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Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

I think Firefox has ~5% of our user base. It's hard to justify running separate tests for it anymore. I wish they'd just become a privacy-focused Chromium fork because I don't see them crawling back to a meaningful marketshare at this rate.

(Yeah I know multiple implementations and all that, but we don't have many people running FreeBSD just to give Linux some competition.)

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Google already singlehandedly controls the web standards. Firefox and Safari are the last obstacles to them basically privatizing the web.

The independent Chromium distributions do very little to that effect, as they're not incentivized to specifically disable features Google puts in.

If Firefox goes away, kiss the open web goodbye. We'll have it on paper, but just that. It'll be Google's web.

Safari is the real alternative keeping web open. Firefox does not serve that role anymore.

Safari is only available on one platform (that internationally has a small market share) and isn't all that great about implementing web standards in a timely manner. To me, Firefox is the far better alternative. But really, why should there be only one?

> isn't all that great about implementing web standards in a timely manner.

It's not good at implementing standards in timely manner which Chrome implements before they're even standards (and then become standards when Google pushes them to become so). Interesting isn't it. That literally goes back to what I said.

Without Firefox and Safari, Google can declare anything it wants a standard and implement it LITERALLY yesterday.

Among standards Safari is slow to implement in "timely manner" is web pages connecting to USB devices, Bluetooth and a plethora of other nonsense which Google keeps pushing through because they want the web to be the application OS for everyone, and then slap ads on it.

Safari is used by rich people who can afford iPhones and Macs. Those people are valuable visitors for many websites. And Safari marketshare (with iOS) is not tiny. So plenty of websites do care about Safari compatibility.

Safari is available on one platform but its engine is cross-platform and used by few browsers (Epiphany, Luakit, Nyxt, Vimb, ...).

"Implementing web standards" is Chrome's strategy for becoming a browser monopoly. They just constantly make up things like USB in web browsers faster than anyone else could implement it.

Just because they standardize it doesn't mean anyone should be forced to keep up with them.

A closed browser with limited features made by a unethical company is keeping the web open?

I'll take FOSS chromium variants before I give my data to Apple(and by proxy, the US and Chinese government).

> made by a unethical company is keeping the web open?

There are no angels with the known contenders of "keeping the web open" unless you want to use SerenityOS's web browser that they made themselves.

Unless you are using a very exotic OS that has a browser, I'm not sure how you can begin to defend a chromium variant still derived by an unethical company (Because you have to update that fork) and then attack another unethical company for giving your data to them.

> unethical company

Unless there's a mathematical definition of "ethical" that we can rely on for objective assessment, that's basically everyone and no one based on how you feel any particular day.

I mean sure, but realistically speaking, how can we afford to continue supporting Firefox? I can't make a plea to the CTO of "Please let us keep investing money in compatibility because it may have a minor impact on the open web."

Firefox is in a downward trajectory for marketshare and mindshare. I would love to hear a realistic solution to this problem. Maybe switching to WebKit?

Given how many discussions I had in the past about people insisting to support legacy, unsupported browsers I'm surprised "5% of our users use it" isn't enough to convince almost everyone to support it.

If you mean Internet Explorer, it's because the deprecation of that is starting now because Edge supports IE mode for legacy apps and is otherwise Chromium.

It's a two horse race, and its Chrome vs Safari. Firefox is non-existent in this race and is so behind that Google pays hundreds of millions to its creator Mozilla, which contributes a significant amount to their entire revenue source.

I hate to be the one to bring in 'the facts' but Firefox itself is becoming more irrelevant and there is no question on that. Microsoft Edge (using Chromium) is used more than Firefox [0] and global Firefox usage has been declining ever since. [1]

As I said before [2] the Chrome ecosystem has given Google the dominance of more than just the web standards and the web developers were happy to live with this.

I'd say the so called 'open web' just exchanged from one behemoth to another.

To Downvoters: So 'Firefox is the most used and dominant browser and Chrome is in second place'? So 'Google is not paying Firefox in the millions'? I strongly disagree and can confidently say that Firefox usage is dying. Change my mind.

I have just given credible sources to substantiate my claims yet no counter arguments or disproving the facts are presented towards my comment.

[0] https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-just-left-a-se...

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop-mobi...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769206

> wish they'd just become a privacy-focused Chromium fork because

These already exist, and Chromium is far from perfect. I'm glad there's a viable competitor.

I'm not sure I'd classify it as viable with how Mozilla middle management has acted the last few years.

It's at least technically viable for now

Safari and, especially, its iOS monopoly (for the engine, at least) are the only thing keeping Google from dominating and nearly everyone from only testing against Chrome, now that MS switched to using Chrome's engine and IE is finally nearing the end even in the important niches where it had been hanging on. FF doesn't have enough "normies" using it, isn't the default anywhere, and its trend-line is heading the wrong direction.

In my experience, Firefox actually has better performance than Chrome nowadays — particularly on Apple Silicon, where the difference is stark and dramatic. And with the new "Proton" interface, IMO Firefox finally looks at least as nice as Chrome out of the box.

Firefox mobile still has some catching up to do on the overall UI/UX, but it's not too far off, and the fact that it allows extensions is nice.

But chrome uses the GPU a lot more, thus making everything faster. Firefox right now is like Linux a few years back: better CPU performance but little to no GPU acceleration

> But chrome uses the GPU a lot more

[citation needed]

Firefox page rendering is GPU accelerated. It's called WebRender. Your information seems to be out of date.

Article from 2017 when WebRender was still being prepared for release: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...

Current platform support list, which seems to be "almost everyone": https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where

this is interesting - i've had the opposite experience on both x86 and ARM Macs to the extent that it's not really a viable browser for me :/ purely anecdotal of course, and i haven't found a lot of information supporting my experience...

Firefox is more like 8-9% of the desktop market. It’s hard for alternative browsers to hold share on mobile where the defaults are set by the platform owners.

I wish more people would run FreeBSD because it would make both Linux and FreeBSD stronger.

Single platforms stagnate, we’ve seen it before with IE6 and we’re starting to see it again.

> Single platforms stagnate, we’ve seen it before with IE6 and we’re starting to see it again.

They do, but at least chromium is open source. If it stagnated like IE6 then someone would fork it.

> someone would fork it.

This myth needs to die. Yes, somebody would fork it but it would very, very quickly become stale as well. It costs tens of millions to develop a browser engine nowadays, it's not something a few hobbyists can develop in the evening after their day job.

Microsoft didn't choose Chromium for their new Edge engine because they love Google, they chose it purely from an economic point of view. Even Microsoft doesn't want to develop a browser engine. Microsoft.

Ironically, as much as I love FreeBSD, I am being forced to migrate to Linux because the USB mass storage support on FreeBSD is broken on Dell rack servers. I recently migrated to a newer generation Dell server w/ 16TB disks to replace my aging fleet of R710s and cut my power usage considerably, and found I could no longer reliably keep a server online if I boot from USB. There's several threads about this on the FreeBSD forums, including one I started, and the general consensus of the community is "don't do that thing you're doing that works perfectly fine on every other OS, even Windows." not "FreeBSD is broken and this bug should be fixed."

I've fought the good fight for FreeBSD for more than a decade, and my last system running it is getting Debian installed on it in the near-term future.

Were you around during the IE and ActiveX days? Because that's what happens when a single vendor gets to dictate web standards.

You say that like Google doesn't pretty much already dictate web standards.

I would be very sad if Firefox switched to Chromium. Not just for standards-reasons, but because Firefox, with some userstyles tweaking, supports multiple rows of tabs, which Chromium-based browsers cannot do. Also keyboard-based navigation shortcuts are much better, unclear to how much that has to do with Chromium or not.

Also I'm not sure if Chromium-based browsers support the full extent of uBlock Origin.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

uBO works best on Firefox. There is no CNAME uncloaking on chromium browsers, except for Brave which does this as part of their shields.

https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/

Vivaldi also have a built ad / tracker blocker where lists can be chosen.

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