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Cake day: July 14th, 2025

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  • Librewolf, Waterfox and GNU IceCat are all Firefox forks.

    For what you’re asking for, GNU IceCat is probably the best fit - the project syncs up with Firefox ESR but removes all proprietary stuff and maintains it’s own extensions. It has some privacy improvements too but is otherwise set up as a standard browser. It’s basically Ungoogled Chromium for Firefox. The downside is the project doesn’t release project binaries; you have to look for binaries in your distro (and many don’t provide them) or use GNU Guix - the package manager from the GNU project (which can be installed on any system; it’s a bit like NIX). Or build them yourself from Github. Details are here: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

    Librewolf and Waterfox are both excellent but by default are very privacy focused and locked down, so you may need to make config changes to get them back to a more “standard” default browser set up (sacrificing the privacy benefits in the process).

    Personally I use Firefox; I understand what you’re saying but the steps you talk about are at first install and that’s not something I do often so can tolerate it.

    EDIT: Just checked, IceCat isn’t in OpenSuSE’s default repos (disappointingly) but I did find it in Fedora’s repos (both standard and it’s Flatpak store). So it’s a bit hit and miss. Guix is universal but it’s a bit of a bloaty way to do it if you only want one item from it’s repos. Fedora Flatpaks can of course be installed on pretty much any X86/AMD64 system by adding registry.fedoraproject.org as a flatpak remote (alongside Flathub).