Sure, but note that free in this case refers to the four freedoms. If something has a usage restriction it is non-free by definition as it fails the first criterion.

Open core licensing models achieve this by offering the main product as a free software project and then selling proprietary add-ons specifically targeted towards enterprises. Or, if it’s a library/framework/infrastructure tool, dual license under a strong copyleft like (A)GPLv3 and paid enterprise license.

I disagree with this take. As someone who feels entitled to the four freedoms with every program I run, proprietary is a dealbreaker. Crypto and “AI” crap can be disabled or removed. If the choice were strictly between Vivaldi and Brave, Brave would be the better option. Fortunately we have better choices.

I don’t use Brave, I use Librewolf (or Ungoogled-Chromium if I need Chromium). I suggested that a “debraved” browser might be the best chromium browser, but apparently Helium is close to this (I haven’t heard of it until today).

Vivaldi being proprietary makes it worse than Brave, even with Brave’s controversies. But I would still rather use Librewolf, but there is even Ungoogled-Chromium if you really need it.

There is definitely a space for a “deBraved” browser that keeps the good parts. That would be the best chromium browser.

Unfortunately Seal has not had a release in over a year, since October 2024. It may still work but due to a recent (November 2025) change in yt-dlp an external JavaScript runtime is now required for full YouTube support.

There is YTDLnis as an alternative. It’s on F-Droid but for some reason the page for it 404’s (it’s clearly there in my client though).

There’s no need to involve a third party server for this. yt-dlp + Open With extension can do this all locally.

Don’t be fooled by the name, yt-dlp supports many more sites than just YouTube

This is what I use. I use OpenWith extension to invoke yt-dlp from Firefox. This extension was abandoned in 2021 but it still works.

This is a proprietary extension for a proprietary “service as a software substitute” program living on someone else’s computer. It’s about the furthest from free software/open source as you can get

Vivaldi is proprietary garbage hyped up by privacy redditors and degooglers. No I don’t care how “private” it is and I don’t care that they’re worried about competitors “stealing” their work (which is, ironically, built on free software). I don’t care about its connection to Opera or that it’s European based. Proprietary is proprietary.

There are plenty of good enough free browsers. Ungoogled Chromium exists if you don’t want Firefox.

Open-source software (FOSS preferred)

FYI, there isn’t really such a thing as “OSS but not FOSS.” The free software definition and the open source definition mostly overlap. Anything that is free software is almost always open source and vice versa.

This is an ad

Haven’t used it, but generally I don’t prefer hardened browsers. IMO the tradeoffs aren’t worth it, personally.

People promoting proprietary software, which directly goes against the rules and purpose of this community

As the article notes they are planning to invest 9 million euros in the transition, so they clearly don’t expect it to be “free of cost.” The difference is paying 15 million euros to license some proprietary American product, versus investing 9 million euros in the free software world.

Interesting detail - the word filter is a per-instance side thing. On a foreign instance I can see the original word.

(I don’t have a problem with the intent of the filter but I kind of expected that the s-thorpe problem had been fixed by now)

“more repos = more apps out of the box” sounds nice in theory but IMO this is more of a downside than it might appear. Having a bunch of repos enabled out of the box means you have to be more careful about which repo offers what app and some apps are even offered in multiple repos. I got bit by this when I installed an app from IzzyOnDroid instead of F-Droid by accident.

With F-Droid you get the baseline repo that has high standards and then you can opt in to having additional repos that may have different or lower standards. Having those extra repos enabled by default may give a false reassurance that those other repos also conform to F-Droid’s standards, or that those other apps are “in F-Droid” when really they’re in IzzyOnDroid or some other third party repo. I’ve seen enough instances of that and there are a few even in this thread.

Note that, although (AFAIK) the Accrescent client is free software, it’s hardcoded to only support their own store which last I checked had no guarantee that it only offers free software. Its marketing seemed to rely a lot on spreading FUD about F-Droid even though it fundamentally serves a different purpose than F-Droid.

This thread is specifically about Android apps, so maybe the better suggestion would be “Fennec F-Droid”

Do you mean F-Droid Basic? F-Droid Classic is a fork, that hasn’t been updated in several years

They may be talking about F-Droid Basic

Given that the server end is self-hostable one could just bundle the frontend and the backend into a single package and run that as an app. I imagine that might be a bit too much though.