Hacker News Reader

Comment by kemotep | Hacker News Reader

It is increasingly frustrating but in my opinion Firefox is the only usable browser. The ads and other nonsense, despite being pushed out often, are still user controllable and once configured, I have always had my settings honored. You cannot say the same about Edge and if app manifest v3 actually does what people say does, Chrome will essentially be undergoing the same cut off of extension capabilities that Firefox Quantum did years ago but even worst.

View on HN

once configured, I have always had my settings honored

totally different experience, FF ESR decided to update itself just the other day and break a bunch of stuff out of the blue, because of course moz://a knows better what I need and when I need it. It is very sad people like me need to put up with this abusive behaviour because the alternatives are worse

Do you have an example? I would like to double check my own browser to see if anything has been changed without my knowledge or permission.

You mean besides the forced update? Unfortunately not much I can help with, in my case I was deliberately running ESR 78.14.0 which was force updated to ESR 102.11.0 on May 26 and later 102.12.0 on June 20 (setting is obviously 'Check for updates'). It was a pretty big change first, so I naturally tried to revert back as much as I could. However for example Google Image Search is broken again, clicking it simply crashes the tab (Gah. Your tab just crashed), which could be fixed by tweaking some options in the earlier version iirc. Unless moz://a managed to break it a different way this time

I remember when they rolled out DNS over HTTPs and set the default to "Fallback Mode" effectively highjacking DNS for most users.

Good times figuring out why users couldn't access certain sites after ignoring the vague opt-out message, good times.

>I have always had my settings honored

They disabled the setting to enable XUL extensions.

They disabled a bunch of extensions I had installed on firefox android.

They didn't disable the setting to enable XUL extensions, they rewrote the codebase to something that can't run XUL. And of all the changes in the past decade, that's actually one I'm 100% okay with, XUL was a hot mess that could do way more harm than any extension should have ever even in theory been able to do.

As long as FF doesn't buy into Manifest v3.

Which it will.

Because it will.

> of all the changes in the past decade, that's actually one I'm 100% okay with

I would have been OK with it if it didn't come with the loss of functionality.

There's "loss of functionality" and then there's "I am enjoying functionality that's due to an extention potentially taking over my system". More of the former, less of the latter please.

Fair enough! It means FF is the browser for you, and it's not the browser for me.

It will when they update their Manifesto to v3 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

I'm wary of Manifest v3, but like you say, it isn't a mandate yet. Is there any reason today why Chrome isn't usable? There's also Brave, which I love on Android.

It’s more or less ideological on my part. There being only 1 browser engine is something I would like to avoid. And unless Safari becomes available on Linux (or that Orion browser from the makers of Kagi), Firefox is the only other option. There is Librewolf and some other gecko based ones out there but other than the TOR browser, none of the others are large enough projects that I would trust with something as important as my Web Browser.

I support plenty of end users on Chrome and Edge at work and will happily oblige my wife by installing and configuring Chrome on all her devices. Firefox is what works for me and what I am comfortable using at this time. Unusable was certainly a hyperbole on my part.

Got it, thank you for explaining! :)

I've never used Linux full-time, but from my understanding, neither GNOME Web nor Konqueror are Blink-based. Are they missing critical power user features?

The lack or nonstandard support for extensions. But looking into it, I see that it looks like at least Gnome Web now can support extensions. Currently not using Gnome or KDE on my Linux install though.

Not sure if this helps, but according to Wikipedia:

> Despite being a component of GNOME, Web has no dependency on GNOME components, so it can be potentially installed on any system supporting GTK and WebKitGTK.

Do you want there to be only one browser, owned by a monopolist megacorporation that is striving for a world where everyone consuming ad 24/7 while having zero privacy? If so, use Chrome or its clones.

If not, your only way of fighting back is using Firefox and Safari, so that people still make websites that work in something else than Chrome and Google's monopoly isn't complete.

I'm fully empathetic to this argument, but IMO this wasn't clearly called out in GP's original post. It also doesn't meet my personal definition of "usable". "Ethical" might've been a better choice here.

> your only way of fighting back is using Firefox and Safari

Then I have no way of fighting back, because I don't use Apple machines and Firefox no longer meets my needs and I have significant performance problems with it.

Ephiphany (Gnome) web browser on Linux uses Apples' WebKit engine.

Over years I've found it really useful to accurately test web-page developments for Apple device compatibility on Linux distros without needing an Apple device or emulator.

That is not to imply the surrounding browser 'chrome' and UI is equivalent - but rendering certainly is close enough that most of the time pixel-accurate comparisons are valid.

Even Debian keeps up-to-date with latest webkit upstream. E.g. right now (Jul 5th 2023) Debian's libwebkit2gtk 2.40.2-1~deb12u1 (on Debian 12 Bookworm) shows this Changelog:

  webkit2gtk (2.40.2-1~deb12u1) bookworm-security; urgency=medium

    * Rebuild for bookworm-security.
    * The WebKitGTK security advisory WSA-2023-0004 lists the following
    security fixes in the latest versions of WebKitGTK:
      - CVE-2023-28204 and CVE-2023-32373 (fixed in 2.40.2).

   -- Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com>  Wed, 14 Jun 2023 11:00:05 +0200

  webkit2gtk (2.40.2-1) unstable; urgency=high

    * New upstream release.
    * debian/rules:
      - Pass -VNone to dh_makeshlibs for javascriptcore to keep the behavior
        of the debhelper compat level 11 and earlier.

 -- Alberto Garcia <berto@igalia.com>  Tue, 30 May 2023 10:19:01 +0200

Reply on news.ycombinator.com