How’s firefox these days?
On a serious note - I’ve seen a lot of browser startups lately.
Are there any of them that really stand out?
On a serious note - I’ve seen a lot of browser startups lately.
Are there any of them that really stand out?
Surviving but continues to bleed users.
The main ones being:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...
The pay wouldn't be so egregious if it wasn't a constant pattern of pay raises, despite by their own stats, losing MAU and revenue. They also laid off 250 people (which is much more than $5MM, any way you cut it) but it seems in bad taste to give the CEO a raise in the same year.
And:
The fact that they're leaning so much into political activism.
On their homepage they're promoting a journalist involved in some misinformation controversy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220928230910/https://www.washi...
The journalist has blamed all this on "editors" -- so we'll never know _who_ exactly did the stealth edits and lied about contacting for comment. In any case, it is pretty ironic, given the CEO of Mozilla seems to think we need more than de-platforming to combat "misinformation":
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
Not a fan of statements that creep into invasions of privacy from a supposedly privacy focused browser.
So, to sum it up;
Wild executive pay for poor performance and too much political activism (that I tend to not agree with) for a web browser.
For me, one of the most important reasons to use Firefox is to support one of the few remaining alternate browser implementations. Sure, Chrome and Safari and Edge have all likely diverged to a degree since their shared ancestry (which really wasn't that long ago), but I suspect they're far more similar underneath than different. I would prefer they not be political (but I can see how they get mixed up, as leaning in heavy on privacy is necessarily political in some ways, such as when it involves opinions of nations that disagree, and then there are probably some at he org that want to push in what they see as a similar direction on other topics), but I don't really care about the pay of the CEO in comparison to the vital importance I think heterogeneity in the actual engines browsers use is for many reasons.
I also don't care about the CEO's comp either _unless_ the business is just... sucking... for lack of a better word. When they let go of 250 people and then bump the CEO's salary by nearly 50%, it just looks a little self-serving.
If Brave or Safari end up sucking enough I look into trying another browser again, I'll give FF a shot. I used it from about 2008 to 2020.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controver...
As for the CEO's donations, I couldn't care less. I don't care who the CEO of Mozilla donates to. I used Firefox for years, even when they (individuals at Mozilla) donated exclusively to democrats: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/mozilla-foundation/recipien...
Mozilla (as an organization) has chosen to participate in political activism and pay their executives ridiculous wages. I don't agree with a lot of the decisions they've made, so I don't use their browser. Simple as that.
Perhaps if the browser was just so good, it was impossible to live without, their MAU wouldn't be dropping... but that's not the case.
Nor their bedrooms. The gall of people to judge others by their consensual love is something I'll never understand.
It's always good to have a backup besides chrome/Firefox, in case Mozilla decides to commit yet another absurd move due to weird political trends.
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...
https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...
> Binaries are unsigned, third party update service, Google safe browsing disabled unless you build from source, running unusual browser setups can actually make you more distinctive online, unencrypted DNS by default, speed of security patches is slower than base Firefox, etc.
Why?
Theres only one site I know of that doesn't 100% work in it, thankfully its not one I use all the time.
I'd say the Android one is probably the weakest link but still usable and of course having ad-block on mobile is a huge quality of life improvement.
Other than that I don't notice any slowdowns compared to Chrome, the UI is very similar anyhow and the addon ecosystem is decent too.
I dont have the most powerful computer but if I want to play baldurs gate 3 on one monitor while stream something on the other monitor it has to be in firefox over chrome.
(The only main thing I don't use it for is for the DRM that my main streaming service wants right now. I dedicate Chromium to that, to keep the nastiness away from my main browser.)
With Firefox, you probably do want to change a lot of settings from the default, for privacy&security reasons.
Firefox is absolutely not holistically security&privacy-friendly overall -- there's a long history, of often behaving like a for-profit tech company, to grow out of -- but it's the closest I'm aware of that we have right now.
Not helping is that browser standards were captured and turned into both serving the needs of particular kinds of businesses, and as massive market moats for dominant players.
I don't know what to think of all the browser startups and open source forks. I know at least one person at Brave, and that person is a 100% straight-shooter true-believer in privacy&security (and intellectually formidable), but some things leadership has done are too trust-me and bad optics. Regarding the rest of the efforts, there might be gold in there, but we have to skeptical of each one by default, for two reasons: (1) our field is bad at what we do, and that's now reflected deep in our technology stacks, as well as in practices for new development; (2) our field has normalized a lot of sociopathic behavior in the last 25 years, so it's easy for even well-intentioned people to inadvertently do bad things, and there are also a lot people with not as admirable of intentions.