Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider | Hacker News Reader

Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider

phoronix.com

850 pointsmarcodiego387 comments

Speaking from the perspective of a (former) V8 engineer, SunSpider is crappy benchmark, and I can't believe people still track it. It has misdirected JavaScript performance engineering work for going on 15 years now, leading to all kinds of weird contortions in JavaScript engines that do not benefit real world sites.

Years ago, V8 switched away from microbenchmarks for the most part. See:

https://benediktmeurer.de/2016/12/16/the-truth-about-traditi...

edit to add: Don't take the above to mean that Firefox's performance improvements aren't significant, and welcome. It's just that SunSpider is the absolute worst benchmark to look at.

I agree, but speaking as someone who's been using JS for computationally medium-intensive tasks: Firefox and Chrome don't differ that much. For most users, the difference is negligible.

The link you posted promotes Speedometer, where Firefox reportedly already surpassed Chrome.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883

Firefox tracks their performance across many different benchmarks. Here is the performance vs Chrome over the past year on many different ones. It is encouraging to see steady improvements being made on a substantial number of them over time.

https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=3...

It appears that Chrome still wins most of these. Even the touted Speedometer win has apparently been trumped by Chrome over the last couple of weeks. The competition doesn't stand still. Which is good, imagine if Firefox threw in the towel, Chrome would become IE 6 in short order.

Safari is faster than either across almost all dimensions, lighter on battery, nicer UI, better standards support generally than FF and even matches chrome for what I care about. It’s the clear best browser imo.

On Mac? Probably because only Safari has access to the private api's

Just compare the results from Windows and macOS.

Lol... Doesn't make any sense

No safari on Windows. And I don't have a Mac.

It sure does. Did you even open OPs link? There you can compare everything.

And no need for Safari on Windows since you can compare Firefox on Windows (where those 'private api's' are not protected by Apple) with Safari on macOS

Generally, no.

Safari is only well maintained on MacOS and iOS. That makes it a non-starter for most people.

More than half of US users run iOS or MacOS on one or more of their devices.

Less than 5% of people live in the US. Not sure how your statement is relevant to my statement about most people in general.

Which is irrelevant if 95+% of your users are coming from the US…

Unless you’re equally interested in non English speaking users then the global average is absolutely meaningless.

What matters to organizations is some subset of everyone and what their specific access looks like.

We're talking about web browsers. Pretty much everyone with a personal computer(including smartphones) needs one. The US makes no sense as a subset here. If we were discussing what markets for a company to target, then sure. But we're not, are we?

I and many people here abandoned Chrome, so it’s only relevant to me from a software development perspective.

In terms of software development a US specific audience isn’t uncommon. Local utilities and many government agencies etc just don’t care about foreign users.

> Unless you’re equally interested in non English speaking users then the global average is absolutely meaningless.

The US is not even the largest English speaking population, it’s India. Additionally, if a subset is to be chosen, why is this subset from the US? Why does it get to be the centre of the universe, especially for a general-use product like a web browser?

The point was it’s rare to care about global numbers, not that the US is the only meaningful subset.

As to why a US only subset may be reasonable vs a language specific subset, some US government agencies care about a global audience but many are US specific. They may have multiple languages because Americans aren’t all fluent in English.

The US is hardly representative. Globally, 25.3% of website visits happen from a device running iOS or MacOS. That's impressive, but still a mere quarter. Windows (29%) and Android (40%) each account for more users.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

Which isn’t actually relevant to any specific website as they all favor either some subset of users and generally a subset of their devices. Ie: Fewer than normal stack overflow users are coming in on cellphones let alone PlayStations.

You need to know your target audience, not simply lookup overall statistics. I’ve seen Windows make up less than 4% of all users and I’ve seen it be over 90%.

Statscounter is a popular statistics for platforma usage, but I strongly doubt that it is heavily biased. I've never found that any websites use statcounter (though I haven't aggressively investigated), and never found installation guide in Japanese. Perhaps is userbase biased to smaller websites on some countries?

I can run Chrome and Firefox on my Debian laptop and on my Android devices. How do I benchmark Safari there? I can't, so Safari is barely relevant to me. Nice to know that it's faster than the other two browsers on Macs, but I'm not very surprised. Apple should be able to integrate it with their hardware and OS more than Google and Mozilla.

Customization and freedom means Firefox is always the best for me.

How's the safari world of add-on's? Do you have tab containers? What about mobile? Can you block ads?

See also, significant regressions in Firefox's memory consumption: https://arewefastyet.com/mac/memory/overview?numDays=365

In general I’ve preferred Firefox’s lower memory usage than pure speed.

To be clear: we track it in the sense that we still have it running as part of old dashboards. It's cheap, and every so often it catches an unintended regression.

The SpiderMonkey team is very much on board with ignoring microbenchmarks. We care about Speedometer, because it correlates reasonably well with real-world performance. We pick and choose which parts of Jetstream2 we bother with. Anything older than that is strictly a measuring stick, rather than a target: it's nice when the numbers go up, but it will only happen as a side-effect of work we're doing for other reasons.

Notably, all the SunSpider wins on this graph are side-effects of Speedometer work we've been doing this year.

I understand the logic, but I never understood why we (and I mean, collectively, the JS VM engineers across the browser vendors) didn't just rewrite the benchmark (or fix it) and name it SunSpider 2. I suggested this many times. It's not that much code.

Presumably because replicating the mix of operations used in real react/jquery code all over the web accurately isn't trivial...

Yeah, I've been making this argument for years too.

Speedometer 3 is in the works, and it's moving in this direction. On multiple occasions we've done performance analysis of the latest draft version, noticed a particular chunk of code is hot, considered what it would take to optimize it, and then changed it because we don't think it reflects real-world usage.

EDIT: And I guess the answer for "why not fix SunSpider specifically?" is that once you've done the work to turn it into something worth optimizing, it no longer bears any resemblance to the original. It probably looks a lot more like Speedometer, honestly.

> EDIT: And I guess the answer for "why not fix SunSpider specifically?" is that once you've done the work to turn it into something worth optimizing, it no longer bears any resemblance to the original. It probably looks a lot more like Speedometer, honestly.

I get that, yeah, but superseding the old name is probably worth it though; the internet is full of people who never get the memo except via version numbers :)

I tongue-in-cheek proposed that we match the Sunspider ASTs in V8 and either make it infinitely fast or infinitely slow. Now that will kill a benchmark once and for all!

JSOP_SUNSPIDER was apparently a running joke back in the day inside SM.

This isn’t an agreement or disagreement:

Having benchmarks based on real-world sites seems like both a good and a bad idea.

Good for obvious reasons. Bad because it creates a feedback loop. People develop based on performance. Performance is improved based on what people develop.

Did you/your colleagues tackle this in some way?

Here's one example from 2016: https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance

In fairness, when sun spider was first released it did accurately reflect the core pain points in JS engines, as present on the web. That applied to V8 as well (though V8 introduced its own benchmark suite as well on release, it was overly focused on property access, and insufficiently on the parts of initial page load that sun spider just happened to cover).

Of course all of that was _15 years ago_, no benchmark from back then is really reflective of anything useful, and they are largely no longer valuable for anything other than catching regressions.

As the saying goes any compiler engineer can make their compiler the fastest if they know what the code is.

I only run Firefox on every computer and phone that I own. I'm extremely satisfied with its performance so far and sincerely hope they keep improving. My second alternative is Brave, just in case I can't use Firefox. My very last choice is Chromium. On Firefox I highly recommend these plugins:

AdNauseam: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/

Consent-O-Matic: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

Firefox Multi-Account containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

I don't care about cookies: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...

Edit: As mentioned below, avoid Consent-O-Matic unless you trust Avast.

Just so you know, "I don't care about cookies" was sold to Avast last year:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/avast_buys_i_dont_car...

There is a fork called "I still don't care about cookies" which is probably worth switching to unless you trust Avast:

https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies

Thanks for that and I wasn't aware it's owned by Avast. I'll switch to the one that you suggested!

Your edit makes no sense though, 'I don't care about cookies' is the tainted one, not Consent-O-Matic.

Oh yes, I made a mistake it's the one that you mentioned. I can't edit the post anymore :(

@dang, could you fix it?

> Firefox easily beating Chrome in this decade-old JavaScript benchmark

while also

> Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox

Big firefox fan here and it's kinda sad to read that

fwiw, https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6... tracks a number of benchmarks.

I wouldn't, firefox has less resources and faced an uphill battle for years. The fact that they keep improving regularly and significantly, even though late on some front is applaud worthy to me.

Can someone tell me how much Chrome has in terms of resources? Firefox, a company with one main product, has hundreds of millions of dollars coming in + millions in donations. That should pay for a sizeable engineering team.

Is the Chrome engineering team much larger? Is the V8 team larger than the SpiderMonkey team, significantly so?

Donations don't pay for Firefox development. Chromium is a bit more than Google these days. Mozilla's largest failure to date has been their inability to attract other significant corporate interest, which Google has done with Chromium

Drawing a precise boundary around "Chrome" is hard, since many people work on it part time, or are associated with tangentially related projects, like the skia graphics engine, v8 javascript engine, etc.

However, there were 767 unique authors who committed code direct to chromium in the last week:

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/pulse

And I would guess the Chrome team is probably 3-5x that, since many people may not be working on code, may not commit directly, or might be working on big things on branches and didn't commit anything this week. Also, that doesn't count work on external dependencies, which are counted as "autoroll bots".

3000 engineers * $200k average total comp = $600M. It's in the same ballpark as mozilla's total revenues.

Average total comp for an FAANG engineer in the US is more like $450k, and last time I heard numbers, Chrome and adjacent teams were more like 4,000 people.

Which average is that? Don't think it's median W2 income.

Yeah it seems a touch low. I'm not at one of the big boys and $200k is more like base salary then total comp. RSUs show up on a W2.

I guess Mozilla engineers are paid quite a bit less. They hire the people with a conscience, so don't need to pay the 'do evil' salary premium...

> However, there were 767 unique authors who committed code direct to chromium in the last week:

This also includes all people from outside the org (Google), right?

I found this but I think it's for Chrome? There are also things like v8 engine.

> The team consists of around 40 engineers, in addition to a number of PMs, test engineers, UX designers, researchers, and others. We built a lot of features in Chrome that are used by more than a billion people.) Feb 22, 2019

I don't really think it's fair to extrapolate github contributors into FTE employees paid by Google, let alone to throw out a '3-5x' number on top.

Manual inspection of todays commits shows that nearly all of them are @chromium.org email addresses, which usually means a google full time engineer. There are some from other companies (microsoft, intel, nvidia). None from random hobbyists that I saw.

OK and that makes perfect sense.

But then saying "therefor other days I expect those other engineers were @chromium", not so much. I expect that the vast majority of contributors are making ~1 commit and then never again.

It also doesn't take into account that the project is over a decade old and many people who have committed to it as FTEs are no longer doing so.

Unfortunately the money for within Mozilla is not that straightforward in favor of Firefox and I imagine I am not the only Firefox user who is incredibly annoyed with that. I'd rather send money to individual devs' Github Sponsors sounds than give Mozilla a donation the devs will never see a cent of.

Optimizing for benchmarks tends to not work all that well for real-world sites. I wouldn't worry about it.

And on macOS, Safari beats the pants off of Chrome by an even larger margin.

Safari only has to worry about one OS. Not just one OS but also a single line of hardware. Very easy to optimize for. It's why iPhones have tiny batteries compared to their competitors but still deliver competitive, and usually superior, battery life

Worth noting that SunSpider hasn't been updated since 2013. JetStream is more representative of modern JavaScript workloads, but the gap is also getting closer on that benchmark.

I'm working with the v8 engine and it's a minefield of de-optimizations and random slowdowns for things that you would not expect to be slow.

Exception handler structures can dramatically change performance characteristics of code. async/await is a real crapshoot -- sometimes promises are faster, sometimes async blocks are.

We can blame the poor specs for some slowdowns (why does `...` destructuring use iterators??), but I wonder if the v8 team is chasing benchmarks at the expense of real-world code that might not be so perfectly written.

> why does `...` use iterators??

If you couldn't use the iterator protocol, generators in particular would be a lot less powerful

I think the JS spec would have been better served with a different syntax for generator/iterator destructuring. Most code I've seen assumes that:

  [a, b, ...rest] = array

is implemented like this:

  a = array[0]
  b = array[1]
  rest = array[2...]

When instead it is a giant performance footgun to the point where it should only be used outside of performance critical code.

EDIT "next -> rest"

I don't assume it's implemented like "next = array[2...]". I don't even know what that means.

Sorry, I assumed that most people could understand the pseudocode syntax for a subarray operation. In Javascript, this is:

array.slice(2)

I understood it, without even thinking about it. In my opinion it's more elegant than the real syntax, and I didn't even realize it wasn't real JavaScript until this comment thread made me look again.

Is it not able to be specialized like that when the object is a (non-sparse) array? What is preventing engines from making that optimization?

It's possible. We have plans to do so. There are a bunch of finicky corner cases, though. For example, destructuring will call the `return` method of the iterator when it's done (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...), so we have to be careful if somebody has defined `return` on the Array iterator prototype. You can supply a default value when destructuring, which is lazily evaluated, so we have to be careful about arbitrary side-effects taking place in the middle of the destructuring. We need to be able to fall back to something less optimized if we suddenly see a generator, or a user-written iterator. And so on.

Fundamentally, it's the same thing that impedes most optimizations: there are hundreds of different patterns we could optimize, it takes a fair bit of thought to get it right, and we have finite resources, so we have to pick and choose. This particular pattern turns out to be idiomatic in a lot of React code, which is why we're looking at it now. (Or so people tell me; most JS I write is gross little testcases.)

Thanks for taking the time to drop these nuggets throughout the thread.

> but I wonder if the v8 team is chasing benchmarks at the expense of real-world code that might not be so perfectly written.

They aren't. V8's benchmark performance for this benchmark has been stagnant because they haven't cared about it for a long time. Firefox has an incentive to care about it (unfortunately) because even when a benchmark doesn't matter it still looks bad to be behind on it.

To be clear, Firefox doesn't care about this benchmark either. It just so happens that changes we made for Speedometer also improved our performance here, which is a fun coincidence but not important in the grand scheme of things.

(Speedometer is the benchmark that most closely approximates messy real-world code.)

Thanks for clarifying, that's interesting + good to know.

> but I wonder if the v8 team is chasing benchmarks at the expense of real-world code that might not be so perfectly written.

Isn't it the other way around? https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-performance

I recall there was some newer blogpost discussing this topic with numbers and examples but can't find it atm, maybe it was chromium/chrome team blog, maybe someone else can find it.

Given all the recent chatter about Chrome turning evil, I spent a few days polishing my Chrome extension (IPvFoo, for observing the IPv6 transition) to run properly on Firefox. Technically it's been available since 2017, but there were numerous compatibility bugs that I was hoping Firefox would fix eventually. I finally decided to just hack around the remaining ones, so Chrome/Firefox are now at feature parity from a common codebase:

https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo

Firefox with uBO is more than 100% faster than Chromium based browsers. uBO doesn't properly work on Chromium based browsers due to their limitations

>Firefox with uBO is more than 100% faster than Chromium based browsers. uBO doesn't properly work on Chromium based browsers due to their limitations

THIS.

The gain is real. Just tested with latest Speedometer 3.0 [1] (unreleased, but open source). Latest versions of the browser were used.

Firefox Nightly (Gecko) 11.6

Safari TP (WebKit) 11.4

Chrome Canary (Blink) 9.9

[1] https://github.com/WebKit/Speedometer

Honestly, for me Firefox is a second choice until their debugging tools match Chrome's and they tighten up their tab UI just a bit.

I really want use firefox daily it's just that I do feel a development speed hit when using it.

Same for me

Interesting, I find Firefox's devs tools a lot easier to work with.

Firefox's design doesn't sit right with me, but there are themes and addons to fix that.

What themes and addons do you use? I never changed more than the stock color scheme.

GNOME theme for system integration, and the most important window altering changes I've made is to install Tree Style Tabs and hiding the top bar through userChrome.css:

    @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
    
    /* to hide the native tabs */
    #TabsToolbar {
        visibility: collapse;
    }
    
    /* to hide the sidebar header */
    #sidebar-header {
        visibility: collapse;
    }

Agreed. The dev tools in Firefox are beautifully designed and a joy to use. Chrome is a dogs breakfast in comparison.

Same, the UI needs a bit of change. It doesn't need to be anything fancy. Just something simple like basic chromium would be nice

If the UI is a problem try twitching the userchrome.css.

I have done so in order to make it work with treestyletab as I like it and if you care about ht UI, the userchrome.css gives you a lot of freedom. In addition, I sync it via Nextcloud across my devices, so that I don't have to make changes per device.

having recently looked at a firefox performance regression for filing a bugreport, tooling that tracks performance (quite publicly) sees attention, easy upload to share tracing profiles also helps: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/testing/perfdocs/ind...

Their dedicated blog keeps you posted if firefox perf is your interest https://blog.mozilla.org/performance/

If you have a particular website you notice chromium being significantly faster with, for an easy report, there's https://webcompat.com/ - though bugzilla is better than it seems when coming from github issues

Bragging about your sunspider score is like bragging about how many myspace followers you have.

Besides I'm not sure how much these benchmark tests are relevant to real world performance anyway.

It doesn’t look like bragging to me. The only comment Phronix has from a Firefox person is:

> We’re now apparently beating Chrome on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark!

“Apparently” seems to indicate that it isn’t something they are putting a ton of stock in.

I think that's what you'd call a "humble brag".

It would only be a humble brag if it was something that the Firefox developers thought others would be impressed by. It's a single line item on their internal dev blog, the bar for entry is not exactly high.

I knew NodeJS and Chrome were in for darker times when v8.dev discontinued their engineering blog. That spoke to me of engineering losing steam. Either will or manpower or both.

Congratulations to Firefox of course. The hare is napping under a tree and you just keep trucking.

You know. That actually highlights an understated risk of the Chromium monopoly.

What happens if Chrome... doesn't become evil, it's just mismanaged? What happens if the team loses personnel and gains too much tech debt? What happens if Chromium is run into the ground just by happenstance? I don't know, maybe they give it to a product manager, or they try Scrum or something.

It's a lot of influence to put in the hands of a single fallible team.

As we've seen happen before with other formerly-popular browsers like Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and Firefox, the users just move on to whichever other browser works better for them at the time.

Internet Explorer was a lot of wandering in the desert. Let’s not repeat IE 6 mkay?

We're already there, ironically mostly pushed by the anti-IE generation.

If it wasn't for the special Safari status on Apple devices, it would be total domination, Web == ChromeOS.

Which was back when you had a bunch of options. If firefox goes under and chromium throws up, it's not like there's a large field of choices.

"What if nobody wanted to continue developing browsers" is an unrelated issue. If Firefox goes under, Chromium throws up, and nobody else thinks it's worthwhile to do anything with the codebases or make a new separate one then the problem is nobody wants to build a browser not how many wanted to build a browser in the past.

Is chromium hostile towards non Google contributions? It's not clear to me why a community of many parties couldn't form and prevent this possibility. From what I can tell, the problem is largely a lack of companies who want to participate in chromium development.

This article from Igalia describe pretty well the situation around contribution to gecko/webkit/blink : https://bkardell.com/blog/2023-Mid-Season-Power-Rankings.htm...

Very interesting read!

If the chromium community are unable to write their own browsing engine, then they are shackled to whatever google implements. When WEI turns out to be so intertwined with deep functionality that you can't really excise it, what are these so called "alternatives" going to do, just not update the chromium codebase ever?

That depends if you contribution is conforming with google's strategy / vision. Very likely google is going to be hostile to the future contribution to re-enable extension manifest v2.

> What happens if Chrome... doesn't become evil, it's just mismanaged?

When executed by an entity with enormous power, incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I'm seeing this already with how they're handling the new right-click contextual Search feature being moved to open the results in the new "Search sidebar" rather than a new tab. This was supposedly able to be disabled with the flag "Search web in side panel" (there's no option for it in the preferences), however if the completely undocumented "CSC" flag was left at it's default then it overrides any other flag to force enable the feature. You can see the consequences of this decision to this very day in places like /r/chrome with users complaining that disabling the feature flags isn't working.

I feel like you are reading way too much into this. You can look up thread and see both a SpiderMonkey and V8 dev/xdev agree SunSpider is basically worthless to almost harmful to benchmark against and that V8 continues to absolutely dominate SpiderMonkey overall.

What did they discontinue? https://v8.dev/blog/speeding-up-v8-heap-snapshots was posted less than a month ago.

As much as I hate monopolies, I hate having to write apps for 5 platforms at once even more. If my app works on Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Android, and Edge, and I have to jump through hoops and litter the code with if (isSafari) workarounds to get it working on iPhone, the last thing I want to do with the remainder of my time is start from scratch to fix all of the bugs or missing apis so Firefox can run it for 1% of users.

I understand the risk of a chrome monopoly, but boy do I feel a the conflict of interest when these conversations come up…

why checking for specific browser rather than using feature detection to properly handle different browser capabilities? ( Good docs at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes... )

For safari, I used to run into a lot of graphical bugs, (especially when pushing things into layers on the gpu with transforms). The second big category would be things that are performant on low end android phones with chrome are not performant on older iPhones and vice versa.

Semi related, I was suprised just how many bugs Safari has with animation timing while using Web Animation API. You can't possibly feature detect that, Motion one lib even disables GPU acceleration for them in Safari. In that case parsing user agent is the only option.

https://motion.dev/guides/waapi-improvements#webkit-bugfixes

1% is an interesting number [0]

Instinctively it feels small, but in practice increasing your CVR on your registration page by 1% is usually a big deal. What kind of other costs in ads or marketing would you pay to get a 1% increase to your user base ?

For most company I worked for, a bug affecting 1% of the users would be a critical show stopper.

[0] Setting aside if you really have 1% in firefox vs more % in Brave or Vivaldi,

From my experience, if things work in Chrome, they will likely work with Firefox too, excluding very new apis, it isn't much of maitenance burden. With Safari every project I work o I discover new Safari quirk or bug. If you can make it work in Safari you can make it Firefox too.

Are there any "real life" benchmarks, e.g. comparing how long each browser takes for a typical popup, banner and autoplay video laden website to load and finally become responsive for user? And of course this should be a moving target, as website sizes just keep increasing.

I used to love Firefox, and I even was part of the organization team that make Asas Dotler's presentation in Argentina. I have pictures with him, an original Firefox bag, and an actual Firefox push. I also put money for the NY times add.

But Google crushed them with the rapid releases. I remember that to realease firefox 3.0 (from 2.0), it took them like 2 years. Crazy slow.

Today is much faster and is really nice, but I don't like the UI, i really prefer the one by chrome, it is much slim.

I like FF's UI better than Chrome's, but the small differences can be overcome quickly once you start using it. There is much more at stake than a few pixels here and a button there: do you want Google to control "the internet"?

> do you want Google to control "the internet"?

Also: do you care at all about Google knowing every single thing you do on the internet?

this is the main reason for me.

> But Google crushed them with the rapid releases. I remember that to realease firefox 3.0 (from 2.0), it took them like 2 years. Crazy slow.

Back in the days, increasing major version number meant something. What are the major changes between Chrome 114 and 115? For some reason, Mozilla decided to take part in this race that Google has started.

But that is the problem. I rather see progressive improvements each 3/6 months, then a big-bang change each 2 years.

Unrelated to this benchmark but Chrome vs Firefox on the same Mac has significantly worse scrolling performance on pages with a reasonable amount of images. Or at least that’s what I have observed.

In Chrome while you scroll you get these moments of empty white space while it is probably loading the content in and out. On Firefox I don’t get these empty white chunks at all it is just a smooth content scroll all the way.

To me this is more jarring than being faster in JS.

I got back to firefox 3 or 4 years ago on mac and it's truely excelent.

The only chokepoint were occasional Google properties, the same way Safari chokes on them, so I ended up compartimenting them in Chrome. Otherwise it has been pleasant to use.

I also use it on android, but surprisingly it was really hard to use on Windows tablets. It performs well enough as a mouse and keyboard browser, but touch support is too accurate and mechanical to be useful.

An example: on HN the upvote arrow is a really small target and clicking everywhere else should result in either nothing or opening the link next to the arrow. Chrome "fuzzies" the click area to include the upvote arrow even if I click completely on the left of it. Firefox will accurately send the click to text part left of the arrow, making it crazy hard to hit the upvote button.

Firefox is technically accurate, but the extra "magic" on Chrome's side is really helpful as a user. Performance wise I think it's already on the right track, from there I hope we can get UX improvements as well. Touch optimizations on the desktop feels like a hard nut to crack, but it would be so nice.

Firefox has some about:config variables to tweak the touch support. The out of box behaviors should definitely be improved, and maybe even a real settings panel would be nice instead of just about:config hidden things.

Thanks! I actually tried it a while ago but completely forgot about it.

The touch radius can be expanded and adjusted but the behavior really comes down to "should it let the user set a caret at any text position", and fuzzing the touch radius will still let the user hit a plain text target and select it, where Chrome (and mobile firefox, coms to think of it) won't let you.

For instance on HN's comment link bar ("WorldMaker 5 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on: Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in S...") I can set a text selection carret on the "|" between "parent" and "context" in firefox with a touch radius of 32 mm, largely touching both "parent" and "context" links.

I am actually getting motivated into looking deeper into this and see what they did to have the mobile version work differently.

That is great news. I hope Mozilla's PR team will use this as a chance to bust the old myth that firefox is slow. We need more firefox users if we don't want to end up in a world where the web is Google's thing.

I have been using Firefox on a daily basis since 2005-2006.

When Chrome leaped far out ahead in terms of speed, responsiveness, Firefox nearly lost me as a user (as it was quite slow at the time). Since Firefox largely caught up all has been well. I'd give Firefox an 8.5 out of 10 in terms of how happy I am as a user. They would have to do something atrocious to lose me at this point. I also prefer their engine over Chrome in terms of visual rendering.

The sole meaningful complaint I have about Firefox is its memory usage, which still seems high. It wants 1-2gb of ram no matter what I do.

I remember that time & feeling the absolute need to run Minefield (for Fx v4.x) over stable since the next gen features/performance were too important even without add-on compatibility. The 4.0 release took forever in testing & Chrome flew out like a rocket. And even thru the lulls, Fx performance has always been good enough to stick around (tho eventually I moved to LibreWolf due to management of the new browser feature defaults).

The article links to the benchmarks in https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays...

Some benchmarks evaluate "execution time", so the lower the better.

Some benchmarks have a "score" instead, that the lower the higher in the chart. I'm not familiar with these benchmarks and don't know how to interpret it. Is higher score worse or better?

I think that site opted for consistent graphs - points lower on the graph is faster/better, indicated by blue down arrow

I'd also appreciate some kind of notes about what these tests actually represent. What's "Assorted DOM", and why is Firefox so much better (if the scale is representative of anything useful)?

I can't say I've ever considered switching browsers because of concerns about JS performance.

I'm pretty confident this is the case for most "average" users, but I'm curious whether it makes me an outlier on HN.

Anyone else share my indifference?

I don't trust anyone other than Google with my passwords. Google password manager is only available on Chrome. So unfortunately I'm locked into Chrome. I do like Edge and Firefox but the passwords are an issue.

You trust Google with your passwords? And you trust them more than 1Password, Apple, etc.?

I’d love to hear more about that statement.

Is the Apple password manager available on non-Apple devices?

It could be argued that Google has significantly more resources to invest in security of the password storage than these smaller companies. We've recently seen LastPass implode, but I've never heard of any successful attack on Google password manager.

Still prefer to keep them offline though.

I don’t really get how people keep falling for online password managers. The only thing I can think is there must be some psychological effect: “well, this person is suggesting something that I know to be very dumb. So, I guess they must know something I don’t, better trust them!”

Or we just appreciate convenience. I trust Bitwarden to operate a great secure service.

still doesn't hurt to have the desktop app on your laptop in case something ever goes wrong on their servers :) . I have it on a couple.

It's available on Windows. Not sure about Linux/Android.

> Is the Apple password manager available on non-Apple devices?

As of last month or so, it is now available on Windows as well.

What happen if google itself is the adversary in the safety of your passwords? That spur of the moment trollish YouTube comment might get flagged, bringing down your google account and all services tied with it; gmail, gdrive, your saved passwords etc. Then trying to rectify the situation is close to impossible since theres no human support for (free) google account.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

Then you are one Google account compromise away from disaster: https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/warning-dont-let-google-manag...

Google password manager is not end to end encrypted.

LastPass, Bitwarden, and Firefox too, are end to end encrypted with the user chosen password at least. If your password is strong enough, it should be safe.

Apple also uses end to end encryption, although there you might also be vulnerable via a hack of your iCloud account, not sure.

1Password is the most secure option: here, in addition to your password being encrypted with your master password, it's also encrypted via a secret key that is pre-generated. So a leaked encrypted 1Password backup won't be brute-forceable.

You can enable "on-device encryption" for Google password manager. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/11350823?sjid=178...

LastPass should not even be mentioned.

Of course this is only my opinion, but I'd rather trust an open-source password manager such as KeePassXC. They all have browser integration (native or plug-in) if this is important.

> I don't trust anyone other than Google with my passwords.

At this stage in their corporate life-cycle, where greed and complete and utter lack of care towards user happiness reigns supreme, trusting google with anything is a rather large mistake IMO.

Some years ago it was common that some sites did not work or was slow in FF. I can't remember that I've had that problem for years. Good work by the FF team regardless of these benchmarks.

I am using Firefox on principle - I don’t care about some benchmarks or that Firefox is only browser that still has connecting to local host so owning developers somewhere on backlog.

But at work there is no real way I could use Firefox and I am web dev. Dev tools in Firefox are nowadays also behind what Chrome has. Biggest upside for Firefox was Firebug but now it is only history. Let alone mentioned security issue….

I think here it is easy to understand that if all web devs work in chrome we have IE situation back again.

Depends on what you need from dev tools. Firefox's built in dev tools keeps some response bodies that Chrome's tools don't.

Google owns internet advertising so I'm not surprised that they also own web devs.

Congrats Firefox team! No mention of Rust - but I imagine it helped.

How much of SpiderMonkey (JS engine) is Rust? AFAIK, besides the bindings, it is still mostly C++ and my guess is that it would be difficult to get the core parts in Rust without a full rewrite.

Chromium is fairly invested in cxx[0]. Firefox could do the same if they haven't already.

[0]: https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx

I wouldn't think so. It's not like Rust in FF replaces slow Python or Java code, it replaces heavily-optimized C++. If anything, Rust would likely impede speedup efforts (even if it might improve overall code quality and safety).

Also, I believe the project to rewrite the entirety of Gecko in Rust has long been abandoned.

But how is which browser is faster relevant?

Can you set up a google container in Chrome? :)

And even if there is such an extension, can you trust the browser not to send everything you do to Google behind your back?

I think that benchmarks are made wrong way. They typically calculate how many times per second a browser can run some code. But this causes browser vendors to do trade-offs, for example, increase memory consumption which increases the probability of swapping which causes everything to stall.

A more fair way would be to account for memory usage:

score = speed ÷ (RAM usage)²

Or they should run their tests at 2Gb system with lot of other applications running in background.

While that's great news, in recent years, AFAIC, the decision to use firefox over Chrome has been entirely unrelated to performance issues.

In my book, Chrome is now officially in the same doghouse IE6 was confined to back in the days: a buggy spying machine that is mostly a vehicle designed to shove Google's policies down the collective throats of internet users.

I would love to switch to Firefox but I'm stuck trying to deploy the Firefox Sync server myself in a way that 'just' works.

The old version is not developed anymore, and the new version isn't easily deployable without going through 10 separate issues and trial and error (and I've never succeeded in it).

That's an interesting reason not to use Firefox.

Do you just not sign in to Chrome at all? It's not like it has ever offered a self-hosted version of Google Accounts.

Sync says all data is E2E encrypted. If you trust that (and you've been close enough to source to verify it yourself, it sounds like), it shouldn't matter who hosts Firefox Sync for you.

That's great. Also on a side note regarding performance. Does anyone else use Firefox developer edition as their main browser because they feel that the performance is better than Firefox vanilla itself?

I feel that based on a heuristic measurements (that is probably not reproducible)

I am pleased with the performance of Firefox over Chrome in every area except GPU-related tasks. I've noticed most (all?) sites that use my GPU (1080 Ti) regularly run around an order of magnitude slower on Firefox than Chrome on my Windows desktop.

Pay attention to vertical x axis scale for the graphs - it doesn't scale visually.

What am I suppose to see?

M6 one and only problem with Firefox is its signed add on policy. I want to write my own add ons and istall them on mobile and desktop without creating an account on some random website.

With chrome and kiwi, I can do this.

I don't know what version of Firefox this is, but the version I use is so slooooow using Gmail. It takes close to a minute to finish loading if I refresh the screen, compared to seconds with Chrome.

Oh no, Google must be really sorry about that!

EDIT to clarify: Google is known to make sure the web experience breaks for firefox, same story for youtube, so this is not an accident. Don´t use chrome and don´t use gmail if you want to keep the web open.

Well, exactly. I used to work for Lotus when every new release of Windows or Dos broke something in 1-2-3.

I use Firefox for nearly everything, but I need to keep a Chrome window open because Gmail and Google Meet will max out my CPU and barely work in Firefox. Google properties are literally the only sites where I experience this issue.

Does anybody know technical details about why this is the case? The anti-competitive incentives for them doing this are obvious, but I imagine that there must be some technical explanation that makes for a plausible excuse. Something like them using Chrome only APIs with slow polyfills on other browsers?

For what it's worth, you can add YouTube to the list of Google sites with CPU consuming bugs - particularly in dark mode.

I'm not sure whether Chrome entirely fixes it, but if you watch YouTube in dark mode, there was a UI upgrade that they added that puts a "glow" behind the YouTube video player.

It's intended to look like a light strip behind your TV (but to me, I originally thought there was just something wrong with the monitor or my eyes), but in reality it's just more Canvas/GPU bound calculations running at 60fps constantly which would cause the CPU/GPU in the laptop to pull tens of watts, killing battery life.

There is no way to turn this "feature" off, other than disabling dark mode or blocking the "effects (do not remember exact item name)" DOM item in uBlock Origin. If you want to replicate this, go to a video on YouTube and use the three dots near the sign in button on the top right to enable the dark theme (may already be enabled). Play a video with bright picture, and after about ten seconds, you should start seeing "stuff" show up under the video as if it was a reflection.

There’s an option to turn these background fx off in the player settings

My Gmail loads just fine on my Firefox even on a low-end Intel NUC. On the modern web Gmail isn't that heavy on resources and any modern browser should handle Gmail fine.

I"ve never seen it take anywhere near that long. Surely chrome seems a little bit faster but not that noticeable...

The graph shows a cliff, presumably there's a specific code change associated, anyone have a link?

Doing well on benchmarks is fine, but real-world code is what matters and programmers will write their javascript to match what is fast on Chrome and not test on Firefox, meaning there will be some code that is accidentally fast on Firefox, the balance will be purposefully fast on Chrome.

I’m really not excited about JavaScript performance. You know what happens when everyone’s JavaScript performance improves? Webpages just add more JavaScript until it becomes just as slow as it was before. People won’t optimize on a large scale until we hit some upper limit.

Is Firefox + uBlockOrigin close enough to Brave's protections?

It seems like it's somewhat close (assuming uBlock Origin grabs most of the tracking query/content).

https://privacytests.org/

HTTPS Only can be enabled (it's still off by default) to score a few more points.

It gets better in Nightly and even more so in Nightly Private.

I hope Chrome team send Firefox team a cake for this milestone.

Will Brave ever separate from Google?

not as long as google provides a completely free render engine and javascript engine.

Okay, time to risk a switch back.

I use Firefox everywhere I can, warts and all, just to avoid the Chromium monopoly. It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chromium; having a giant like Microsoft support a third browser engine would really have been a boon to the health of the ecosystem.

Me too. I wonder though what would have happend if we had given $7B to Andreas Kling.

I guess with WebDRM this point is moot though.

You would need to spend at least a billion to clone him first - this whole project is moving forward because the man is an exceptional programmer.

I think now with the sponsorships he’s hired one of the contributors full time, and I think Linus Groh was also going full time so that makes three people dedicated to working on it as well as the other contributors.

Better than nothing, and just incredible what they’ve achieved so far!

I do the same thing but it isn't much of a sacrifice. It feels icky to use google's software knowing it's actively working against my interests.

Kinda like Brave.

How is Brave working against the user’s interests? Not being snarky, I’ve been using it for a while and it seems fine.

It isn't, but on HN the agenda is "Brave bad".

Anything Chromium-based bad, Brave is no different than Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Samsung Internet etc.

We need more engines, not browsers. If every other engine dies, Google gets to dictate what the web is even more than they do right now.

Crypto.

Yet another Chromium browser contributing to Google's massive market share which enables them to push all the anti-consumer shit Brave is supposed to fix.

It's heavily tied in with crypto, but even if you don't care about that they have done extremely shady shit like inserting their own referral code in registration forms.

Write your legislators and tell them it's unfair for Google to control the web's leading browser.

Google dominates web search, controls mobile as part of a duopoly, pays the other mobile provider to feature their search, dominates mobile advertising, ranks websites based on ads and chrome performance, increasingly takes over functionality from the websites they index, etc.

They use their money and power to transform the web into a platform they own and control with AMP, Manifest v2, WEI, WHATWG, and repeated attempts to kill the URL bar.

Chrome is a key instrument of their monopolization. Their business units need to be carved up, and Chrome needs to go its separate way, kept apart from search and ads.

so Microsoft adopting chromium as it's engine, would, erm, make this more likely or less?

Microsoft, in third place, barely has a 5% market share. I don't think they contribute to the present situation.

I hope they gain in browser market share alongside Firefox and all the other non-Chrome, non-Safari browsers.

Probably a very unpopular opinion, but it seems any time a business/product reaches the point where they have majority of market share, people say it's a monopoly. At what point are businesses forced to scale down because their products are TOO successful? I still don't understand what the big deal was with Microsoft having IE bundled with Windows. If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies. Imagine an amateur boxer fighting a pro twice their size and saying "it's no fair, they're stronger and have more experience." Well, the pro put in all the work to get to where they're at.

Good question! Speaking in legal terms, not popular usage, generally the problem being addressed is not "you have too much market share," but rather, "you used your dominant position in one market to then dominate a different market." To stretch your analogy, it'd be like your pro boxer entering an amateur tournament and taking all the prize money. In the case of Microsoft's IE bundling, they were using their dominant position in the Operating System market to become dominant in the Web Browser market, by bundling IE with the OS and providing specific OS integration hooks which were unavailable to other browsers.

> If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies.

The trouble comes when the entity in the dominant position squashes competition unfairly. In the IE case, Microsoft included a browser with every copy of the OS, so consumers had to overcome hurdles to even try a competitor's browser. Additionally, as I mentioned above, Microsoft provided secret hooks into the OS that were unavailable to other browsers, so it was impossible for a competitor to create a superior product. Those actions limited fair competition in the browser space, which usually results in worse outcomes for consumers or the market as a whole, hence the laws forbidding monopoly abuse.

Hope that helps give some idea of what happened there. Of course, you can read much more detail about the case & anti-trust law in general elsewhere.

I don't really like this boxing analogy (because browsers don't directly interact with each other and browsers aren't a sport, etc), but I'll go with it anyway. When there are only two boxers and nobody apparently cares about the amateur, gloves that fit the amateur stop being made. All boxing gloves produced only fit the pro. But I guess "the pro put in all the work to get to where they're at." Again this analogy doesn't make much sense to begin with, but I think I've made my point about websites being designed exclusively for chrome. I have had websites tell me that my browser is unsupported and promptly refuse to let me use the site until I fake my user agent and then it works perfectly fine.

People start complaining something is a monopoly when the business starts squashing potential competition from the position of power, using bully or shady tactics, or screwing their customers by being more and more greedy.

In case of Microsoft and IE, even if you don't read up on the history and details of it, it's obvious that they were just trying to do what Google is doing now - gatekeep the web and get some of that toll money. I don't think many would have issues with Microsoft just including a simple web browsing tool and leaving it at that. Instead, they were actively working to kill the competition, took over the majority of market share and then just killed off innovation basically completely, and held back the web for years and years afterwards.

can they afford to turn on a dime at some point?

Same here. Then again, I'll never leave Firefox as long as Tree Style Tabs[1] continues to be supported as an extension. It's been a life-changer since I discovered it well over a decade ago and makes every other browser pretty much unusable for me as a daily driver.

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

There are multiple chromium alternatives for this extension.

And they are all terrible.

One of them is called TabFern, get it? It's like TabTree but it doesn't have branches.

> And they are all terrible.

For other Chromium-based browser users, Tabs Outliner is great, more powerful (but with a steeper learning curve) solution.

It’s not a one for one replacement but edge has vertical tabs and tab groups built in. I have to use edge for work and it’s a decent compromise.

Have you given Sidebery a try? Also for firefox.

Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. Nothing like the crazy 90+% it had at its height but certainly not a browser you can ignore. Now they're at about 10% and it seems like they have to use every manipulation tactic in the book to get it.

But I agree, that third browser engine kept things interesting even if I didn't use it. Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there. I don't use Apple products personally but benefit from the diversity of ecosystem it provides.

> Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare.

The only reason IE retained any marketshare was because it was required for legacy enterprise and government applications. For security this was bad all around and Microsoft was right to kill it off even to their own detriment.

I think the problem with Edge was two-fold:

- People were trained to automatically install a new browser on their computers when they got it.

- Edge is a never ending nagfest and that became another prompt to go and download Chrome.

Less is more was probably the better strategy to take with Edge.

> Less is more...

You hit the nail right on the money. Every time I accidentally open Edge through the Windows search, it never ceases to shut up about itself. There is fanfare, there are notifications for details I don't care about, popups showing me all the features that are standard in any web browser.

You know what would make me use your browser Microsoft? Getting the hell out of my way. I do not care that it's Edge, I don't care that it's new, I don't care that it has 7 ways to input and take pictures and who knows what else. Just show me the search result.

Contrast this to how Safari behaves when it pops up to show you something. It just gives you the web page. That's it.

I can tell you from doing testing on Edge back when it represented a potential third engine to support: that browser crashed a lot. It was very unreliable prior to switching to becoming another chromium fork. It is clear the dev team was either underfunded or plain incompetent and Microsoft was in dire need of a default browser that didn't make people wince, ASAP, they could not afford to wait [insert X years to get a mature engine] so they went the obvious route and chose to make a chromium fork.

Making a reliable engine that supports all of the modern web is a monstrous undertaking. Not just "support", it needs to be reliable. Microsoft missed the boat when they allowed IE to rot and it was too late to catch up now. Every year spent without a reliable browser preinstalled on your OS is detrimental.

> Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare.

It had been on the decline for years. Statscounter shows 26% in January 2013, 17% January 2014, 13% in January 2015, then Edge was introduced in July of that year.

If anything Edge was a recognition of that reality: the investment in maintaining their own browser engine wasn't worth it when compared to the resulting market share. IMO the failure of Windows Phone was the death knell of Trident (the IE engine): desktop share overall is smaller and they have no footprint in the mobile OS space.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...

You are confusing the old Edge that had an engine forked from IE and that MS exclusively maintained, with the new Edge that is a fork of Chromium. Maybe that the old Edge was not of stellar quality was simply because the age of the codebase of its engine.

I'm simply replying to the OP's assertion that "Edge seems like a blunder in general".

IE market share was declining before Edge was introduced, and it continued to decline after Edge was introduced. Since the browser engine switch their market share has actually increased a small amount! So all in all I don't think there's any evidence that Edge was a blunder.

Yeah, this does seem to line up more with the Windows8/Windows phone failure more than anything.

Despite people having a better opinion about Edge Chromium it didn't seem to stem the decline.

> death knell of Trident (the IE engine)

Nitpick, but the Edge name signaled the switch to the ground up rewrite Spartan engine. Trident is still sort of alive in its zombie corporate state in the Windows backwards compatibility swamp. Trident was still maintained for backward compatibility (and still exists in IE Mode in Chromium Edge), but Edge was always Spartan and it is Spartan that is dead (RIP).

> Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there.

It's so weird these days seeing people literally cheering for the success of a proprietary product on a completely closed platform over an open source engine. Firefox, sure. I can get behind that even if my professional life technically argues against it. I see the draw there and won't argue about benefits.

But Safari? Seriously? Even discounting the existence of Firefox, the "monoculture" argument falls down in the face of products like Edge and Opera (and countless others -- Linux distros ship Chromium, Teslas all have a build installed, etc...), which are *successful forks* of Chromium. If Google goes evil and turns into a bad steward, we know already that Microsoft et. al. won't be impacted and can continue to ship their unadulterated products. Because that's what they're doing today.

Really? Safari?

> If Google goes evil and turns into a bad steward, we know already that Microsoft et. al. won't be impacted

I suspect that's not OP's fear. Google is powerful enough that they can do whatever they want with Chrome. They could even close source the thing and implement a load of proprietary APIs if they wanted and the bulk of users would continue to use it.

One of the things holding them back from doing so is the fact that Chromium can't run on the most popular mobile platform in the US. I'm no defender of Safari but I can see the logic at work.

> They could even close source the thing and implement a load of proprietary APIs

Right, but that capability is exactly what the upthread comment is cheering for Apple having. Apple goes even farther and straight up denies competitors access to its platform entirely.

It's the asymmetry I don't understand: why is proprietary control good for one side but not for the other? Is the goal here preserving open systems and interoperability or is it just to Beat Google?

> why is proprietary control good for one side and not the other?

It isn’t for either, this is a “least worst” scenario. Both sides have the capability to push proprietary APIs but largely fail at doing so because they don’t have a monopoly over the market. They are forced to compromise on a middle ground (supporting the open web), which is better than one side being able to entirely dominate the market and do whatever they want.

> Is the goal here preserving open systems and interoperability or is it just to Beat Google?

In this specific scenario they are one and the same but the aim is the former. Google controls the desktop browser market already, one of the only reasons they haven’t done the same on mobile is because Apple won’t allow it. The argument is not that Apple should control everything, it’s that stalemate is the best we’ve got.

> Google controls the desktop browser market already, one of the only reasons they haven’t done the same on mobile is because Apple won’t allow it.

Yeah, I think this is wrong, but I'm going to bail on this discussion since it's too close to my employment.

But my opinions haven't really changed anyway: from my perspective both sides have "control" over a market, but one side has been a good steward, allowing forks and experimentation and open implementation, and the other side has been an inarguably bad steward by disallowing competition entirely. And it's shocking (and frankly a little Orwellian) to see people trying to argue the opposite.

One side having been a "good steward" is your opinion, describing counter opinions as "a little Orwellian" strikes me as hyperbole.

From my perspective I agree that Google has been a better steward of the web than many others would be or have been. But I have spent too much of my professional life dealing with things like AMP pages and shitty, browser-crashing ads provided via Google ad networks to say they are a total objective good (to say nothing of the Web Environment Integrity proposal and other stuff that never succeeded, remember when they wanted to put Dart in Chrome?).

Even if you think they are objectively good, remember that they've been a good steward within the current context where they don't hold overall power. Microsoft is a good steward of the web these days but I've been around long enough to remember the IE6 days. If given total control over the future of the web I have every expectation that Google would behave like MS did back then. It's nothing personal against any company, I think it's inherent in the nature of any private company in total control of a market to bend it to their will. Expecting them to do anything else is foolish.

I fear the native future Apple wants but can't achieve because of the open web. I fear the dominated web future Google wants but can't achieve because of Apple. I'm equal opportunity scared of all these bastards.

> I fear the native future Apple wants

It seems like you agree with me then. I remind you that you stepped in to a subthread arguing in favor ("seeing the logic" in your words) of Safari as an alternative to Chrome as a way to preserve open access to web content. And as you yourself point out, that's ridiculous: iOS/Safari is much more locked down than any WEI-compliant browser ever could be.

I repeat again that I'm happy if you want to boost Firefox or Chromium or (if you must) Opera or Edge instead, as those platforms represent open choices in a reasonably free market. But telling people to use Safari on iOS in this particular argument is a very weird up-is-down/gaslighting/Orwellian take. It's just wrong. Your stated goals upthread don't match your recommendations, at all.

I haven't commented really since afavour has mostly articulated my position for me. I don't use Apple products as I am philosophically opposed to the control of the hardware. And my life goes on fine.

WEI alone is enough for me to disagree with you on who is the bad steward.

> WEI alone is enough for me to disagree with you on who is the bad steward.

But... again, WEI is just duplicating features that have been there from day zero on iOS (and mobile apps more generally).

I understand that you dislike WEI. I understand why you might argue against its implementors and push platforms like Firefox that don't do that. I get that part.

What I don't get is your celebration of a platform that is even more locked down, in every reasonable interpretation. Your ability as an arbitrary client to connect to the service of your choosing using the software of your choosing (which is all WEI is about) is objectively much weaker with iOS than any other significant client platform. So maybe you should revisit your thinking here?

Firefox has lost about 20 million users since the announcement of Chrome moving to Manifest v3. It can't avoid the monopoly even with the press in their favor.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium at this point and create a vendor-neutral platform that everyone can rally behind.

I wouldn't expect Manifest V3 to have any effect until Manifest V2 is actually disabled and ad blockers stop working. Approximately 0% of Chrome users are following technical browser announcements, they won't care until their stuff actually breaks.

Have to agree here. Most people have no idea what manifest v whatever is and have no reason to switch.

Not to mention, google pulls its own underhanded tactics.

Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons installed in the first place: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior So 59% of current Firefox users could switch to Chrome without being affected by the Manifest V3 change at all.

I don't know how many Chrome users use add-ons that would become less useful after the change, so it'll definitely be interesting to see whether Firefox's numbers will show a sudden uptick at some point.

I expect that number to be biased since more tech-savvy users tend to disable/block telemetry, and they're also the sort of people who install add-ons. I have no idea if it's biased by 1%, 10%, or 50% though.

Even still, add-ons have always been a Fx selling point so I’m still quite shocked.

Not really. Firefox blocks more things out of the box for a better browsing experience than Chrome does. But I admit that there’s a good chance that at least some not-insignificant percentage of those 41% wouldn’t notice and realize that they would need to install uBlock to use Chrome comparably.

> Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons installed in the first place

This seems like surprisingly low percentage. I wonder whether these stats count people who disable telemetry or install add-ons from their distro's repository.

Firefox should really (somehow or another) come with ublock origin installed and on by default.

This isn't accurate since Firefox comes with a built-in ad blocker, which Chrome lacks.

The Manifest v3 version of uBlock Origin (uBlock Lite) has been out for a long time now, and it still works its just less effective.

For people using Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, etc it won't impact them. Their adblockers are all native and not using the extension API.

There was a huge wave of anti-chrome propaganda about how manifest v3 would prevent all ad-blocking* on Reddit and Tumblr (and probably tiktok) and such. Even if none of them read the actual announcements, the low-info folks still learn about it from the outrage machine.

*Which isn't actually true; "cosmetic" blocking (altering the DOM), the original type and the one most users actually care about, will still work just fine. It's only privacy tracking which is going to be totally broken, and frankly, outside of the unreality bubble of HN, most users care much less about "privacy" than you'd think.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I agree, I myself was waiting for ublock to stop working before I migrated to Firefox but now that I’m hearing it will still mostly work… I just don’t care that much. So they collect all this info on me… as long as I don’t see ads I just don’t care

Just because people don't care doesn't mean it's unimportant.

So these limitations of manifest V3 don't exist?:

>One of the main issues with Manifest V3 is its limitation to filter lists: an extension can only include up to 50 static lists, and only 10 of them can be active at the same time.

>There are also limitations to the number of filter rules inside these lists: installed extensions cannot collectively exceed 300,000 static filters and it is no longer possible to update

I never said it wasn't important, but it is misinformation. Case and point: to answer your question, no, those aren't limitations on DOM-manipulation ad removal; those are limitations on the new declarativeNetRequest API, and they ONLY apply to blocked web requests.

Also, even that part isn't as catastrophic as you'd think; ad blocking, like most things on the internet, roughly follows the 90-10 rule: 90% of the ads are blocked by 10% of the rules. So even with a tenfold reduction, you should still see the vast majority of the ads blocked by even the intentionally-gimped declarativeNetRequest API.

Yes, it's going to make ad blockers slightly less effective and make your page loads slightly slower. But that doesn't get as many clicks as "Chrome is banning adblockers!!1". And it's important to note the difference because when v3 rolls around, all those users that were lied to are going to see that their ad blockers still mostly work, and lose even more trust in whistle blowing.

>Chrome is banning adblockers

You forgot the part where Google postponed the original timetable for the deprecation of manifest v2. Without that postponement, developers would not have had enough time to change the extension so that there would have been a time when adblockers were banned. The outcry prevented that.

> It's only privacy tracking which is going to be totally broken, and frankly, outside of the unreality bubble of HN, most users care much less about "privacy" than you'd think.

explaining this distinction is actually enough to drive me to switch thanks

If that's their takeaway about Chrome, good.

Why does the announcement of manifest v3 mean anything? They keep pushing the date v2 will no longer work back. Why?

Because they've already taken the media heat for the switch a half dozen times, each time less intensely. Eventually, when they finally switch it off, there will be one article about it on the Register, and it will be mostly jokes.

It's a tactic.

Extensions including ad blockers don't work at all on Android Chrome.

I use Chrome on desktop because websites work properly in Chrome, and Firefox on Android for the adblocker, except when a site is unusable.

What is FF marketshare on Android?

Us two probably?

Make it trouble.

I really wish the timing of FxOS was better as well as the marketing. I’d certainly choose it over Android, but we’re now sort of locked into the duopoly with terrible decisions from apps like Signal requiring you have a Android or iOS primary device or no service for you.

Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile web standards, but clearly, mozilla just isn't doing enough

Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault that the GIANT corp sitting in front of the internet, being the homepage of 90% of computers, that nags users to install chrome "for a better experience" on every single web site it can, is able to get onto more systems than firefox?

How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?

> so Firefox is faster than chrome

Faster on sunspider. In practice, on real web pages, as someone who occasionally browses the web using a low end tablet PC (Surface Go 2 with linux. The CPU is downright anemic but good enough for treating it like a reading device/video stream platform), I experienced many more stutters on Firefox that I did not on Chrome and it has become one of the reasons I stopped using it (the syncing is also way worse and often breaks. "Read latest tab from other device" is almost useless if you don't manually trigger a sync because it sure won't do it by itself in any reasonable time frame).

The performance difference is much less visible on my main computer though. But yall really need to try firefox on low end devices before you make generic statements about its performance. Or the android version.. lord, firefox on android is just unpleasant.

Funny, I use Mull on my Android, which is basically Firefox on Android but even more heavily restricted. Have for at least a year. Didn't know people considered it unpleasant.

I don't think they really do. Firefox, at least after the rewrite, is what made browsing on low-powered android machines bearable, in my experience.

Especially since it supports uBlock Origin and Dark Reader.

I use Firefox fork as main because anything else is worse on QubesOS. Both WebKit and Chromium have scroll lags, while Librewolf is smooth almost as on bare metal. I don’t know what’s the difference on normal websites, but I can use it and there are almost no lags on it when running few VMs on 8GB RAM.

Android variant is actually shit, but it’s getting only better. It’s much faster now than 5 years ago. Hopefully they will improve it further.

I have very similar experience - subjectively I experience more stuttering in FF than Chrome both on Android and Linux laptop.

I have the exact opposite experience. Streaming video is stuttering and buffering so bad that I can't use Chrome at all on those sites (Brave isn't any better). It was the reason I switched to Firefox and the performance was so much better.

Your experience is not "exact opposite" since for me video in FF with VAAPI-based hardware decoding also works better than in Chrome. However, FF can stutter while scrolling animation-heavy sites or when open/closing tabs.

Firefox still runs great on my ThinkPad T420s running Linux, which is 12 years old at this point.

And while I never use Firefox on Android without uBlock Origin, I don't get how it can be described as unpleasant after the rewrite a few years ago. The combo makes browsing bearable compared to Chrome.

The sync tabs thing used to be flaky, I agree, but now sending tabs to and from Linux and Android always works for me.

By stuttering, if you mean video stuttering, I used to experience those a lot; I installed Brave for that very reason, because Netflix, Twitch, etc. were performing pretty poorly on Firefox (on a 4GB RAM low end laptop). But I very rarely experience that these days, to the point I've switched back to Firefox for those sites too.

But general performance-wise, Firefox is so easily better than Chromium in my experience, it's not even a competition. Firefox with hundreds of tabs open performs better than Chromium with 10-20 tabs. It's more responsive to interactions, uses less memory, and is much less likely to freeze up. With Chromium, I have to constantly keep a watch over open tabs, and close them mercilessly, or suffer from overall system slowdown and a browser that's almost a slideshow.

It's about 12 months ago now, but I worked on a GL project where Firefox was significantly slower than Chrome – and, agreed, it was often on lower end devices. This was to the point it was easier to just drop features wholesale from Firefox, in order to ensure a steady 30 FPS (with Chrome solidly performing 60). I believe a large amount of it related to WebAudio APIs.

Not shipping WebReplay in firefox (instead it's a startup called replay.io),

Killing the servo project.

Running metaverse projects instead.

Yes, mozilla could do better.

These are all things that the average user doesn't even know exist

"Power users" aren't most of anyone's user base. The vast majority of people use chrome because google told them to, because google IS the internet

Websites arent made with firefox, so they are not optimized for firefox. They also can be buggy, firefox is my daily browser, yet, multiple times per year, a website is simply bugged on firefox.

Google Chrome was recommended by power user, and that how they took the market lead, not because they are the internet, but because power users told regular users to use chrome.

I have never found a website that is broken on firefox that isn't also non-functional on chrome. What does firefox break?

Folks mistakenly associate "breaking" with "not being completely compatible with an illegal streaming website with improper TLS/cyphers." That's just an example but you know what I mean.

Those are the types of websites that have issues with firefox, because mozilla maintains it's own root trust store held to various standards/compliances, and many..less savory web addresses use not HTTPS content on their HTTPS pages.

This is a feature/value added bonus, but because it "breaks" sites for people....back to chrome.

Most are due to the firefox tracking protection. Others (with everything disabled) were for an airline company, some french governements website, and recently an SVG editor that just call to use chrome and doesn't works on firefox.

Google massively advertised Chrome at the start with banners on Gmail, Search,... telling you you should download it.

Powerusers don't shift the market.

Google also paid freeware application developers to bundle Chrome in their installers.

Somehow they managed to have a huge market share when Microsoft was fighting tooth and nail in courts and out to tell people to use IE, and Microsoft WAS home computers.

Faster on one benchmark, but they don't have a consistent history of performance wins. The bigger issue is that nobody is embedding Gecko. Every Electron app is another developer targeting Chrome. Applications that embed a webview? Chrome. Any new web browser that wants to deliver a new experience (like Arc, or even Brave) is built atop Chromium.

The problem is that "not pushing hostile web standards" and "more flexible ad blocking" clearly isn't stopping the insane bleeding of the userbase. These are people actively migrating away from Firefox in droves.

I would argue that Electron webapps shouldn’t really count towards the browser marketshare. If would be nice to have a Firefox version, but it doesn’t matter precisely because the end user is not choosing the browser - the company pushing the product is. And let’s be honest: nerdy HN users aside, Joe Schmoe has no clue Teams is a web app running in an emasculated browser at all.

every time someone uses electron they buy into the chrome ecosystem -- when they run into problems they write mailing list posts or stack overflow questions that other people can read to help them when they have the same problem, and if they actually want to contribute bugfixes or features upstream they go into chrome not firefox. also if they have a webapp version the webapp version that's running in chrome works exactly the same as the same code running in electron without really having to do any separate testing so which browser are they going to push to be used internally?

> I would argue that Electron webapps shouldn’t really count towards the browser marketshare.

Perhaps not, but if you're writing your desktop app in Electron, you'll be benchmarking your performance optimizations against the Chrome engine. If that same code is used for your web app, you're optimizing your website for Chrome.

Mozilla can pour resources into making Firefox more performance, but the real-world ecosystem will change behavior to improve Chrome's performance on their webapp with little concern as to whether it hurts Firefox's performance.

(I assume people use largely the same code between Electron and their webapps, and that optimizations for Electron translate reasonably well to optimizations for Chrome.)

1. I use firefox in Windows, Linux, and Android. I am NOT suffering.

2. Most people aren't actively choosing their web browser. For example, my wife uses the Samsung web browser on her phone because that is the default.

3. Most people think Google is the internet, can't distinguish between the browser and the google webpage, etc.

4. A dwindling marketshare percentage does not directly imply old userspe are moving from Firefox to another browser, it could imply that new users don't know/use firefox

>4. A dwindling marketshare percentage does not directly imply old userspe are moving from Firefox to another browser, it could imply that new users don't know/use firefox

You're right that it could theoretically mean that, but unfortunately monthly active users have actually fallen by ~20% since 2019 according to Mozilla:

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

It may also just mean more users are opting out of telemetry. Given Mozilla's privacy focus in their marketing and their UX, it may not be a shock that a large number of users are also opting out of even Mozilla's telemetry.

I do.

Keep moving the goalposts, Firefox is going to go real far this way.

Google is _forcing_ Chrome, onto everyone. Gecko is fully embeddable on Android, through GeckoView. Nobody uses it, because the default WebView is chrome. androidx.browser is Chrome. And if you want to delegate to the browser while still staying in an app context, the feature is called Chrome Custom Tabs. Everything is made to make people forget about Firefox's existence. Google actively harms Firefox performance on their websites, while happily displaying a "it's better on Chrome" everywhere you browser. They force the WHATWG's hand on 90% of features. There's articles every month on new-obscure-feature-that-is-only-implemented-by-chrome-and-requires-an-army-to-implement, pushed and paid for by Google, which dumbass webshits are going to go and implement because obviously their VC backed startup _really_ needs WebUSB and WebMIDI, as well as Google's shitty, unfinished implementation of WebGPU.

Google is a cancer that grows everywhere, killing everything it touches. Firefox smoking a cigarette from time to time is not responsible for that.

Google sucks. Your position seems to be, though, that because Google sucks, we can't talk about the self-inflicted wounding of Firefox and other buffoonery that happens under the Mozilla Corp umbrella—since Google sucks so much more. There's a word for that: whataboutism.

> self-inflicted wounding of Firefox

This makes no sense. The parent argument is that Chrome wins due to aggressive bundling and free ads on Google. Neither of those are self-inflicted wounds. The claim is that Mozilla doesn't actually have self-inflicted wounds.

The claim is that we have to blame Firefox's failure on bundling and google.com banners, and can't discuss how hostile and bizarre they've been. We also can't discuss that 80% of their revenue comes from Google, for nothing, and that the other 20% of their revenue is the entire return on 100% of their investment in the browser.

> The claim is that Mozilla doesn't actually have self-inflicted wounds.

Not in the comment I was responding to; you would have to be arguing that "Firefox smoking a cigarette from time to time" doesn't describe a type of self-inflicted wound—and for you to be right—for that to be true. (Whether you genuinely think that or not is one thing, but you definitely wouldn't be right about it, in any case.)

The entire comment I responded to belongs to the flavor of apologia that takes the form, "it doesn't matter if X is bad, because Y is worse".

>it doesn't matter if X is bad, because Y is worse

In the case of Mozilla and Google, yes. Mozilla's leadership fucking sucks, and I've written at length about how the entire Foundation board is a bunch of useless MBA clowns that are here to suck from the golden teat.

But it doesn't matter, when the alternative is Google having absolute and total control of the web. Mozilla, for what they're still worth today, still have a weight. Write an article titled "Mozilla opposes API proposal X from Google for privacy reasons" and people will at the very least give it a listen. RFCs from them are listened to. The WHATWG has to at least pretend to hear them out.

Go on. Let Mozilla die. See what the web looks like when Google can push every API they want, unopposed. WEI would look like a walk in the park. Apple could say nuh uh we don't want to, and Google would do the exact same thing they did with Firefox: snuff it out. Microsoft wouldn't even need to be pressured to work with them, pissing off Apple sounds like a lovely distraction for them. Little by little, websites would stop working on Safari (not that they work quite well currently, most Safari users are doing it because of a complete lack of technical knowledge and it's the default browser, with three nerds on HN saying it's because it's better for their battery life), APIs unsupported because Apple isn't interested in the open web.

At best, you end up with an Apple Web, and a Google Web, both of them sucking ass in their own right. At worst, Apple becomes irrelevant because of their focus on native apps. Most of which are already Chromium wrappers anyways.

So yes. Pinch your nose and go in. Mozilla is worth the support, no matter what. Their leadership already sucks, what's the worst that could happen ? They keep sucking, but take back marketshare ? Good. For once, give them support instead of being the worst user in the world, the one the just shits on them for not being good enough, while flocking to Google anyways.

You seem to be replying to an argument no one is making (e.g. "Don't use Firefox"). Not sure why.

maybe don't forget that firefox probably would have died a much sooner death if mozilla hadn't been google's pet charity project though. mozilla has yet to demonstrate really being a self sustaining organization

Corporations (and the wealthy in general) don't do charity. The tacit objetive of every corporation is and will always be profits über alles. Every time you see a corporation donating money to some cause there's an ulterior motive that ultimately grows their bottom line. The most common motives are: pay less taxes (or none at all), PR move to improve their public image, and, finally, publicity (sometimes because of controversy).

Now, of course, Google's financial relationship with Mozilla is no exception. The stated reason is that they give money to Mozilla in exchange for having Google as the default search engine, but its actual purpose is to mitigate claims about Google having a monopoly on the browser market and thereby avoid anti-trust laws.

If Firefox were to gain the majority of the marketshare Google would no longer have an incentive to give them money. Mozilla wouldn't be happy about that because they'd lose their biggest source of income. And Google wouldn't be happy either because they make money through web ads and harvesting data to sell it to ad companies, and there's no better way to go about doing that than creating their own web browser and a whole ecosystem surrounding it, and then making sure it's the most popular one.

> Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault

Clearly it is Mozilla fault: the world is not fair, if they are where they are they should crunch their resources and win. Google haven't started being the home of most computers. It is the nature of competition. Is it hard? Sure.

If you use anti-trust practices to get your foothold, it isn't fair.

"The world is not fair" in part because we refuse to punish Google for their blatantly anti-consumer practice of purposely making their websites work worse on non-chrome browsers and advertising chrome on every google property.

How the fuck is mozilla supposed to compete with a GIANT that is nearly everyone's homepage? Even if they had comparable budgets (Which they don't) mozilla still wouldn't get the free advertising that google gives chrome

I think the Mozilla foundation has enough money to lobby about monopolistic practices. Did they?

If your argument would be 100% true there will be no innovation or market dynamics. Business history has proven that one day you are at the top and another you aren't anymore.

If firefox sued google over monopolistic practices, that lawsuit would have to be funded completely by google. Google is 80% of firefox's revenue and 0% of its expenditure.

> purposely making their websites work worse on non-chrome browsers

This is wild exaggeration that I never hear about except from people defending the mismanagement of Firefox. I've used Firefox since forever, and I don't have much trouble anywhere that I can remember. The browser works. This is an article showing that it's outperforming Chrome on some metrics. It's Firefox's business and design decisions that wreck their browser. It went from being awesome to being janky Chrome that calls you abusive when you complain that they put an ad for a tv show in your browser.

I find it amazing how people forget that being a monopolistic power doesn't help if your product sucks: Google has, time and time again, failed to gain traction in the messaging app market on Android, the market being entirely occupied by competitors like WhatsApp.

Chrome won partly because of the marketing and being preinstalled, sure, but also by being a good product. If nagging people to install Chrome was all it took to win, then why is Edge in such a precarious position on Windows with all the nagging Windows 10 and 11 brought? Microsoft failed to succeed time and time again.

People on HN have weird preconceptions about how suggestion and marketing works.

I don't know where you are from but you seem very biased to your own friend or country bubble. For reference I don't know anyone at all who use WhatsApp. I use Google Chat and Facebook Messenger with a few but SMS with Google's RCS with everyone else, including my younger and much older family members.

WhatsApp is used all over Europe and Latin America. Very easy to check. For example [1].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311229/whatsapp-usage-m...

According to statista.com 12% use WhatsApp in Denmark. As I said, living in a bubble if one believes everyone uses it.

Edit: A quick search said this from the same source:

>Using WhatsApp less often than once a month was the most common usage frequency among Danes in 2019, according to 23 percent of the service users. 15 percent used the app weekly and 13 percent used it several times a day.

Please don't joke about Denmark, it has a population of 6m. Anyway, it is easy to check what I said, I am from Latam and anyone uses WP.

I live in France, and WhatsApp has a pretty big presence. Not a monopoly style one though, there's plenty of other apps used: Facebook Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, Discord.. I have friends who have family in other countries and some different apps will be dominant, like Viber, but the common theme is that the only time I've seen people use SMS is when they're unsure as to whether the other person has any other means of communication. Most importantly, I've never seen someone use Google's own non-RCS chat apps, like Google Chat, Google Hangout, Google Allo, Google Talk.. Google has had many chat apps, sometimes just different names for the same thing, but in the end, they have no users here. Google continuously tried to make a dent in that market and failed.

RCS is a non-starter if you need to do group chats with iPhone users or send them pictures without a massive loss in quality, as iPhones do not support RCS. As long as Apple refuses to support it, it will continue being a terrible choice in any country with significant Apple user base. An Android user with WhatsApp shares an identical experience with an iPhone user with WhatsApp. RCS on the other hand will drop you back to what cell phone messaging was many decades ago.

>I find it amazing how people forget that being a monopolistic power doesn't help if your product sucks:

Which is why none of our companies use microsoft teams, right? Or wait, maybe when it comes to products that aren't that different, what comes with the package matters.

That never stopped Phoenix in the early days, or Chrome itself in its early days. Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome and breaks a lot of sites. And over the last decade it kept pushing crapware and spam on you, right in the browser.

Mozilla mismanaged it to hell. They don't even really care about the browser anymore.

Which sites don’t work with Firefox?

Safari is a huge simply due to iOS but it’s a shame that Apple stopped maintaining the windows port.

Sadly I don't remember anymore. I ran into plenty of them 3 or 4 years ago (every week or so), then I stopped using Firefox altogether because of that. At work, some coworkers were using Firefox last year and it broke various third party libraries (especially graphics heavy ones). Rather than trying to fix the bugs, we just decided to deprecate Firefox support altogether because its usage was down to like 2 or 3 percent. Those resources were better spent on, say, improving mobile usability and performance for everyone.

Edit: I wish Mozilla would just fork Chromium and add/delete whatever privacy things they want, like Brave. There's no reason to maintain Gecko anymore.

I didn't have websites outright breaking on FF like solardev, but I had other issues with it, like cloudflare getting me into an infinite loop of asking me if I'm human and not letting me browse the website. This happened even if I deleted my firefox profile and started fresh with no extension. Note that this behavior of Cloudflare is highly dependent on the settings of their anti-ddos stuff, some websites have it set on a higher level of defensive behavior than others, I didn't have this issue everywhere.

This wasn't due to my computer's IP, the problem went away the moment I browsed the same website with Chrome, and this time I wasn't even asked to click the checkbox to prove that I'm human.

>Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome

Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal tabs are clearly inferior.

Anecdote: I tried that back in the Netcaptor days but it didn't really stick (or something like it, anyway). Having to read a long list isn't particularly fast for me, personally, so I just use a combination of multiple windows (one per context, and easy to switch between on Mac) and the search engines feature (where you can make custom keyword lookups for Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, etc.) to quickly look things up. Chrome also has collapsible tab groups and pinnable tabs now, but it's not particularly great.

I never have more than 4 or 5 tabs open at a time, closing them as I'm done with them. If I need to recover them later they're always in the history.

I'm sure Firefox and other browsers offer some power user features that's good for some folks. I just don't care enough.

As a user I just want to see the information I need without tinkering with settings, and Chrome does that well. As a web dev I'd much rather focus on UX than cross browser compatibility, and the Blink/Webkit duopoly makes that possible in a way that standards never did (and still don't). So there's just no need for Firefox in my personal or work life. YMMV of course.

Firefox is still hostile to vertical tabs, adding a useless sidebar header that can be hidden with css, but you have to know that and spend the possible hours it could take to figure out how. Then, since that's unsupported, you have to prepare for it to possibly be broken after every update.

>Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome

Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal tabs are clearly inferior.

Brave and Edge can do vertical tabs natively, but chrome doesn't. The extensions I have tried in Chrome are as unusable as Safari's native vertical tabs implementation.

> Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal tabs are clearly inferior.

That's it, though. If Firefox breaks that again, like they intentionally broke it before, that 3% usage will drop down to 2%.

What Firefox definitely offers is uBlock Origin on Android. Augment it with anti-paywall blocklists and the experience is basically a killer feature for Android over iOS. I use Chrome on desktop (mostly for better sandboxing) but on mobile there is no real competition between Firefox and Chrome: Firefox just wins.

You can get the same experience (but across all apps) using Adguard, which acts as a fake VPN and MITM certificate. No more ads in any app, while still keeping your Chrome synced tabs and logins and such between devices.

VPN and MITM?! What a horrible horrible security nightmare!

It sure is. But what a great user experience afterward! Security and convenience are usually tradeoffs, and in this case it's totally worth it.

Is the experience really equal? E.g. uBlock Origin operates at the DOM layer so it can and does block dynamically generated content using CSS selectors. Does Adguard simply inject the same DOM-aware JS in every page?

I dunno, but it's good enough. And way more useful to block in app ads than to be limited to the browser only. Of course you can use both if you want, but then you'd have to use Firefox or another browser.

Except there's no way to export your bookmarks on android out of Firefox without using their sync service. I think this omission (a simple export!) speaks volumes about Mozilla's true goal of browser lock-in and another example of their chronic mismanagement.

Ah yes browser lock in, from the company that makes zero dollars selling their browser, compared to the company that wants to actively harm the open internet.

What's wrong with you guys? Could google stab you in the face and you still swear up and down that firefox is negligibly slower than chrome? What will it take? Google is pushing a "feature" to completely lock down the internet, take away all meaning from "user-agent", and make blocking ads functionally impossible! When will you stop aiding and abetting this behavior because you feel mozilla is "not perfect"

In truth I just don't really care? We've gone through this cycle so many times with various kinds of DRM, from DVD CSS to Denovo to WideVine to Adobe Cloud to various other schemes that at the end of the day just aren't big deals.

A lot of the tech echo chamber bandwagons and freaks out about things like this, but I bet in a few years it'll turn out either a non issue or else alternate browsers will naturally rise to popularity. No point fussing about it beforehand. In the meantime Chrome just works, Google is whatever, Firefox is annoying, and Mozilla just feels irrelevant.

Shrug. I feel way more annoyed by Firefox than anything Google's ever done. Whatever their ideology, their product just isn't great.

better extension environment

much better privacy

practically the same experience while surfing

keeps competition going

ublock origin actually works as it was meant to

mozilla didn't forget what "do no evil" and "open internet" means

Note that in the Phoronix post it also mentions in the modern and demanding Jetstream benchmark, Firefox is still way behind. While seeing improvements is good, Sunspider is a very old microbenchmark not sure how relevant it is.

Uh, clearly you don’t know anybody who actually worked there? Management is very very very unpopular and they’ve been facing a massive brain drain for years.

Because they do have a great browser, but have a horrible strategy and have wasted money in any number of ways, and made themselves wholly dependent on Google for handouts.

>Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile web standards, but clearly, mozilla just isn't doing enough

>How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?

A hard lesson I learned at my last company was that it's not enough to have the better product. Better marketing and better relationships will, more often than not, trump a better fitting solution to a problem. It sucks, but it's real.

Yeah! In fact, I would say a large portion of this is every android phone coming with Chrome pre-installed, and you know, that entire decade google spent with literal super bowl advertisements and THE GOOGLE DOT COM WEBSITE URGING YOU TO INSTALL CHROME with a mountain of dark patterns that plenty of smarter people than I have written about.

Can you imagine the fucking fit HN would throw if mozilla dared to buy a super bowl ad?

It’s not about speed, compatibility with Firefox is actually getting worse. I switched (back) to FF and DDG a few months ago and FF is having trouble with multiple websites I use on occasion (for an example off the top of my head, if I want to log-in to Haaretz.co.il to get past pay walls I have to use safari as FF doesn’t manage to log in).

This is still the small minority of sites but I keep safari and chrome around as it still happens often enough.

I am a tab hoarder, and on multiple different operating systems, with different installs, etc.

Firefox ALWAYS seems to have random leaks after weeks that other browsers don't have, once I saw Firefox taking 24GBs of RAM, while Edge and Brave on the same or more tabs and time were taking only ~2-3gb of RAM.

This has been going on since at least 2019-2020 or so, when I started dropping Firefox because of this behavior. It is just random websites that seem to cause leaks but this has never happened with Edge or Brave and no website should really be breaking a browser like this, the system becomes unusable after a while.

They are seemingly unable to fix the issue or pretend it doesn't exist even when its reported so I basically had to stop using FF as my main browser.

Manifest v3 announcement feels like a pretty arbitrary line to draw in the sand.

> I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium

Ah, yes, Linux, the OS used on something like 3% of desktop machines! I'm sorry but I don't see the logic at work here at all. Chrome dominates because Google pushes it and they have the means to reach basically every internet user out there. Switching out Mozilla for the Linux Foundation would do absolutely zero to counter that. Case in point: by most measures ChromeOS has a higher desktop market share than vanilla Linux already.

Linux accounts for:

82% of the smartphone market

90% of public cloud workloads

62% of the embedded market

99% of the super-computer market

The first figure alone makes it more relevant to the general population than windows or any other OS.

Let's see, 55% of all web traffic is mobile devices so that means roughly 45% of all web traffic comes from linux-based smartphones.

And that isn't counting things like Chrome OS, or linux desktop browsing, which account for another 2-4%

So roughly 49% of all web traffic is literal user-facing linux devices, and 90% of the websites they are browsing are served by linux servers...

So yeah, if anything linux is probably the most important OS in existence right now. Definitely not obscure..

And how much of that 82% is attributable to the Linux Foundation as opposed to Google?

100%, because Google is using Linux?

That makes no sense. 82% of the market is using Linux not because of the inherent goodness of the OS, it’s because Google chose to use it. If they change their mind tomorrow (see Project Fuschia and all that) there isn’t anything the Linux Foundation would be able to do about that.

This isn't true at all. Most people are using containers anyway, and guess what they're running in those containers...

ASP.net had it's day, and everyone wanted to instead run their .NET apps on linux rather than deal with windows licensing and security issues, which is why mono was so popular

Other things had their chance too, like MacOS-based hosting, and it never really took off, again because people don't want to manage closed-source production systems that they can't simply patch themselves.

Public clouds don't dictate what people use. You can freely run windows or any other OS on an AWS or Google VPS, it's just people very seldom choose to do so, because (this is the punchline), linux is just that much more popular and developer-friendly.

The domination of linux in the hosting / server world predates the existence of public clouds. I was there, I remember.

At the turn of the millennium for a very very brief time there were a lot of windows servers running ASP.NET. That was it. Nothing has come close to linux since then, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what AWS/GCP offers. What they offer is entirely beholding to what developers like.

> Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough

No disagreement there.

> We'd need the Linux Foundation

Who spends a whooping’ 3% of their total spending on actual Linux? [1]

Call me a pessimist, but I might look for a better candidate.

[1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-foundation-spends-just-...

I’m confused why people would move away from Firefox to Chrome because of Manifest v3. If anything, it should convince one to move even harder in the other direction.

Indeed, the point OP is trying to make is that despite Manifest v3, Firefox is nevertheless still losing users (to highlight how dire the situation for Firefox is).

Got it, thanks for clarifying. Definitely points to a management problem IMO.

Where does this data come from?

I use Firefox because I am privacy-conscious, as a result I have telemetry turned off. Do people like me show up in those stats?

> We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium

Why is the answer always more chromium?

And for a userbase nominally so positively biased towards open source it is weird to see how google gets a pass on pretty much everything, while mozilla/firefox has this incredibly carefully curated list of offenses that is maintained and spread by the community, doing most of the work at ensuring that firefox never goes anywhere. There's a lot of Linux proponents here who are doing all the heavy work of carrying water for Google when it comes to chrome dominance.

Yeah, so every time you actually restart firefox after it updates you probably get an ad for mozilla VPN. Okay compare that to Google literally being the central advertising and spyware hub of the entire internet. "I'll just have to use the worst option possible, because the alternative isn't 100% ideologically pure".

Nobody hates FOSS more than FOSS users.

I tried migrating from Chrome to Firefox with the recent developments. The user experience of Mozilla could be better, imo.

After not liking Firefox, I tried four more browsers: Orion, Arch, Brave, and Vivaldi. I finally landed on using Brave.

After you turn off everything related to crypto, it becomes a great and user-friendly browser with adversarial interoperability with Chrome. It's the only browser with an actual chance of beating Chrome by convincing its users to migrate.

I'm hoping they can continue maintaining the Chromium fork (it's an actual fork, by the way), as it'll get harder and harder as it diverges more and more.

It's not an actual fork, by the way. Them saying so doesn't make it so. It uses chromium as a base and applies quite a lot of patches. Otherwise every chromium based browser is a fork, despite all pulling in more or less all upstream patches?

OK it's a branch.

More importantly: being a fork or not doesn't matter! As long as the Brave team is not able to write their own browser engine that could compete with chromium, they are stuck with whatever development goes into chromium. "Oh it's just patches and things", but it won't be forever, and we WILL see work go into chromium that is deep enough to be difficult to untangle and subtly designed to to force you into whatever path google wants. There will be a day where Brave is unable to degoogle chromium to a useful point. Participating in a chromium browser is only helping google, and there's no way around that.

… Taking an upstream project, and then applying your own patches to it, along with a commitment to not ship anti-user changes (like manifest V3) is a fork by any objective definition.

I find nothing saying they didn't implement manifest V3. The only info I can find from them is that their own adblocker, which isn't an extension, will continue to work[0] and that, for example, ublock will continue to work as long as google doesn't remove manifest v2 support.[0] Seems odd to me that what Google does to manifest V2 matters at all to Brave, if Brave is indeed a fork and not just chromium with a skin.

0: https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446

1: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152

What's wrong with the user experience? To me they're all the same there: you have tabs and a toolbar and the rest is the webpage. Little else I actually interface with in a normal day.

Maybe I'm naive, but Brave doing anything with crypto doesn't inspire confidence in their long-term product vision. Why does a browser need a business model?

Why do developers need to be paid?

What was your experience with Orion and why do you think it does not have a chance of convincing Chrome users to migrate?

The real shame is Mozilla cutting back on Firefox development despite being a billion dollar corporation. Google would have had no leverage to push stuff like WEI if Firefox was the dominant browser.

Tbf, they cut back because they thought that, strategically, they needed a competitive mobile OS. Unfortunately, regardless of whether it was the right decision, they then mismanaged development of such OS (particularly on the commercial side).

Not sure in which reality you're living, but FirefoxOS was developed at Mozilla from 2011 to 2016, before any cut back. Mozilla Corp actually grew a lot during that time.

About FxOS being mismanaged, well... you have to understand that if you follow a model where you rely on others for distribution (carriers and open market OEMs), you are bound to their constraints. In that case, it was a chicken and egg situation where selling devices without a WhatsApp app was very difficult, but WA didn't want to develop an app for a new OS until it grew to tens of millions of users.

Then Moz top management lost some key proponents of the project, and the FirefoxOS haters got their wish. I still don't understand why Mitchel Baker didn't agree to support a community based project (like Thunderbird) or try a strong privacy based spin.

> In that case, it was a chicken and egg situation where selling devices without a WhatsApp app was very difficult, but WA didn't want to develop an app for a new OS until it grew to tens of millions of users.

Disclosure: I worked at WA during the FirefoxOS time period as well as when the KaiOS client was developed and launched.

I honestly don't remember the internal sentiment on FirefoxOS, and I don't know if Mozilla ever approached WA to ask for a client. But the public interfaces for apps were insufficient for a WhatsApp client, so that's a bigger issue. The KaiOS client (which afaik, Jio approached FB/WA to ask for) was difficult to build in part because the OS was missing important features for apps, and that takes time and collaboration to get added to the OS and then pushed out to users.

From memory, the major missing interfaces were around access to TCP sockets and ability to run code that accesses the network in response to a (silent) push message that optionally submits a notification for the user. If FirefoxOS didn't have push messaging (I can't remember), then ability to keep a socket open always and post notifications at will would suffice. Arbitrary tcp sockets are needed because the chat protocol is not http based; running code on pushes is required for e2e, so sender names can be populated from the device's address book, and to avoid notification horrors. Horrors include getting a notification about a message you can't read because the client hasn't fetched it yet and getting a notification about messages you've already read; WhatsApps model is the client is the source of truth, and so there's no reason to accept notification horrors that are common with server source of truth systems. e2e was under development for quite some time, so even if the public timelines don't match up, it would be a requirement for supporting new OSes.

For calling, access to UDP sockets would also be needed as well as ability to run native code as the voice codec and data marshalling is in C; although Firefox OS came out before WhatsApp calling. Calling didn't make it to all platforms, and would have been an acceptable thing to defer, IMHO.

Hi! Yes Mozilla approached WA (talks were held with Brian Acton if I remember correctly). We tried various workarounds:

- 3rd party clients. That worked initially, but WA was quite aggressive in breaking them, and once e2ee was added they stopped working.

- we wrote a j2me VM in Javascript (https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet) to run the S40 version :) Perf was not good enough when dealing with java threads.

- we collaborated with a company (OpenMobile) to run the Android app in a container, rendering in a DOM element. That was a pain in term of OS integration, and OpenMobile finally didn't get the distribution agreement from WA.

I implemented the KaiOS additional APIs, basically exposing a subset of libsignal. You're right that there are missing pieces in the web stack for these apps - it's very frustrating that you can't rely on WebCrypto for all the e2ee. Let's hope WebAssembly will fix that!

> - 3rd party clients. That worked initially, but WA was quite aggressive in breaking them, and once e2ee was added they stopped working.

Yeah, that happened. :/ I was mostly in favor of a light touch, but e2ee would have been a hard cutoff anyway, and we didn't have the desire to make a compliance program for 3rd party clients, so they just got the boot whenever they caused inconvenience. There would usually be a flurry of activity around individual changes, but afaik, third parties saw the writing on the wall when e2ee started showing up.

> - we wrote a j2me VM in Javascript (https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet) to run the S40 version :) Perf was not good enough when dealing with java threads.

Wow, that's impressive! (and kind of terrible!) Were you able to leverage this for other things, I hope?

> - we collaborated with a company (OpenMobile) to run the Android app in a container, rendering in a DOM element. That was a pain in term of OS integration, and OpenMobile finally didn't get the distribution agreement from WA.

I was unaware of this. That's interesting to hear about. I think you're right from your earlier post, that user count would have pushed WA the other way, and that lack of WA support made it harder to get user count. Samsung (Tizen) and Jio (KaiOS) got WA to make clients by subsidizing handsets and leveraging user counts / other business relations; s40 got a client because Nokia was clearly going to sell at least a few million of them (s40 predates WA, of course, but the earlier ones never ran WA); same with WP7, although no client until 7.5, because the platform was missing pieces.

WebOS didn't get a client because the platform was missing pieces and didn't survive long enough to add them (lack of WA support wasn't really an issue, given the timing). MeeGo didn't get a client because Nokia cancelled the N9 before they launched it, and limited the release.

> FirefoxOS was developed at Mozilla from 2011 to 2016, before any cut back

It absorbed resources and focus, which resulted in the browser stalling development, which resulted in shrinking marketshare, which resulted in less money from the search deals, which resulted in the ongoing job losses.

> you have to understand that [hard realities of the mobile market that everyone knows already]

I don't disagree, but: none of that was new or unexpected when going in. That's why a lot of people thought FFOS was hopeless: because breaking the mobile duopoly is so hard, by then it had already claimed a giant (Nokia) and seriously humbled another (Microsoft). The play for the "developing market" and low-end devices was hopeless and misguided. We had just seen Nokia dying while trying to hang on that same market... There was a lot of wishful thinking in all the strategic moves, and unsurprisingly they didn't pan out.

> It absorbed resources and focus, which resulted in the browser stalling development, which resulted in shrinking marketshare, which resulted in less money from the search deals, which resulted in the ongoing job losses.

That's history revision. The browser development didn't stall because of FirefoxOS, it was slow for other reasons (look at the leadership team changes when the Quantum started).

Please remember that FxOS started in 2011. At the time WindowsPhone was quite new (first release in 2010), Samsung was pushing Tizen and Android was not nearly as dominant. Context matter. Mozilla already knew that Firefox would not be the default browser on Android (Google waited for Chrome to be ready to replace the crappy default one that was subpar compared to Firefox) so owning a platform was a logical step. It would still be better these days.

> The play for the "developing market" and low-end devices was hopeless and misguided.

I don't think that's right. The developing and low-end devices are probably the only plausible route into the phone market. Especially during the time period that FirefoxOS was active, there was a tremendous opportunity for a phone that cost very little and was widely available. I don't know that FirefoxOS could have really addressed that market, given their software stack, but the market was there. Wikipedia claims 23 million KaiOS devices were produced in Q1 2018; given that KaiOS is a fork of FirefoxOS, I think that's a demonstration that the targeting was fine. 23 million devices is a small chunk of the mobile market, but it's still a lot of devices.

Microsoft was making significant gains in market share with WP7 and WP8 by having devices that were low cost and worked much better than similar cost Androids. In the US, you could go out and get a $60 wp7 device or a $100 wp8 device when they were new and have a much more usable phone than a $150 Android. and an iPhone was like $400-$500 at the time. Microsoft had some high end wp7 and wp8 devices too, but not many people bought them, because high end iPhones and Androids worked well, and at that price point you're looking for different things. WM10 had promise and interesting features (Continuum might have been pretty cool, especially if Intel hadn't dropped development of x86 phones days before the Continuum public demo), but WM10 didn't run well on low end phones, so there were no low end WM10 phones, and user growth evaporated. (It doesn't help that WM10 included at least the 3rd new framework for windows phones in 3 generations, and called this one 'universal', which meant it only ran on the OS which had the least number of phones for its whole lifetime....)

> Microsoft was making significant gains in market share [...] Microsoft had some high end wp7 and wp8 devices too, but not many people bought them

And that's the problem: the phone market is fundamentally aspirational, phones are status-symbols, it's the high-end that directs the market. Yes, you can have a number of bottom-feeders at the cheap end, but they are fundamentally irrelevant: (almost) nobody buys a KaiOS device because of KaiOS, they buy a cheap phone that will run whatever OS ships with it. And the same was happening for Microsoft: people bought MS phones because they were cheap, and then chucked them away as soon as they could afford a flagship Android or iPhone.

If you cannot produce a flagship phone that people actually want to buy for the OS, for the experience, rather than for the price, you're having no impact whatsoever on the direction of the market, regardless of numbers. Nokia was still shipping hundreds of millions on cheap featurephones when it died on its ass.

I mean, maybe you both high end and low end, so there's something to aspire to, but on a global market, the majority of phones sold aren't flagships. And a new entrant isn't going to be able to sell a flagship phone with no apps; and you're not going to get apps without at least expected sales. Addressing the bottom of the market allows you to get sales to justify app development, and that allows you to make sales for high end phones plausible.

I don't use iOS devices, but I understand the experience is generally considered to be pleasant. The Android is really not that great; there's definitely room for someone to build something with UI that's not made of molasses; but it's going to be a real uphill slog to get it into the marketplace, and it's going to have to be driven by market share on the low end that goes upmarket over time.

> a new entrant isn't going to be able to sell a flagship phone with no apps; and you're not going to get apps without at least expected sales.

That's where you need the commercial talent to go out and make deals, build relationships, get mindshare before you even go to market. To do that, you need sexy software, a sexy experience that makes a difference, and a lot of money. A clunky OS targeting the low end will never be sexy, and you'll never convince developers to work on it "for the good of the web" or some other non-financial reason.

> The Android is really not that great; there's definitely room for someone to build something with UI that's not made of molasses

But the thing is, there really isn't. Android is actually pretty good, on flagship phones it works as well as iOS. There just isn't a massive quality gap to exploit. One needs a value proposition that changes the game, because you're not going anywhere with progressive enhancements.

> it's going to have to be driven by market share on the low end that goes upmarket over time.

Nobody has ever done that in post-2007 mobile. Nobody. Every player that saw the low-end as strategic, went there to die. As Microsoft demonstrated, it's a road to nowhere. You need to make a splash at the top end, make headlines, make people want it, or you'll never move the needle.

> That's where you need the commercial talent to go out and make deals, build relationships, get mindshare before you even go to market. To do that, you need sexy software, a sexy experience that makes a difference, and a lot of money. A clunky OS targeting the low end will never be sexy, and you'll never convince developers to work on it "for the good of the web" or some other non-financial reason.

I think I agree with most of this. But on the other hand, Jio was able to make KaiOS "sexy-ish" by promising to gather millions of new to smartphone users, only possible because of the low cost. And they delivered, and apps showed up, at least a little. That's not because the phones were sexy, or people were excited to buy them, or because they're not clunky, or because of some open web BS; it's because the phones were cheap and capable enough and the numbers were there. Mozilla clearly wasn't able to build the relationships to get there as we know from history, but it was able to be done with Firefox OS because Jio did it with the fork.

> Nobody has ever done that in post-2007 mobile. Nobody. Every player that saw the low-end as strategic, went there to die. As Microsoft demonstrated, it's a road to nowhere. You need to make a splash at the top end, make headlines, make people want it, or you'll never move the needle.

If anything, Microsoft's WM10 flop proved it. WP7 and WP8 were doing ok, WM10 didn't address the low end and the sales disappeared[1]. Is 2.5 - 3% market share great? No, but they had a reasonable bump after WP8 (q4 2012) and WP8.1 (q2 2014), and a proper release of WM10 (q4 2015) likely would have been another bump instead of a rather quick demise. It didn't help that there were signs that the WM10 release was not a quality release and that Microsoft had plans to abandon the platform; I was interested in a phone at the time, and could see that a) there was nothing worth buying for WP8.1, b) nothing worth waiting for on WM10, c) Microsoft didn't care, so I should start making my way towards the door.

Like I said, it's an uphill slog. You've got to make consistent releases that don't suck, which isn't easy.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/236034/global-smartphone...

Capyloon is an alternative trying to carry the FxOS torch, but its focus on IPFS & things other than telephony make it hard to recommend if you can’t use a phone as a phone.

Thanks for the mention! Capyloon (https://capyloon.org) had a grant from Protocol Labs (the IPFS stewards) in 2022 so we focused quite a bit on that indeed. We learned a lot - especially about the maturity and usability of the IPFS stack.

I'm still very bullish on the dWeb pieces: content based addressing, UCANs (https://ucan.xyz/) for distributed auth, new web app models (https://hackmd.io/@robin-berjon/tiles) to create an ecosystem that is not locked by centralized app stores.

There's a lot to do, all contributions are welcome (frontend, device ports, platform apis...). We have a Matrix channel (https://matrix.to/#/#capyloon:matrix.org) and you can try desktop builds easily following the steps at https://github.com/capyloon/nutria#quick-start

> Moz top management lost some key proponents of the project, and the FirefoxOS haters got their wish

That's an interesting way to say that the people who foresaw its imminent failure were correct—but (conveniently) does so in a way that not only downplays[1] the correctness of their prediction, but also maligns them by ever-so-subtly suggesting the reader consider whether blame for the resulting failure shouldn't perhaps be shifted onto those who made the prediction [1 again, unfortunately]...

1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20201022224913/https://www.colby...>

Giving up on a failing browser, and trying to make a whole OS instead, is insane. The OS is much harder.

IMO it's not insane (and they didn't give up on their browser in order to do it).

It was a Hail Mary for sure but really their only way to be competitive on mobile. iOS and Android are both owned by direct competitors in the browser space, Mozilla is never going to be given a fair shot there. FirefoxOS would have their way to rectify that and I think we would have all benefitted from greater competition in the mobile market. But alas, it was never to be.

Meanwhile firefoxOS as kaios has been successful in their goals. There are likely more kaiOS users than firefox users at this point. That points to there being a commercial solution that Mozilla missed, as you say.

In terms of being the right idea, the idea of firefox OS was great and really needed in the face of chromebooks popping up and iOS dominance. I can’t imagine building a browser and not also planning a response to mobile lock-in and cloud based devices.

Personally I think ms did the right thing. Edge compatibility is no longer an issue and their maintenance cost plumetted.

I still love Firefox. Not seeing ads anywhere is worth whatever warts I hit

What are firefox's warts ooc?

Usually it's some nitpick about the time they advertised Mr. Robot "breaking our trust", or buying pocket, a bookmarking utility that lots of people liked and used and integrating it into the web browser, which is clearly a user-hostile move, to buy and integrate functionality that might be useful. With such horrible missteps, you should obviously instead use the browser that has pushed MULTIPLE APIs with negligible real world use and significant fingerprinting capacity, lead the change to limit add-on functionality, makes it harder to block ads (BECAUSE THEY ARE AN ADVERTISING COMPANY), sends most of what you do to their advertising engine, and FUCKING WEI.

Or, oh no, the CEO of the foundation makes more than they do as an engineer at google, that must be corruption! Meanwhile Firefox is faster, less buggy, has never stopped being a very good browser and the only one made by a group that can't subsidize it, and doesn't get to shove it's advertising down your throat on every single website that Google owns.

> It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chromium

I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the web. There are now no major closed source browser engines remaining. It was a massive indication that in the end, open source software will always win in any market. We just needed Google to dump in billions of dollars to help accelerate the process, but they did that, and now we're all better off for it.

Now we just need Windows, OSX, and iOS to die out, and the whole world will be running on open source software.

Hard pass. Monocultures are bad.

What monoculture? There is an incredibly rich ecosystem of Chromium forks, all playing with different ideas for how the web should work. There's a nice, clean, stable base for people to work with, and extend upon. This seems like the ideal scenario.

I think the GP is more disappointed that Microsoft choose to use Blink rather than Gecko as their rendering engine. Not that they abandoned the closed source EdgeHTML.

Free software and open source software are great. But, web pages are "you get what we serve". So, if there's a hostile standard that web pages all start using, having an open source implementation of the thing working against you is a very small consolation...

> I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the web. There are now no major closed source browser engines remaining.

Microsoft announcing an open source "Edge Core" (cf .NET Core, ChakraCore) would have satisfied the same criterion.

Me too. I find the vast majority supports it fine. I find those that do not are happy to fix the problem, often within a few days or maybe a month.

Firefox is so good. It's fast, modern, extensible and worth almost any downside if only because of Google's approach to privacy.

If privacy is a concern of yours, especially when it might involve Google, you should probably read Firefox's privacy notice:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

There are more data and participants involved than one might expect, especially considering the prominent "At Mozilla, we believe that privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet." notice at the top.

You'll find the name "Google" in there a number of times, for example.

It could be argued that some of the privacy-compromising functionality can be disabled, or that Firefox is still the "least worst" option, and so on.

Ultimately, though, I don't think that Firefox is as privacy-respecting as some people seem to mistakenly believe it is.

If Firefox truly did respect the privacy of its users, that privacy notice would be a lot simpler than it actually is.

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

I'll self-godwinize myself, but: if Google is the Hitler of privacy, Firefox is like Churchill - still quite the racist and imperialist guy, but a last bastion of defense against absolute evil and deserving of all the support.

I don't see anything objectionable at all on that page. If anything, seeing that Firefox makes stuff like this opt-in makes me feel better about using it:

> If you enable "Improve the Firefox Suggest Experience," we and our partners may also receive your search queries. Learn more below.

All the other data being sent is pretty standard. It uses location data to configure search and show Recommended by Pocket articles (though, I'm not sure they actually use location data for this - unless it's really high level, such as country). And they use analytics to know how often you click on items - which practically every app does these days.

This is always hilarious to me to read considering Firefox is full of garbage like Pocket and “recommended” (sponsored) sites on the new tab page.

That's because said garbage has names. Anything by Google doesn't even have the language needed to criticise it.

I don't care. Firefox is fast enough for me, even on my Pixel 4a, and without ads.

> Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox

It is a good outcome that we have for the web: good standards and a reference implementation in the form of WebKit/Blink.

This is a boon for web developers: follow the standards, but if there are gaps in the standard, check the behavior on Chrome. If there were multiple mainstream browser implementations with split market share; it would be painful for web developers. Large amounts of time and energy would be wasted on testing the web apps on every possible browser implementation. This is probably why platform technologies such as Operating Systems, browsers, etc. trend towards monopolies or duopolies. A highly fragmented market is not in users, developers, or even platform developers' best interests.

Chrome also has well-resourced competition in the form of Apple and Microsoft. As Chrome adds more user-hostile changes, users will switch away to friendlier browsers, such as Brave, Edge, Safari, etc.

> If there were multiple mainstream browser implementations with split market share; it would be painful for web developers.

But good for users which is the tension. Having multiple browsers that have significant differences that you can't not develop for means that you actually have to gracefully degrade instead of demanding everyone else behave more like Chrome. If we're at the point where were calling Chrome the reference then what's even the point of other browser engines? What would they even bring to the table except the skin?

This is one of those weird arguments that actually supports iOS forcing developers to use Webkit. The only differentiating features of browsers are the skins so quit caring about the engine /s.

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