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Comment by 55555 | Hacker News Reader

I use a browser probably 12 hours per day. Maybe there's enough people willing to pay a dollar or two a month for that to be a possible business model again.

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This honestly sounds like a great idea. At this point I'd pay money for a browser that was private, fast, and dev-friendly, simply to avoid the moral dilemma of switching from FF to a Chrome clone.

Is Safari an option for you? (Mac?)

Safari is about the least dev friendly browser there is. Their API support is atrocious, especially for web extensions.

Perhaps Orion will be of interest to you (WebKit fork with web extensions support, I am the founder)

Really interesting project, will check it out!

What's wrong with Firefox?

It's an honest question, since as a user I really love it. Is it the 'dev-friendly', which Firefox lacks?

One small thing in the latest redesign: if you have two tabs, one active, one not, the visual cues suggest exactly the opposite. The active one seems like a clickable button, the inactive one seems pushed down and not clickable.

After misclicking hundreds of times, I still couldn't train myself to go against my perception and follow the designer's "bold vision", using it feels like writing with my left hand or steering a bicycle with a crooked wheel.

Might want to check https://color.firefox.com

This is the way. Additionally I went into about:config and set browser.proton.enabled to false, which fixed most of the issues I had with the new design.

ah then i'm not the only one. i had to change color scheme.

The new UI overhaul looks awful, they killed most useful plugins with the big update awhile back, and ideologically/politically Mozilla has become equivalent to an impoverished Google so personally speaking I'm horny for something new in the browser space

FF is my daily driver (since Quantum in '17) but I've found it really just isn't holding up these days:

• Profiling functions between Chrome/FF reveals that Chrome is frequently considerably faster (usually 60%+)

• During WebGL work I'll often hit blue screens around memory management (this seems to be a relatively recent development)

• Similarly, trying to profile a WebRTC application with video feeds will consistently trigger a blue screen. (I can tell this is from FF, as the browser itself flashes white a few times before the system goes down.)

• Things like the UI changing - while minor - are enough to cause inconvenience, plus the occasional random feature removal (View Image context menu option) indicates that I'm not necessarily the target audience for the browser.

I actually slightly prefer the devtools in FF than Chrome, but there are a number of quirks that have started appearing over the past year or so, ranging from actual bugs to just weird UX.

As I write this, I'm realizing I'd love a browser that's seen more as a devtool than a catch-all web navigator which happens to have a profiler built in.

If WebGL and WebRTC are causing bluescreens, that is probably a GPU driver bug (though I realize that users don't care whose fault a crash is). If you have steps to reproduce, even if not 100% reliable, you can file a Firefox bug in Bugzilla. Mozilla has contacts at Microsoft and can pass along the bug.

Yeah, no user application should cause a blue screen of death or kernel panic under normal circumstances, unless it is either a bug or they're messing with something from the kernel (but in this last case, you generally need to run the program with high privilege anyway).

This is a distant ideal with today's GPU drivers. Browsers go to heroic lengths to rewrite graphics API calls and recompile potentially hostile code originating from WebGL to avoid tipping over crashy GPU drivers.

What normally happens with native GPU intensive apps is that devs change their code to work around driver and OS crashes, and if the app becomes popular, GPU vendors will react to frequent crashes from that app with driver fixes.

Thanks. You make a few interesting points. It just doesn't seem to hit me so bad as an average user.

I actually liked the UI they implemented in Android. Alas, I seem to be in a minority

I actually quite like the mobile browser, it hasn't really given me any issues yet. The fact it supports add-ons like uBlock is awesome.

There are salty power users of the old insecure XUL based plugins who can't let their deprecation go.

I'm salty because WebExtensions still can't do something as seemingly simple as bind global keybindings years after the transition. I actually supported the switch, but back then I was optimistic about missing features being added soon.

Still a Firefox user. There is really no alternative for me that don't drive me crazy.

That said:

I'm not salty because they replaced XUL but because they mostly gutted it without replacement.

I'm salty because they pretend we are a community whenever they want donations but write as if we are enemies when we try to ask very nicely about something that is missing and has been missing for years.

I'm also salty because they really haven't been clear about donations not going to browser work but to all kinds of niche projects.

My biggest issue is, running it with a 4k resolution on Windows seems to be considerably slower than Chrome (Intel graphics). With a full-hd resolution I didn't notice the difference and on a different PC running Linux I don't have any performance issues either.

Though I'm not sure what they are up to exactly, isn't this what The Browser Company [1] is trying to do?

[1] https://thebrowser.company/

If it had a decent search agent in it, without ads, I'd pay for it.

Because, let's be honest, advertising sucks and anyone that thinks advertising and search belong together sucks even more.

This is what neeva tries to do, it’s currently free in beta.

They've actually added option for donations: https://vivaldi.com/contribute/

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