Boycotting companies and products for ideological reasons is not something I indulge in very often. Let’s face it, my footprint in any market is pretty…well…nonexistent.
But the Mozilla Kerfuffle has me thinking about how unhappy I’ve grown with Firefox for reasons unrelated to its sexual preferences. It was always less stable than IE, but lately it gobbles up memory and slows things down in a very IE-like fashion.
Comments in this thread mention a browser called Pale Moon, but it appears to be a work in progress that only runs on Windows.
Uncle Joel is not a software geek. Any suggestions for a functional but small non-Google browser?
Opera might be what you’re looking for: http://www.opera.com/
I like Iron. It is a Chrome clone but without all the dangers, like tracking and phoning home to mama that Chrome is known to do.
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
I second Ken Hagler on Opera. Have been using Opera for a while, maybe a year, and it works pretty well. Sometimes it begins to gobble up ram, but on those occasions, I just close it and restart. It doesn’t handle bookmarks quite as smoothly as IE (can’t create a folder on the fly), but I live with it.
I switched from Firefox to Pale Moon. It’s only been a couple of days but so far I like it a lot. It’s open source like Firefox, and is in fact Firefox based but the builders aren’t affiliated with Mozilla.
Found another which I am switching to.
Pale Moon.
http://www.palemoon.org/screenshots.shtml
Install instructions if problems arise.
http://www.staresattheworld.com/2014/04/transition-mozilla-firefox-pale-moon/
If you don’t mind inviting Microsoft into your computer you could install Wine from the software manager and run Pale Moon in Wine’s emulated version of Windows. Just tried it and it works fine.
I may get the source code and try to build a version tonight, what the heck. If I have any success I’ll let you know.
The title of your post made me chuckle as that’s about my attitude on it right now. After reading all the reviews on alternative browsers I tried my luck with Iron just to discover I hate the interface. Can’t even customize the toolbar with icons other than back, forward, and reload? No “tabs on bottom” setting (about:config)? Sheesh, really?
May eventually give this pale moon thing a try but, damn, Firefox is a pretty good browser. Too bad they had to go full retard.
Comodo IceDragon is a bastard child of FF, but seems to be more user-friendly, and less prone to ‘buggery’.
At least in my few months of trial and error of such things.
gfa
Just lost a bloody long comment…
Opera is a very nice browser to use, I used it for about 4 years.
Opera is funded by Google (as is Mozilla – but fox/weasel is at least open source),
Opera always defaults to google search, you also need to positively click the search area to be able to type in it if you use one of the other search engines.
If you’ve been searching for some esoteric subjects and you’re expecting to have polite company visiting, you need to run crap cleaner, as opera isn’t very good about cleaning its bedroom when you tell it to.
I’m going through big computer changes, I got a fresh hard drive for the anceint laptop and have just replaced xp with debian, I’m still struggling to get a version of flash which will play youtubes and to put VLC media player on it to replace the DVD player software
I also got a trashy tablet, and was amazed at how much personal info google demanded before they would let me use my new property – a friend who fixes computers for a living says “at least google asked, the windows people probably just assume”
I’m not yet feeling ambitious enough to install one of the opensource versions of Android, or bootstrap debian onto it.
I’m also looking at alternatives to skype, and having Mr microsoft and all of his pals listening to my personal calls
It seems there are several possible alternatives: http://prism-break.org/en/projects/csipsimple/ https://ostel.co/privacy http://www.gnutelephony.org/index.php/GNU_Telephony
I’ve run Firefox on half a dozen operating systems and never found it unstable. I’ve tried a number of others… just because I could, but never found a better one.
I have zero use for anything from MS, but that has nothing to do with the beliefs or political contributions of the CEO. I would imagine that most upper management of ANY corporation, and probably a lot of other people involved, work for and make contributions to all sorts of organizations and causes I find immoral or offensive in some way, but their personal and political leanings are no more my business than mine are to them.
This economic blackmail of corporations for the political position of their executives on homosexuals, blacks, whatever, is no different than the PC crap being pushed on us as individuals, not to mention the identical sort of blackmail and outright extortion from the anti-gun crowd.
The fact that the personal lives and preferences of one group, the homosexuals, was made subject to a “vote” in California is the real problem. Seems to me that’s where our energies and indignation needs to focus. I’m already boycotting all things California, to the best of my ability. And I have been boycotting the idiot idea of ruling other people by “voting” for a long time.
You could use Chromium, the open source project that Google used as the basis for Chrome. “apt-get install chromium-browser” in Ubuntu. I still prefer Firefox on my iMac, but only very slightly over Google Chrome, which I use when I need to debug JavaScript, since I like its debugger much better than FireBug.
Wonder what the venn diagram of people demanding refunds for Firefox is when overlapped with people who cheered G&A for ousting Dick Metcalf.
My own “pro-freedom” side disappoints the **** out of me on a regular basis.
“Oh, we didn’t mean ‘At-Will Employment’ to apply to decent folks. They’re owed a job!”