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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

if you haven't already use Firefox and recognize that this is a fundamental question of freedom and whether you want the internet to be controlled by dystopian corporate advertisement monoliths or institutions that care about your rights.

Every time this comes up and 80% of discussions is about whether the tab bar in firefox is flat or three pixels wide instead of five makes me more depressed

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Fair criticism of Firefox is that it is dependent on Mozilla 'the org' which is a pretty shaky foundation to base such a critical component on. Witness the exodus of even die hard supporters over the last couple of years. That has nothing to do with minor UI details.

I’d prefer Firefox, but some functionality works inarguably better in chrome. One example is YouTube, which slams my processor due to the lack of hardware decoding.

So swap to chrome for those 1-2 websites that require it and use Firefox for everything else?

This is exactly how I work and it works quite well.

Yeah the user is DEFINITELY wrong here and it’s not the browsers fault for being mediocre.

"Don't use the product" is ALWAYS a poor rebuttal. Few people like having to utilise multiple browsers.

In practice I've found that people claiming site X works in chrome but not in Firefox is usually incorrect, and unless you actually try it you won't know. I use Firefox and have done for 15+ years, and I genuinely can't remember the last time I had to switch browser to use a page or webapp.

Yes, but some of us are forced to. As long as Mozilla claims that implementing WebMIDI is impossible that's how it will remain. It's technically in there somewhere but it just doesn't work or requires all kinds of unstable trickery, not good enough for a normal user.

The h264ify add-on will let your computer load YouTube videos more efficiently on Firefox, if it supports hardware acceleration for H.264 but not VP8/VP9.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

Right, I have no interest in installing an add on to make one of the most popular websites work correctly on Firefox.

Use a plug-in from an AppStore where plugins are regularly bought and replaced with malware?

No thanks.

h264ify is free and open source. You can inspect the source code and also compile/package it yourself, if you do not want to trust addons.mozilla.org:

https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

Yes, so we’re a number of other products which have been purchased by another party where updates have since been pushed that contain malware.

You can compile/package the h264ify source code with only FOSS products, which can themselves be inspected and compiled from source. Your reasoning could be used to distrust any software, open source or not.

I’m not suggesting that you can’t trust any software, but the Mozilla App Store has proven to not be trustworthy. I avoid installing software from pip and npm also.

But you’re still missing the point, this should be compiled into Firefox core, if it’s a licensing thing badge it as Firefox-non free. Not everybody cares about altruistic goals, I just want a browser that works so I can do my job, securely.

Edit: but if you don’t already see a future where ultimately open source cannot be trusted unless it comes from a trusted repo (yum, apt) then you should start preparing for that.

The issue is that Firefox doesn't actually support hardware video decoding on Linux without various hackery.

Thanks for tip, I've always wondered what was the root cause of those occasional stutters, specially since I often speed up videos

What platform? No problem with Youtube and Twitch with Firefox on Windows 10.

Linux

Firefox open source. If the Mozilla foundation is as questionable as some like to claim then why isn't there any effort to fork Gecko. We have more than enough Blink/Chromium based browsers already.

Blink is better than Gecko. Why would someone who intends to create a new browser do so using Gecko?

For literally the reasons we're already discussing: to offer an alternative to Chrome.

If every browser is based on Chromium then you're not really offering an alternative to Google Chrome because Google still own the supply chain. Not only in terms of your new browser's rendering engine but also in terms of website owners being vindicated in targeting Chrome.

The only way to offer a legitimate counterargument to Chrome is not to use Blink.

I think that's backwards. Gecko requires constant and expensive work to keep up with Blink. And it has been falling behind.

Whereas Blink gets that work for free from Google.

If you want to offer a legitimate counter argument to Chrome by using Gecko then you have to find some way to bring in the hundreds of millions of dollars of necessary funding to bring Gecko up to Blink's quality.

If you want to create a counter argument to Chrome using Blink, then you have everything you need already.

> Whereas Blink gets that work for free from Google.

For now.

My bet is they are already planning how to boil the frog.

I do appreciate the difficulty of maintaining a rendering engine (I wrote my own browser in the late 90s) but let's not over dramatise Gecko's position, I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for years and almost never find a website that couldn't work in it (the only instances when it doesn't work is when someone throws up a demo of some unstandardised and bleeding edge Chrome API). Plus lets not forget that Mozilla are still actively working on Gecko so it's not like all responsibility falls on us tomorrow.

The bigger issue for me isn't the maintenance of Gecko; I just can't see how extending Blinks market share really hurts Google in any way. Ultimately Blink-based browsers are still tied into Google's supply chain so even if you did displace Chrome with a Blink-based competitor, Google still win.

"quality"

unilaterally implementing unstable APIs and telling people on web.dev that "it's safe you can use it it's totally production ready" isn't exactly quality, but you do you.

Two forks exist, Waterfox and Pale moon.

They work beautifully for me but I don't dare to use them on machines that I type customer data, work credentials or use internet banking on.

Not because I doubt the mainteners but because Internet is an extremely hostile space - technically.

One missing patch and one exploit that snuck through one ad network and you can be compromised.

That said I'm happy to donate to see someone starting a soft fork of latest Firefox.

A good starting point could be to make a rudimentary fix for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447

Wasn't aware of Waterfox and I mistakenly thought Pale Moon was just a de-branding. Looking at Pale Moon's site, it's clear that it's a whole other branch now (like Blink/WebKit/kHTML).

I'm happy with Firefox (and Mozilla) personally but I'll be sure to recommend these if/when I hear people asking for an alternative to Google and Mozilla in the future.

Thanks for sharing.

Mozilla for all its flaws is far, far preferable to Google as a steward of the web.

Switching to Firefox should be a no-brainer for people who care about the future of the web.

FWIW, you can adjust the tab bar by editing UserChrome.css, I use this:

  .tab-content {
     background: #ffffff20 !important;
     border-radius: 4px 4px 4px 4px !important;
     margin-bottom: 4px !important;
     margin-top: 4px !important;
   }

Firefox is very actively of the opinion that politically motivated people should decide what I see on the web. When that is their stance, I kindly nope the fuck out.

They are a browser maker, and I don't remember the last time they came out with anything really exciting. Vivaldi and Brave both have, and even Brave's stock Chrome UI has good stuff like a solid tab groups implementation that Firefox just doesn't have. There are extensions, but they just don't work the same.

I don't really find Google to be that dystopian. Chrome, gmail and google photos and search are all quite nice. Sure I can change if they get annoying.

I sort of agree. I use Firefox because ublock origin works best on it.

I still use gmail and youtube.

Search I switched to duckduckgo, no profiled results and the ! bangs is great. The google search popup when using incognito gets real annoying fast too.

Didn't Mozilla fire their devtools team ? FF devtools weren't up to Chrome as-is, and doesn't sound like they ever will be. FF seems like a sinking ship, not worth investing time in.

TBH I'm perfectly happy with Chrome and using Google accounts. The benefits of my data following me around seamlessly far outweighs the downsides of Google having access to it.

I hope you like ads, cause Chrome will be choking on them.

Used Chrome on mobile once. Remembered why I don't.

To your second point, what does Chrome's browser sync do that Firefox Sync doesn't?

Firefox also fired their security team.

Really? Have any news regarding this?

It's not true. See my reply to their comment.

I was there too. You and GP are partially correct. IMO foxsec's capabilities were still gutted in the end but the entire team was not laid off.

This is false.

(I am a former Mozilla employee who was there when the layoffs happened)

This is what I know about what happened there:

There were two enterprise IT teams with similar duties but different purviews. When management was deciding on layoffs, they decided to unify those two teams. Unfortunately that meant that there were redundancies.

My heart goes out to those who lost their jobs, and they have every right to be upset.

But the inferences being made as a result of the resulting tweets just weren't true: this notion that all security teams were wiped out is false. And there are now others assigned to threat management.

Furthermore, the security teams that work on Gecko and Firefox were left mostly if not entirely intact.

The entire hardening/sandboxing team was still intact: https://twitter.com/gcpascutto/status/1293519587967983616

TL;DR: Don’t base your understanding of an organization’s capabilities off of one tweet.

I was put off by Firefox by some questionable opinionated decisions they made. I don't want a browser with a political agenda, just want one that that follows the specs and performs well.

Isn't Chrome making opinionated decisions (like this one), pushing a political agenda (anti-privacy, pro-corporatism, pro-monopoly etc) and abusing the standardisation process?

Why jump to the assumption I would want Chrome?

It's the subject of the article.

Why would anyone make a browser if they didn't have a political agenda? You're looking for a massive software project with no motivation?

Dunno, maybe I'm out of touch and people only build for $ and agenda ... sad times!

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