Hacker News Reader

Comment by ralphstodomingo | Hacker News Reader

I won't worry about that. I'm guessing this effectively creates a fork of Chromium that does not have the anti-ad blocker changes in question, which Opera/Brave/Edge will use instead of the main one.

On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?

View on HN

> On that note, are people switching over to Firefox already?

Not sure why power users ever left Firefox as their default browser when surveillance tech came along. I sure didn't. Firefox was always the more competent and customizable browser. Happy to see users returning. Among other things, the current "Welcome Chromium/Chrome users!" megathread in the Firefox subreddit[1] seems to indicate there's something going on. :)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bvh4pq/welcome_chr...

I flicked between multiple browsers at work since the Chrome news dropped. Having used Chrome for many years.

Firefox always had and still has an issue which can cause up to 2x page load times when used on Mac with scaled mode. Fascinating bug report but ultimately impossible to cope with at work!

I’ve actually landed up using Safari (I rarely use dev tools) and pleasantly surprised by it.

I never understood the appeal of Chrome over Firefox in the beginning.

It was faster, especially for JavaScript heavy sites... Which is the majority of sites these days it seems.

It took a couple years at least for FF to catch up. I would say for most sites Firefox is now at least as fast while using less RAM.

Now the problem is that Google web apps are tuned for Chrome, so users will complain their gmail is slow on FF.

> Now the problem is that Google web apps are tuned for Chrome, so users will complain their gmail is slow on FF.

I've heard this argument often, but it does not really resonate with me well. I've always used Gmail in Firefox and never noticed it being especially slow. I just tried it now and emails open seemingly instantly when I click on them. It feels quicker than ~100ms on average and certainly not slower than 200ms even for the occasional large email or hiccup. I just don't see how this can be used as a reasonable metric for choosing a browser.

I switched because CPU usage on Mac OS was so much higher under Firefox than Chrome. I tried so many different things, following suggestions in Bugzilla, HN comments and just about every site I could find through DDG and Google. Nothing worked, and usually when I bring it up people dismiss the complaint with "it's better than it used to be", "it's not that bad" or "it's just you". But I'm not the only person complaining (or being dismissed outright).

To be clear, it's not pegging any core at 100% or anything so extreme. But it causes my laptop to heat up and my fans to kick in very frequently - something that almost never happens with Chromium/Webkit/Blink based browsers. If I primarily used a desktop, I wouldn't even have noticed, but a warm lap and constant fan noise makes it unusable for me.

Safari was out because I needed to run multiple browser profiles concurrently (something Firefox and Chrome support readily).

I've recently switched from Mac OS to Windows but my experience (as recently as a month ago) with Firefox leaves me feeling that it's the less mature implementation with an over zealous fan base ("it's not us, it's you!").

> Not sure why power users ever left Firefox as their default browser when surveillance tech came along.

On any Firefox thread on HN, search for “macOS” and you’ll find several complaints. In my case, I could live with most of Firefox’s problems, but not the lack of AppleScript support.

I'm writing this from Firefox to test if it's still unusable on Mac. It's not that bad as before, to be honest. But for some reason now I can't synchronize it on Android... hopefully after another few years I will be finally able to switch over to it.

I've been using Firefox for 6+months now as my primary browser. Once used to the slightly different UI I've not noticed any difference in day to day browsing.

Only complaint - and this is my fault for enabling it and not a Firefox issue - is that if I used a container for Google, reCAPTCHAs are a huge huge huge pain in the arse now and take many attempts to pass. This is (I guess) because the Google cookie cannot track your general web usage (since your google cookie is in a container that only works on google domains, rather than general web properties) so it is harder to distinguish you from a bot. Also the dev tools are not as nice, but that is a niggle.

Try https://www.startpage.com/

Works as proxy for Google Search. No captchas, very customizable. Could never live with the Bing based crap results of DuckDuckGo.

Whatever DDG does to Bing, it makes it worse. I recently switched from DDG to Bing and the difference is colossal - 95% of the time it’s as good as Google.

But non-proxied Bing results are still far worse than Google, so I chose StartPage. :)

Oh DDG gas been my primary search engine for ages now. Highly recommend DDG. No CAPTCHAS there - it is just on random other sites that use reCAPTCHA that are a pain now as I believe (I don't know for sure) that Google relies on your Google cookie(s) that they have associated with your account - if you have sandboxed Google then there is no "normal" browsing history to check so you look like a bot. Annoying, but not really a big deal.

I don't think having proxied Google search results will solve the reCAPTCHA menace since you presumably won't get the Google cookie(s)? If Google still cookie you when using startpage then that kinda defeats the point surely?

> I don't think having proxied Google search results will solve the reCAPTCHA menace since you presumably won't get the Google cookie(s)? If Google still cookie you when using startpage then that kinda defeats the point surely?

Let me be clear. I'm not taking about SOCKS proxies. In this context I'm saying that both DDG and StartPage are acting as anonymizing proxies for Bing and Google.

Search for the "Buster" plugin. It uses the sound captcha to automatize the process. Works great, though sometimes the sound option is "not available", but those are the least in my case.

This might be sustainable for a couple of months but Google will keep on developing chromium with the assumption that those APIs aren't available and maintaining and back porting patches will not be sustainable in the long run. And we've seen Opera and Edge shying away from too much work with their own webengines, why would it be different this time?

I'm not sure how the architecture of these browser projects work, but is it too difficult to stub out the non-existent APIs in their forks? I'm hoping it's different this time because this is a topic people care for... but I can only hope.

Maintaining a fork takes effort and this effort grows when the codebases diverge from each other. If the affected code is at a busy location in the source code then other changes can also affect it which makes maintaining the fork harder in the long run.

I'm not switching to Firefox.

I never left. Firefox, even for its warts, wasn't run by a adtech company. I knew this would happen sooner or later. And now, the thumbscrews tighten.

Now yes, Moz://a has done some dumb stuff.. But so does many others. Still its the best we have.

I switched to Brave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com