Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web into a walled garden

Pocket isn't proprietary. The bundled extension is OSS and maintained in-tree. It's also not deeply integrated. You can turn it off or use artifact builds to create a custom Firefox with it completely gone, and nothing will break, because it's just a WebExtension.

I don't disagree about the fact that Mozilla makes questionable moves. I still deeply resent that they laid off the servo team, and I treat their executives with as much suspicion as the rest of HN, see their recent moves with Firefox suggest in the address bar. But I think the fundamental difference is that, at the end of the day, I think Mozilla and Firefox are still the lesser evil in the borwser war; Firefox is still the best browser to run uBlock on, they have aggressively worked to end tracking and they have a mobile browser that actually supports extensions where possible (hello, Firefox Reality!) So I prefer to try as much as possible to work with Firefox instead of just accepting Chrome's dominance, especially given that it's just a worse browser for privacy.

We know the web is now so complex that it is impossible for a voluntary project to maintain a web browser, at least to a level of near-parity with Chrome.

It seems impossible, but I wonder if Mozilla could be salvaged?

I want a browser styled like the rugged and customisable UI of Firefox 4.x with the Gecko improvements of the Quantum releases. With desktop-to-mobile sync with real cryptography, before this nonsense of a 'Firefox account'. A browser that preserved features pleasing to techies and power users, while omitting features abhorrent to them, would be the ideal.

How could such a thing be funded, and how could we get the old hacker collective style of Mozilla back? Or how would we start something new and get the full time labour necessary to develop such a browser, with an independent rendering engine and JS VM? While keeping unethical incentives as far from sight as possible.

I don't pretend it is an easy question, but framing the right question is a start.

>Let's not pretend Mozilla is a saint

Okay but what's the upshot? If it's just a meandering comment to the effect of "well, Mozilla does bad stuff too", then this is exactly the kind of comment that the parent commenter was talking about.

Take all of the concerns about Mozilla, add them up, and then bring them back to the larger conversation about what it means for the web to become increasingly dependent on Google.

That is the second step, and that second step is the critical step, and somehow in these conversations, that piece keeps getting lost. Or worse, people decide to dig in before they get to that piece, and then, after already having been dug in, they confront this question and decide to follow it to the logically consistent but extreme conclusion that these trivial details are a sufficient reason to abandon the web to Google. I suspect that is a position that they wouldn't otherwise have consciously reasoned themselves into, but I do think it's how people respond to the challenge of reconciling their criticisms of Mozilla with the bigger picture.

I don't think the Mr Robot thing was great, but I also don't think that's a reason to abandon the web to 100% dominance by Google. And is the Mr robot thing supposed to be an input into that bigger conversation about whether or not to abandon the web to Google? If yes, then I just have to say that I don't think that's a very good reason. If no, then I submit that we're losing track of the bigger question.

>it really feels like Mozilla and FF are "controlled opposition"

I have to admit that this is where you completely lost me. I think Mozilla is navigating some uncertain and difficult territory, and I don't think their choices are the best. But I guess I'll put it this way. If I find my brain spinning narratives like this, I take it as a sign that I need to get up and go on a walk outside.

Most others are Chromium based. But I see no reason to switch to Chrome when we have Chromium available in every Linux distribution and Brave for Windows/Mobile.

Who exerts the most control over Chromium? Google shareholders or the OSS community? How much Chromium development is done by people not employed by Google or now Microsoft?

Brave/Edge/Vivaldi/Opera are all Google controlled browsers. Just because you can slap your own logo and build a sync system on top of Chromium does not mean they get to have any say in how Chromium consumes the Internet.

Sure, less data gets sent directly to Google. But when Google says[1], Chromium will not allow you to completely block autoplaying videos, it takes years to for the clones add an option to block[2].

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay/ [2] https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/40377/option-to-disable-auto...

Is there really any alternative to Chrome (outside of the Apple ecosystem)? Vivaldi is Chrome, Edge is Chrome, Opera is Chrome, Brave is Chrome.

Sure, technically they're Chromium, not Chrome, and probably you don't share your data with Google (though who can say for sure). But whichever you choose, you're still allowing Google to control the Web ecosystem, from web standards to ad blocking.

Yes, they amount to absolutely nothing in this context.

When you use Firefox, your bookmarks bar gets covered up while you're typing an URL. When using chrom(e|ium) or its plethora of derivatives, you're actively contributing to browser monoculture, sharing your browsing habits with a predatory corporation, and supporting anti-user changes such as the manifest v3 webextensions, which cripple content blockers and disempower you, us, the user.

If the choice is difficult for you, I really don't know what to say.

In respect to the destructive nature of continued support for googles monopoly over search, online advertising and their desire to ‘own the web’, yes, those issues sounds pretty minor.

They’re also sound like quite achievable goals for a fork.

I think the difference is that these changes are overt. And generally user changeable.

FF tends the take flak about things people just accept from other browsers.

Don't want pocket, disable it. Don't want address bar suggestions disable it. I don't agree with everything that goes on with FF but there is no alternative to what MS dreamed of with IE and Google seem to be achieving with Chrome.

Out of interest, why do you need to see your bookmarks bar if you are typing in the address bar? Genuine question.

> Completely covering up bookmark bar when clicked inside address bar is nothing

How often do you click the address bar, then change your mind and navigate to the bookmark bar instead?

You know the address bar searches your bookmarks too if you do change your mind and don't want to change focus?

Did you purposefully list stuff no one in their right mind would care about for more than 5 minutes after the update or were you actually trying to make a point?

Because yeah, all of this is literally nothing. There are things going on with Firefox which are not nothing, but none of what you cite is.

The house is on fire, but at least when you sit on the sofa it doesn't make a weird squeaking noise.

Wow, even Opera is much less pushy. I know people might have major issues with new Opera ownership, but I've come to love it, whatever. It's Chrome, but way more productive and user-friendly.

>What about them putting ads in the URL bar suggestions?

Not great... at least they ask you at least once to allow this, and let you disable it at any point, something that cannot be really said for some of their major competitors.

>What about them (temporarily) putting ads into the new tab page that you couldn't opt out of?

I honestly do not remember them doing that? The only thing I remember was these self-promotional things like "Try Firefox for Android" stuff, but not "real" (i.e. paid for) ads. Maybe I just forgot?

>What about them removing the ability to customize the new tab page?

Customize in what way? I can customize my new tab page just fine, edit and pin and remove things. Change the number of rows, disable "sponsored shortcuts" aka ads and Pocket (aka more ads), remove the search bar...

>What about them making it all but impossible to install your own (unsigned) browser extensions?

This indeed was not a great move. But I kinda get where this was coming from a little. There was in fact a substantial number of malware extensions out there, and somebody in my family even fell for one (IIRC it disguised itself as a video codec update).

That there is no hidden setting or "cheat code" in the release browser to override the signature requirement bugs me, tho. The rational here was that if there was an override, people would just disable checks based on recommendations on "power user" sites and/or tutorials and/or disable it because a malware author told them to, or that an external malware could override this silently to bug the browser (but that argument does not count for me; if you have some malware running on your machine already capable of flipping such a setting, you lost already, anyway). I'd say, just make it blatantly obvious that turning off signature checks is rather risky[0] and enable those users to make an informed decision (and if they do not inform themselves and just click around, that's honestly their bad).

Compared to Chrome tho, this is all still very low-level annoying. Chrome never let you permanently install unsigned extensions in the first place, and you have to use their "store" to host your extensions.

Ads... Google...

And the new tab page is also more customizable in Firefox than in Chrome.

That Firefox made and keeps making some not-so-great decisions is surely something we can and should criticize and ask them to do better. But also let's not forget here that you and me are the not the only users, and they have find a balance of features and available customization that suit most users without overburdening their own developers with the design, implementation and most importantly maintenance costs associated with such features.

Something like menu icons seems small, easy to implement and put behind a setting, but then you realize that there is a lot of maintenance cost associated with it. You have to maintain a good icon set, and do additional testing to ensure everything looks fine with the setting on and off, etc. And that's just one feature out of thousands, and each of those comes with costs, and then you need to prioritize because you don't really have the developer power to pay all of these costs. (And now we can quibble about which features to implement or to keep or to remove and so on, based on our personal preferences, but that isn't really helpful most of the time either)

At the same time, we shouldn't forget about the larger picture that Google and their Chrome browser are not "nice", but a company and their tool to enact mass surveillance for profit, which quite often behaves very unethical aside from that, maybe even with outright illegal practices, if you e.g. believe the court docs unsealed and in the news this week, or if you ever glanced at the GDPR and compared that with what Google is actually doing.

[0] I know, I know, a lot of the signature checks are just security theater, as the signing is automated after some automated checks, and therefore it is entirely possible for malware authors to get past those checks and get signed. It will stop some non-malicious extension writers from releasing their thing with known-vulnerable code patterns. On the other hand, mozilla still know what it signed, so at least they can consult their archives and rather effectively block retroactively the spread of such malware once they become aware of it. That does not undo any damage already done, but it stops further damage. If a piece of malware is targeted at single users or small groups, it may remain undiscovered and hence unstopped indefinitely. But at least this may help stop nondiscriminatory large scale malware campaigns in it's tracks.

> It's like the house is on fire and people start to complain because they don't like the tapestry on the wall.

People don't like tapestry being changed by Mozilla when the house is already on fire...

>Important to keep in mind that the old hippie days from the 80s and 90s are long gone.

What does this mean?

> Important to keep in mind that the old hippie days from the 80s and 90s are long gone.

Er, in what alternate history were there “hippie days” (except maybe as some kind of retrospective event) in the 1980s and 1990s?

That is not my only criticism, but it was the most relevant one. Also, the issue is not that they get money from Google, it is that it is almost all of their revenue. I think Brave has a fair chance of surviving without Google, though your point of their lack of manpower stands.

I don't think Firefox will have many good options for generating revenue, given that they have lost 46 million users since 2018 [1] (while paying something like $2M to the chair [2]). And the only effort they made in that direction was is to become a VPN reseller [3].

[1]: https://www.techspot.com/news/90692-firefox-loses-46-million...

[2]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

[3]: https://mullvad.net/en/help/partnerships-and-resellers/

> The day Google stops buying Firefox's ad space, Mozilla has hundreds of alternative options for generating revenue.

Then it's really bizarre that they leave all of this money on the table, seeing as the money they get from google only requires setting a single variable. Maybe it's not actually true.

> You can install uBlock Origin on Brave and Chrome too.

...for now.

Be aware that Chrome is going to stop supporting Manifest v2. This will make uBlock Origin stop working - not because the author doesn't want to support v3, but because it is not possible for uBlock Origin to work under the new extension API.

If you like uBlock Origin, now would be a good time to get out of the habit of using Chrome.

Not on mobile Chrome though which is what parent was writing about.

>What an outrageously toxic and arrogant comment. There are many reasons to dislike Firefox. Just because you're not personally affected by those reasons, doesn't make people who are affected by them somehow mentally ill or lesser humans than you, your majesty.

Saying someone is uninformed or irrational isn't the same as saying they're mentally ill or unintelligent. Your comment, however, does well to lend credence to their anecdote.

I didn’t say I’m not affected. I’m uninformed about most things, and I sometimes behave irrationally. I don’t see that as a problem. But it does explain why I make bad decisions. That’s all I’m saying. I guess I should have clarified that I didn’t mean my comment negatively.

2021 is a rich era of multiple standards-compliant browsers, including Firefox.

But if there's a bug where either a browser deviates from the standard or different browsers implement an ambiguity in the standard differently? Web developers will fix that bug in Chrome, Safari, and Edge before fixing it in Firefox. For almost every site, that's what the cost benefit analysis looks like.

If my site doesn't work right on Chrome or Safari, that's my problem. If it doesn't work right on Firefox, that's Mozilla's problem.

Actually I've been doing it about a decade. Long enough to have had to make the judgement call to not change our site to fix performance regressions on Firefox because there weren't enough users to justify the cost a couple times.

It's okay; FF unbroke themselves in 2 revisions anyway. But if it'd been Chrome, fixing the site would have been our top priority.

The latest version mate

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779947

The moment UBO doesn't work on chrome, I will switch.

But say what you want about their privacy practices, Google is as strong as it can get on security front.

I use about 15 extensions... less then half are available. Over the years Mozilla has removed many features from Firefox that I was using but this one has me looking at alternate browsers.

No way, it actually worked. Thank you!

I've used both and for me personally the Chome ones map better onto my brain.

Thank you, can you please elaborate - superior in what ways?

The Chrome profiles work really well for me but I’d love to learn about the alternative. Using Chrome is a bit of a guilt trip at this point.

It's a too long list of small but numerous issues. No single thing to pick, more like a systemic problem. (Debugging on FF is especially problematic)

FF used to be really good about 10 years ago with creation of firebug extension, it basically created a concept of modern browser devtools, but Mozilla stuck in the past and did not evolve ever since.

Pretty sure they don’t. I use them all the time, no account.

They don't? I've gone as far as disabling all account functionality with about:config and am using containers right now.

If you want a chromium skin with vertical tabs, both Edge and Vivaldi offer them built into the browser.

use cases?

It has at least one drawback. In the past there was an option to reload all tabs ( because every couple weeks Firefox starts begging to be restarted and after restart all tabs are blank ). Now you have to select all, reload, and not forget to de-select. If you forget and hit Ctrl+W you close all tabs.

Don't you care about an open internet?

If I'm trying to get away from Google, why should I switch to a Chromium derivative that also depends on the Chrome Web Store for add-on distribution?

Brave and Edge are better than Chrome if you care about privacy, but 99% of the code base is still controlled by Google and they don't really have a voice in standards committees. To support the open web it's much better to have engine diversity too.

Microsoft and Brave both run ad networks. They are trapped in the same perverted incentives. Same thing for Apple.

Firefox is the only one that doesn't.

Then again, Mozilla only survives thanks to Google for sending search traffic their way.

You can change when the overflow scrolling starts by setting browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 50 (or any number you want, the unit is pixels) in about:config

I sincerely suggest using vertical tabs! There's two popular FF extensions for it, the original Tree Style Tab [1] and Sidebery [2]. Most widescreen displays are far wider than web content these days, so you don't lose any horizontal space by switching to vertical tabs, and you gain the ability to actually read the text + organize them by hierarchy.

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

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

Firefox's behavior here is massively better. Why in the world would anyone actually LIKE the tiny tiny icon-only tabs?!

I find it odd that the “hacker mindset” answer to this is, accept surveillance.

Do people actually prefer to memorize website favicons and their placement instead of scrolling with some text still visible to let you know what the tab actually is?

Check out an even better option (in my opinion): multi-row tabs

https://github.com/Izheil/Quantum-Nox-Firefox-Dark-Full-Them...

Vivaldi is webkit/blink based though.

No one's saying you can't have Chrome installed.

It's really no big deal to open it when you want to watch any of those. I've never heard anyone complaining about switching from your phone's browser to the Netflix app on your phone, so I don't see why opening another browser on your computer is a big deal.

Can you give an example? I've been using both Safari (personal laptop) and Firefox (work laptop) for years, and I've never noticed anything like that.

That's unfortunate, you should try updating your GPU drivers (if you're on linux there's some different things you need to change). Firefox uses the GPU for more stuff so bad drivers really heck it up.

wdym

The marketshare on desktop is more like 8%, up to 60% depending on the country.

I'm using firefox too, and yea it works great - but that doesn't mean its the "anti-chrome" / anti-google browser. The executives running Mozilla live in the shadow of Google's interests, and long ago have forgotten that their job is to make a damn good browser. Now they're too encumbered by the politics of the game, politics (and game) which Google are in full control of.

>And honest question, what's your idea for monetizing Firefox?

How about taxes? Browsers are modern infrastructure, same as roads and street lights.

"What you cannot do is force other people to change their behaviour to accommodate your beliefs"

Now that is a tangent, because that is not what is being suggested.

A lot of super technical stuff I'm googling at work all day I feel like is fairly static content that I think old school google excelled at. Modern Google is great for finding a local restaurant but not so much at figuring out the nuance in some searches.

Centralization, control and censorship are on the authoritarian–liberal axis of the standard two-dimensional political compass, not on the left–right axis.

>The Google founders have managed to create this amazing narrative that they’re the good guys while all the bad decisions are just taken by the new money grubbing execs.

Page and Brin are still board members and controlling shareholders of Alphabet. It's foolish to assume they don't share responsibility for the current state of Google and the rest of Alphabet's properties.

I meant to say that they drank of that chalice the moment they started adwords. The rest was always going to happen, though the exact timing might be up for debate.

It does not matter that they are ethical sleeze bags, that is just what was eventually going to happen.

Maybe the poised chalice is a bad metaphore, perhaps it would be better to say that advertising was Googles original sin, and one that will eventually undo them.

Ads gain value the more you can target them. This erodes privacy.

I remember a time when we actually called companies and asked them if they wanted to place a banner on our site. We didn't know anything about are visitors.

It absolutely is right, and a right. Corps aren't people, but there are people submitting the documents to the legislators. There is zero difference between this and a study on climate change being submitted to the EPA.

Law is not just for right and wrong. Most laws and regulations are to further people's interests, like the google people submitting the documents. This is called freedom of speech. Legislators are free to not read them.

> excert economic pressure on lawmakers

I don't think this means what you think it means. To exert economic pressure on a lawmaker (a person) means to make them to personally lose money in some way. This is a pretty grave accusation - it means "if you don't agree with us, we are going to damage you financially. Google has not being caught attacking people financially, or threatening them, or even paying off lawmakers thus far.

Google is also allowed to place their products in their own systems by default (not android, which is open source). If you buy a Samsung phone, Samsung picks the defaults - some are google, some are Samsung, some may be the carrier you bought the phone from. Of course if google makes the Pixel, it's going to have google's defaults. Are you surprised when you buy an LG TV, LG also makes the remote, despite plenty of other brands of remotes available for that TV and others?

As far as buying themselves default search placement within other products? Have you been to the grocery store? Did you know every brand you see there pays for better shelf space and placement?

There is literally zero wrong with any of what is going on here. Plenty of bad things about google. This ain't one of them. This is them purposely damaging their product for some of the possible market. Which is their choice. They are not "gimping the web" - they are simply making their own products worse. If google's search wasn't a good default choice in a firefox (it is), firefox would take google's payoff, decline in use and lose marketshare, and in lose turn google's money since they don't have market share anymore. And firefox is free to do that.

I see what you did there.

what do you think about that guy's opinion about how ciphers should be handled?

> I know we're on a google is evil thread, but not literally everything they're involved with is a conspiracy.

100% agree, and yet one of the downsides of their recently exposed behaviour is an erosion of trust in everything they touch. For good or bad. Especially big important security considerations.

The more crap like this I hear about, the less I’m willing to trust their products. For example, I almost chose GCP for a project but decided against it because I just don’t trust them not to hose me due to something completely out of my control.

These things pile up and tarnish their brand and anyone closely associated with their brand.

That is true, but this is a normal thing that happens when there is a trust deficit.

Read up on apartheid - there are no decision makers. Maybe a few bad apples, some sociopaths, sure, but by and large if you look at Google, for example, you'll find mostly average people, content with doing whatever it is they are doing to get by, maybe cutting a few corners here and there and trying to get promoted so they can afford that new Tesla model. Product manager responsible for introducing the auto login in Chrome sure wasn't trying to think about how he's helping embezzle billions of dollars; poor guy was just trying to get to that sweet L7. There are no grand master minds here that you can put in prison and make an example of - and if there are, these guys would be way too well connected, and isolated with 10ft of 2000$/hour lawyers.

We need to stop looking for the responsible, evil, individuals that are making this happen and start treating the problem like the systemic problem it is. We need to dismantle the systems and organizations that allow these things to happen. The US government is using these techniques against other governments, and often against terror organizations (if not against its own citizens via the justice system), so why not do the same for domestic organizations and corporations? Because they (govt & corpos) are all intertwined, to such a degree that this relationship is itself is codified into a "system" (one aspect of which are the lobbyists).

We live in a world of systems and rules - we've been living like this since before Jesus walked the Earth but recently this trend has accelerated significantly: individuals can no longer be held responsible for much of anything: they depend too much on the state, on the organizations they work for, etc. etc. If you think on it every single significant aspect of your life depends on someone or something that is external to you and you have no control over. And so, good policing isn't chasing after criminals in the streets while shooting at them; good policing is preventative and in the more advanced states wouldn't even be necessary since all people would've not been allowed (or rather, given a chance) to misbehave.

You don't blame or punish a man, you make it so that he can no longer do anything bad.

p.s. Shit sucks, I know, I want to be free too but what can you do; we were born into an age of hyper connectivity and over socialization. We are basically slaves of the machine that I can't even name. Used to be capitalism, but I don't think that word has any real meaning left behind it any more... not when China is the most successful capitalistic nation in the world.