Thoughts on current available browsers? Both for Trisquel, and for android/replicant

Abrowser by the Trisquel project is the best browser for Trisquel by far. It's basically Icecat, but kept constantly updated against the latest Firefox version, and is open to your choice of extensions. If you need a chromium-based browser, ungoogled-chromium is the most libre one that I know of. Seems to work well.

From Fdroid, I use the "Mull" browser - it's Firefox (or "Fennec" or whatever Firefox is called on mobile) with some added privacy settings from the Arkenfox project. Works great. Similar default privacy settings to Abrowser. I've heard that there are other good mobile browsers but I haven't tried any others for a bit over a year and don't know their names to recommend them to you.

As far as search, SearX seems the most libre and gives you the most options. I've tried Brave search but the few times I tried it I did not get good search results for some reason. It's probably being upgraded constantly, so I would assume it will end up being good. I don't know whether or not it uses libre software.

There has also been issued concerns regarding Mozilla's "path" the recent years.
I personally know nothing about the technicalities of the situation.

The latest thing I heard about is that Mozilla will implement manifest v3 in firefox, following chrome's update for cross-browser compatibility reasons. This could -as far as I understand- prevent a bunch of addons like ublock or ad nauseam to work properly. Firefox will still offer the ability to users to use manifest v2.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening

I have really grown to love Abrowser to the point that if there was ever any one thing keeping me on Trisquel it would be Abrowser. It is basically very much how I would configure Firefox except all of the work done for me already. I add in uBlock Orign; Privacy Badger; LibRedirect as well as sometimes Jshelter and LibreJS except that those last two prevent certain sites I need from working so I don't always use them. I use SearX for searching. As for mobile browsers I can get by with Fennec when I used to be on Android based systems but I can't say I have found a mobile browser that I like very much. I actually like that in distros for the Pinephone they use the desktop version of browsers.

I see this manual page is quite outdated

https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/tweak-your-browser-enhance-security-and-privacy

It could be a good move to update it with new plugin recommendations, like lib redirect wich didn't exist back in time, some more about:config tweaks, and recent informations about privacy good practices. Maybe doing this would involve opening a discussion thread about which plugins to recommend though.

I been using privacy browser on Replicant OS. It works great so far. I tried Mull and Fennec, it won't load anything. I use Mull and IceRaven with my old Moto running Divest OS. Those are the best in my opinion.

Hey aren’t you the jackass that commented this:
> how kids used to play acoustic guitars
instead of candy crush

“This is a grotesque generalization without roots in reality.

Yes more kids are playing candy crush today compared to whatever time period you refer to, most likely because whatever time period you're referring to didn't contain Candy Crash or Smartphones. That's like saying "ahh there's so many more people today flying airplanes than in 1721, I wonder why...".

And there are plenty of kids today that plays acoustic guitars.

Feel free to be nostalgic about the past and whine about "what's wrong with the world" (even though I think the majority of the world's population would agree the world is becoming a gradually better place to live, all of this is subjective of course.
But I just got "an urge" to point out that "what's wrong with world" maybe has something to do with you and your perspective about things plus maybe you're getting older and getting depressed about that, and then you're projecting the problem which is in yourself up upon "the world".

It’s amazing how butthurt you got at the other guys response, even though what he said was completely true (that’s obviously why it stuck a nerve, because it attacked your insecure beliefs).

“And there are plenty of kids today that plays acoustic guitars” Thanks Captain Obvious, but that wasn’t the point. The point is that there are so many more losers in the world today compared to back then because they spend their time doing lower-level activities such as viewing cringe shit on TiKTok and playing brain dead games like Candy Crush. Duh, of course there are still “plenty of kids today that plays acoustic guitars” but there are also plenty that don’t.

But the problem isn’t specific to playing acoustic guitars, you could replace that with any activity that’s actually useful and productive. It’s all about useful vs useless.

“even though I think the majority of the world’s population would agree the world is becoming a gradually better place to live, all of this is subjective of course.)”. No they wouldn’t, and also, this is exactly what is wrong with this world. This loser viewpoint of thinking that everything is “subjective” has given idiots a safe bubble of bullshit to e.g. have shit taste (*cough *cough Justin Bieber!), do shit activities (e.g. playing Goat Simulator. Gamers are so dumb and stupid that they actually made a freaking Goat Simulator popular enough to have not just 1 but 2 sequels! That right there says everything.) etc.

Fact is that everything is actually objective, the only thing I can think of that isn’t is preference in food, and even then within the same dish, there’s still objectivity (that’s why judging competitions exist of course).

I don't think any of the major browser vendors can be fully trusted to respect user interests, because they all get their revenue from datafarming the people using their platforms. This includes Mozilla, who get the majority of their dev funding from datafarming search companies like Goggle and Boohoo. Also, the governing bodies of the Mozilla project have been slowly stacked with corporate carpetbaggers, who are happy to engage in ruinous compromises in pursuit of financial goals. You can see the corrupting effects of this in a wide range of Mozilla decisions that impact negatively on users;

* adding proprietary EME module made by Adobe to Firefox

* the Pocket acquisition

* the Sync function that makes stores people's complete browsing history etc on servers controlled by Mozilla

... and many more. It also seems to be having a corrosive effect on the quality of some of the code being shipped in Mozilla projects, leading to problems like the persistent freeze-ups we're experiencing in downstream projects like Abrowser: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/abrowser-freezing-randomly

So what's to be done? There are basically three options; fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency (just kidding, Monty Python joke ;)

But seriously...

One, a robust evaluation of all the minor browser vendors. Is there one with sufficient commitment to user freedom that we could all rally behind? One problem here is that many of the lesser known browsers are rebranded versions of the free code bits of a major browser, which totally depend on the upstream browser vendor for the ongoing maintenance of most of their code. Some of these are even proprietary, despite being parasitic on free code (eg Opera).

Two, a coordinated campaign to roll the carpetbaggers out of Mozilla governance and replace them with people committed to user freedom. This will be a hard slog, and potentially open up anyone involved to a campaign of ritual defamation, like the one that targeted RMS. It may be more trouble than it's worth.

Three, start a new browser project. This could begin as a fork of an existing browser, but would aim to become totally independent of the upstream. Realistically this would be a big project. It would need to find sustainable sources of revenue to pay fulltime developers. To do that, it would need to be under the umbrella of a legal entity with solid governance and a fanatical devotion to the principles of user freedom. Is this something the FSF has the capacity to do?

For my laptops - Abrowser, Gnu Icecat

Phone / Tablet - Privacy Browser and Mull. I like bromite, but it sometimes misses ads.

Brave had a few controversy's with crypto and some information leaks with Tor. I look at them like another fake privacy service.

Peep this about Brave - https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html