Just pick one - All the Fox functionality without bloatware
Librewolf - https://librewolf.net/
Waterfox - https://www.waterfox.com/
Zen Browser - https://zen-browser.app/
More browsers here - https://alternativeto.net/category/browsers/firefox-based/
You can also use this add to disable the shitload ai function in many search engines in one go
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ai/
GitHub page - https://github.com/jruns/disable-ai
You can find all the links on Mastodon<
I use Fennec in Android and Librewolf in Linux.
Libre wolf needs a bit of tweaking at the begining but then works like charm.
Are there any plans to make a mobile browser?
Waterfox is available for Android.
As a heads up, Librewolf last I checked had issues with media involving DRM. Ergo, streaming services will throw a fit if you try using them on it. Not an issue if you don’t use any of course, and there may be ways around it, but worth knowing that it doesn’t work out of the box at least.
it’s in settings > general
Yeah, you have to enable a setting. I think it links you to it when you run into it. Much more of a turn off to me is not being able to use my camera in it, so I have to use a different browser for video calls.
I was ignoring everything Waterfox back when I realize they were bought by an advertising company, System1, which also owns StartPage.
BUT, I recently read from Wikipedia that Waterfox has gone independent again since 2023.
As someone who uses waterfox but hadn’t heard any of this news, that was a rollercoaster. But consider me relieved.
I also just installed Waterfox for the first time after reading the Wikipedia page. I use it to replace Firefox to be used when I need webgl or webrtc/voice call. my main browser is still Librewolf
Last I used librewolf/waterfox they lagged behind a few days on security updates, so I switched to regular Firefox with arkenfox user.js
Impressive how management can blindly ignore their own core pricipals.
I use Iceraven for my phone
Here is a github link for the android app https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
Really hate how iOS has zero alternatives. Thanks apple for your stupid WebKit.
I bought an old Pixel 7a with (new) case for less than $179 USD and put Graphene OS on it. Definitely cheaper than buying youself a new iPhone, and installation is easy af.
Could be worse, seriously. Safari is not a bad browser and WebKit is the only engine since years that can keep up with chromium. I get that it is annoying to have leas freedom on iOS, but I also appreciate the increased security[1] and quality of life that comes with it.
[1] yes, I am aware that open source software tends to be more secure, as it can be reviewed by all. However, Android by default is way less secure than iOS, unless you use GraphiteOS or similar.
I also appreciate the increased security
This hasn’t been true for a long, long time. Mac was only ever more secure than windows because not enough people used them to make them worthwhile attack vectors. Nowadays, iOS sees just as many vulnerabilities as every other popular OS.
Report after report finds iOS to be more secure than Android. Here’s just one example: https://www.rokform.com/blogs/rokform-blog/which-is-more-secure-iphone-or-android
Without taking a position on the claim itself, this is a bad citation. It makes a variety of claims that either don’t hold up to basic scrutiny, or aren’t evidence that iOS has a security advantage. Here are some examples:
Open-source platform increases vulnerability surface area
This is perhaps one of the most thoroughly debunked pieces of FUD in the entire tech industry.
[Various claims about inconsistency between devices]
These are mostly true but largely irrelevant. You’re not buying an aggregate of all Android devices that exist, but a specific device with specific traits. The Android phone you should actually buy will have a security chip and many years of updates just like an iPhone.
The rigorous app review process and mandatory App Store distribution (except in EU) virtually eliminate malicious app threats for average users.
This might be a benefit when the user has no clue how to use a computer, but I expect people posting in this community are past that stage. It’s a big disadvantage for those who want to use something like Firefox (real Firefox, not a skin on Safari) with potential security and privacy upsides.
I wouldn’t really call this a “report” when there aren’t any metrics in the reasoning other than price.
Even in their own article, it mentions how support and updates vary by manufacturer so it’s kind of meaningless to compare iPhone to the whole Android ecosystem. You’d need to choose one or more manufacturer in order to make an apples to apples comparison.
It was just the first one that came to hand. LOL at this source for another example: https://deepstrike.io/blog/Malware-Attacks-and-Infections-2025
That claims that Android devices are 50 times more likely to be compromised than iOS. Look at most reports from people like Kasperky & Malwarebytes and they don’t even bother to mention iOS in statistics and only occasionally mention the platform if there is a specific notable threat.
It can be argued that iOS isn’t as secure as Apple would like you to think or as a lot of Apple users do think, but it really can’t be argued that it’s equally as vulnerable as Android
Safari on iOS is especially tolerable since they allowed uBlock Origin Lite onto the App Store recently.
Wipr 2 is so great though. Indie dev, perfect streamlined implementation.
They whaaat? Finally!!
To be honest I don’t use Firefox on android anyways because it’s noticeably slower than chromium. Since I’m on graphene is I just stick to vanadium + DNS level adblocking.
There is actually a current Chromium-based browser for Android with Manifest v2 extension support and uBlock Origin.
spoiler
It’s Microsoft Edge. No, I’m not advocating that you use it.
There are some good iOS browsers.
At the moment, I use Orion (from Kagi) and Narrow32. Quiche Browser is good, DuckDuckGo is fine.
Discoverability on iOS is awful though. The store is just packed with SEO spam and corporate slop on top of all the passion projects or “benevolent” ones.
At the moment, iOS doesn’t not allow any other browser engines. Every browser on iOS is just reskinned Safari.
That’s kind of a blessing in disguise; otherwise basically all web traffic would be Chrome.
Apparenty this is softening some: https://www.techspot.com/news/108965-japan-gives-apple-december-deadline-drop-ios-browser.html
And Safari is quite performant on iOS.
Maybe I’m too cynical, but I wouldn’t mind if that continues, just so there’s some chunk of traffic that isn’t Chrome and that web development doesn’t turn into a complete monoculture. A smidge of Firefox and Safari alone isn’t enough for that.
(EDIT: My assumption is that if Apple allows Chrome on iOS, you can bet they are going to funnel basically everyone into it).
That traffic only skews the graph like a false positive. While WebKit itself is oss, apple’s tendency to just separate itself from the rest of the world makes it largely irrelevant. There are very few alternative browsers based on webkit for other platforms and the expected benefit of developers having to cater to apple’s choices are thus negligible for the rest of us.
Still. I don’t want to be on an internet where Chrome is basically the only develoment target, and for most sites to work properly you have to be on Google’s browser. Safari’s mere existance forces at least some generalization, but that disappears if Google pushes most of those users to Chrome anyway.
That’s the internet where Google has even more total control.
I agree, my point is that safari’s dominance on iOS is not the light at the end of the tunnel, it does very little to offer alternatives to chromium.
Yep. I really really want Waterfox on IOS but I’ve settled for Qwant. It’s not bad.
Yeah but the problem with iOS is that all browsers must use the Safari rendering engine under the hood (except in the EU, but not many developers create a browser for just the EU)
Zen ♥️
Am I the only one that zen is laggy and buggy for?
I’m using it on Linux Mint on an old hp laptop. So far good performance and medium/low CPU usage. Try to set the cache and history to clean after it close.
Been using it for awhile now and it’s getting better with each release!
Hell yeah shoutout to alternativeto.net! Fucking great site.
Does librewolf or water fox have a mobile version that syncs tabs to desktop like official Firefox ?
All Geckos can sync if Mozilla Sync is enabled with an account. So you can sync say LibreWokf or WarwrFox on desktop to any mobile version, such as IronFoz. They do not have to “match”.
Oh cool, I didn’t know that and it was the main fear I had from swapping. I really should have just looked it up by now, but oh well.
I use Librewolf on my work and personal desktops, then Waterfox on my Android. I prefer Waterfox, but I find the logo so lame looking I settle for Librewolf. The OOTB settings for LW are super strict and a slog to deal with unless disabled. WF feels like using FF in just about every way.
Agree on waterfox’s android icon looking bland lol. and a lot of icon packs don’t have an icon for waterfox and still not making it despite requests.
No, but you can use Ironfox or another Android Firefox fork and have working sync.
Waterfox does, I use it.
Edit: On Android.
IronFox
I use Librewolf everywhere but android where I use Firefox. The sync feature works perfectly between the different brands. Librewolf does not currently offer a mobile browser.
And at some point someone will tell me what is so horrifying about these new features? Mozilla might be the only company trying to provide privacy first AI features. What exactly is so bad here? You can even disable these features if you do not like them at all.
I’m not particularly horrified about the availability of AI features, but I’d rather see Mozilla focus most of its resources on core competencies. Firefox lags behind Chrome in web standards feature support, e.g. the browser scores on https://caniuse.com/. It’s also prone to making my laptop fan spin more than Chromium browser do, and people often complain about speed.
They should make the core browser better, and maybe task a couple developers to build some LLM support as an extension.
You can even disable these features if you do not like them at all
As a smart person said:
BETTER IT NOT EXIST AT ALL
If I went to a restaurant, they placed a hot steaming stinky turd sandwich on my table and then went “oh, but you don’t have to have it”, I still wouldn’t fucking eat there.
Why should we be okay with the Turd Sandwich that is
crypto being served by BraveLLM features served by Mozilla being opt-in???Firefox is not the devil, but “ideologies aside”, the basic idea is:
-
(Just like microsoft), They’ve could just decide to put it in one of the “many” variant of the product, name it FoxAI, let the users decide and call a day. Instead, they’ve decided to force a very heavy component like that on the main version out of blue.
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Switched or not. Now, you will have ‘way’ more bloat on a browser, which should be focused on speed and performance.
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The whole thing about AI on free stuff is getting as much data as possible to train. You have to trust them to switch it off completely.
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Mozilla is still the only company maintaining an alternative to Chromium (there’s also webkit if you count Apple). Without Firefox you can’t have Librewolf or other alternatives.
Mozilla is not perfect but people really need to stop treating them in a purely binary fashion (you are either horrible or are perfect).
You can criticize Mozilla for the direction they are taking with Firefox, but also you can argue that being a hardcore privacy-centric browser will kill interest for Firefox even faster.
Yeah, the AI- free Firefox browser is normal firefox with the AI slider set to “off”
A sports car is a van where you weld the back doors shut.
The problem is that they’re pushing it without any way for those of us who really don’t want that crap to strip it out of the browser. I don’t want all this ai garbage, never asked for it, and am harassed at every corner by every fucking company thinking it’s somehow going to change the world.
Sure, Mozilla allows you to turn off some of these features, but I’ve already had it reenabled in updates after previously disabling it. Further, many of the settings are buried in about:config, which is not a user-friendly way to make those changes. At best, these functionalities should be opt-in and presented as addons that can be installed, rather than being a core part of the browser that cannot be removed.
It is opt in. Or will be. And they’re adding an AI switch.
Not disagreeing with you, just adding context.
The bigger problem is that they’re wasting their finite resources on this crap instead of adding actually cool features like their forks are doing.
You should add a maybe. The will try to push it. You can’t do that with an off by default feature.
They keep saying their ai features will be opt-in, and yet everything they’ve rolled out so far is opt-out. I struggle to believe future ‘features’ will be any different. Maybe it’s opt-in in the sense that I’m not required to click whichever button activates it, like whatever they added to the context menu, but that’s not really what opt-in means and degrades my trust in Mozilla.
I’m also frustrated by their seeming inability to focus on their core browser product and building a popular competitor to chromium browsers instead of going off on side quests.
I do not want the dev tools and neither the Extension framework, can I get rid of those? No? Being able to completely disable the features is not enough how? How does the code laying bare on your harddisk get in your way of using FX? They already promised a kill-switch. And you saying it turned on after an update is but an anecdote.
You asked, and I gave my opinion. All this AI bullshit has done and continues to do significant damage to the global economy and ecology, god forbid I have a problem with that or any company contributing to it.
Dev tools doesn’t require a data center to run. Your comparison is flawed and suggests an ill-informed opinion about this topic.
I feel like you’re just here to piss into the wind.
Do you hear people screaming to disable the extension frame work or devtools?
No?
If you don’t want those features you can compile your own version of Firefox and remove them.
But lots of people are anti-AI. And there are people willing to provide a browser that keeps it out.
If you want it, have at it. But don’t piss on people just because they don’t.
I’ll try to give an out-of-the-loop answer to this, if that helps. Concerning “AI” tools, I think the chunk of people who don’t want it included in the browser on any level come in one or both of two forms. One is a moral opposition – for example, a pro-environmental or pro-artist stance. I don’t think those need much explanation, but feel free to say otherwise.
The other is in my opinion is in response to exhaustion. Pro-“AI” features have proven themselves to be untrustworthy at nearly every turn with thoughtless or downright irresponsible implementations. A worthwhile use-case is the exception rather than the norm and It’s tiring to have to constantly check if this time I want it on or not. As a result of opt-in-by-default changes to privacy policies or account settings, my trust in any site or app publishing an “AI” implementation has been broken and it’s nice to have options I don’t have to worry about wherever I can get them. I found it irritatingly tone-deaf that Mozilla wasn’t considering a kill-switch with their first swing at this.
If it seems unreasonable or hard-to-understand, I think taking a step back and looking at the broader software industry rather than just Mozilla will help.
These are all valid reasons. I’ll also add that I personally desire manual control over my computing experience. A huge part of the reason I run Linux is that it does exactly what I tell it to and nothing more. When you start introducing other agents to my user agent, it ceases to be a user agent. Something else is arranging my tabs. Something is popping info up into in my face that I didn’t ask to see (and which might be incorrect). I just want these things to go away so my browser can be my browser again and not be under the control of a random word guesser.
Yes, I have turned these features off, but I don’t even want them installed. They’ve been force-installed onto my system through software that didn’t used to do that. If I lose my config, I have to go turn it all back off again. I’d rather just not have the feature anywhere in the software. I’d rather Firefox just not smuggle AI features onto my PC at all.
I don’t know the others but for me, it’s the constant bugging with their users. I’ve used Firefox since the beginning, and they have made bad choices before, but this is the last straw. I’m tired of circumventing these choices, sometimes doing so is not even that transparent as a “kill switch” and users had to find strings in a cryptic about::config page, for example.
More important, I don’t want so-called AI in my life. I couldn’t care less about it. I won’t use it unless it helps me to find some scientific conclusion that advances our culture, and I’m not talking something huge, I’m not saying it shouldn’t be used at all. However, any use of AI for cotidian achievable tasks is morally unacceptable for me, and I’d ask for everyone a space for reflection on whether it is something filling a necessity in their lives. So, I guess it’s a rupture for me with Mozilla. I can’t use their product because I find it fundamentally wrong to support the massive use of technologies that barely do any good to society, and none to the planet. It’s not about another little discrepancy on features and settings, it’s about not giving people like me the platform to shout “fuck it, I don’t want it, stop it now”.
I’m still mad at them for forcing that useless Pocket icon in the toolbar.
The other day I watched this video and I think it makes a very good case. https://subscribeto.me/w/7qSsYEPM2aC3D6stdZ54nq (the website is the author’s peertube instance)
There is no such thing as a privacy first AI, unless you’ve the hardware to run the model yourself (and, you don’t).
There different kinds of AI and some run just fine locally or even on mobile. Not everything is a big LLM.
Mozilla might be the only company trying to provide privacy first AI features.
They are not. There are boatloads of privacy friendly “AI” implementations, they just aren’t very high profile.
But I do think people are over-reacting. This is a less bad approach. And if you can turn it off and leave it off, what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that development time is put into these… Uh… “features”.
Considering Windows is basically saying “we’re going to switch what we’ve always been and become an agenic OS, you will just talk to it and Microsoft Cloud will interpret your will (only $89 a month!)”, people are rightly scared about having all technology rug-pulled from under us.
Mozilla was one of the shining beacons of FOSS that allowed users choice and stability against corporate greed. Are you surprised that people are angry that they’re caving to the same toxic greedy behavior?
They should be worried. It’s pretty clear Mozilla’s leadership has “AI fever” that every CEO seems to be going mad with.
Still though, people need to take a breath. This isn’t Microsoft. And Mozilla’s “local first” approach is not bowing to Big Tech and the AI conmen like everyone else is (though the reality is that hardware isn’t ready for stuff outside of lightweight tasks).
Any recommendations for iOS? I switched to Librewolf on my Linux pc and Fennec on my Android phone, but still have Firefox on my iPad. Looking for good alternatives.
All browsers on iPhone are reskinned Safari as far as I’m aware. I don’t think it matters much what you pick.
I could be wrong though.
You’re right, expect in the European Union where Apple is forced to let people install non-Safari browsers.
I believe you are correct
didn’t that change some time ago?
I think it’s only Europe that is looking into that.
…leave iOS?
True, I really hate iOS. I only got this iPad for the Apple Pencil and Procreate. I usually try to keep hardware until it dies, but I may need to dump this iPad for my sanity.
Yes, add e-waste because of corporate brand loyalty.
No one cares what you use. If it fucking works for you, keep using it.
It’s exhausting keeping up with all the internet outrage over tedious shit that truly does not matter with the short amount of time we all have on this water covered rock spinning in space.
Where are you getting the corpo loyalty impression from my post? If I stop using the iPad, it’ll go to someone who will use it. And I wouldn’t be dropping it due to internet outrage, I just don’t like iOS at all, from its gesture controls to its locked App Store.
its locked App Store.
I have bad news for you if you are planning to switch to what I think you are…
Edit: ironically posted this from my Android phone.
Apple is already at the bad news stage and has been for years. Android is headed towards it, but people can make decisions to get hardware that is unlocked and has community support to install another OS on it. Devices that can already be unlocked and has custom roms will keep working with the ability to install apks without restriction.
My netizen on the internet, GrapheneOS (what I am currently using), PostmarketOS, and LineageOS are all right over on Android devices - alongside alternate app stores like F-Droid, Accrescent, and anonymous play store front ends like Aurora.
Let’s not spread lies here, m’kay?
What lies did I say?
Haven’t used iOS in a while, but I remember Orion being really good. It can install chrome extensions and Firefox add-ons.
Vivaldi has been my pick for a bit. It can install Chrome add-ons but not Firefox.
They also have taken a stance not to include genAI:
Currently using Orion, it works well though I haven’t thoroughly paid attention to scrutinize it thoroughly.
I use Floorp on desktop. Since I got used to it, I just can’t live without that advanced sidebar. Being able to open the mobile versions of web pages right on the side is just too useful.
Mullvad Browser for the win!
