The problem is there are almost 0 alternatives beyond Firefox so if you don’t like their UX you’re stuck. All the “new” browsers are just chromium skins (edge, arc, etc.) Are there any real competitors building a new browser?
Sometimes it feels like "Sure, Chrome sold my kids data to human traffickers. But I can't switch to Firefox because I really _need_ MIDI-2 over websocket support"
Sure, FF is not perfect but a lot of issues is due to sites being optimised for webkit and that will not change as long as Chrome has 80% marketshare. You need to sacrifice a little for freedom.
And herein lies the rub. 20% of people, at best, will sacrifice convenience for freedom.
Firefox and Chrome overtook IE because they were move convenient to use (Firefox had tabs and extensions, Chrome had a more reliable multi-process architecture and more CSS/JS/... features faster).
I use Ungoogled Chromium.
For starters, recent Firefox versions do proper process isolation per domain, similar to Chrome, which has long been claimed to be the primary security benefit of Chrome-based browsers.
In addition, the Firefox codebase is partially rewritten in Rust. This effort is incomplete and likely always will be, but it's still significant. Keep in mind that according to Google, 70% of security vulnerabilities in Chrome are related to memory unsafety!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18117216
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442618
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014968
These days the big ones for me are profile switching and the things leaked between containers.
Safari ended up being JPEG-XL’s unlikely champion.
I kind of wished Apple would release Safari for other platforms again.
> AVIF has an image resolution limit of 65536 x 65536 pixels.
but from https://tonisagrista.com/blog/2023/jpegxl-vs-avif/
> Max image size is limited to 4K (3840x2160) in AVIF, which is a deal breaker to me. You can tile images, but seams are visible at the edges,
> WebP also has a hard limit to an image's frame size, with its maximum dimension being 16,383 x 16,383
> WebP supports a max bit depth of 8-bit
> AVIF flexes a max bit depth of 10
Jpeg XL has progressive rendering support https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/09/using-saliency-in-...
AVIF spec doesn't (although it might gain it: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=122171...)
JPEG-XL manages to be more efficient than other current formats: https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-how-it-started-how-its-g...
All of that while being a good all-around image format (rather than a specialized one like webp and avif): same format for web, photos, raw photos, etc. To me, this makes it the most noteworthy image format now.
let alone normal users
JPEG-XL includes features and performance that might differentiate it from other formats, but the benefits it provides are not significant enough on their own to justify the cost of adding another raster image format to the Web.
There is nothing neutral about supporting one format and not supporting another.
If it were people wouldn't be pushing for JPEG-XL.
I'm not going to repeat the advantages of JEPG-XL - plenty of posts on that already.
For some bizarre reason, Mozilla chooses to back the other format - release Firefox can display AVIF right now - while leaving JPEG-XL stuck behind a flag in a Nightly.
It's barely maintained even on their own platforms. If they could stabilize and not break localStorage, indexdb or forms every other week, that would already be a great start before thinking of other platforms.
That is really an absurd claim. Check the webkit blog.
I've been a long time Firefox user, but the UI/UX has stagnated (like all browsers) for so long. I'm enjoying using Arc at the moment because it's rethinking a lot of things that bug me about the traditional browser UI paradigm but I also know that it's a trendy startup that could either: explode, decide to change features radically at the drop of a hat (pivot), or simple do something distasteful to please investors.
Extensions technically fill in the gap on the Firefox side, like Containers, but the UX is just an afterthought.
Google is the plugin on Chrome. If you unwittingly walk blindfold into using it on say Android etc. You'll have all that Google stuff activated, and it's a real boon. Difficult to give up. Heck hard enough to sign out. You unknowingly can sign in.
Yeah there are different options, and yeah there are extensions. But why would I install an extension that basically says it can spy on every tab in my browser? And why would I even trust Google in my browser?
What some people call "stagnation", others call "stability".
No, sadly it does not. And then I would be just dependant on mozillas leadership and sadly I do not trust them either.
Ladybird and Kling I would trust, but it is not advanced enough yet. But they are making progress!
"What features do you need that only Chromium can give you?"
WebGPU and sone features with webworkers.
As for the tracking - I'm pretty sure Firefox blocks a lot of those by default, last time I checked it was plastered all across their homepage. It's not 100% effective, but if them making an effort to do the right thing pushes you away, you might be asking too much unfortunately. Building an entire browser takes a lot of energy and time, and Firefox seems like the kind of browser that's worth it in the long term.
Game engine.
"As for the tracking - I'm pretty sure Firefox blocks a lot of those by default, last time I checked it was plastered all across their homepage"
And the thing is, that firefox itself is tracking you and sends that data home. Maybe look up what "studies" mean. But so far at least you can opt out of it, unlike with chrome.
But firefox studies means, (or can mean), that firefox will track you and sell that data to ad companies, if you "allow" it. Which everyone does, by default. This behavior from a "privacy orientated" company is close to a scam by me. Because a normal user who believes the privacy promise, won't know of, nor find these settings.
And apparently now there is a third setting(on Firefox mobile, but not on desktop), that at least openly tells you they share tracking data with a ad companies.
edit: ok, that is weirdly funny. "Adjust" the ad company firefox is apparently working together with, has a website, that does not really load in firefox at all, but only in chrome
There is a switch with "marketing data".
And as far as I understood, this thing came out of "Firefox studies". They branded it as experiments, but I have not seen a experiment not related to tracking. Most famously the Mr.Robo scandal, but that only gained visibility, because it was visible. Others just ran in the background. But you should be able to look, what kind of "studies" did run on your computer.
That, crypto, and the Mr.Robot extension fiasco burned a _lot_ of goodwill.
I hadn't heard about the Mr.Robot fiasco, that's seriously troubling..
If a feature is rolled out to 95% of users, then websites have to adapt. If you have a browser and are part of these remaining 5% you will be the one blamed by the users and by the websites. So there is no incentive to remove any hostile feature.
If there isn't another option, you're stuck. We open ourselves up to horrific effects of browser monopolies like all the security issues that Microsoft didn't give a damn about back when internet explorer had a monopoly. It takes effort to switch to a different browser stack, like moving away from Chromium for example, but in the long term you do not want everyone stuck with only one option, because that will be even more costly.
yes you'll have the source, but it won't remotely attest unless you're Google/MS
so it is effectively closed source
- use youtube
- watch "premium" video content (disney/netflix/...)
- use online banking
- visit sites with adwords
but you're missing the entire point
if brave doesn't implement WEI then brave ceases to be a functional web browser
it will have voluntarily removed itself from the market
Over time, AOSP became harder and harder to build this feature back in to. AOSP (and Chromium) is Open Source in name only. One may view, download, and build the source, but maintaining modifications long-term isn't feasible without massive amounts of dev time and/or cash.
Brave, for all their talk, are at Google's mercy.
And no, don't give me "but Chromium isn't just Google anymore": it is 90% Google.
On the other hand, didn't he start the whole thing after getting kicked out of Mozilla?
At the origin, Brave was supposed to be an adware that replaces the ads of the website with theirs.
Just pick your poison but all browser developers need money to live.
The only way to be sure a browser works in your best interest would be if you accept to pay, and nobody wants to do that.
See what has happened with Neeva.
The main reason I moved to Brave is Firefox's bizarre updating model on Ubuntu which causes it to randomly shutdown all the time. Plus on Android, brave just blocks a ton off ads, that firefox doesn't without extensions and fiddling about.
From my perspective it seems that the current FF CEO basically did a hostile takeover of Firefox, that involved maximising their personal wages. Firefox is absolutely for profit, the $millions the CEO takes is ridiculous. I read that they got a personal stipend from Google too, but I've not been able to confirm that. Maybe you're confusing them with the Mozilla Foundation. The way they structure things so you can't donate to engineering on Firefox is skeevy, far worse than a system designed to enable content owners to get paid.
I was a supporter/promoter of FF for 18 years, fwiw.
So you might as well be using Chrome.
Now you're backtracking to "just eroding trust". There's quite a gap there.
1) You provided that example directly in response to the question "Can you show some sources for how Brave is scamming people out of privacy".
2) That example, I think we agree, is explicitly NOT "scamming people out of privacy".
You're wrong. It's okay though. Just acknowledge that you misspoke, clarify what you were trying to say, and move on. No need to be childish.
AdGuard also offers a pi-hole-esque ad-blackhole that I deploy on my home network and it's got much better UX than pi-hole.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adblock-pro-safari-ad-blocker/...
I have zero issues with this setup.