Firefox 95 Released | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 95 Released

mozilla.org

162 pointsecliptik152 comments

This is silly, but one of the main things I like about Firefox is being able to drag a sizable JSON file on top of it and getting that JSON in treeview, with a search filter. It's convenient out-of-the-box functionality.

Not silly. Just yesterday I used it myself the exact same way. Couldn’t even get VS Code or Sublime to do it without random plugins.

Firefox, aka Mozilla JSON tree viewer.

One of my favorite features used to be the built in RSS reader.

This is fantastic. I’ve always wondered why browsers don’t show HTML, CSS, and JS source with syntax highlighting, bracket matching, and other basic dev tools features. You are, after all, viewing the source.

It's one of the reasons I have Firefox Nightly on Android: it still honors the "view-source:https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=29480749" protocol allowing me to look in the page sources on mobile. Naturally, Firefox does this on desktop, too, but that's expected. The "normal" Firefox for Android used to do that, but it also used to let people install extensions as if they owned the phone, but that era is over

So while not "bracket matching," it does have syntax highlighting and often it will even highlight bogus HTML in red

I've especially enjoyed this functionality since a very popular JSON Viewer extension on Firefox got taken over by tracking malware and started logging all your history.

That's a great feature

> We’ve added a User Agent override for Slack.com, which allows Firefox users to use more Call features and have access to Huddles.

YES

E: Shame on Slack. Three years and counting they haven't fixed this.

I thought it was standard knowledge that if you need a specific Web API or JavaScript feature, you explicitly test for it, rather than making assumptions based on the user agent.

I thought it was standard knowledge that Slack doesn't care about their in-browser experience :P

Seriously, though, Slack is easily among the worst apps I've used in browser. On Safari I have a mountain of issues, including one where it grays out every message it sends and then shows them twice. On FF they flat out didn't support calls and huddles until FF called their bluff on it, and even on Chrome I've had missed notifications^. It's almost like they deliberately make it worse so you have to download their app - which also just runs in a browser.

^: Incidentally, for a work focused messaging platform, Slack has had the worst notification misses for me. They also don't clear notifs on mobile if you see the message on desktop and vice versa. Discord and WhatsApp - both platforms for casual use - are way better.

MS Teams refuses to do video in browsers except Edge and Chrome, so I have to force Chromium to spoof Chrome UA.

Good lord, what's old is new again.

Maybe FF should just always use a Chrome-like UA and be done with it.

Question about Firefox's future and Mozilla's corporate leadership:

Last week I made a slide deck and 20 min demo video of some features I feel like are fundamental to web browsers that none of them have. I think Mozilla is - in principle / on paper - the best organization to embody the principles that my ideas espouse.

The general HN attitude toward Mozilla seems to be that it's a leadership issue.

Is there any hope that I could send my pitch/demo-video and be heard out? Is there any hope that Mozilla can revive itself, or, if the problem is in fact bad corporate leadership, is the organization essentially doomed with no recourse?

Why not share it publicly? If the ideas are good, I'm sure they'll get adopted by someone.

https://ideas.mozilla.org is a dedicated site for user feature suggestions. Perhaps you might want to try submitting over there?

I'm still rooting for Firefox but the only thing stopping me from switching to it as my daily browser is that it can't do multi-language spellcheck [0]. Chromium-based browsers have been supporting this for years now.

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1402822

> reduced the power usage of software decoded video on macOS

Oh nice - tho Firefox is lower-power than Chrome for me it was noticeably bad on some video sites.

I didn't see it in any release notes, but AV1 decoding on Windows has also greatly improved in power consumption this year. My laptop used to nearly overheat when watching HD videos (Youtube started serving AV1 for HD within the past year), but nowadays it doesn't seem to cause any extra stress.

> AV1 decoding on Windows

most likely due to dav1d than anything else.

One thing that shocked me was discovering that Firefox encrypts the saved passwords but doesn't (and won't) encrypt the cookies database at all.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1259652

Firefox is now also an Ad-Ware and Spyware:

> “When contextual suggestions are enabled, Firefox Suggest uses your city location and search keywords to make contextual suggestions from Firefox and our partners, while keeping your privacy in mind,” the support post reads. The “relevant suggestions” from “trusted partners” appear at the bottom of the usual search suggestions pulled from your bookmarks, browser history, and open tabs — a less intrusive version of a search ad, but technically still an ad.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-...

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I've now switched to Tor Browser - it's a privacy hardened Firefox browser with all the crap removed. (Disabling and removing Tor, which is integrated with it, is a slight pain, but doable).

You can disable that with a chckbox. Calling it adware is a stretch, calling it spyware is diminishes the word.

Wow that's indeed bad. They should at least make it optional.

Which version did they remove the cool screenshot feature? seems like they just added it.... (you could easily take a screenshot of the whole page)

Edit: Looks like Firefox 88 only moved the feature: https://techdows.com/2021/03/firefox-88-removes-screenshot-o...

I wonder what useless/detrimental move they made this time

I remember when they removed the right-click View Image not long ago... luckily there's an add-on that can bring back this basic feature.

They removed one of the ways you could get to it: from the right-click context menu. You can still use the keyboard shortcut or add it to the toolbar.

(Yes, it was disappointing to see it removed for no good reason)

Yeah and then a few updates later their holy telemetry tells them nobody uses it anymore (makes sense as it's much harder to find) and it gets cut.

It goes like this a lot. They listen too much to telemetry. Especially because a significant part of their userbase will turn it off.

This is exactly the issue with telemetry, it's a vicious cycle. Most power users will turn it off because it's "spyware", so the only telemetry they get is from average users who don't even know the feature exists, which leads to them removing useful features, so in its current state it's practically useless for actual measurements and only ends up hurting things.

That's why I don't like when there's a blind hate mob against telemetry, because it can be legitimately useful for developers. People should focus on voicing actual privacy concerns and trying to get them addressed rather than completely rejecting any form of telemetry no matter how anonymous they try to make it.

But on the other hand, Mozilla should be well aware that a large majority of their user base probably turns off telemetry (I'm not sure if there's any telemetry sent back that says "user turned off telemetry", maybe not because some people are outraged even by that, but regardless they should know that) and not arbitrarily remove features that are "unused" when their sample is not representative. I highly doubt a feature like this causes a huge maintainance burden that necessitates removing it.

I'm not entirely sure what kind of data Mozilla's telemetry collects, so I'm just more talking in general and not claiming that it's fully anonymous and there's no reason to be concerned at all. You should definitely be allowed to opt out (or maybe even make it opt-in - that does reduce the sample size even further but maybe if they showed trustworthiness then more people would be inclined to opt in), but IMO we need to find some solution that benefits both sides.

The only other alternative I see is having some sort of forum where they make discussions/polls to ask users about how much they use certain features. But that requires active user effort and I imagine a lot of people couldn't be bothered to do it. Shoving surveys in users' faces would just annoy them, but not advertising it would result in a lot of people not knowing about it and missing out on an opportunity to vouch for their favorite feature because they weren't part of the discussion.

Well this is the same argument Microsoft make. "It's useful for us (and you) so it must be turned on". But I don't want my computer looking over my shoulder, anonymised or not. Other FOSS projects have been nice and asking about it (like Debian since forever with their popularity contest). The feeling of privacy is important too, it's not just about whether you can have any negative effects in life. And our privacy has been infringed so much that there is a big countermovement now. It's the industry's own fault. I used to be OK with it but because so many supposedly-innocent telemetry and tracking turned out to be malicious I no longer believe in a distinction between 'good' and 'bad' telemetry.

That mindset also solves the problem of having to read every privacy policy before agreeing to stuff and be on the lookout for sneaky changes. Even though I think Mozilla is trustworthy as such, the concept of telemetry is just dead in the water in the pro-privacy community. Which is of couse a major percentage of Mozilla's userbase.

A poll in-browser would be a good idea IMO. Just put it in the menu and lots of users will answer it.

Basically infected by Google's A/B testing methodology. It really shouldn't be how design works. ( Part of the reason why Google still dont understand Design )

Nice iterative release with mostly cross-platform security and MacOS specific performance improvements.

I wonder if there is any benefit to Windows Store Vs. installer setups (e.g. does the update process change)?

System-wide tools like Homebrew and Chocolatey are nice because they allow you to decide to update everything on your system when you've fucked off and it doesn't cost you any time while your machine chews away - without the loss of control and rights "stores" represent.

Also, agreed - the MacOS performance improvements will be most welcome (I'm waiting on a de-Mozilla'd derivative to update.)

+1 https://scoop.sh/ is pretty much the first thing I ever install on a Windows computer and then I use that to load up everything else.

Based on my experience Microsoft Store will kill the app to update it.

Comment regarding usability and layout from a grumpy old fart who dissed them before (in partially most impolite ways):

I'd still like a more compact layout for tabs and address-bar.

At least one can improve the visibility of active tabs vs. inactive with what nowadays counts as color theme. Both for dark and light modes.

So that point of critic is now moot.

Regarding dark mode, more and more sites work with that without fiddling, which didn't in the old 7/8.x ESRs, neither 94.x.

With 95 there were a few pleasant surprises in dark. But that may have to do with the passed time, too. Maybe the sites themselves changed something. Didn't check for that.

Anyways, apart from the still wasted pixels it's very pleasant to use.

/me eats chalk...(but just a little. GIEF MEE BACK MY PIXELS!)

I can't remember why I moved from Firefox to Brave. I'm curious if I should move back again.

Can anyone sell me on/off this idea?

A large reason why I have not moved on from Firefox is that Gecko remains the only independent full-featured browser-engine. If Firefox were to be discontinued by Mozilla, Google would gain even more control over web standards than it already has. I'm aware that there are other independent, open-source browser-engines available, I'm not aware of any others that are equally usable as an everyday browser for ordinary users though. This fact alone has remained enough for me to continue using it in the face of a continually declining quality, and Mozilla's totally misguided corporate leadership.

> I'm aware that there are other independent, open-source browser-engines available, I'm not aware of any others that are equally usable as an everyday browser for ordinary users though.

Safari is both usable for everyday users and is used every day by more than those that use Firefox, which means WebKit is a viable alternative to Blink.

WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though... GP was probably referring more to efforts like WebSurf.

> efforts like WebSurf

I guess this is a reference to the browser that's actually called NetSurf? Or maybe not?

It's not clear, either, what the statement that "WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though" means.

Overall, this comment is very confusing.

> this is a reference to the browser that's actually called NetSurf

Yes, sorry, I meant http://www.netsurf-browser.org/. (I knew I should look up and put in the link, but it was late... Turns out I even misremembered the name.)

> what the statement that "WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though" means.

That the Blink layout engine is a fork of the WebKit codebase, so if the issue is keeping the standard healthy by ensuring multiple people can implement it independently, having WebKit and Blink be the only implementations is less than ideal, even if not a complete failure.

Only on Apple hardware though.

No, in fact Mozilla’s hostility to embeddability makes the world’s largest megacorp look positively selfless as a contributor to the FLOSS community: the WebKit devs actually give 2¢ about it and webkit2gtk, and it enables a whole range of cross platform (GNU/* and *BSD) browsers from GNOME Web to suckless surf to luakit.

In terms of non-Apple WebKit browsers, that's about it though. And they're all quite niche in terms of intended audience.

I wish there was a more Firefoxy WebKit browser out there, I'm not going back to a web without Ublock.

> they're all quite niche in terms of intended audience

I wouldn’t say that of GNOME Web.

> I'm not going back to a web without Ublock

I do every day (switching between luakit on a laptop and firefox-mobile-config on a smartphone), and IMO a good /etc/hosts is good enough (edit: luakit can also read the same blocklist format as µBlock, though it ignores cosmetic filters).

> hostility

I wouldn't say it was really hostility. But Gecko just wasn't designed to be embeddable in the first place. And they have millions of things to catch up at the time they ultimately decided they could only focus on a few things like Quantum and other things in Project Snappy. May be in the future.

Compared to Webkit the whole engine was designed as an embeddable engine from Day one.

> Gecko just wasn't designed to be embeddable in the first place.

This is untrue in the starkest sense. Please don't make stuff up and then present it as fact.

Embeddability was a major goal for Gecko at the outset. It's the reason for many of the architectural decisions that exist today (past the point where that goal has been abandoned).

except that Safari doesnt have a decent adblocker like ublock is for me a big issue. Plus Safari 15 must have some kind of a bug or something it drains my battery just like Brave.

That's beside the point. I didn't recommend Safari. Safari is a Web browser. The discussion is about alternatives to Blink and Gecko—browser engines, not browsers.

The fact that WebKit is in Safari and Safari is used by millions of ordinary people means that Webkit meets the commenter's criteria and is a viable option as the basis for building a (perhaps yet-to-be conceived) Web browser.

This argument I can understand, and I'm torn between Firefox and Brave because of it. Maybe the best option for people like me is to use both. Or create a Brave-like browser with Gecko?

But what's the point of Gecko now? It's not like the 2000s where Firefox was still able to affect the browser landscape and drive development.

Google has become the web standards body, and Webkit/Blink are the only renderers that matter anymore. Mozilla doesn't have enough influence to change anything anymore, it just dies a little more every year as browser support for it decreases even further. It's already down to <5% marketshare, what's left for it but to die?

The only reason it "dies" is because people aren't using it. By using it, you help it to not "die."

By using Firefox you show web developers that they need to support you as a user, or risk losing your business. That in turn makes Mozilla influential.

People flocked from Netscape to IE because it was better. People flocked from IE to Phoenix/early Firefox because it was better. People flocked from Firefox to Chrome because it was better. People aren't flocking from Chrome back to Firefox because Firefox has gotten worse while Chrome has gotten better.

Why would I use something that most of the web doesn't support, is full of crapvertising, doesn't work seamlessly with my other Google services and Android, and on top of that, gets worse every year?

I opened it just now, just for kicks, and it's begging me to pin itself to my taskbar (even though I'm on a Mac). And the tab right behind the modal popup is a bigass advertising for some Mozilla VPN product. The New Tab below that is a grid of six more ads from something called Pocket.

How the hell did it get so bad? At this point I'd rather just see Firefox die entirely, or be made into another Chromium reskin. It's just malware these days.

> People flocked from Firefox to Chrome because it was better.

This part isn’t entirely true. One large and influential reason why people switched to Chrome was because every Google search result page and many other pages on Google properties heavily and prominently advertised Chrome. Chrome was also bundled with some other third party software. Chrome may have been better in its initial years than Firefox, but that wasn’t the main trigger for people to switch.

For most people, the default browser installed with their OS is what they’d use unless they’re sold another browser or they know that another browser is what works for them.

The ads is just Firefox trying to become independent from the Google money flow. I don't like it either but at least they're not tracking.

They should just charge a fiver a month for Firefox Sync IMO. It's a valuable feature. I have no need for pocket and VPN.

But the web works just fine on FF. I have no issues with it save for the odd site that just blocks it. If I ever have problems it's always due to my extensive adblocking.

You call Firefox malware, but use Google services?

Google services are deeply invasive, but also tremendously useful. It's a tradeoff.

Firefox ads are just pure spam.

All Firefox ads can be turned off. You can very quickly remove Pocket from new tab pages.

Meanwhile, Firefox is providing useful features like tab containers and Facebook container that are not replicable in Chrome even with extensions.

When you use Chrome you're using a browser made by an advertisement COMPANY. Every time you Google search you are looking at Google ads, and Chrome itself integrates with Google search and other services so that users feel like they are missing out if they decide to choose an alternative.

The entire purpose of Chrome is to lock you into Google services, Android, and make it just that much more convenient to use Google products for everything you do.

But somehow, the independent alternative run by an actual non-profit is worse because they dared to try and monetize their product, in a unintrusive and fully optional way. No, it'd be better if we all subscribe to Google's information dragnet, because that's "free" and has "no ads."

You know, kudos to Mozilla for trying so hard... but Google is just better at it. shrug. By all means, they can keep fighting that losing battle if they want, but the world has already moved on and forgotten them. Nobody cares anymore except a tiny niche on here and what's left on slashdot.

Maybe the ideology of it is really important to you. To me it's just a browser, and not worth fiddling with. Chrome does one thing really well, and that's getting out of my way. Firefox constantly interrupts, whatever the reason. I don't really care if they're struggling, sorry. Maybe that's an indication of their plummeting value to society. It's just not a useful product for most of the world anymore. If they can't afford to keep the lights on, maybe they could go the Brave or Opera route and make it a Chromium reskin without the Googly bits, and deprecate Gecko altogether. Maybe Firefox has some value as a nonprofit browser, but Gecko, as far as I can tell, does not -- to me and to most of the world.

Besides, it's not like the internet is any more open with Firefox... 90% of the content is just served from like 5 huge tech companies anyway. Third party tracking is less significant when all the first parties track everything directly and they host most of the content to begin with. And at the end of the day, the internet is just a time-waster full of crap, not some beautiful ideological hill for humanity to die on. We already lost that battle in the 2000s, and capitalism won.

As for Google, I already don't see any Google ads anywhere. The only effect I notice from their dragnet is that my Google News feed is annoyingly based on my browsing habits, which is unfortunate indeed. Other than that, Chrome is wonderfully unnoticeable... YMMV may vary, of course. And if they deploy those changes to the extension model and break uBlock, sure, I'll consider another browser. Probably Safari or Brave. Still not worth the hassle of Firefox.

Choose whatever browser you want, I just think it's disingenuous for you to claim that Firefox "constantly interrupts."

It absolutely does not do that.

It absolutely has every time I've launched it in the last 5-10 years.

Because you only launch it every once in a while, because it's not your preferred browser. So, every time you launch it it's installing an update.

Having some kind of message when you update is not abnormal.

> Having some kind of message when you update is not abnormal.

But having new adware every time IS abnormal. When any other modern browser* self-updates, it does so unobtrusively. Maaaaaaaaybe (very rarely) opens a new tab with a changelog -- even that's rare, though. I don't get that issue when I reopen Safari once in a while, despite never using that either.

With Firefox, there's always some new adware being shilled. It decreases trustworthiness a lot. Every time I open it, I can't help but be turned off by wondering what new shady partnership they've joined this time, or what terrible UX change they've decided to unilaterally implement because they have too many designers with time on their hands.

The whole Mozilla operation went from "let's make a really lean and mean engineering powerhouse browser" to "incompetent technocracy with too many people and not enough vision". It's just a mess. The new anti-features they keep adding aren't useful to anyone except maybe their execs... every new release is a desperate, flailing attempt at relevance instead of core improvements. The LAST thing I want is a new browser experience every few months. Just let me check my email and get out of my way, damn it.

*Except maybe Edge? Haven't used that in a while, understand it's gotten pretty intrusive lately too.

I moved from Chrome to Firefox a year ago, because:

1) Multi-account containers - open each tab in an isolated container with its own session cookies etc. Use case? Login to multiple Google/Azure/AWS/etc accounts at the same time on different tabs. This is a game-changer if you have to login to multiple cloud accounts because you work for a multinational and each subsidiary you support is on a different tenant.

2) Firefox Lockwise - (though they are deprecating this on Dec 13) standalone password manager that syncs with Firefox's passwords, and which works on any iOS browser/password window. (I would use Keychain except I don't use Mac desktops).

There are some downsides:

1) Some plugins don't exist on Firefox (e.g. Language Learning with Netflix), and those that do don't compare well to their Chrome cousins (Google Translate -- doesn't do popup translations). Most mainstream plugins however work extremely well (uBlock Origin etc.)

2) Some pages don't render because webpage author targets Chrome (but this is very very very tiny % of pages that one would normally encounter -- I encounter them because of poor web authoring practices on the company intranet).

The render/Javascript performance is pretty darned good. Benchmarks say it is hair slower than Chrom(ium), but in practice, it's pretty snappy even on older hardware (I run Linux on a 2014 Dell) so I'd say it's a non-issue.

Also, one more thing to note, uBlock Origin works better in Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

> 2) Firefox Lockwise - (though they are deprecating this on Dec 13) standalone password manager that syncs with Firefox's passwords, and which works on any iOS browser/password window. (I would use Keychain except I don't use Mac desktops).

Deprecated only in that it's being integrated with Firefox on iOS and Android, which (at least on iOS) will then show up as a valid password provider...

Bitwarden's firefox plugin has been flawless for me.

Bitwarden on firefox buggy as hell for me, it does not autofill (except using shortcuts) and does not work on private nav ...

> does not work on private nav

Did you enable it? Firefox requires you to opt-in to any extensions running in private browsing (there’s a checkbox in the pop up that appears when you install them, and also on the add on preferences page).

>>1) Multi-account containers - open each tab in an isolated container with its own session cookies etc.

I also like having separate profiles for stuff like banking, browsing, shopping, gmail, etc. You can combine this with containers and 'force open in container' setting.

Yeah https://business.apple.com is an example of a site that explicitly blocks Firefox. If it was just some indie web dev with no time to spare i could understand...

That's shocking. Why would it do this?

Well it hides website ads, which is fine, but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not.

It has a history of injecting its own affiliate codes into your URLs.

It has a history of accepting "donations" for people who cannot claim them, and pretending to represent those people.

Many of their more egregious issues have been "fixed", but the pattern is clear. Their CEO provided institutional support to the proposition 8 campaign (to ban same-sex marriage), and they get consistent placements on the far-right's pet hardware projects.

I'm not here to promote Firefox (indeed, I use Safari and, on Linux boxes, Falkon), but no-one should be supporting Brave.

What are "the far-right's pet hardware projects"?

We shouldn't use Brave because the CEO, not the company, has a particular political (and moral) position you don't approve of - one which has no chance in hell of ever becoming law. This is the guy who invented JavaScript, should we also stop using that? Are you saying he's a neo nazi or neo nazi sympathizer?

I noticed that Mozilla is making decisions that work against cryptocurrencies, while Brave is embracing them. Does that have anything to do with your dislike of Brave?

The "Freedom Phone" is one of the more high profile examples.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/06/technology/freedom-phone-...

As for Javascript, hopefully the difference between an abstract programming language he doesn't have total control over and a closed-sourced software project that handles your personal data on a daily basis is obvious.

Oh, we should fear the fascist underpinnings of a "privacy focused" phone with an "uncensorable app store" designed by a yuppie who has no idea what he's doing.

Are you being serious?

I was expecting some kind of phone that blocks certain political viewpoints and reports your location and activities to the authorities.

You do understand that Brave's philosophy is based on the utopian (maybe naïve,IMHO) idea of fair profit distribution and automatic revenue share, right? And thus as "left" as it can be if we are going for the political spectrum.

Also have you boycotted Javascript-related tech already? Because its founder was a big part of its development...

I feel like I would use Vivaldi before I did Brave.

At least Vivaldi has a different philosophy for what a browser should be which justifies using it.

I’m not sure what Brave adds to the mix other than schemes to make money for themselves.

>but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not.

To be clear, the software pops up OS level ad notifications, whether you visit sites with ads to block or not. The two features are independent of each other.

It may still be a gray area, but its unfair to paint it as what its not.

Doesn’t the user have to specifically turn that option on?

I was replying to

>but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not.

While conceptually sure they offer ad replacement, technically they sort of dont. Ads support their product, and their product blocks ads. You can turn off the support ads, you can turn off ad blocking. They are two independent unrelated features.

Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution. This is very bad for guaranteeing a healthy competition on the market, it creates an enormous walled garden.

Firefox is truly multiplatform, open source, committed to privacy, security and an open web and Mozilla is an authority on these topics. Sure, they're not perfect, but so far they proved to do a great job most of the time. Firefox is updated, alive and vibrant, very performant, welcoming and produces the ONLY remaining alternative to Microsoft/Apple/Google's joint effort to own the web with Chrome.

> Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution.

Good. The Basic Attention Token is meant to take the power away from adtech by making ads less intrusive and establishing a market directly between content consumers and content creators, cutting out the advertising middleman. The safe ads can eventually be completely removed from the transaction, as users can fund their BAT wallets instead of seeing ads, and support the creators they want directly.

There's a lot to dislike about Brave Inc., but the BAT is the only scalable solution to the ad-infested web we have today. Yes, Brave Inc. makes a profit from this (and other arguably shady means), but this is a far more consumer friendly way of supporting a browser vendor than the established alternatives.

Please read https://basicattentiontoken.org/

"Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution. This is very bad for guaranteeing a healthy competition on the market, it creates an enormous walled garden."

So has anyone using an Adblock in the past 20 years. Also what do Ads have to do with market competition? And what is "toxic" about having a browser that promotes alternative revenue models?

I'd argue the worse "toxic business model" is the advertising model you're advocating for. I'm not saying Brave's solution is correct, but I'm glad someone is at least trying something different.

Sure I hate ads as well, but Brave's proposal is just making it worse. It's like a different incarnation of Facebook.

To me it's not the advertising that's wrong or bad per se. It's the tracking. The personal privacy violations. That's what I find toxic and ultimately unethical.

Killing off the competition? Enormous walled garden? If that is Brave's business model, it's a delusional pipe dream. Brave trying to kill Google, or even merely match with the scale of Google's garden let alone surpass it, is like trying to cool down a volcano by pissing into it. The scale discrepancy between these two organizations is off the charts.

The browser is a user agent. In this case, the user has decided that the ads Brave serves are better than the original ones on the website (otherwise they would't use this browser). Why is that so bad?

Although I don't wish to participate in it, I find Brave's business model an interesting pro-user take on the problem of a toxic industry. Calling _Brave_ toxic is a weird turnaround of the facts.

I use Firefox. Honestly, some sites are broken, like my brokerage account and Zillow. Having uBlock work at blocking 100% of known-bad requests is worth it to me. Chrome only blocks something like 60% due to the asynchronous nature of the extension API.

> Chrome only blocks something like 60% due to the asynchronous nature of the extension API.

Let's not kid ourselves. This is clearly a 100% deliberate design decision, aimed at making content blockers less effective. This has nothing to do with the API being asynchronous. It is just the excuse Google went with.

On my smartphone uBlock Origin adds ~10 seconds in startup delay, which is fairly annoying. Having the Adblock be asynchronous but the browser start a lot faster would be an reasonable trade-off for me.

I didn’t express an opinion on the motivation for the API, I just mentioned why uBlock doesn’t work as well.

> Can anyone sell me on/off this idea?

It's open source Free Software so if you try it and don't like it you can switch back with no loss? Personally I've never used anything but Mozilla since the days of the Suite 1.0 milestones, through Camino (RIP) on OS X, through Firefox today. Nothing else has as nice a UI as Firefox + Tree Style Tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I use Firefox as my main browser, and have done so for years now. I really like it, I've had no problems with it, and I like the fact that it's the only major non-Webkit browser.

"The only major non-WebKit browser", if it exists, is a title that would have to go to Chrome, and it would require you to consider Firefox a "minor non-WebKit browser". At <5% (on par with Opera circa 2012), that wouldn't necessarily be an inaccurate way to describe it.

Biggest advantage for me is the container tabs. One clicka nd I can be logged into the same service as 3 different users (regular account, test account, admin account) plus puts a firewall between work stuff and personal stuff.

Really love the container tabs.

I never used this feature personally. Do you think it’s better than a separate profile which you can launch with -p flag or a profile switcher extension?

It's a ux improvement over manually managing profiles. You can tell it to always open certain tabs in their own containers for example, or you can reopen your current page in a new container all from the same browser window

never got into Brave because I found their growth-hacking techniques to piggyback on gullible crypto-bros coin-peddling highly questionable, perhaps even predatory if you get randos believe that they can earn money by clicking on ads. https://twitter.com/NoNameGladiator/status/12589167028063682...

they disappeared from my radar the moment they mentioned tokens.

It's simple, do you want to contribute to the Webkit dominance or would you like to support the last remaining engine not in the hands of Google (or Apple if you happen to use their hardware)?

For me the answer will be Firefox as long as it's a thing and I have no intention of switching to any Chromium derivatives.

> do you want to contribute to the Webkit dominance

There is no WebKit dominance. This is not 2012. WebKit, used in Safari et al, accounts for <20% of browser usage. The majority comes from Chrome, which uses Blink.

(Every time you conflate WebKit and Blink, you harm the cause you're ostensibly pledging yourself to.)

I am in the same boat and I was just thinking about it after upgrading to a Mac M1 pro. One plus point for Firefox is the dev tools, especially for grid and flex.

Like others have already written: Firefox is the most effective at suppressing ads, _with the uBlock Origin extension_. Ironic that most of Mozilla's funding comes from ad king Google. M's corporate leadership has really driven the project into the ground, and still... Firefox is the only browser that makes mobile Internet usable for me, and so I stick with it everywhere to take advantage of sync for bookmarks (bookmarks being something that someone with influence at M must really hate).

Brave's credulous promotion of crypto currency turned me off, as did what I perceived to be a terrible UI design (being a long time Mozilla user, back to the days of Netscape Navigator 1.0, my bar is clearly set pretty low).

The fact that I can't have a new tab open with a list of all my bookmarks on Fennec is still just ludicrous.

What's the problem with bookmarks, Mozilla??

I find the way Firefox handles displaying lots of tabs in the top bar really intuitive - instead of trying to cram them all within the width of your display they overflow, allowing you to scroll through them while still being able to see favicons and some title text. Can’t remember if Brave uses the same approach as Chrome for this

Also if you’re hardcore about managing your tabs I hear people swear by tree-style tabs https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Chrome has seen have an option for fixed width Tabs along with Tab overflow.

But yes in terms of Super lots of tabs Firefox still wins in terms of resource usage and UX.

Does Brave have the resources to maintain a fork of Chromium once upstream moves to Manifest v3 (which would kneecap uBlock origin)?

Probably mentioned here but its UI customization is pretty much limited to your css skill. You can go dense as much as you want or elegant with much paddings as usual. I tried almost every chromium variants but can't bear the touch friendly paddings and scaling.

I was a Brave hardcore user but decided to just try Firefox again and really liking it so far.

Can't really say why though, it just feels nice. For extensions, Multi account containers and uBlock origin are nice. You can also hook up the containers with proxies so that when you're in container A, all sites in that container get loaded over that proxy connection.

But there wasn't a killer feature in Brave that kept me there, and there also isn't a killer feature in Firefox that's keeping me here though

> I can't remember why I moved from Firefox to Brave.

You moved from Firefox to Brave because of the cosmetic change that made tabs look like buttons, detached from the content it's associated with. There were many other straws (random freezing, memory bloat etc.) but that was the last straw that broke the camel's back. You tried Brave, and found that it offers pretty much anything you'd expect from a web browser.

I use them all for specific purposes.

My desktop doesn't feature dark mode switching, so Firefox since version 95 is in dark mode all the time without any option to change it to light mode anywhere, not even in about:config. Since when is dark mode a reasonable default?

This is the update I've been waiting for since the pandemic started!

It no longer turns my MacBook into a toaster when I'm on a video call. (=

It used to jack the power usage metric up to like 100, now it's more aligned with Chrome or Safari even when I do video calls.

Thanks!

> We’ve also reduced the power usage of software decoded video on macOS, especially in fullscreen. This includes streaming sites such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

Thank god. This has been a real problem.

I wonder why hardware decoding isn't used for those sites though.

The Widevine CDM is responsible for decoding the video, and on desktop platforms so far only software-based DRM is supported, though they're planning to introduce hardware DRM for Widevine on desktop soon, which would enable higher quality streaming and possibly also hardware acceleration.

So far they're only planning to support this on Windows 10 and above, maybe macOS support will come at a later date, but Linux users will almost certainly be left in the dust, considering they already don't support VMP (Verified Media Path) on Linux, resulting in many streaming services limiting video quality to SD or blocking streaming on Linux altogether.

> We’ve added a User Agent override for Slack.com, which allows Firefox users to use more Call features and have access to Huddles.

So now `window.navigator.vendor` returns "Google Inc." if your URL matches `://app.slack.com/`. LOL.

https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/eea0fac2cb8cae1e5a...

There's a list of UA overrides and other hardcoded website patches in about:compat.

The things you learn. The damn CDC Covid tracker won't open in Firefox. It feels like not following open standards for cross compatibility is a dereliction of duty for government agencies, let alone the official tracking app during a pandemic.

Opera 12, with the Presto engine, had this same problem. It had a huge list of overrides (JavaScript and CSS) to fix problems with popular websites.

This is inevitable when a browser has limited market share.

Wow, what a collection of hacks. It reminds me of the efforts Microsoft goes to so that old programs keep working on Windows.

I think in both cases it was less hack and more getting around browser sniffing code that makes outdated or incorrect assumptions.

Please don't browser-sniff, use feature detection instead. The web platform is standards-driven, not browser-driven -- let's keep it that way :)

I'm sympathetic to the need to do this, just admiring the kludges. It's not just user agent spoofing; some of the compatibility hacks seem to be modifying CSS of websites.

Kind of interesting that they don't even mention talking to Slack about just removing the check ...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1727100

They tried but Slack weren't interested. Update from 2 years ago

To summarize my current understanding: Slack's video conferencing service only support Chrome's non-standard Plan B format for WebRTC calls. And our attempts to talk to Slack about changing that were kindly rejected (we met with them shortly after they had launched the calling feature). And my repeated questions in public events about adding Firefox support were also turned down.

Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1626121#c4

Further clarification from last year https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1626121#c10

I have seen people mention that they have tried few more times to contact them, but Slack weren't interested.

My understanding as to why it works now, correct me if I am wrong, is because of Slack moving to using AWS Chime SDK for calls which has Firefox support and just faking the UA to Chrome tricks Slack into loads the necessary SDK/JS for calls and Chime SDK takes care of the rest.

Such kind of attitude from Slack is disgusting.

I'm very confused - if it's working on Firefox with the Chime SDK, what good reason is there for Slack to block the feature on Firefox?

Is there some political reason for them to disadvantage Firefox that I'm not aware of?

When Slack launched video calls, it was using Chrome's own implementation of WebRTC which is called Plan B. So it worked in both their app which is electron based and Chrome. Not sure if it worked with chromium derivatives like Brave, Vivaldi, etc.

Firefox rolled out the standard based WebRTC implementation and chrome eventually did as well, but companies like Slack and various others didn't migrate instead just threw an error message saying calling isn't supported in Firefox and instead use their app or chrome.

Since Slack's partnership with AWS about 2 years ago, they migrated from their own call infrastructure to using AWS's Chime. Chime SDK has support for all major browsers https://docs.aws.amazon.com/chime/latest/dg/meetings-sdk.htm...

But their browser check still remains today and Mozilla started to spoof the user agent as a workaround so that Firefox users can make calls as Slack aren't willing to remove the check or properly add support.

Chrome is planning to remove WebRTC plan B soon, so this should force companies to use the unified WebRTC implementation and hopefully means Firefox support. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/IY2am...

Thank you

Sadly, this behavior is somewhat common for many sites that block firefox based on the user agent. At least form some webcompat bug issues I've looked at.

Slack is very nasty in how they refused to support proper WebRTC.

I wonder why they bother with user-agents in the first place. It's more of a fingerprinting vector than anything else, especially considering Firefox's browser marketshare.

Just hardcode it to Chrome's once and for all.

Sometimes browsers have bugs that cannot be identified with feature detection, in which case the user agent is all we have to know when to work around those bugs.

I feel like with the modern rate of browser development by the time you have identified and fixed the bug the fix may no longer be relevant

This^

I like Firefox, but it's the only browser to blindly follow the questionable and backwards incompatible parts of the SVG-2 spec... I challenge anyone to identify that SVG-2 <use> is implemented instead of SVG-1 <use> without parsing the useragent string.

The former is backwards incompatible (implemented in Firefox) and will render some nice black shapes if you've previously relied upon target context CSS rules for inheritance that have been supported by SVG-1 for the last decade. AFAIK you can only see this in the output since the inside of the <use> element is a shadow DOM inaccessible to JavaScript, so you cannot determine computed styles. For this reason I wrote an "unpolyfill" [0] that implements some of SVG-1 <use> elements with mutation-observers in JS, albeit in a not 100% correct way. Even so, it still needs to be explicitly enabled, depending one something else to parse the useragent string.

We enjoy far more consistency than a decade ago, but browsers are incredibly complex, and there will no doubt continue to be obscure differences that are difficult or impossible to detect programmatically. Rendering differences most of all.

[0] https://github.com/ThomasBrierley/svg2use-unpolyfill

Heh, user-agents have been like that since the start. Almost all modern browsers start their user-agent with "Mozilla/", so we are back to the beginning in that regard. And naturally it is for the same reasons too!

The big wheel of `User-Agent: Mozilla` has finally turned.

Quirks Mode 2.0

You can't make this shit up O_O

What's so unbelievable about faking something to get an app that works perfectly fine on your browser to stop refusing to work on your browser?

I think he's talking about the fact that they had to do that at all.

In that case, what's unbelievable about a developer phoning feature detection in and just using the user-agent string? :P

Is it possible to detect the format of the webrtc video? That sounds difficult anyway.

Blame slack.

This.

Does it run on Windows 95 though?

The best you can probably do on plain Win95 is K-Meleon 1.6 (2010) http://kmeleonbrowser.org/wiki/KMeleon16

With installation of KernelEx you can try K-Meleon 74 or Opera 12:

https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2018/05/k-meleon-74...

http://kernelex.sourceforge.net/wiki/Opera

IIRC K-Meleon predated Firefox / Phoenix 0.1 and was the (or one of the) original minimal gecko-based browers. It filled an interesting niche at least for me at the time in being a capable, open-source, Windows-native browser when IE had already started to dominate + bloat and Netscape / Seamonkey was also quite heavy in resource usage. Plus I think it had tabs.

cool to see it's still getting new releases!

Been a long time since I saw someone using Win95. What's the reasoning?

Yeah it does.

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