I thought Mullvad was the best in anti-fingerprinting. Anyone can check their own configuration with EFF's "cover your tracks" site.

I don't think we understand very well the threat model here. Are we talking about having a Mozilla account or the web engine itself. If you have an account they will probably start doing mining shit with it. What about activists researching certain topics then? The content browsed can be visible to Mozilla if they use their account for syncing bookmarks. That should be a dealbreaker right there. No different than Meta user-profiling the fuck out of your engagement behaviors. Now if this is NOT the case and you haven't a Mozilla account, I assume that the version of the web engine available back at the time of the fork is exactly the same. So far so good.

The problem is that browsers are hard, and there is a ton of web protocols to be implemented, various fixes for security, support extensions and other QOL features. WORD ON THE STREET is that tasks like these cannot be undertaken as solo/hobby projects, that funding and an organization structure is essential. The teams behind LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc have a track record of already lagging behind Firefox's version updates. Same goes with user-profile and configuration sets like Arkenfox (if I am not wrong). You may tweak the conf all you want, but if privacy and anonymity is compromised at the web engine level, these forks will be left with little to do about it. Then the only option will be to keep using an old version of the web engine (sacrificing security and quality of life extensions), or ditching the gecko web engine altogether.

That is why people are looking for genuine alternatives to the web engine.

Zen seems to have picked up a lot of privacy improvements but it's a pretty small team doing a lot of ambitious work. I like it, but it's got a lot of (minor, mostly aesthetic) bugs.

I use mullvad for stuff I really don't want a record of (for as much as that's possible)

On the chrome side, Vivaldi (former opera before they sold out to china) is a good browser, but even more ambitious and even more buggy than zen. It has a built in email client. Like, who does that?

I switched to LibreWolf after seeing these news. It's been working just as well as firefox and you can adjust the privacy functions as much or as little as you want.

I wish librefox would come to android

Librewolf is the best ✅

I started using Zen today, it seems fine. If you're privacy conscious librewolf is definite the best

gestures vaguely in a direction

Ehh, people, you know?

I have the feeling people are overreacting to anything Mozilla does these days, just to have an excuse to talk people into using (politically?) worse browsers.

Being halfway between both sides, I can see the need for a monetary model to sustain development, yet I am challenged by the opacity that this feels like. The OP's point that it feels like a downward slide toward principles compromise is challenging. Especially in light of the enshittification of everything lately, Mozilla needs to do a better job communicating how this is not going down that path and yet also trying to sustain itself.

Alpha will drop around 2026[site], but they have several contributors so who knows. Compiled it a few months ago at it was just a browser without engine, not sure how much it developed now but I'm hopeful

Keep an eye on it, but it's not ready yet.