Firefox as an option, not sure about Vivaldi as havenât tried it yet. Will vote later when I have done so.
It was bad enough with Mozilla incorporating that proprietary âPocketâ cobblers, IMHO.
Itâs the âenabled by defaultâ I have the issue with.
ETA: I didnât see the âcat video campaignâ bit. That might just sway me. Iâm trying not to wear my glasses unless I really need to as my eyesight is getting slightly better over these months.
I had not read Why isnât Vivaldi browser open-source before today. But after reading it, I guess I am a bit torn. On the one had, I have been using Vivaldi exclusively for a couple of years now. In terms of general performance, it is simply rock solid - that has been my experience. I donât put a lot of stock in the value of benchmarks, but I do find them interesting. The only browser that I have tested that out performed Vivaldi was Edge. That surprised me.
Also, I really appreciate the appearance and they way that customizing it works better than any other browser.
On the other hand, the fact that Vivaldi is not open-source (entirely), and that they go to great length to point out that all but about 5% of the code is made available, part of me thinks that is a poor attempt to shift the focus. I do think that they bring up some perfectly valid points. By ensuring that there arenât any direct forks, which potentially would be less secure and/or have poorer performance, they eliminate any harm to their reputation. I get that. But I have to accept the explanation that they provide at face value.
I am not 100% comfortable with that. It certainly is possible for them include some malicious code or capture private and personal data.
At the end of the day, I decided to continue to use Vivaldi. 1) I choose to trust their intentions and commitments. 2) I am not truly an open-source purest, I do use some closed source software that best meets my needs for specific tasks. Like Vivaldiâs code, about 95 (or more) percent of the software that I use is open-source.
Most will say, Hold on to Firefox, it is the other web-engine besides chromium-based browsers. However in 2026 a new browser called ladybird will hit the market to change that all. It is based on new code from scratch from a team around Andreas Kling, who worked on Apple Safari, Nokia (WebKit) and KHTML. He is joined by Chris Wanstrath, GitHub co-founder & past GitHub CEO, who works on an unannounced Game Engine, owns Null Games and runs the Computer History Museum. He also donated 1M USD to the non-profit foundation. More info in their project announcement. Also Lunduke posted about this.
What is ladybird?
Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.
From its humble beginnings as an HTML viewer for the SerenityOS hobby operating system project, Ladybird has since grown into a cross-platform browser supporting Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like systems.
Ladybird is currently in heavy development. We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
How to get ladybird? Well, a PKGBUILD is available in the AUR: AUR (en) - Packages
It is very early and pre-alpha state. I tested it briefly. Most websites you canât even visit with it. Our new homepage works, kinda with odd issues. So it is way to early to even recommend it yet.
but before it can really be used productively ⌠besides, there are already more idiots for whom the project doesnât seem woke enough â attitude counts more than expertise these days âŚ
I prefer brave but it also had some drama. Vivaldi is doing to much at once, it has a calendar, mail client etc. build in and can be really slow and unresponsive.
Maybe giving the user the choice before the installation which browser to install or to not install any browser at all.
This used to be a thing.
Manjaro Calamares used to offer this for office suites only (libreoffice, onlyoffice, etc) but it always seemed it would be nice to apply this to a handful of non-critical areas including office, media, and as you say, browser.
Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me but I thought it was the case that such âpluginsâ were leveraged for multiple software choices on some other distros implementation of calamares.
I believe everyone who values privacy will already have customized their Firefox. And continues to monitor the changes. Also, as @cscs pointed out, itâs quite easy to disable programmatically.
However, I do think the Ladybug browser sound like an excellent idea and will test a binary version when itâs available.
So I vote, keep Firefox, with the setting disabled programmatically, as @cscs suggested, and look at the rest. Perhaps specifically Ladybug later on.
I certainly prefer it to chromium. It has a really nice UI, easy to customise and has built in add blocking. It syncs across all my devices as well. Just my browser of choice but some people love brave some love opera.
Tbh pretty much every browser apart from Firefox is chromium based.
We could go completely privacy centric and ship with bromite but you do lose features some people might want to keep
I think the easiest solution will be to keep FF with that âfeatureâ disabled. In the long run - Ladybug.
Me personally - i use Chromium now. It is Chrome without (most of) Google. But i find it extremely important to have an alternative engine. Mozilla is slowly dying. And then we will be left with GoogleâŚ
Not having a real choice is BAD.
As Ladybird does not support Windows (yet), and adding Windows support is currently not high on the developersâ priority list, I canât see it becoming a main browser for those who use multiple devices and sync their browser history, bookmarks etc across those devices.
IMHO Mozilla goes into the wrong direction of data collection, advertising and political activism for quite some time. Therefore I am all in for changing the default browser, but it might be difficult to find a browser, that fits for most of the Manjaro users.
With the shipping of Firefox 128 I have changed to âLibreWolfâ (Flatpack) on Manjaro and to âBraveâ on Android. My suggestion is to change to LibreWolf, because it is open source and comes with decent privacy default options. Maybe changing to Ladybird in some years .
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