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Mozilla's actions have been rubbing many Firefox fans the wrong way as of late, and inspiring them to look for alternatives. There are many choices for users who are looking for a browser that isn't part of the Chrome monoculture but is full-featured and suitable for day-to-day use. For those who are willing to stay in the Firefox "family" there are a number of good options that have taken vastly different approaches. This includes GNU IceCat, Floorp, LibreWolf, and Zen.
How we got here
Mozilla has been disappointing a lot of Firefox users for years, but it seems the pace is accelerating. Its announcement on February 19 that it needs to "diversify" beyond Firefox did not inspire confidence, and it annoyed many who would like to see Mozilla go all-in on its flagship browser (and increase its market share) rather than chasing AI or dabbling in advertising. But a recent and more alarming example is its introduction of terms of use for the browser and the removal of its pledge not to sell users' personal data. Though it has backpedaled somewhat since, and rewritten its terms of use, the damage has been done.
Firefox forking is hardly a new phenomenon. Debian began maintaining forks of Mozilla applications with minimal changes but different names due to conflicts between the Debian Free Software Guidelines and Mozilla's trademark-usage policy. (LWN covered this in 2005.) The era of Iceweasel, Debian's brand name for Firefox, came to an end in 2016. Note that the name Iceweasel is not merely a play on the name "Firefox"; its origin is one of Matt Groening's Life in Hell comic strips (here), which contained a fictional quote attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche.
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
The GNU project also adopted the name IceWeasel for the GNUzilla
project—basically Mozilla source code with any non-free
code, such as the Adobe Flash
Player, stripped out. In 2007, Karl Berry announced
that GNUzilla would be adopting the name IceCat for its version
"not because we have anything against weasels
" but to avoid
confusion with Debian's version.
GNU IceCat
IceCat has the distinction of being the oldest Firefox fork still in development. Ray Dryden applied for GNUzilla to become part of the GNU Project in August 2005, and test releases based on Firefox 1.5.0 were available later that year. IceCat, as with all of the forks covered in this article, is available under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 2.0. However, the scripts and other tools used to create an IceCat release from Firefox are licensed under the GPLv3.
GNUzilla does not distribute binaries of IceCat. The project recommends using GNU Guix to install IceCat on x86_64 Linux systems, and also makes its scripts available in its Git repository to compile IceCat from Firefox's extended-support releases (ESRs). It may, however, also be packaged for a user's favorite Linux distribution. Fedora 41, for example, currently has IceCat 115.20.0esr—which is based on Firefox 115.20.0; both were released on February 4.
Current-day IceCat has several changes that distinguish it from
Firefox. The most immediately obvious is its use of the LibreJS add-on to
block "nonfree nontrivial JavaScript while allowing JavaScript that
is free and/or trivial
". In practice, this means that a significant number of sites will not work unless the user adds exceptions for
the JavaScript used by the site. Users can choose to add exceptions for
individual scripts blocked by LibreJS or to add an exception for the
entire site. Even LWN, which uses a minimal amount of JavaScript,
has scripts that are blocked by LibreJS.
IceCat includes the JShelter extension, which attempts to block not just malware, but browser fingerprinting and user tracking as well. It modifies the JavaScript environment that is available to web pages to try to confuse fingerprinters and make it more difficult to carry out attacks using JavaScript. It may block APIs or return fake values to thwart these attempts. Like LibreJS, it can be modified or turned off entirely for specific sites. There is a paper from 2022 that explains the extension's approach in great detail, and an extensive FAQ that may be of use in troubleshooting interactions between JShelter and web sites.
In a similar vein, IceCat includes a fork of
the Third-party
Request Blocker extension that (as the name implies) blocks
connections to third-party resources without user consent. It is a
little concerning that the page
describing the extension describes it as "seemingly maintained by
'sw'
", and its last update was in March 2020. The home page
listed for the extension is no longer available. Despite the lag in
development, it still seems to be working and blocking plenty of
third-party requests. A visit to a site like The Guardian, for instance, shows
seven sites blocked. As the screenshot shows, site layout and images
are often affected by IceCat's default settings. Usually the sites are
still usable, but far less aesthetically pleasing.
One thing that worked well for me was to enable just enough to see the page text and then use the reader view to read a site's articles or other content. (Sadly, none of the forks offer a "browse everything in reader view by default" option.)
In all, IceCat ships with eight extensions that either attempt to enhance user privacy, block non-free software, or unbreak sites that are affected by its other extensions. It includes a "LibreJS/USPS compatibility" plugin to offer an alternative shipping calculator for the US Postal Service site as well as an extension to replace JavaScript blocked by LibreJS on the Library Genesis sites.
The project has an extension-finder service called Mozzarella, which (of course) only lists extensions that are free software. However, the extensions may be outdated compared to their counterparts listed in Firefox's add-on catalog. For example, the Privacy Badger extension in the Mozzarella catalog was last updated in June 2023. The Firefox catalog version was last updated on January 29, 2025.
Right now, three people are listed as maintainers for GNUzilla: Ruben Rodriguez, Amin Bandali, and Mark H. Weaver. The development mailing lists are a bit on the quiet side. The last-archived conversation currently for the gnuzilla-dev list is from August 2024. The bug-gnuzilla list is a little more lively—its last activity was in December 2024.
IceCat is probably a good choice for folks who are more concerned with the free software ethos and privacy than with functionality.
Floorp
The Floorp project is a much newer entrant. It is developed by a community of Japanese students called Ablaze. Development is hosted on GitHub, and the project solicits donations via GitHub donations. According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page—but the ads, which are displayed as shortcuts with a "sponsored" label, can be turned off in the settings. I've been unable to find any information about the project governance or legal structure of Ablaze.
Its contributors page lists seven primary maintainers and 39 code contributors, as well as many people who have contributed to its language packs and translations, or who maintain packages. Floorp does not offer native packages for Linux distributions, but it does provide a Flatpak via Flathub and precompiled releases for x86_64 and ARM64.
![[Floorp browser]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2025/floorp.png)
Originally Floorp was based on Chromium but switched to Firefox in early 2022. The first Firefox-derived version was Floorp v7 (announcement in Japanese), and it was based on the Firefox rapid releases, but the project switched to the ESR releases as their base with v8. The most recent release, version 11.23.1, was announced on February 15, and is based on (according to about:config) the Firefox ESR 128.8.0 release, which came out on March 4. It would be nice if the project were more explicit in its release notes about which version of Firefox a release was based on. This is not merely for curiosity's sake—it would help users track whether Floorp was receiving the most recent security updates. The project has said that it plans to move back to the rapid release versions of Firefox with v12, which is currently in beta.
The project promises "strong tracking protection
" and that
it does not track users or have any affiliation with advertising
companies. However, the project does not give details on how its
tracking protection differs from Firefox's. It still uses Google as
its default search engine and includes the Firefox
browser sync feature. It also uses Mozilla's add-ons repository,
and should work with most Firefox add-ons
that are compatible with the corresponding Firefox version.
Floorp does have a number of interesting features and enhancements that may tempt users. It has a dual-sidebar layout that allows users to access bookmarks, history, and other tools on the left-hand side, while the right-hand has the Web Apps panel. Users can add web sites to open in the Web Apps panel, which can be useful while (for example) doing research for an article while keeping a version of the article open in the panel.
In addition to the Apps panel, Floorp has a split-view feature that lets users open two pages side-by-side by selecting a tab and clicking "Split this Tab". Each split has its own history and URL bar. Floorp's layout is great for wide-screen monitors, and I like the ability to open sites in split view rather than juggling multiple browser windows.
Another interesting inclusion in Floorp is its Workspace feature. This allows users to group tabs by categories like "work", "comics", "shopping", or whatever makes sense for the users' browsing habits. I've found this useful for working on projects and stories for LWN—I might have a dozen tabs open for a specific story, which I can group into a single workspace. Workspaces can also be assigned to Firefox's multi-account containers. For example, a user might want to log in to the same site using different accounts—without having to sign in and out repeatedly. Combining the workspace and multi-account containers can be useful in a number of scenarios.
Firefox's tabs have seen little feature advancement in the past few years. Floorp adds a few much-needed enhancements here, allowing users to move the tab bar to the bottom of the window, use a multi-row tab bar, and even a vertical tab bar. However, the Floorp implementation of the vertical tab bar will go away in v12, now that Mozilla has finally added vertical tabs in Firefox 136.0.
Overall, Floorp is an interesting project with some nice enhancements to the Firefox UI. However, the development roadmap seems a bit more haphazard than I would like—switching back and forth between Firefox rapid release and ESRs, for example. That may not dissuade other folks, though.
LibreWolf
The LibreWolf project got its start in 2020. Its focus is primarily
around privacy, security, and the removal of "anti-freedom
"
features, such as telemetry and DRM, from Firefox. It lists seven core
contributors on its home page and points to its Matrix room for
development discussions. Its development is hosted on Codeberg.
LibreWolf is available in the Arch User Repository (AUR) for Arch Linux users; and the project offers its own package repositories for Debian-based distributions and for Fedora. It recommends its Flatpak packages for most other distributions. The most recent version of LibreWolf is 135.0.1, which was a minor update based on Firefox 135. The first LibreWolf 135.0 release came out on February 9, about five days after the upstream Firefox version.
LibreWolf has the normal configuration options one would expect for a Firefox fork, but it also has the option of using a special configuration file called librewolf.overrides.cfg to set preferences that can take effect across multiple profiles rather than having to tweak the configuration for each profile. It also makes preferences easy to back up and move to a new machine. The documentation explains where to find this file, depending on the installation method, and offers several suggestions for possible preference changes.
LibreWolf is mostly notable for what it doesn't have rather than what it does. That is, it removes other features from Firefox that have not been well-received by many users such as Pocket integration, telemetry, and more. Firefox Sync is disabled by default but it can be enabled in settings.
LibreWolf does include the uBlock Origin add-blocker add-on as part of its standard installation. It should be noted that uBlock Origin is being disabled for Chrome users as Google phases out support for the WebExtension API V2 in favor of V3, which will curtail features that uBlock Origin and other add-ons require to function. To its credit, Mozilla has committed to continuing its support for Manifest V2 and V3. LWN covered Manifest V3 and its impact on content blockers in 2021.
For the most part, users would be hard-pressed to spot many differences between LibreWolf and Firefox at first (or second) glance, so a screen shot of LibreWolf seemed a bit unnecessary. That approach is likely to appeal to many users who are uneasy with things like telemetry and Pocket, but don't want an entirely new browsing experience.
Zen
The Zen browser project is the most recent entrant. Its development began last year with an announcement on Reddit. It is currently in beta, with its most recent version, 1.8.2b based on Firefox 135.0.1, released on February 25. Kudos to the Zen project, by the way, for proudly including the Firefox version alongside the project version in its "About" dialog—information that literally every other Firefox fork seems intent on hiding. Zen lists 12 people in the main project team, and about 90 contributors to the browser. Development for Zen is hosted on GitHub, and discussion takes place on Discord (link goes to a Discord invitation).
Like Floorp, the project solicits donations to assist with development, but little information seems to be available about its governance or structure to provide transparency about how the money is spent.
Unlike the other forks, it is not immediately obvious that Zen is an offshoot of Firefox. It does not look at all like the standard Firefox interface, even before users start customizing it. Even Floorp, which allows significant customization, still bears some resemblance to Firefox on first use. Zen sports a tab sidebar on the left that blends the Workspace concept from Floorp and vertical tabs, with a set of default bookmarks ("Essentials") as icons at the top. The browser menu is located in the top-left corner, indicated by a button with three dots. The window title bar is hidden and only appears if a user hovers the mouse at the top of the window for a few seconds.
![[Zen browser]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2025/zen-sm.png)
While Zen looks modern and interesting, its sleek user interface and configurability comes at the cost of intuitive usability in some cases. For example, one might expect that setting Zen to light mode in the "Language and Appearance" settings would also change the browser's interface to light mode. It does not, as shown in the screenshot. Instead, a user has to go to the "Add-ons and Themes" settings to select a light theme. It would help a great deal if Zen's user guide were more complete, but it only has a little bit of documentation to offer at the moment. To be fair, it is still a beta project, so it may be much improved by the time the Zen browser has its first stable release. For now, users will need to be ready to dig through Reddit and other forums for tips.
Features like glance, which pre-fetches a link and gives a preview of it before opening it in a new tab or window, are useful, but not at all obvious how to use, even if one is aware the feature exists. (On Linux, activate glance with Alt+click.) Likewise, Zen's split-screen mode requires the user to select multiple tabs and then right-click to select "Split Tab". Rearranging the splits is also not intuitive. That said, the additional features are compelling if one is willing to do some searching to figure things out.
The Zen interface can be customized extensively to suit individual tastes via the settings. If those options aren't enough, Zen has its own set of add-ons and extensions called Mods to modify the interface or add features. This ranges from a green-hued theme called Matcha to tweaks to further minimize the sidebar. Most Firefox add-ons should work with Zen as well, though some may clash with its user-interface changes.
Currently, Zen isn't fully baked enough for me to consider switching to it. Others may be more adventurous in their browsing habits than I am, though. I can say that it has stabilized significantly since I first tried it shortly after its first public release. The project does bear keeping an eye on, and the Mozilla folks could do worse than to copy some of the ideas (and code) that the project is experimenting with.
Others
The Firefox fork rabbit hole is surprisingly deep. There are a few alternatives I chose not to try—but mention here for completeness—and probably a few that I've missed. The Basilisk project is a kind of retro-Firefox project that aims to retain technologies that Firefox has removed. This includes the deprecated Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plugin support, ALSA support on Linux, XUL extensions, and more.
Waterfox is a browser that began in 2011 as an independent project by Alex Kontos while he was a student. It was acquired and then un-acquired by Internet-advertising company System1. Its site does not, at least at the moment, have enough specifics about the browser's differences and features to compel me to take it for a test drive.
The Pale Moon project is another browser that has forked off of Mozilla Firefox code and no longer tracks it directly. It uses the Goanna fork of the Gecko rendering engine and still supports NPAPI plugins and XUL extensions. The project promises no telemetry or data gathering. It offers a somewhat nostalgic look and feel that is similar to Firefox in the mid-2000s.
For those who pine for the days of the Netscape suite that included the browser, mail client, HTML editor, IRC chat, and more, there is SeaMonkey. The project uses code from Firefox and Thunderbird, though it is not directly based on recent versions. According to its site, it backports security fixes from Firefox and Thunderbird ESRs that apply to SeaMonkey. The project also maintains the Composer HTML editor and ChatZilla IRC client that are no longer maintained by Mozilla. SeaMonkey is still packaged for a number of Linux distributions, and binaries are available for Linux on x86_64 and x86 as a tarball. It might be a good option for users who are still using 32-bit x86 Linux systems.
Still dependent on Mozilla
Regardless which Firefox fork one chooses, it is important to remember the downsides. First and foremost, all of the forks are dependent on Mozilla to do the heavy lifting. The bulk of development is carried by Mozilla, the direction of Firefox is set by Mozilla, and choosing to run a fork puts the user one step removed from security and bug fixes. This does not mean users shouldn't consider one of these forks, but they should be aware of the potential downsides.
There is some precedent for soft forks displacing the original upstream. For example, the Go-oo fork of OpenOffice.org became LibreOffice after Oracle consumed Sun. That fork has clearly overtaken OpenOffice.org in the Linux community as the go-to desktop office suite and its development has eclipsed that of its counterpart Apache OpenOffice. Go-oo, of course, had corporate support as well as community support. For a Firefox fork to be truly independent and sustainable, it would need a similar effort behind it. Thus far, no such movement has materialized.
A recent question on the LibreWolf issue tracker drives that point
home nicely. User "kallisti5" asked if
LibreWolf was prepared to fork Firefox "if Mozilla continues
farther down this path?
" One of LibreWolf's contributors, "ohfp",
replied that the project was "absolutely not prepared to do
that
" due to limited time and energy to work on the project as it
is. "We would not even remotely be able to fork and maintain a
browser fully, let alone to continually develop and improve
it.
"
Another downside to the forks is that there are far fewer eyes on their code and communities. When Mozilla makes an important move, whether it's positive or negative, users are likely to hear about it quickly. As of now, the forks get relatively little attention.
Folks who want to jump ship from Mozilla's ecosystem entirely, while still sticking to open source, have some options. Ladybird, which LWN covered in June last year, is an attempt to create a new browser from whole cloth. It is an interesting effort, but not ready for day-to-day use for most folks. Qutebrowser, Nyxt, and NetSurf are also worth a look—though they may have some drawbacks for day-to-day use in terms of site compatibility and features. We will take a look at some of those options soon.
Read the original article
Comments
For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox.
The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".
By cosmic_cheese 2025-03-1416:495 reply I don’t know that this idea would work for literally just Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish and poweruser features. Think a “Firefox Pro” of sorts.
Why do I think this? Three reasons:
- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.
- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.
- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.
If someone was building "Arc but for Firefox" I'd gladly pay for that. Firefox is, because of its position in the market, incapable of doing anything broadly interesting that's not "Be as Chrome-like as possible." They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart. We'll only ever just get marginally better privacy settings or whatever the next Pocket ends up being.
Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_.
I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.
By cosmic_cheese 2025-03-1420:364 reply Totally agree. Even core features like bookmarks have barely improved in decades. All the emphasis has been on skin-deep UI refreshes, gimmicks, ways to monetize the user, and ways for developers to control the user’s experience.
I used to be a big fan of OmniWeb back in its day because it pushed the envelope in adding utility and emphasized its role as a powerful tool that put the user in control. It included things like per-page user CSS years before userstyles became popular in Firefox and Chrome.
It was paid however, and at least in that point in time there was little appetite for a paid browser, and so now it’s a hobby project that Omni Group devs occasionally tinker on and hasn’t been actively maintained in some time.
Zen browser is exactly this. It has a growing ecosystem of “Zen mods” and has a great Arc-like out-of-box experience.
By emaro 2025-03-156:07 TBF, I like the browser doesn't change that much. I install it for / recommend it to friends/family/etc and big changes would only increase the support I have to do. I think forks are much better suited to try out new concepts, which eventually might end up in the browser (I enabled the vertical tabs in 136 and I love them).
By rewgs 2025-03-153:32 “Arc but for Firefox” is called Zen and it’s been my daily driver for months. Fantastic browser.
By evo_9 2025-03-1518:55 That’s exactly what Zen Browser is - Arc but off a fork of FF.
By hyperbrainer 2025-03-1510:59 isn't Zen exactly that? Arc, but firefox
By Izkata 2025-03-154:12 > They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does anything that really sets Firefox apart.
> and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6.
Firefox 36 and 3.6 were pre-Quantum/Electrolysis. In those days, the XUL addons had an insane amount of control and could do so many things simply not possible nowadays, that if you took advantage of made a browser that looks nothing like modern Firefox.
By ForTheKidz 2025-03-1510:00 Inevitably, I'd want any feature worth paying for to be freely accessible. Presumably I'm not just trying to support the devs but also fund other people accessing the same features that draw me to firefox in the first place.
I think in todays world, when everything is a subscription, payment for a browser doesn't look so far-fetched.
By lolinder 2025-03-153:28 That is the question I ask myself every time this comes up, and the only answer I've been able to come up with is "because Google pays them not to".
The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money would be going to this one person?
You can't donate to Firefox anyway—you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation.
So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.
To be fair, Mozilla has come out with a lot of new services that have dramatically decreased their dependency on Google. They went from over 95% of their revenue being google royalties to less than 70% just in the past half decade
This structure sounds completely broken. So the people who work on it answer only to the people who hold the purse, but not the people (the Foundation). Do I get that right?
By JumpCrisscross 2025-03-1520:542 reply > fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was
Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].
(I’ve donated to Mozilla before and recently brought in friends who gave 6+ figures. I’ve been encouraging them to, and they’ve been successful so far in, charging back for those donations.)
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
By st3fan 2025-03-1612:54 Donation go to the foundation, not to Mozilla Corporation which does all the browser engineering work. If you donate you give money to the team that does open web advocacy and related programs.
By heavymetalpoizn 2025-03-1520:06 [dead]
> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox
This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted.
I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.
They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
> This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.
I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole...
> They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered.
However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.
By maccard 2025-03-1510:57 That doesn’t seem unreasonable for a drive by PR to an enormous project. I contributed go an open source rust project a few years back and my first PR took weeks of back and forth. My second and following ones were merged in days.
I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea.
Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent.
As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox.
I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser.
I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.
Thunderbird received close to $10 million in donations in 2023. And I’m willing to bet far more people use Firefox. If funding development directly, that’s not too shabby.
By glenstein 2025-03-1514:32 Wow, I honestly had no idea about that and you're exactly right, and everything I can see suggests that those were small donors to Thunderbird. It's hard to extrapolate, but it certainly seems like 10 to 20 million per year could be in play.
I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary. Call it a million a year, and that’s enough to comfortably employ 4-5 programmers to work on something full time, with enough left over to cover the lulls in income. Make it 1.2 and there’s enough for an admin person to prioritise, liaise with Mozilla, and do the financials. That’s 150x less than Wikipedia.
I also agree with you that direct donations won’t solve this, whether it’s 100k or 100M
>I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary.
Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million. So it sounds like you're saying an additional 1 million is a difference between 3% market share and 30% market share.
We seem to be on the same page about what plausibly could come in from revenue, but I just don't see how that moves the needle in ways that people seem to be expecting. I feel like the psychological comfort from pointing to that as an underutilized option is intended to make the point that there's not enough resources for software development. But if you compare it to what they're already spending, they're spending more than would ever be generated from such revenue. Which admittedly is a little bit off-track from the point you're making. It'll be interesting to see if Lady Bird does well with economics along the lines of what you're describing.
The use for donations could be for a single person whose job is to check the upstream code for any antifeatures (telemetry, ads, product placements, online service defaults, Google as paid default search engine, etc.) not in the user's interest and revert them, as well as bundling any useful extension like uBlock Origin and verifying them.
That needs minimal effort compared to building a browser, because it doesn't involve doing any of the hard work, but just removing code that serves to line the pockets of those doing most of the work at the expense of the user.
By fresh_geezer 2025-03-1414:57 I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea, then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the main entity developing the browser.
"The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox."
For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on company law in the domiciled country) where either full or part-time programmers would be compensated for their work.
As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance, (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new features and updates would be more timely than is the case with much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner.
Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still keep code open for general inspection/security etc.
Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.
By PaulDavisThe1st 2025-03-1514:012 reply > The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited).
Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also being GPL'ed). This is not possible.
Here at ardour.org, we use this:
> either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code.
(technically, name your own price for the binaries)
and retain the GPL. It works fine for us.
By wruza 2025-03-169:02 Idk about others, I’d pay one time for specific features done once and never touched again. Cause I can measure my suffering and workarounds costs, and I have a sense of efforts and ownership.
I’d even pay for forks of software that simply allow to modify their basic internals without providing any specific features, so I could augment them with programming without hard reveng (which often fails with no result). Like setting custom shortcuts in firefox.
But software doesn’t offer that. It wants me to pay monthly money for features I don’t really like on average, and they may take away anything in the next update, irreversibly. Just because someone felt like doing so, cause users can’t take away paid money in return.
I guess I wanted to say that “willing to pay” depends on what you are selling. And what “they” are selling is usually some no-guarantees always mutating fad rather than features you need.
There’s another nuance in supporting existing software even without new features. These costs are already way above all limits and must be forced down by re-designing text and image scrolling to where it should be, complexity-wise.
By MrAlex94 2025-03-1423:08 FWIW, when Waterfox was part of S1, I’d make sure all work we did was open and there were the odd times I had our dept push upstream patches if/when needed.
By jeffparsons 2025-03-154:161 reply If you can get your organisation registered as a deductible gift recipient (DGR) in Australia, then I'll bet a few people here — myself included — would contribute. Being able to help out _and_ reduce ones tax bill at the same time seems to have a magical effect on some people — again, myself included.
By maccard 2025-03-1510:53 Herein lies the problem. Multiply this by 10 countries, add in accountant fees and legal fees, HCOL adjustments, and you’ve spent $20k very very quickly before you’ve written a line of code. You might suggest “only do this if there are more than X donations from a country”, but now I need to bookkerp this which again takes away from the core goal of writing code for Firefox. Maybe I hire a fractional accountant to manage it? Now there’s an annual overhead to cover.
How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay someone in Europe full time you’d need about 6k people to donate that annually. My experience here is that what people say they value and what they actually value when asked to open their wallets are two very different things
By AnthonyMouse 2025-03-150:53 It could be interesting to do this and raise money in the same way that Mozilla does -- by selling the default search engine. The difference being that all of the money would go to improving Firefox instead of all the random not-Firefox things Mozilla currently does with it.
By kiicia 2025-03-1422:23 Web browser is something I would pay subscription in a heartbeat, and I mean it, it is my actual OS now
By dev1ycan 2025-03-1423:25 The problem with most non profits like Mozilla is that a big % of their budget goes to leeches that flood said companies, and then to justify their job as the company crashes down from bloat, they start introducing garbage like what Mozilla tried to do.
Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).
By intelVISA 2025-03-1516:51 Surely to avoid the org dysfunction that sunk Firefox the person 'creating' this fork would also be actively building it?
Please someone make a Firefox that makes profile portability readable and with sensible defaults.
By maccard 2025-03-1510:54 That’s not what OP is suggesting - that’s a Firefox fork.
By rwmj 2025-03-1510:00 Because historically that money has been squandered on C-suite salaries, irrelevant acquisitions (Pocket), and development that has nothing to do with the browser (like failing to make a phone OS).
By Narishma 2025-03-1520:23 AFAICT donations to Mozilla aren't used to fund Firefox development.
Zen looks like Arc Browser, but Firefox-based and open-source. Exactly what I'm looking for!
The UX pattern for tabs in Arc is amazing. No, it's not just "vertical tabs". It's an innovative blend of the concepts of bookmarks and open tabs. Sort of like files: they can be open or closed, and live in a folder hierarchy.
But the development of Arc stopped half a year ago (except security Chromium updates), with a well-working Mac version, but Windows version which is barely usable and no Linux support. The creators decided to focus on some sort of "AI agent" browser.
So I came looking for alternatives that would be cross-platform, have working adblockers, and preferably be open-source. There are some "Firefox transformation" projects like ArcFox, but they are clumsy to set up and usually only copy the general look, not the actually useful features like nested folders. There are extensions like "Tree style tabs" but they work a different way than Arc.
By InsideOutSanta 2025-03-1515:041 reply I've been using Zen for a few months now and love it. There are some rough edges (the article mentions how customizing it is confusing because multiple mechanisms affect different parts of the app). However, it's getting regular updates, and once it's set up, it's really a pleasure to use.
Apart from the elegant, minimalist user interface, I particularly like how it implements workspaces. It makes it super easy to switch between personal and work contexts.
I highly recommend it.
By askvictor 2025-03-1521:38 Same here. My main gripe has been address in the latest update - the icon! The old stylised 'Z' just didn't look a like a browser icon when alt-tabbing, and I had to think about where my browser is, rather than instinctively going straight to it. At this point my brain only seems to accept that browser icons are circle-based.
The vertical tabs and side-by-side tabs are fantastic
By adhamsalama 2025-03-1510:122 reply Try Sidebery extension. It has nested tabs, workspaces and much much more.
By majesticmerc 2025-03-1513:242 reply I tried Sidebery for a couple of months off the back of multiple recommendations and while it has some decent features, I found it surprisingly lacking in terms of basic features like "close multiple tabs". I also found it regularly would semi-regularly prevent me from clicking on tabs which was frustrating until I restarted the extension or Firefox.
In the end I found good old Tree Style Tabs was better. I just wish it had an easier UX for creating named tab groups.
By rekabis 2025-03-170:40 Tab Mix Plus is the OG GOAT of tab management. Its claim to fame is that it’s still the only add-in that gives you multiple tab rows.
By easygenes 2025-03-162:27 Have you compared the experience to using Sidebery? Every FF alternative I've tried comes up short to the power of what Sidebery can do with tree style tabs.
Honestly, Zen should be upstreamed. It would be a great way to introduce FOMO.
By PufPufPuf 2025-03-1810:42 Actually, some of the Zen features are lesser-known native features of Firefox: including the collapsible vertical tabs.
By sieabahlpark 2025-03-1516:53 [dead]
By GoblinSlayer 2025-03-169:36 Ironic to provide compact interface leaving bighugefat spacing intact.
By pablooliva 2025-03-1523:55 The Zen fork should be based on the Mullvad browser, which is itself a fork of Firefox, or the Tor Browser, same thing I guess. Or they should collaborate. It would be nice to have the UI improvements on an already more privacy focused fork.
I recently did this exercise as well. There are a lot of browsers not mentioned that you can find here,[0] but there's one big missing one imo.
The Tor browser is forked from Firefox to support the Tor Network. On top of the actual tor network it's filled to the brim with novel and unique privacy enhancing features. Mullvad (the VPN company) recently did a partnership with Tor to create the Mullvad Browser.[1] It's exactly the Tor browser but without the onion protocol part. Instead it just has all the anti-fingerprinting and privacy enhancing features.
I ended up going with that browser as it's the strongest privacy-focused Firefox fork option
Tangent, how does “mullvad” sound to native speakers (and non-natives too)? I can’t tell why, but it feels like such an unfortunate combination of phonemes that I avoid even looking into it subconsciously. Can barely force myself to pronounce it, is that just me?
By kseistrup 2025-03-169:02 To native Swedish speakers it will look and sound like just another common Swedish word. And in the context it will even sound like a relevant choice of name.
/me is Danish, and the Danish equivalent would be ‘muldvarp’.
It's just another foreign-sounding word in a language full of kidnapped vocabulary
