Tell HN: Firefox has madea lotof progress. Let the browser wars continue | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Firefox has madea lotof progress. Let the browser wars continue

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Like many others around here, i switch over to chrome around the v8 days when it was a superior runtime and haven't looked back. Due to the recent youtube shanangins with adblock and adding a Thread.Sleep(5 seconds) call to every webpage load, i decided to try out firefox again. I had alot of extensions (ublock, bitwarden etc) so i was concerned this was gonna be a whole thing.

I downloaded firefox, it imported the chrome history and all the plugins i had and i was pretty much continuing where i left off without any issues or "noticing the change".

I'm no longer concerned about manifest v3, youtube adblock warfare etc and it's nice to have a complete drop in replacement for chrome so we don't end up like the intel days where it had no competition and suffered with 4 core cpus for a decade.

Let the browser wars continue.

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I love Firefox, it's my main browser since before version 3. I have never really experienced the downsides of it, even on mobile, but of course this is highly personal, with regards to what websites one visits.

One of the features that's exclusive to Firefox, and I love, are the "Multi account containers". These let me have colored tabs with different contexts, so I can log in to a service with multiple users in one browser! Mighty useful for web development, for example. Even colleagues look at my setup with awe, but it's just Firefox and the official container addon.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Glad you're enjoying Firefox but I'm afraid the multi account feature isn't exclusive. Chrome allows multiple Google accounts to be signed in and you can create new windows for each user that are color-coded.

That is right, but in Firefox it's a different, better feature. The different web contexts don't have to be tied to a user, you can create as many as you'd like, even programmatically, and they all live in the same window (or in as many windows as you'd like). It's a killer feature for Firefox, and something that's not found in other browsers.

The only complaint I have is the ever-increasing calling-home-analytics-surveillance game they too are playing. Please stop.

Yes, the focus on "ethics" and "privacy" seems to be largely theatre these days, IMO.

This actually drove me back to chrome (ungoogled-chromium specifically).

Each time I try Firefox something is not right for me. No matter if I'm on windows or Linux. GUI rendering issues, freezes, ghost process that doesn't stop when I close the browser. Each time something new.

Plus it doesn't offer me as much configurability as Vivaldi, at least in these areas I care for.

I'd love to hear that FF has 50% usage ratę again, but I will stick to chromium based browser.

What irks me the most with Firefox is the silent removal of the features they don't want to support. "We changed tab styles, so now its hard to see a separator between tabs, and no, there no way to revert it, deal with it". And this happens every time. I remember times when Firefox was popular because of customability, now I don't know what the major vision of Firefox is.

It isn't user-friendly but adding a simple border between tabs should be trivial to do with a CSS rule or two in userChrome.css.

This is one of the things I love about Firefox. So many options available, even if not "fully supported" tend to work well. Although they appear to be moving away from this approach with the move to only We extensions.

> should be trivial

and

> with a CSS rule or two in userChrome.css.

Are firmly at odds. Over 99% of users will not have the ability or the desire to do this. Heck, I know exactly what you mean and how to do it, and I would never do it as it's a pain in the butt. I don't use a browser to mess around with its "conf" files. Either it does what I want or I can change it without leaving the app. Everything else is onerous.

I daily drive ff on desktop and it’s fine. However one thing google does is give ff users a degraded experience and it sucks.

Just get a user-agent switcher add-on and have it report your browser as Chrome on Google properties.

one of funniest thing here is on firefox you get picture on picture on youtube, but on chrome you dont - unless you pay, lol.

Arguably Firefox has never been a bad browser, at least technically speaking for sure. But instead of staying the leader, they started to trail Chrome unfortunately.

And of course, on Android, they messed it up big time when they switched to Quantum, and stopped supporting most extensions for years. (That was when I switched to Samsung browser, and realized that it is pretty much the best one on Android - after Firefox 68, which got pretty old after a while).

Of course I'm still a Firefox user on Desktop (and I also support them with code actually in the embedded space), but I consider them a wasted OSS opportunity.

I rarely use Chrome myself. Firefox in my opinion is less opinionated and let me use it the way I want.

For example, it's much easier in FF to not use tabs, which is important to me.

Also I want to support them because I think Google is getting to strong overall and a monoculture is no good.

I wish more Devs/IT people would use ff and lead the way for their non techie friend and family

I love Firefox and you will have to pry it from my cold dead hands.

I like FF as much as the next person and have been using it as my daily driver for a while now, but FF doesn't hold a candle to the responsiveness or snappiness of Chrome. It's especially noticeable on content or media rich sites where FF crawls down to a halt. The general browsing experience is nowhere near as good or refined as Chrome's, but when there's literally no better option you kinda just have to suffer through a sub-par browser.

I keep seeing these kind of comments and wonder why that might be. I personally run Firefox on 2 different laptops running Windows 11, one of the laptops is dual boot and I also run Firefox on Linux (Fedora). In my previous company I also used Firefox on MacOS.

I've had exactly zero performance issues. I watch YouTube, Netflix, AppleTV+, HBO. I access many SPAS. I use Google Meet for conference calls at work. I use websites that have a custom video player to watch their stuff.

CPU and memory usage are always low. No freezing. Nada.

I'm not questioning you or anything, I'm genuinely curious why some people seem to have these issues.

What I want next is for FireFox to do something to protect my cookies on disk. Chrome at least encrypts them using a key backed by the system keychain (although Chrome allows remote debugging from any other process, negating any benefits).

https://mango.pdf.zone/stealing-chrome-cookies-without-a-pas...

IMHO this seems like pointless cat and mouse. If you don't have per-app sandboxing it will be fairly easy for any local application to scoop up both the database and encryption key. If you have sandboxing than relying on the systems full-disk encryption is sufficient. Adding a little obfuscation for the non-sandboxed case seems like trouble for very little improvement.

Maybe something that would be valuable is encryption with the password manager's master password. That way you would have to enter the password at browser startup.

The encryption Chrome uses isn't just some key on disk that can be scooped up. On macOS at least, it's stored in the secure enclave which only signed Chrome binaries can access.

Now all this is pointless due to Chrome allowing remote debugging, but Firefox could come along and do it right and it would actually be an increase in security. A random unsandboxed binary trying to access the key would be blocked by the kernel.

I have used only Firefox from version 2 to about 102 (can't remember exactly). Performance was bad at some point but it was't unusable. What finally drove me away was the constant stream of UI updates - some may have been improvements but not so major to have been worth of the pain of adaptation period, some have been just...ugly.

Back in the Internet Explorer days, there used to be an extension called "IE Tab" that let users open non-compliant websites by usinv the IE engine as a webview without leaving the browser.

This might not be completely feasible under the current form of webextensions, however I wonder what would it take to work around Google's bad faith behaviour, and make firefox truly first-class.

Won't Google defacto lose all mildly informed users once adblocking is no longer feasible in Chrome?

I think the average NH user overestimates how many people use ad blockers. We’re the minority.

yeah whenever I use someone else family/friend laptop for doing something it usually is without adblock. I ask if its okay and install it for them

It’s roughly 30-40% world wide and latest stats in the US say between 25 and 35%.

I don’t know if people are overestimating but it sure as shit does surprise me each and every day.

I think some PM at google saw that 50% of users use adblock on https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users and said "hey, if we block ads, revenue will double".

also re adblock users being the minority, i think if we were, google a 1T company won't bother with this. It has to be a large chunk of their viewers.

I'm not sure. I think ad-blockers have become wayyyy more popular. I know a decade ago it was estimated at like ~3% but I would bet that, in the US at least, it's close to or even above 50%. They've just become so popular - I think there were even commercials for some products that blocked ads at one point/ privacy ads.

uBlock origin has 10,000,000+ users on the web store. Adblock has 10,000,000+ users. Adblock Plus has 10,000,000+ users.

I believe that 10,000,000+ means "any number above 10m" and not something like "between 10m and 100m", which means that 10m could potentially be a vast underestimation.

But either way, that's 30m devices, minimum, running adblock. That's 10% of the US population. Just for 3 adblockers I picked at random. And I would not be surprised to find that the number was 10x, even 50x higher than that.

Does it really have 10M+ users, or 10M+ downloads? Because they are not the same thing.

I know I've downloaded uBlock Origin probably about 20 times over the years.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/ublock%20origin

"users", which I assume means "devices".

Killing ad-blockers outright would likely cause many people to switch, but maybe not all. I am shocked to see that people buy "smart TVs" that are basically just TVs except that you don't just get commercials, you also get ads.

Instead of just buying a monitor and plugging your laptop in to stream... which seems far cheaper and better.

So I think a lot of people actually don't really mind ads that much tbh.

They mind. A lot of people have set TV apart from Internet, and that is an age thing. Peeps grew up with TV.

Others just do not know how to setup a media experience and just take what their Roku, or other media device gives them.

As younger people age up, these stats will change significantly.

It is that future fueling ad block wars, IMHO

I'd be a lot more chill about firefox if they didn't bake in a direct competitor (Pocket) to how I earn my livelihood. I'd love to have a decent Chrome alternative that wasn't trying to bankrupt me.

I just switched back from a decade of FF use to Chrome, sadly.

Whenever I would alt-tab back to FF, it would hang for a half second, just long enough be annoying. Chrome is instant.

Only thing I miss is middle click mouse drag feature.

I also made the switch, the deciding factor was when Firefox got out of websql so we now have the much inferior indexedDB instead. The browser platform would be much better with native sql support but Firefox decided otherwise so I moved away

I like having all my bookmarks synced, and I like having uBO on mobile.

Yes! I went to Chrome, and have come back to FF guilty I left

It boggles my mind that Chrome never had a good tree style tab plugin, something that existed on FF since forever. That's why I never switched to Chrome.

Does FF finally have a good tree style plugin? I remember when Firefox broke it because of droping support of old style plugins. So, now it finally works?

Sorry for ignorance, some moves from Mozilla like unblockable ads on page about VPN, constant redesign of GUI without clear aim, removing/dropping support of settings that I use forced me to change browser from Firefox to Vivaldi.

Sidebery is great for this nowadays, looks pretty slick too. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

how can i install plugins for any/all the users as root on my computer, instead of installing them per user?

or for that matter set default settings? like use of doh or proxies?

for any browser actually.

Can you bring me up to speed on the thread.sleep issue?

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858

Is the Mozilla Foundation still a politically active sideshow? That is what made me switch, I could put up with the performance gap - I couldn't put up with their plugin moderation and activities in the whole "combating disinformation" sphere.

Meh. No native tab groups, no vertical tabs. Product development is a sh.tshow. No thanks.

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