I've gotten fed up of Firefox's AI/user unfriendliness and Thunderbird's broken calendaring, specifically
- Thunderbird, despite being a mail client, cannot seem to send calendar invites to people. Shockingly, Android's builtin calendar (which is not a mail client) seems to do a better job at this(!!)
- Firefox seems to be adding more and more AI features which are annoying to opt out of. I can't be bothered to write the nix config to disable these as a matter of policy (and I really shouldn't have to). In my opinion, investing in these features shows that FF is out-of-touch with its userbase and no longer cares about making a good browsing experience
- Firefox is behind on important web standards, in my case particularly WebUSB and Bluetooth (used for some hardware I have)
- Firefox makes decisions which give webmasters the final say rather than
me, the user. Specifically, Firefox has no way to override HSTS
(Chromium lets 'thisisunsafe' override HSTS). This is not only a bad
move on part of user freedom, it's also really annoying for
development
- Chromium also makes some of these decisions, cough ManifestV3, and Google attempts to make more, cough Web Environment Integrity, but Vivaldi comes with a built-in Adblocker and I can - more or less - get everything I need on a Chromium based browser
Vivaldi fixes both of these, at the cost of being proprietary. That means
- We can't build it in CI
- We definitely can't make it default (perhaps it could be an ingredient)
We can't remove the other browsers we have since as we commonly need them for testing
If anyone has any good FOSS alternatives that I've missed, I'd love to hear about them... For my purposes, LibreWolf is not a good FOSS alternative (it makes various decisions that break websites), neither is base Chromium.
I would also appreciate having this setup (firefox makes me sad)