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Comment by zee234 | Hacker News Reader

Firefox browser and engine is technical obsolete joke. Their sand-boxing security model, multi-threading, graphical libraries... Remember cancelled Servo rewrite, or the whole "multi-threaded" saga?

Try to actually compile that bloody thing, before you write "software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible"

Even Ubuntu team gave up on compiling their software, and are serving mainstream binaries from Mozilla!

Brave has some shady stuff, but that is easy to disable in configuration. And under-hood they follow security patches pretty well, have good security and stuff like 3D acceleration just works!

And you do not need 10 browser extension from some shady authors, that has full access to your browsing data!!!

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As someone who has built and lightly studied Firefox codebase out of pure curiosity this technical joke doesn't really ring remotely true. Sure it's an older codebase and Mozilla doesn't have enough funding manpower to do big rewrites but I don't remember Firefox crashing on me in recent times and I use it exclusively on Mac/Linux and Windows. No site compat issues either. So stop blowing smoke I guess and provide actual details on how it is a joke?

It is not about crashing, but security. Chromium based browsers have multiple layers of sandboxing and hardening. Webpage rendered basically runs in several virtual machines that are very hard to breach.

Mozilla had process based isolation (mainly due old code base). That is far less effective. Some things like GPU access are not sandboxed at all!

>Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 for an estimated $400 million to $450 million per year.

Mozilla is a multibilion corporation. They DO have resources for proper rewrite in Rust. How they spend their money is another thing!

Old code base was good excuse in 2016! Brave Software Inc is much smaller company, and they do advanced stuff like their own search engine!

GPU sandboxing landed in 110 on Windows. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox/Process_model#GPU_... says it will be likely added to OSX and Linux with Webrender. Web Content processes are already sandboxed so I wouldn't say it's a joke ;) - sure they lag behind Chromium but Google has way more resources than Mozilla.

That's due to trademark restrictions. The Gentoo community regularly builds Firefox from scratch, it's not the slowest package to build.

<< And you do not need 10 browser extension from some shady authors, that has full access to your browsing data!!!

Which extension authors are shady? I am mostly sticking to ublock origin, but this is the first time I hear that accusation.

Most extensions are single person projects run on GitHub. Imagine if their Gmail account, or phone SIM gets breached and backdoored version reaches Extension Store.

Plus several extensions were just sold to highest bidder!

Sure, but it does not address the question I have placed for you. Can you name the extension you consider shady? A lot of projects on github are one man operations.

Sure!

Ublock Origin installed from Firefox Extension Web Store. I have no idea how this was verified and distributed. I do not trust webstore as a channel. Also user may easily click on "Unblock" or "Unlock" and get something completely different.

If this extension came from my Linux distro package, or bundled into Firefox binary, I would trust it.

With Brave I have no need to use extensions. Everything is bundled and can be enabled via about:flags.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/webext-ublock-origin-firefox

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