Can I just say: hats off to the bug archaeology you’ve done there :)

Heh yes, but for the purposes of this post I wanted to focus on why it wasn’t just another distro recommendation, but one tailored specific to their use case :) (I don’t even use Kinoite myself, so it’s extra genuine.)

If you do a reinstall, I’d recommend going with a Kinoite install. It’s like regular Fedora KDE, except that it avoids this risk of traces of past experiments everywhere.

Ah OK, so it just feels like Windows Recall if we assume it’s going to become Windows Recall in the future…

thelibre.news is woefully underappreciated.

Huh? The article says:

it is generated locally, on your device

Did I misread something?

(Agreed that this should be the norm and not luck.)

Except without the shitty parts where it keeps a log of everything you do and sends it off your device, luckily.

I didn’t say it was exactly the same as FF

Yeah I know you didn’t, but we’re in a comment thread that started with

It’s otherwise exactly the same as the stock firefox experience

That’s why I responded to check whether it doesn’t change a bunch of stuff as well that might catch people off-guard if they expected the same experience.

I mean, that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s easy to turn off if you know that and what you need to turn off. Literally on this same page there’s someone mentioning they keep getting logged out, which is because Librewolf clears cookies on exit - which of course was completely reasonable for them not to know. So it feels like “it’s exactly the same as Firefox” is setting the wrong expectations.

Not really, and the reason is that everyone disagrees on what “Mozilla’s BS” is - e.g. some say not enabling full protection is BS. Some say it’s fine for Mozilla to know what hardware Firefox crashes most on, some say it’s none of its business.

But honestly, it’s possible to disable almost everything you don’t like in Firefox, and it’s usually just a toggle. So I think the easiest option is to just do that whenever you run into something you don’t like. The alternative is doing it the other way around, i.e. starting with e.g. Librewolf and then undoing their tweaks if you don’t like them, but it’s harder to know what tweak is responsible for breaking a website you use, for example.

Doesn’t it also turn on stuff like aggressive fingerprint protection (which provides more protection against fingerprinting, but also breaks more and more important stuff).

Good for you, but those forks too owe their existence (among other things) to the donations (and down the road subscriptions) to Thunderbird.

You’re right, but I think “hugely profitable” is probably optimistic - I’d expect something to the level of Proton or Fastmail. Fine, but not a big money maker like Firefox is.

Well… The Mozilla Corporation doesn’t. But both the Corporation and MZLA (which makes Thunderbird) are owned by the Mozilla Foundation.

But yeah, the different org does probably matter.

I’m on Linux as well, so that’s probably not it. But I just checked the release notes, and it does say:

This feature is part of a progressive roll out.

What is a progressive roll out? Certain new Firefox features are released gradually. This means some users will see the feature before everyone does. This approach helps to get early feedback to catch bugs and improve behavior quickly, meaning more Firefox users overall have a better experience.

So hopefully you’ll get it soon!

Weird, and this is with the separate search bar disabled? If I type mario, then press Enter, then DuckDuckGo opens with the search, and my address bar still says mario, and I can still change the search engine.

You might want to look for this option under “Search” in the settings:

Show search terms in the address bar on results pages

I’m not sure how you’d do it through clicking, but I can press Esc to close the suggestions, and then Esc again to get the original URL. So instead of my usual Ctrl+L -> Ctrl+C, it’s now Ctrl+L -> Esc -> Esc -> Ctrl+C.

That’s what used to happen, but with this version, if you type a word and search something, and you’ll still see the search terms in the address bar. (Although you can disable it if you don’t like it.)

Heh, that seems exactly what the new search term persistence feature enables with the unified address bar.

In settings, the first checkbox under “Search” is “Show search terms in the address bar on results pages”, so it should be relatively easy to disable if you really don’t like it. I’m going to try to see if I can get used to it first though.