It gets my goat that people think it’s a good option. There are plenty of articles explaining some of the many issues with it, but a few are:
- It’s run by anti-LGBTQ+ crypto bros.
- It has ads right out of the box.
- It collected donations towards people who never signed up for them - then held them to ransom in exchange for the kind of information you should never share on the Internet.
- They’re a for-profit advertising company. “Privacy-centric” my elbow.
A bunch of forks just add extra functions, patches or defaults on top of firefox. It’s not a hard fork as in they maintain everything themselves, they’re still based on the latest official firefox releases.
Removing AI is one of those patches yes.
Yea I’m going to go ahead and recommend against opinionated firefox. Oh yea I want some dweeb with misplaced anger and too much time on their hands to dictate how I use the internet. Bitch asses.
You (the end user) decide how you want to use the internet. The forks you’re probably angry about are the ‘hardened forks’, but whether or not you care about their goals and want to use those is a choice only you can make. Most of what they do is basically change some default configs and remove some ‘bad’(according to the maintainers and the users) features.
There’s also forks like zen that under the hood use firefox, but customize the user experience significantly.