this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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In light of Mozilla’s recent policy changes, we no longer feel assured that Firefox aligns with our commitment to protect your privacy. This prompted us to revisit the choice of default web browser in Zorin OS 17.3.

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[–] [email protected] 170 points 1 week ago (22 children)

While FF's evil quotient has been on the rise, Brave definitely isn't a better option. If anything, librewolf is the way to go.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 week ago (3 children)

As a Librewolf user I wouldn't make it default for casual users this kind of distro is aiming for. Sure enabling logins to use it as a main browser is piss easy, but that's still more work than the average person wants to put into setting up their system.

Waterfox would be the better choice since it's just default Firefox in every way besides Mozilla's spyware.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

Agreed, I wouldn't recommend Librewolf for casual users. I understand why Librewolf makes those decisions, and I'm glad that it exists, but you definitely run into some quirks when using it. I'm thinking about switching from Librewolf to Waterfox myself.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

there’s Zen also. that also has normie defaults, however the drastically changed UI/Uxmight not be for everyone.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Doesn't Librewolf log you out of every site when you close it, by default? I don't think that's a good default

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

That is the default behaviour, but it's pretty trivial to change. Also, I'd imagine the distro maintainer could choose to change the default settings as part of a post-install script, if they wanted to.

Edit: Not sure why you're being downvoted, as I do think it's a valid concern.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It has to be the default tho, bc the whole point of Librewolf is that it's trying to by default be untraceable and private.

It's very easy to disable that and re-enable cookies and the like, but your default experience will fundamentally be private, which is its goal

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's not the only point though. IIRC, they also remove telemetry, and pocket as well as some other things. I personally turn back on persistent sessions and history, but leave all the other privacy features there.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ok but like, that makes a terrible default for Zorin OS users. They're gonna be confused and think it's some hot garbage

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[–] [email protected] 126 points 1 week ago (8 children)

How is brave the lesser of those two evils?

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 week ago

Crypto scam browser is never a better evil...

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 week ago

Based on absolutely nothing, I feel like it isn't..

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago

It isn't.

Brave sucks Google balls.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 1 week ago

“Mozilla has a bit been shady lately, so we are making the difficult decision to change our default browser to something significantly more shady. We are confident our users will feel safer knowing their data is in even worse hands than before"

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 week ago

That's a clown makeup moment for Zorin OS

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I'm actually not familiar with this distro. But if I installed a Linux distro, and it had brave installed. I would immediately switch.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Brave is a fairly recent outlier, and while it isn't quite proprietary, it stinks a fair bit of something capitalist/crypto.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They should've picked LibreWolf which ships with uBlock Origin. Brave is a disappointing choice because it supports multi-level marketing pyramid schemes which says enough about their moral compass.

--
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Brave marketing has gone crazy to convince people it's less dodgy than Firefox. Come on!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Every time someone says anything positive about Brave I assume they're part of the Crypto scheme, or love Brave's CEO.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Seems like a strange choice. If anything i would've expected them to just use a firefox fork or something.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 week ago

Firefox is bad, Brave is evil. Why did they decide switching is a good idea?

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago

That's gonna be a no from me, dawg

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago

"we replaced the browser with ad ware, that we even admit we had to ship settings to minimise its malware effect"

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago

Brave hates gays

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (2 children)

one of the worst distros ever so I guess this is pretty obvious choice and telling to some.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago

A bad move. But again i hate that many distros have a default browser and they don't let you choose.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I feel like if they were gonna go chromium, they should have gone with Vivaldi. It may not be open source but it's not doing a crypto scam. Waterfox would have also been a good choice, probably better because it's Gecko.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (9 children)

The distro sucks anyway. They ship really fucking old packages, even more so than Debian or other stable distros.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Not sure why they don't just ship Firefox with extensions like uBlock pre-installed

Edit: it looks like they're heavily tweaking Brave regardless. I doubt this move was for technical reasons

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Probably someone's pet project

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Or, you know, a marketing company that develops a browser maybe bought an ad

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Wow, never recommending zorin to anyone again. Switching from gecko to chromium is a dumb move.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (11 children)

the everyday linux distro that is famous for asking people for money for their pro version, cause they know most of the userbase is coming from windows and doesnt know that everything is free?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

talk about bad taste

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Maybe this was not supposed to have been posted until April fool's day. Silly Zorin was too early for the joke.

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