This is terrible news in two different ways: it's replacing a FOSS program with a proprietary closed-source one, and it's making the Chromium monoculture worse.
Recently started using an RPM-based OS as my daily driver (previously Debian->Gentoo->macOS, never ever used anything RPM-based before). I'm mainly terminal-based, so the number of GUI apps I installed is pretty small: FirefoxDevEdition (my main browser), Chrome (needed for cross-browser testing as a web-dev), Slack, Telegram, VSCode. Only one of those posed a problem. The open-source one. The irony of this is pretty embarrassing.
A LOT of this can be put down to the fragmentation of Linux OS package management, and the package repos maintained by individual OSes, but the entire experience has been so bad with Firefox in many ways that can't really be blamed on CentOS/Fedora/RHEL folk, or on the broader Linux community in general.
- Not only do Mozilla not provide any 3rd-party yum repo, they don't even provide RPMs.
- The built-in Firefox updater UI dropdown (with the upgrade now button) triggers but doesn't seem to have considered Linux at all: it's just a no-op. It would be nice if the updater actually worked in Linux (as Chrome's does), but if it's a no-op the UI should at least not be misleading/confusing.
- The updater CLI is largely undocumented, it doesn't autodownload new versions (you must handle that yourself) and it doesn't gracefully handle killing/restarting running processes.
- There is no programmatic way to shutdown the Firefox process gracefully via the Linux cli anyway...
- Firefox puts its user data in "$HOME/.mozilla" instead of being XDG compliant.
If that's Firefox's level of support for what is (surely?) the 2nd biggest Linux packaging format, I wonder what the Manjaro/Pacman experience is like. I get that Arch's systems are generally much simpler, so it might be much better, but still...
As someone who loved Opera up to 12.x, I want to like Vivaldi. However, I've already been burned once by a proprietary web browser deciding to change direction, and I'm not interested in getting burned a second time.
It seems the worst thing you can say about Vivaldi is that it’s closed source. I actually really like Vivaldi when I want a bloated browser experience (sometimes I do). I’ve been jumping between Vivaldi and Qutebrowser on my Linux box. Qute us amazing except when it isn’t, which is about 10% of the time.
Im not sure how much I care about browsers being proprietary as long as the engine is open source (I really like safari). If there’s evidence that Vivaldi is doing terrible things with my usage data then I’ll likely change back to FF.
Last I read [1] Vivaldi was one of the chattier browsers out there [2], generating a unique ID for you, and building from source also was not actually possible. Wonder if this has changed, and how Manjaro handles the building. Much of Vivaldi's components are closed source (the mail client for instance).
As a Vivaldi user I'm quite happy to see my default browser as a default for Manjaro Cinnamon. I've been using it since 1.x on both desktop and mobile (after they added the adblocker).
From my point of view, I try FOSS alternatives but if I don't like them... I don't like to spend time changing CSS files or messing with configurations. I spent quite a lot of time doing just that for Pale Moon and then Firefox. These days, I just use closed ones (or none).
But... From the FOSS point of view, Vivaldi is closed source and we shouldn't use it.
I keep ungoogled-chromium as an alternative on my desktop devices and Bromite on Android for sensitive stuff (things like banking).
Still, I hope that someday Vivaldi makes its source available. Even if it's mostly a custom Chromium base with a React user interface (and quite complete actually) on top.
A few months ago I went on a quest to find a new browser. I settled on Vivaldi (and I tried just about every browser there is!) It's quite simply the best browser I've ever used. I love the tab groups, the speed dial, the way it manages bookmarks, the notes - it's just a lot of small things that really make it a great browser to use.
Isn't Manjaro the distro that previously planned to drop LibreOffice from its installation and include the proprietary word processor FreeOffice instead? [0]
I guess my point is, this is kinda par for the course.
Both Manjaro and its parent Arch Linux aren't distros oriented to pure FOSS.
The community repository contains a mix of open and closed source applications.
And there's AUR to build your own custom packages, which most of them are just a PKGBUILD file.
The PKGBUILD downloads the source, patches it (if required) and compiles it to create the desired package.
If the package is closed source it just downloads the binaries and repackages the result as a Pacman package.
So they can offer both open and closed source editor suites and you're free to install whatever you want.
I've tried several office suites and FreeOffice is quite faster than LibreOffice actually. I've also tried one suite which was an electron app (OnlyOffice) and LibreOffice felt faster than a plane compared to it.
Well Firefox users are used to having to install a browser on their Desktop OS. It's usually the first thing I do on any OS and typically the last time I use the bundled browser. Chrome users have a similar experience (unless you are on Android or ChromeOS of course). Otherwise most of us would be using Edge and Safari instead.
I actually played a little with arch recently in a VM. It's actually a quite nice distribution. With arch the whole point seems to be not getting locked into any kind of opinionated defaults for whatever. The gnome desktop I installed comes with a thing simply called Web, which appears to be some Gnome Webkit derivative. I also played with Manjaro, which is a lot simpler to setup. I wouldn't get to hung up on default apps on either of those two platforms. If you install them, you kind of should know what you are doing and what you like.
Used Vivaldi for a while albeit on Windows. Dropped it because it broke constantly a game I was playing in browser. Likely due to some high refresh rate and trying to use multiple screens and play video on other one... Strange thing is haven't seen this on Firefox or Opera with same use pattern...
Vivaldi is nice, but it's a niche browser. It has a ton of features, and some people might find that bloated. I definitely do not think it should be default.
I'm still gonna stick with Firefox, but Vivaldi is a pretty good browser from what I've tried of it. The only thing I dislike is their leadership: they cited 'Vivaldi's brand' as the reason why they can't go open source, which seems like such a cop-out in my eyes that I switched back to Firefox. That said, browsers are hard to get right, so at the very least, Kudos to the Vivaldi team for being less-terrible than Chrome.
If they disabled installation of other browsers I'd be concerned. This way people can interact with a browser that is not commonly known and give it a try. Maybe some people like it, others will just install whatever they prefer.
Firefox is coming to an end. The Mozilla mismanagement can't be continued forever, either people start supporting a new browser vendor or Chrome monoculture it will be.
This really is a weird decision! And a closed source Browser, too. There was money involved in that decision, i guarantee it.
Now talking about browsers since firefox's market share seems directly corrlated to the inverse of their CEOs paycheck, what GOOD options are still out there?
* Chrome - Spyware
* Chromium variations of all kind - Spyware with some mitigations
* Midora, Konquerror, other weird browsers etc. - hopelessly never going to be feature complete enough to be useful
* Firefox - Now with spyware AND woke politics!
* Firefox based privacy remixes like libewolf - current best choice for privacy and reasonable website compatibility.
You know, that's a good question given the threat exposure in a browser.
Maybe the right answer is a mixture. Use a dedicated Chromebook in guest mode for financial transactions/bill paying/banking (high security, low privacy from Google) and something akin to a text-based browser on an open source OS for everything else.
Is there something like Lynx but with a bit of formatting + still images? I can see going that route simply because the sheer size (in LOC) of a modern browser is so great that I question it's trustability.
I think this artisanal browser shit is a disservice and what pushes people away from Linux. Every single “custom browser” out there is largely, IMHO, a pile of shit. They very often add no value except for niche use cases which almost no one uses. They’re likely to confuse users because they abso-fucking-lutely have never heard of it.
I seriously don’t know how the hell anyone thinks this sort of thing is user friendly or good.
The solution is simple: ship with a basic open source browser, and during the intitial setup procedure, the wizard should ask users if they want to import data from an existing browser they currently use, or use that same browser, and to select it.
This lack of understanding onboarding and setup UX is the great differentiator from Windows and macOS for most consumers.
[+] [-] josephcsible|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aisen8010|4 years ago|reply
The Firefox's interface is getting worse and worse and it does not seem to be doing anything to protect the users privacy.
[+] [-] anothernewdude|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filthylurker|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathonf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucideer|4 years ago|reply
Recently started using an RPM-based OS as my daily driver (previously Debian->Gentoo->macOS, never ever used anything RPM-based before). I'm mainly terminal-based, so the number of GUI apps I installed is pretty small: FirefoxDevEdition (my main browser), Chrome (needed for cross-browser testing as a web-dev), Slack, Telegram, VSCode. Only one of those posed a problem. The open-source one. The irony of this is pretty embarrassing.
A LOT of this can be put down to the fragmentation of Linux OS package management, and the package repos maintained by individual OSes, but the entire experience has been so bad with Firefox in many ways that can't really be blamed on CentOS/Fedora/RHEL folk, or on the broader Linux community in general.
- Not only do Mozilla not provide any 3rd-party yum repo, they don't even provide RPMs.
- The built-in Firefox updater UI dropdown (with the upgrade now button) triggers but doesn't seem to have considered Linux at all: it's just a no-op. It would be nice if the updater actually worked in Linux (as Chrome's does), but if it's a no-op the UI should at least not be misleading/confusing.
- The updater CLI is largely undocumented, it doesn't autodownload new versions (you must handle that yourself) and it doesn't gracefully handle killing/restarting running processes.
- There is no programmatic way to shutdown the Firefox process gracefully via the Linux cli anyway...
- Firefox puts its user data in "$HOME/.mozilla" instead of being XDG compliant.
If that's Firefox's level of support for what is (surely?) the 2nd biggest Linux packaging format, I wonder what the Manjaro/Pacman experience is like. I get that Arch's systems are generally much simpler, so it might be much better, but still...
[+] [-] lbhdc|4 years ago|reply
I am running fedora, and firefox is in the default repos.
[0] https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=firefox
[+] [-] nobody0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edflsafoiewq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtx1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oynqr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wayneftw|4 years ago|reply
Chromium is entirely open source.
[+] [-] ch_123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bstar77|4 years ago|reply
Im not sure how much I care about browsers being proprietary as long as the engine is open source (I really like safari). If there’s evidence that Vivaldi is doing terrible things with my usage data then I’ll likely change back to FF.
[+] [-] brnt|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/vivaldi.html [2] https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/
[+] [-] kunagi7|4 years ago|reply
From my point of view, I try FOSS alternatives but if I don't like them... I don't like to spend time changing CSS files or messing with configurations. I spent quite a lot of time doing just that for Pale Moon and then Firefox. These days, I just use closed ones (or none).
But... From the FOSS point of view, Vivaldi is closed source and we shouldn't use it. I keep ungoogled-chromium as an alternative on my desktop devices and Bromite on Android for sensitive stuff (things like banking).
Still, I hope that someday Vivaldi makes its source available. Even if it's mostly a custom Chromium base with a React user interface (and quite complete actually) on top.
[+] [-] taylodl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|4 years ago|reply
I guess my point is, this is kinda par for the course.
[0] https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-freeoffice-manjaro-linux/
[+] [-] kunagi7|4 years ago|reply
The PKGBUILD downloads the source, patches it (if required) and compiles it to create the desired package. If the package is closed source it just downloads the binaries and repackages the result as a Pacman package.
So they can offer both open and closed source editor suites and you're free to install whatever you want. I've tried several office suites and FreeOffice is quite faster than LibreOffice actually. I've also tried one suite which was an electron app (OnlyOffice) and LibreOffice felt faster than a plane compared to it.
[+] [-] lcnmrn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammyhavoc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|4 years ago|reply
I actually played a little with arch recently in a VM. It's actually a quite nice distribution. With arch the whole point seems to be not getting locked into any kind of opinionated defaults for whatever. The gnome desktop I installed comes with a thing simply called Web, which appears to be some Gnome Webkit derivative. I also played with Manjaro, which is a lot simpler to setup. I wouldn't get to hung up on default apps on either of those two platforms. If you install them, you kind of should know what you are doing and what you like.
[+] [-] Ekaros|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleibrock|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vegai_|4 years ago|reply
Firefox still has some use insofar that adblocker blockers don't target it as much.
[+] [-] jdlyga|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoldesu|4 years ago|reply
I'm still gonna stick with Firefox, but Vivaldi is a pretty good browser from what I've tried of it. The only thing I dislike is their leadership: they cited 'Vivaldi's brand' as the reason why they can't go open source, which seems like such a cop-out in my eyes that I switched back to Firefox. That said, browsers are hard to get right, so at the very least, Kudos to the Vivaldi team for being less-terrible than Chrome.
[+] [-] dna_polymerase|4 years ago|reply
Firefox is coming to an end. The Mozilla mismanagement can't be continued forever, either people start supporting a new browser vendor or Chrome monoculture it will be.
[+] [-] NikolaeVarius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtx1|4 years ago|reply
Now talking about browsers since firefox's market share seems directly corrlated to the inverse of their CEOs paycheck, what GOOD options are still out there?
* Chrome - Spyware
* Chromium variations of all kind - Spyware with some mitigations
* Midora, Konquerror, other weird browsers etc. - hopelessly never going to be feature complete enough to be useful
* Firefox - Now with spyware AND woke politics!
* Firefox based privacy remixes like libewolf - current best choice for privacy and reasonable website compatibility.
[+] [-] OneEyedRobot|4 years ago|reply
You know, that's a good question given the threat exposure in a browser.
Maybe the right answer is a mixture. Use a dedicated Chromebook in guest mode for financial transactions/bill paying/banking (high security, low privacy from Google) and something akin to a text-based browser on an open source OS for everything else.
Is there something like Lynx but with a bit of formatting + still images? I can see going that route simply because the sheer size (in LOC) of a modern browser is so great that I question it's trustability.
[+] [-] cassianoleal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubyn00bie|4 years ago|reply
I seriously don’t know how the hell anyone thinks this sort of thing is user friendly or good.
[+] [-] hammyhavoc|4 years ago|reply
This lack of understanding onboarding and setup UX is the great differentiator from Windows and macOS for most consumers.