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Comment by circularfoyers | Hacker News Reader

I would suggest reading the lengthy discussion that was had regarding this feature in Firefox[1] before brazenly claiming it's an obsolete browser.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/194

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It's obsolete not because it lacks nuanced discussions, but because the world has moved on and left it behind. The Firefox team can argue all they want about whether they want to play catch up, but they're always playing catch up and getting further behind every year.

There's no such thing as web standards anymore, only what Chrome and Safari do.

Edit: I think that discussion is a good example. Reminds me of the Ents' council in LOTR that endlessly debated what to do while the battles were fought without them. Firefox is just living in its own little bubble. The rest of the world keeps lurching forward under the Apple-Google duopoly, and Firefox gets more irrelevant every year. It was once a glorious challenger, now it's just a forgotten has-been celebrated only by ideologues and purists. I wish they'd give up on Gecko and just officially work on Chromium to make that better instead.

I think the issue is that even if Mozilla did do that, to achieve the same level of configurability for privacy and security, in ways that the user.js and all it's options offer, or with the many objections they've had to new standards, they would end up needing to fork Chromium to a point where it might become debatable whether the effort was worth it in the first place.

I don't think enough users care about a lot of the values offered by Firefox, and simply use whatever is the default or what most people they know use. If anti-competitive laws force vendors to provide users with a choice, I think this could hopefully give Firefox more of a fighting chance. I think it's important there are options like this that exist, even if they are small, because they provide for the needs of Tor Browsers users for example. Where there are no other browsers that match the anti-fingerprinting features that Firefox offers and which Tor users require.

> I think the issue is that even if Mozilla did do that, to achieve the same level of configurability for privacy and security, in ways that the user.js and all it's options offer, or with the many objections they've had to new standards, they would end up needing to fork Chromium to a point where it might become debatable whether the effort was worth it in the first place.

Yeah. That's basically what happened with Blink/Webkit. But that chasm is narrower than Gecko/anything, since at least they share a common heritage. And with Chromium, we already have Chromium/Brave/Opera/Edge/Samsung/Silk/Vivaldi/etc., all of which have fewer problems than the entirely separate Gecko, to say nothing of SpiderMonkey vs V8 & Node.

A browser is more than just the renderer, as those alternatives have shown. The world might need an underdog nonprofit browser, but it doesn't need an alternative renderer.

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