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Comment by ajxs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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).

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.

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.

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