Do you use any forks instead of default Firefox? If yes, which ones and why?
Librewolf, it’s got better anti-fingerprinting, still lets you define your own search engines, and never implemented AI (at least last I checked).
I still use Firefox for when certain sites have a hissy fit with Librewolf’s safeguards (banking, health insurance, etc.) but otherwise it’s my standard.
I do use Floorp.
It is, by far, the most customizable and power-user friendly Firefox fork, and it has zero telemetry by default, so I do prefer it over vanilla Firefox because of that.
I also value its focus in performance.
What’s performance like? I found it to be very slow the last time I tried it.
I use it daily on my desktop. Works fine. Except yesterday where they published a broken release… Oopsy
Yeah, at least they seemed to repair it fast, though
Did they? took 2 days… and in the meanwhile I had to manually search the web with CHROME… and to download a sketchy binary from a google drive, where they shared a working deb file of Floorp… so huh.
Well, at least for me it has worked within a few hours.
they couldn’t rollback PPA they said… :\
Oh, well, the fact is that I use Arch btw, so it might have impact on it, maybe. Idk really, because I don’t think that a simply PKGBUILD update would suffice. Maybe just the Debian/Ubuntu artifact was broken?
It may be a matter of hardware compatibility, a bug, or an issue during compilation or installation — I am not entirely sure. However, at least in my case, it runs significantly faster than virtually any other Firefox-based browser, including vanilla Firefox. It reduces CPU and GPU load by approximately 5–10%, which is substantial given my setup: an Intel Xeon v4 (Broadwell-EP, v3 SIMD) clocked at just 2.20 GHz (base, up to 2.90 GHz with Turbo Boost), featuring 12 cores and 24 threads, paired with an NVIDIA GTX 1060 (3 GB VRAM).
Regarding memory consumption, RAM usage does not exceed 4–5 GB, even under a heavy extension load of nearly 100 installed add-ons. That said, this performance might be achieved in part by my custom
about:configflags, the use of CachyOS repositories (optimized up to v3), and forced optimized compilation utilizing Mold, LLVM/Clang, Ananicy, and full LTO, among other tweaks, inside of my makepkg.conf (I use Arch, btw 🤪).
No. I just use the default. The forks are typically far behind… I tend to use the nightly builds. Cuz I like to find bugs and document them. :)
Yes. Zen Browser. Its fantastic once your brain adjusts to vertical tabs.
I prefer vertical tabs. Don’t kill me!
I do now. It just took a while to realize it.
Vertical tabs are fine, but they went full retard with the tab syncing update. They destroyed my trust in the project by enforcing that workflow on everyone at first, and made multiple windows entirely pointless.
I use Zen with multiple windows and love the way it works? It’s far from pointless, this is better than it used to be, especially combined with workspaces
I use multiple windows specifically because I want different tabs in them. With this “feature”, we have the clutter of all tabs in all windows which makes it harder to find the one you’re looking for. Screen sharing can leak tabs you didn’t mean to show during presentations; videos playing on another screen would switch screens as you try to find the right tab; and those of us who never cared about workspaces were forced to use them.
But again, the main issue is this was an extremely opinionated change that forces people to change their workflow and was pushed to all users with no way to disable it. I had been using Zen for almost a year at that point, and, what was supposed to be a minor update made it extremely frustrating to use.
Use different workspaces in different windows and your problem is gone. You only see the shared tabs if your windows are on the same workspace.
see, that’s the thing, I don’t care about workspaces and I don’t want yet another concept to manage when basic windows already do that job.
Tab syncing + workspaces force a different workflow to solve problems I don’t have.
You can either take ten seconds to make a “window 1” and “window 2” workspace and then never touch the feature again, or you’re better off not using Zen. It’s not just about vertical tabs, workspaces are pretty core to how you’re supposed to interact with it and are incredibly powerful once you embrace them.
I keep reading this argument that “it’s incredibly powerful” with no concrete examples. I don’t want a powerful browser, I want it to get out of my way.
Zen has been my main for awhile now, I love how it looks!
I use Librewolf but have enabled firefox sync on it. Just don’t like the AI features in Firefox 150 and don’t need an in browser VPN. So far it’s been usable. I also use helium browser for when I’m feeling minimalist or a site doesn’t play nice with something that isn’t chromium.
Librewolf on desktop and tablet, and Iceraven on Android.
I changed Ironfox for Iceraven as it has better compatibility and personalization.
If you already use Mullvad VPN, I strongly recommend using Mullvad Browser for any task that doesn’t require signing into an account to do like quick web searches.
For everything else, I recommend Librewolf if you care about privacy. I heard Zen Browser is good, but I never got the appeal of using vertical tabs since I already have years upon years of muscle memory of having tabs be layed out normally. Maybe there’s another niche of Zen I’m not aware of? Not sure.
vertical tabs have been a life changer, but you don’t need zen for that anymore, firefox has it natively (thank allah). but i also use a 1440p monitor so im perfectly fine with losing a little screen real estate, but that + removing the bookmarks bar makes it look so slick and imho is way more intuitive since the horizontal tabs eventually clump up and you lose track of what tab is what whereas the vertical one is always clear but you can also indent groupings. highly recommend giving it an honest shot but obv you do you
Either LibreWolf or IceCat.
I was also looking for a fork. Major concern of such fork is, if I can trust the developers and package maintainers (in Linux), and if its up to date very close to original Firefox. That eliminates almost all forks. Librewolf was a candidate I would have installed and tried, but its missing a feature: it does not have builtin support for passwords. I know why its excluded and understand that. I know how to use KeePass application to store my passwords. But I personally want it in the browser builtin without any additional applications.
BTW no, my reply is not a request for alternatives. I just wanted to point out a missing feature in Librewolf.
I tried Librewolf too, and I just disliked the design, and it was also very slow for no reason.
I switched to Waterfox some time back. Switching was quite painless.
Absolutely same, but I’ve been switching from Opera. I was kind-of veteran Firefox user but my primary browser for many years was Opera. By 2025, Firefox became slow and bloated as hell, even it’s visual design (on mobile at least). I’ve tried a couple of forks, but they were either slow or ugly in my opinion. But Waterfox was not slow and it’s look is exactly what I need: modern but not bloated. So I switched immediately.
And I use waterfox as well on mobile.
I use floorp. But they just released a broken version 🙈
Waterfox. All FF features, no telemetry or AI, no “opt out”.
I haven’t had a good enough reason to move to a fork. Most things I don’t like can be changed in about:config.
I’m in the market for one
