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Comment by sweettea | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what Mozilla does. I've been using FF since Deer Park, and it was great then. Adding increased security, speeding rendering... probably some nice incremental changes there. But blowing up the extension universe, preventing you from using ftp, not letting you ignore old security on ancient websites, and the assorted UI cripplings of which this is just the latest? It could have been a perfected tool, unchanging in appearance because it's the way everyone knows and can wield whether a novice or master.

I still use FF, but it is no longer the easy to use yet deep power tool that vim/emacs/imagemagick are.

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Mozilla has a substantial payroll and those folks need to justify their pay, so we see all kinds of changes introduced for the sake of change. It's not just Mozilla, it's the broader mature software industry.

A traditional question for these threads: are there real alternatives yet? I mean, such that you actually did switch.

You said that you didn't, and neither did I. I just don't know if anything but Chromium would be sustainable, and I still don't want to switch to Chromium. If anything, FF profiles are still a reason to use it. Even though I don't really believe FF is still much better than Chrome in terms of privacy and such (well, TBH, it still gives me peace that I can disable some stuff in about:config I almost surely couldn't in Chromium: I'd need to investigate, and it doesn't help that Chromium users generally don't bother themselves with such issues). And it hardly is in terms of actual browser technology. I didn't check if all plugins I need work under chromium, but I assume they would, since most non-major stuff was broken in FF anyway, and major stuff tends to have even better support in chromium nowadays.

Depends on your criteria, I guess. If you are okay with closed-source (but based on OSS), then Vivaldi is a great alternative, IMHO. It supports most extensions from the Chrome Store. Has had vertical tabs for years (the main reason I switched). And it's very privacy focused.

I'm straddling vivaldi and firefox 84 on two screens. First and foremost Vivaldi updates via it's own exe so you can rename that and all updates are disabled with no nag. I put control above privacy, what matters privacy if your flow can be taken from under you on next forced update.

Vivaldi is still behind FF84 in three notable areas: video/PiP (why they dim the video when the mouse is over the pip window I have no idea), occasional tab thread instability (requiring esc press to unlock), scrolling physics.

But vivaldi also makes up for it with other features. Mouse gestures are a godsend and improve browsing immeasurably (e.g. I made an up-left-right gesture to bring down bookmarks bar). I briefly hooked into a fake email server so I could enable the built-in RSS features and that's going places. The stacked tabs are solid, they seem to be taking great care in getting them right.

On Android, they removed saving pages locally. No PDF, no mhtml, nothing. Forced me to go to bromite after years and years.

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