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Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

tuta.com

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I keep seeing Edge mentioned as a worthy alternative, and I just don't get it.

First, all Chromium-based browsers will eventually block uBlock Origin for the sole reason that they can't maintain Manifest v2 on their own, and they all rely on Chrome's Web Store anyway. This won't happen immediately because Manifest v2 will probably stick around for longer because of enterprise users, but the writing is on the wall.

Then there's the fact that Edge is just Microsoft's spyware, being worse in my book than Google's Chrome. And people forget that Microsoft is also an advertising company. Even if that's not their main revenue source, they also hate your ad-blockers.

In the EU, when you open Edge for the first time, they ask you to agree to sharing your personal data with the entire advertising industry, via an IAB dialog. And there's no way to workaround it, you have to answer it (with the rejection being an agreement to “legitimate interest” claims, which are BS). Google's Chrome does not do this, and searching on google.com only asks for sharing of data with Google itself.

Edge also exposes an advertising ID, meant for Bing's Ads, much like what Chrome does for Google. And in true Microsoft spirit, it also has telemetry, which you can't turn off.

Edge doesn't end-to-end encrypt your synchronized data. Compared with Chrome, which at least supports an “encryption passphrase” that does e2e encryption. Don't get me wrong, Chrome is also cursed because with a passphrase, they don't synchronize all your history. And also, they keep turning on that option for sharing your browsing history with Google, for the purpose of improving search. But in terms of what browser is more adversarial towards users, Edge is worse, IMO.

And Edge is hard-coded to use Bing. It's harder to use Edge without Bing or Microsoft's online services, than it is to use Chrome without Google. Personally, I don't want my browser to tie me to certain online services.

Seriously, Edge is just Microsoft's spyware and a piece of crap. Other Chromium alternatives, like Vivaldi or Brave, are better, firstly because they aren't so adversarial. Or if you're on macOS, give Arc a try.

> they can't maintain Manifest v2 on their own

The code for manifest v2 is really very simple (when you know that functionality for manifest v3 must remain available) - maintenance of it as an unmerged patch would be pretty straightforward.

I suspect such a patch could be just 10's of lines of code - you're simply changing the condition list under which a web request can be blocking or not.

Isn't it about keeping the manifest v2 API running?

It isn't a server API or anything... It's just some code in chrome, and it has to remain because it's still allowed to be used in Manifest v3 but for a narrower scope of usecases.

(Note - I'm specifically talking about the controversial WebRequestBlocking part of the changes - the rest of the manifest v2 to v3 migration is largely just like a python 2>3 migration - there is equivalent functionality for everything).

I thought the accepted solution was to just add Blocking WebRequest to the Manifest v3 implementation, which should be simpler than maintaining the entire v2 specification.

I use Vivaldi (and firefox before that) but a reason to use Edge is because it's supposedly very resource-efficient.

It's the same Chromium, it can't be more resource-efficient. It did have some tricks, but “energy saver” and “memory saver” modes have been added to Chromium.

It can be more efficent on Windows where Edge is first class passenger similar to how Safari is more efficient on MacOS. Try looking at battery life. You can easily squeeze more juice on Edge than on FF/Chrome.

What percentage of users actually, really care how marginally more efficient their web browser is these days?

Given that most computers I see have a billion tabs open, I'd guess most of them.

I'm not saying that many users will care about their browser's performance. I'm just saying that that is a potential reason to use Edge.

People who don't see the problem with Edge must all be domain joined or on Pro for Workstations / Enterprise. Supposedly the browser doesn't annoy "confirmed" business customers as much.

I recently switched to the RC Insider ring just to get the EU digital markets update, which lets you uninstall Edge.

Because it started doing incredibly creepy stuff.

* Keeps asking me every day if I want to keep my new tab extension. No way to set a blank page either. If you don't use an extension, it's "Microsoft Home" (which doesn't even let you properly set your own background, and keeps showing me squids, no thanks). Despite me clicking no every time, it still occasionally disables it. I think there may be a timeout, and then the disabled plugin syncs everywhere.

* Asked me if it could shouldersurf my Kagi searches and scrape them to improve Bing. If I was Kagi, I'd think about blocking the Edge user agent.

* Upon clicking "no" on the point above, it changed my search engine to Bing.

* Edge also has a feature to regularly scrape other Browsers for their history to submit to Microsoft. Given every other Edge feature did not respect my consent in an honestly gaslighting fashion, I don't feel confident any browsing data on a Windows machine is private unless you install the above Release Candidate and set your Region to EU to uninstall Edge.

Here's the guide I followed. Just set your region to Ireland or something: https://www.partitionwizard.com/news/uninstall-microsoft-edg...

>to get the EU digital markets update, which lets you uninstall Edge.

Again — as a former anti-EU person — I am reminded why I am now pro-EU. While nowhere perfect it is much better than not having an EU and way, way better than the US.

I've come across many anti EU persons and there are some broad categories:

- the uninformed, they have no idea about how the EU came about or what it does, but they're against it anyway

- the people on the receiving end of the regulations (anti-trust, advertisers, marketeers, bankers, data sellers etc). They have a very good idea about what it does, but it interferes with their preferred way of getting to more cash.

- the people that are nostalgic and that remember their country as it was 50 years ago and would like to go back there. They believe that because the EU happened to coincide with the downslide of their country that the two are related. What they usually forget is that without the EU that downslide would have been much worse.

- the people who genuinely believe that 'smaller is better' when it comes to politics and who tend to miss the wood for the trees: that in politics smaller is only better when you are very wealthy and can set your own rules. Think Switzerland. Everybody else will have a less privileged position and if they find themselves up against the giants of the world for whatever reason suddenly 'small' translates to 'weak'. In unity there is some strength so it makes sense for smaller countries to join in a larger unit, if only to curb the inevitable infighting (and the local wars that come with those).

I've yet to come across someone who actually spent some time figuring out what the EU actually does who remained against it. There is a lot of valid criticism against the EU bureaucrats: lots of them are grifters and there is quite a bit of corruption. But it is much worse in other places and on balance I'll take the grifters because I realize that politics as such is a grift of sorts, but it is inevitable, like taxes are.

Until we manage to change human nature no political system will be perfect. But given that the EU tends to stand up for the little guy and that they are powerful enough to make a difference but not so powerful enough that they are getting drunk on that power I'm ok with it.

Spot on. There's a lot to criticize the EU for and it's definitely in dire need of reform in some places, but overall it's a net benefit to all members despite the squabbles, that being anti-EU feels strange.

The wealthy countries that chose never to join like Switzerland and Norway have their own valid reasons to not join (fear of regulation on banking, fishing and oil that's not in their favor) and still thrive due to their wealth. But leaving the EU doesn't automatically turn your country into Switzerland or Norway like the UK expected.

People often do miss the forest from the trees and that stuff like quality democracy and unions like the EU are never a "fire and forget" solution but a rolling grinding game that must constantly be kept in checks and bounds witch citizen involvement and outcry, over generations, otherwise it slowly gets eroded.

> But leaving the EU doesn't automatically turn your country into Switzerland or Norway like the UK expected.

this was never expected or mentioned by anyone

Oh it was, and a lot, by both pro-Brexit parties and advocates, you probably don't remember.

They kept pointing at Switzerland and Norway as arguments of how well you can succeed without the EU.

There's a difference between saying "it's possible to exist without EU - see countries X and Y as an example" and "if we leave EU we will turn immediately into country X or Y". The first is reasonable argument, the second is completely ridiculous.

There is a difference indeed, but that difference was completely ignored when the referendum slogans were shouted precisely to lie to people that if they left the EU they would be in the same position as Switzerland and Norway which is an appealing prospect.

> when the referendum slogans were shouted precisely to lie to people that if they left the EU they would be in the same position as Switzerland and Norway which is an appealing prospect.

no-one ever said this

they were used as examples of countries that are successful despite being outside the EU

not that the UK would "be in the same position" if it left, i.e. becoming 10x richer per capita or starting to mass produce cuckoo clocks

> they were used as examples of countries that are successful despite being outside the EU

Completely ignoring the fact that both countries are 100% aligned with EU on basically all laws and regulations, have open borders with the EU etc. etc. etc.

Could you bring a couple of examples of such slogans?

The closest I can come up with:

"Singapore on the Thames"

But I'd assume it's more remainers pointing out that GB wouldn't be like Norway or Switzerland being dismissed as "Project Fear" and rembering the double negative as a positve affirmation by the brexit shysters.

Wait… so they just straight-up lied to the public by simply eliding the most likely outcome? Shocking.

Hm. It actually was. One of the major reasons the UK left the EU is because it would turn the UK into the financial center that it once was not having to deal with all these pesky EU regulations on financial markets. Small detail: it was the EU acting on behalf of the US that was the foundation for a lot of these regulations (mostly the fall out of a couple of really bad episodes) and Switzerland, one of the few hold-outs eventually also caved in to US pressure. So that sentiment was definitely there but it didn't work out. Meanwhile the UK is 100 billion(!) per year short compared to the in-the-EU alternative https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-31/brexit-is... .

Of course the marketeers working for the relatively wealthy fraction of the UK got paid handsomely. That wealthy fraction finds themselves without a hairs breadth of Brussels interference to enrich themselves further at the expense of the rest of the population in the UK, and they don't really care: they are now the largest fish in a much smaller pond and as long as the smaller fish can be kept in line they will make bank.

Not that any of the smaller fish would ever admit to being duped, after all this is a team sport and what matters is that your team wins, not that that which you have won is actually a step back.

> One of the major reasons the UK left the EU is because it would turn the UK into the financial center that it once was not having to deal with all these pesky EU regulations on financial markets.

Eh, yes and no.

A lot of the financial backing given to pro-Brexit politicians was from rich City types hoping to be deregulated, it's true.

But London, the financial centre, had some of the lowest support for Brexit (outside of Scotland). Areas like the West Midlands and Yorkshire had the highest levels of support, and they've got no financial industry to speak of.

What matters is not where the voters where, but where the money came from.

> Areas like the West Midlands and Yorkshire had the highest levels of support

Areas with higher unemployment and lower economic development and opportunities often tend to vote on the extremes of the spectrum out of desperation. It's easy to think the EU or foreigners too your jobs away and that leaving the EU will somehow make it better.

Ironically: those votes made their plight even worse. Spend enough marketing money and say the right magic words and you can easily get people to vote against their own interests. That's something I always hated about democracy: that people tend to be divided by talking points and emotional issues that don't matter all that much and then vote into power parties that will rob them blind. Case in point: in NL we have had a center-right coalition for a really long time. But that presumes that the fraction of people that voted for the main party (VVD) is wealthy enough that the VVD is accurately reflecting their interests. They don't! But immigration policy allowed the VVD to get a whole raft of people to vote for them. Such divide and conquer tactics are really nasty and subvert democracy at its core, it allows a few wealthy individuals (not quite 'the elite', but definitely the top 10% or so) to use democracy as the ultimate form of regulatory capture: it makes them become the regulators bosses, and they get to make the laws as well.

In almost any normal society the 'left' would be 80 to 90% of the vote and if it isn't that's usually because of some demagogue or trick, immigration, religion, frustrations about various (often perceived) injustices and so on.

> Spend enough marketing money and say the right magic words and you can easily get people to vote against their own interests.

again, total rubbish

the working class mostly voted against mass low-skilled immigration from the EU

it was very much in their interests to cut off this stream of competition, and a few years later...

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-sees-fastest-wage-rises-...

to me it seems like they knew exactly what they were voting for (vs. EU regional development fund money for the town's middle class opera house/cultural centre/...)

>https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-sees-fastest-wage-rises-...

Hmm, the article is from February 2022, aka right when we had "peak economy" just before the wordlwide shit hit the fan and everything tanked again, so I'm curious how much of that wage grows was just due to the Covid money printing boom that drove up demand in all sectors, coupled with reduced immigration due to Covid travel restrictions, is the true cause of this this wage boost instead it being the cause of just "EU workers diluted our wages".

>it was very much in their interests to cut off this stream of competition

Except now they have even more competition from outside the EU, with the UK reaching migration records as of recently. And non-EU cheap labor tends to be even cheaper compared to cheap EU labor.

Of course the pandemic economic boom coupled with temporary cutting off of migration due to covid travel restrictions would cause wages to spike in 2020-2022 but that could very well be temporary now with the increase migration from non-EU countries and with lower investments into the UK due to the lack of EU membership bringing the labor demand back down within the next 10+ years.

My point is only time will tell whether Brexit will or will not improve working class wages, the past ~3 years were a anomaly on many fronts. We'll just have to wait and see.

> Hmm, the article is from February 2022, aka right when we had "peak economy" just before the wordlwide shit hit the fan and everything tanked again, so I'm curious how much of that wage grows was just due to the Covid money printing boom that drove up demand in **all sectors**

you answered your own question here

> Except now they have even more competition from outside the EU, with the UK reaching migration records as of recently. And non-EU cheap labor tends to be even cheaper compared to cheap EU labor.

there's a minimum salary requirement

previously this didn't apply to labour from the EU, now it does

so they've all but completely shut out low wage competition from the EU

sounds like they got exactly what they wanted

>there's a minimum salary requirement; previously this didn't apply to labour from the EU, now it does

Excuse me but how is this the EU's fault and not the UK's own fault for not enforcing some sort of minimum wages before?

Where I live now in Austria, there are legally require minimal salary bands negotiated yearly by unions for every profession, so no matter where you come from for work, an employer here is mandated to pay you at least that legal mandated salary regardless if you are Austrian, EU or non-EU, just so it's much more difficult for an employer to wage-dump by using desperate migrants.

So, what stopped the UK from enforcing minimum salary bands on all workers instead of going through the extreme self flagelatory route of leaving the EU and loosing out on the EU membership benefits instead? You might say that would have been difficult and complex to implement, but so was Brexit and that came with pain on the side.

To me, most of the issues the UK complained it was suffering because of the EU, like this one and others, were all self inflicted through poor internal policies, as other wealthy nations in the EU did have proper measures in place to not have the issues the UK had, so blaming the EU was UK's lazy way of pointing fingers for it's own pollical incompetence.

>sounds like they got exactly what they wanted

For now maybe, but long term that could be being penny wise but pound foolish. Investors invested a lot in the UK post 2014 because being part of the EU was a big selling point. Who knows how it will play out now that the UK is isolated and with open borders.

> So, what stopped the UK from enforcing minimum salary bands on all workers instead of going through the extreme self flagelatory route of leaving the EU and loosing out on the EU membership benefits instead? You might say that would have been difficult and complex to implement, but so was Brexit and that came with pain on the side.

It's really easy. Germany has a minimum wage. Everyone has to get it. End of story. That's just a problem UK made for itself before and politicians who got pressured by their donors to keep the cheap labor as long as possible looked around and "uh ... its ... uh ... the EU is at fault!"

>and politicians who got pressured by their donors to keep the cheap labor as long as possible looked around and "uh ... its ... uh ... the EU is at fault!"

Spot on. All the problems the UK was complaining about were entirely self inflicted but also entirely fixable internally without having to leave the EU.

The EU was not stopping the UK form fixing it's shit, like implementing minimum wages or expelling illegal migrants, the same way the EU wasn't stopping Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Finland, etc. from taking care of their internal matters much better than the UK has.

> Investors invested a lot in the UK post 2014 because being part of the EU was a big selling point. Who knows how it will play out now that the UK is isolated and with open borders.

I'm sure the working class are devastated that foreign investors have potentially lost money

> Excuse me but how is this the EU's fault and not the UK's own fault for not enforcing some sort of minimum wages before?

it has one?

you have missed the point entirely, and have now dropped to arguing in bad faith

goodbye

>it has one?

Then it was a very poorly implemented one that obviously does not work.

>I'm sure the working class are devastated that foreign investors have potentially lost money

Who's the one responding in bad faith here? Investors aren't just the stereotypical Monopoly Man smoking cigars in his top hat while driving his convertible in central London.

Investors means all the companies opening up shop in the UK creating jobs for those working class people: semiconductor, auto manufacturers, aerospace, metal work, med tech, electronics, etc. Outside of the EU, the UK becomes less attractive to open up jobs there by international investors.

You clearly have no understanding what "investment" means and instead responding in bad faith to invisible straw men with a chip on your shoulder.

> One of the major reasons the UK left the EU is because it would turn the UK into the financial center that it once was not having to deal with all these pesky EU regulations on financial markets.

total rubbish, almost 100% of the City were pro remain, with maybe a handful of people/firms as leavers

I was on a trading floor that day, and the impotent rage at the "wrong" result was present from everyone, from the interns upto the MDs

what I imagine most of the Dutch went through last week

The traders and the bankers are not the same people.

I totally believe you and the traders tend to be very keen about what the near future is going to bring (barring black swan events).

As for the Dutch, yes, it's embarrassing.

plenty of bankers there too

Ok, so for some odd reason everything in your surrounding contradicts everything that I've been able to dig up on what powered Brexit. I'm happy to believe that this is your genuine interpretation of what happened but I'm going to stick with mine because it appears very much that that is what the aftermath has confirmed: that finance + wealthy parties put up the money that financed the Brexit campaign and that they are the ones that stood to gain from it most. Follow the money. That the economy as a whole shrunk doesn't seem to have impacted them much, their Pounds Sterling are solid and in the short term their doing fine. And if they don't, well, there's always the fluidity of capital when it wants to move across the border. Something that somehow is a lot easier than for an immigrant to make it into the UK.

Who do you think will take responsibility for Brexit?

> I'm happy to believe that this is your genuine interpretation of what happened but I'm going to stick with mine because it appears very much that that is what the aftermath has confirmed: that finance + wealthy parties put up the money that financed the Brexit campaign and that they are the ones that stood to gain from it most.

where did you get your information exactly? a section of the high quality British press?

there's your answer

remain had almost the entire British establishment behind it: the government, the civil service, all large political parties, most of the media, the City and all other industry. these groups mostly had their own self-interested reasons for wanting to remain ($$$ at risk dependent on the result)

leave had Aaron Banks, Farage and maybe a dozen other prats. they also had their own self-interested reasons for wanting to leave ($$$ at risk dependent on the result)

in terms of access to resources, remain absolutely dominated leave by several orders of magnitude

this was one of the reasons it was such a shocking result

> That the economy as a whole shrunk doesn't seem to have impacted them much

it didn't shrink as a whole, it's larger than it was in 2016

and since 2019 it's grown more than its France and Germany (peer nations), in both absolute and relative terms

- People who are employed by "the people on the receiving end of the regulations" and therefore get lower wages than in the US

Switzerland is the outlier, after the US it's a pretty steep drop. this is adjusted for Purchasing Power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...

Average wage is a very narrow view of what ultimately translates into quality of life.

You couldn't pay me to live in the US. I've gotten very close to immigration, but after seeing up close what kind of predatory situation a new immigrant into the US lands in I figured it isn't for me. Though I totally understand why you would want to move there if you are from a country in Asia or Latin America. Then it is a huge step up. But from Europe (ok, one of the wealthier countries in Europe) it felt like a big step down.

50K in Sweden is like 100K in the US. And that's before we get to the distribution of that income, which in the US is extremely lopsided, far more so than in the EU.

That's fair, but pretending there's no downsides to regulation besides for some uber-wealthy owners isn't

Let's have some of those downsides then.

wages, adjusted for purchasing power see the wiki link. innovation suffers. more government intervention is needed. I'm not saying these are slam-dunk, but there are upsides and downsides to everything and one doesn't have to be a millionaire to be anti-regulation (I am not, and I am) EDIT: moved a period

> wages, adjusted for purchasing power see the wiki link.

That's a non-starter for me, purchasing power is relative to the society you live in, not an absolute that you can use to compare across countries unless everything is the same, and the USA and the EU couldn't be further from each other. Especially when looking at average rather than at say the part that is below the average distribution wise.

> innovation suffers.

Innovation suffers the world over from Silicon Valley, and more importantly the wealth concentration there. No other region in the United States has managed to come close to challenging SV, and neither did Europe (or any other region in the world, for that matter). Wealth concentration is like gravity.

> more government intervention is needed.

In what way? I really fail to see the connection here.

> I'm not saying these are slam-dunk, but there are upsides and downsides to everything and one doesn't have to be a millionaire to be anti-regulation

But it is perfectly possible to be a millionaire and to be pro regulation. Because out-of-control businesses are just as dangerous in the short term as out-of-control governments are in the longer term, the difference is that the businesses tend to live a lot longer (they are essentially immortal unless they really blow it).

I don't know much about Sweden salaries but if it's close enough to general EU I believe it might be MUCH harder to get a net 50K job in Sweden than a net 100K job in the US.

Sure, in the US you will have less "prepaid" services or might need to pay much more for specific stuff but that's kind of the point of freedom of choices. You get to make your own mistakes without entering a collectivist group that on average is bound to make more costly mistakes.

> You get to make your own mistakes without entering a collectivist group that on average is bound to make more costly mistakes.

The costly mistakes of not being bound to your employer because of life insurance.

The costly mistake of not having to think about mass shootings in schools

The costly mistake of having acess to working public transport and generally great public infrastructure.

The costly mistakes of...

Source: I live in Sweden. I have friends in the US with high paying jobs who still have to spend a week on two on the phone with their insurer after an illness, and who can't get anywhere witout a car.

What about the people who see the existing EU as an anti-democratic bureocracy

What about them?

Do they see the federal government of the United States also as an anti-democratic bureaucracy?

Do they see their own government as anti-democratic?

And if not why do they see the existing EU as different?

Do they understand how EU representatives are chosen?

Do they follow EU parliamentary proceedings and do they understand how EU law interacts with local law?

All of those are important questions and usually the more people answer 'yes' to the above the bigger the chance that they see the EU as a net positive.

What does the US government have to do with anything :/

I am a pro EU person but I feel you are being quite dismissive of an important issue. Namely that understanding the EU governing structure is very impenetrable to a great number of people, much more so than their national government. The foundation of democracy is that citizens distribute power. How does democracy work if citizens have very little idea about how that works in the EU?

Then you also have people from smaller coubtries who are quite concerned about centralization tendencies in the EU.

> Namely that understanding the EU governing structure is very impenetrable to a great number of people, much more so than their national government.

You can say a lot about the EU that needs fixing but their documentation is excellent. What it needs is for the national governments to get better at communicating how and when they interact with the EU and what the practical effects are. The bigger problem is that anti-EU forces within the EU (usually: populists) do their level best to take every problem in their own societies and spin it in such a way that the EU looks like the culprit. Which makes people believe that if the EU were to go away that everything will be unicorns and rainbows.

> Then you also have people from smaller coubtried who are quite concerned about centralization tendencies in the EU.

Yes, that's one of those peculiar cases: they somehow believe that as smaller countries in a much larger world that they would be able to do better than as a bloc. This makes no sense at all and despite many examples to the contrary quite a few people believe this. But common sense unfortunately isn't all that common and as Brexit proves beyond a doubt going it alone isn't better, it is far worse.

To the tune of a trillion per decade for the UK, money that they badly needed. That there is no serious investigation of how the UK public was swindled surprises me, but then again, it probably shouldn't, after all, those that would be in charge of such an investigation all ended up making out like bandits and they certainly aren't going to risk killing their golden goose even if it dumps the rest of the population of the UK into poverty.

> they somehow believe that as smaller countries in a much larger world that they would be able to do better than as a bloc

Yeah colonies too would have been economically much better off today had they not experimented with national liberation, but thats not how people think. They dont want to be paying taxes to a place they see as foreign. Nor do they want foreigners telling them how to do things. You are aware we are talking about old Europe here, and not Canada, Australia, or the US? The one that fought two world wars with itself in just over a 100 years. Not to even mention the other 2000 years of its long and very bloody history. I am very happy that the EU exists, but for Europe slow and steady wins the race. Centralization is not the answer because then countries with smaller populations get dominated by bigger countries.

I'd rather be dominated in a political arena than in a military one, which is pretty much the alternative. At least as it is the small countries can throw their weight behind the larger one that has their interests most at heart.

As far as colonies are concerned, that's a very thorny issue and also even further off-topic, and for NL (where I'm from) it is a very much embarrassing issue.

“I'd rather be dominated in a political arena than in a military one”

Is that really the only choice nations face? Just a binary eu or no eu, domination either by treaty or by military force? What about diplomacy?

Ask Canada how that's working out for them.

Diplomacy is great, but trade wars are real and between nation states trade wars are extremely nasty if one party has an economy 10 times that of the other.

So yes, there is a third option, but it isn't all that pretty either. Within the EU there are no trade wars.

I wonder if it is embarassing enough to return all the benefits of imperialist plunder to their original owners. Or pay restitution to all places where NL was involved in slave trading.

Anyway, as far as EU is concerned it is not off topic. Many of the smaller countries (even some big ones) within the EU were once seen as rightful spheres of influence/dominance by the old European imperial powers. You dont have to go outside the continent to talk about national liberation. Do you remember how WWI started?

Centralization is not without its dangers. Take for example Yugoslavia. This was a very decentralized federal republic in which constituent republics, nationalities, and autonomous regions, had a pretty big political autonomy. During late 80s Serbian politician Slobodan Milosevic led a movement that tried to centralize the government. He argued that it would make the country more efficient and better capable to address economic problems. Serbs were the numerically dominant nationality of Yugoslavia. Serbians supported centralization, non Serbs didnt. A very bloody war ensued and the country fell appart.

> How does democracy work if citizens have very little idea about how that works in the EU?

Democracy doesn't work if the citizens do not care about the very entities that administer their lives on their behalf. The EU isn't impenetrable, or at least no more impenetrable than the national and local governments, but most people just do not care enough to learn how it works.

Admittedly, that apathy has been reinforced by many national politicians who wanted the EU to remain abstract and obscure in order to better use it as scapegoat for their own failures.

> Do they follow EU parliamentary proceedings and do they understand how EU law interacts with local law?

Although I didn't vote for Brexit myself, I've spoken to a number of Brexit supporters.

While they might not know the precise details, they know that a "Constitution for Europe" was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005, it was changed into a "Reform Treaty" in 2007 which meant most countries' voters didn't get a vote on it, and after Irish voters rejected that, they had to have a second referendum on the same treaty the year after.

They feel they have seen how EU law interacts with local law, and they don't like it.

> While they might not know the precise details, they know that a "Constitution for Europe" was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005, it was changed into a "Reform Treaty" in 2007 which meant most countries' voters didn't get a vote on it, and after Irish voters rejected that, they had to have a second referendum on the same treaty the year after.

But that's fine isn't it? After all, if we didn't get a 'Constitution for Europe' (which I'm ambivalent about) the treaty got us most of the benefits and as far as I can see today none of the drawbacks. Those drawbacks that were mentioned did not materialize, which seems to be the case with most EU law: there is an enormous amount of racket about how it will cause problems down the line but that almost never happens.

> They feel they have seen how EU law interacts with local law, and they don't like it.

Given how EU law has kept dutch politicians in line during the last decade or two I'm pretty happy with it. Without EU law NL would arguably in much worse shape re. international trade, privacy, anti-trust, agriculture, climate commitments and a whole bunch of other subjects.

Of course if you're a climate denier or you want to return back to the guilder none of those arguments matter but in general I see far more positives then negatives. Those local politicians that are clamoring the hardest for splitting from the EU bear the most scrutiny: likely their agenda requires a lack of oversight to succeed.

> But that's fine isn't it?

To a Brexit supporter, the French, Dutch and Irish people were all opposed to the constitution/treaty, and other countries would have rejected it as well if their referendums hadn't been cancelled, and yet it was forced through anyway by a body that considers voters an inconvenience to be worked around.

When Brexit supporters call the EU 'undemocratic' this is what they are referring to.

Of course, that's not the only reason for Brexit. British politicians deserve a reasonable portion of the blame; for several decades prior to the vote they could straddle the fence on issues like immigration, by telling people "we can't do anything, it's the EU"

Well, if that's what they believe they are comically misinformed. As it was the main reason that constitution would have been a good thing is that it would - hopefully - create a more level playing field. But the UK already had an exceptional position within the EU, and now it has none, with all of the downsides of being outside of their nearest neighbors and largest trade bloc.

It's going to be a long road back to inclusivity and if and when that happens you can bet that it won't be the nice exceptional situation that was there before.

> Well, if that's what they believe they are comically misinformed.

Ah yes, you've just reminded me of one of the other issues: Some Remain campaigners had difficulty engaging with people who were on the fence about the EU without calling them ignorant yokels.

> It's going to be a long road back to inclusivity and if and when that happens you can bet that it won't be the nice exceptional situation that was there before.

Absolutely agree with you here - Brexit was such a bloodbath politically a UK re-entry won't be on the cards for a generation IMHO.

> Ah yes, you've just reminded me of one of the other issues: Some Remain campaigners had difficulty engaging with people who were on the fence about the EU without calling them ignorant yokels.

In other words: The truth hurt. And out of spite they cut off their own nose. Well, whatever works for them.

> In other words: The truth hurt.

There it is again.

Let's not engage with the person in an economically deprived area who suspects that increasing the supply of workers might lower wages, or the person who's struggling to afford a house who suspects that increased demand for housing might raise prices.

Unfortunately the remain campaign seemed to have very few people who could engage with the substance of such arguments, in the language of the people who hold them - like pointing out a lot of immigrants are working in the construction industry, building more houses.

For every one campaigner who could engage in such discussion convincingly, remain seemed to have ten ready to sneer at such voters' comical ignorance and mutter that they were a closet racist. You can see how that went.

Obviously the villains are the bad faith actors who tried to sell leave no matter what. How do you deal with those?

But people who voted enacted their agency so they don't get a free pass. They let themselves fooled and pulled the trigger. Is it their fault? Who knows. But the ones pulling the trigger don't get a free pass.

Right. I think some people simply prefer less concentration of power. I suspect it boils down to personality, maybe the big five traits largely determine where one sits with respect to freedom/control of other peoples.

Thanks, very nice summary and categorisation. Two nitpicks:

* In my view Switzerland is not doing fine because it is wealthy, it is doing well as it was historically difficult terrain to conquer (thus no one bothered to invade it in most wars) and because today it is surrounded by wealthy democracies, all of which are part of the EU and economically closely integrated with Switzerland through the EU-Switzerland agreements. If France wanted Geneva 'back' it could do so without much resistance, similar to the Russia-Ukraine and China-Taiwan dynamicy but this doesn't fly with the other EU countries looking on.

* I can't think of any EU bureaucrats who got in the news for corruption or similar, rather it always seems to be the national political caste which are then sent to Brussels as representatives. So the parliamentarians and commissioners, all of which are political appointees or get their post based on national party lists, and the political staff they bring along. See Qatargate - all Italian and Belgian politicians and party staff.

Fair point on .ch, yes, the geography really helped. Some questionable banking probably also deserves a mention.

Yes, true, there are plenty of local politicians that 'go to Brussels' and end up exporting their own corruption. The Bureaucrats are for the most part clean, though there have been some cases. One problem is that - just like everywhere else - the oversight body is understaffed.

there's really nothing else to say. nice mic drop.

> the people on the receiving end of the regulations

This sometimes does include the average citizen. In particular various ecodesign rules resulted in household devices being forcibly replaced with versions perceived as inferior (whether justifiedly or not), and most washing machines will default to an EU mode that doesn't work well, takes exactly two hours and 59 minutes, but is more energy efficient.

The EU also has serious problems with a lack of democratic oversight, sometimes leading to legislation that couldn't be passed on a lower level getting reintroduced through the EU "back door" on behalf of either governments or lobbyists. The parliament, for example, doesn't get to propose laws - only the commission does! And by being "far away" from the public eye, bad proposals can often get very far before civil society even realizes they exist.

I still think even the legislative influence is a net positive, and the practical benefits of standardization and open borders are massive, but let's not pretend it's perfect and purely awesome for "the little guy".

I never intended for it to be presented as perfect and on average the little guy sees a lot of return from Brussels.

But there is plenty to be improved still, however, I'm cynical enough to realize this may well be as good as it gets.

You forgot one:

- Don't touch my fish

What does this have to do with the EU? This just sounds like decent regulation.

EU is pretty much all about regulation

Well yes, that's what governments do. They regulate things (it's usually called laws, which the regulations are not called, so it is clear they have to be translated into local law first), they make deals, they coordinate responses. What do you expect the EU to do?

Like eIDAS? That's not very appealing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109494

Regulation can be bad or good. I was stating a fact about what regulations and EU have to do with one another. I believe that EU has big problems however I also believe that it has a much bigger potential. I am also glad that UK left because no one can have preferential treatment.

The EU wants to use this trust relationship to break all encryption.

The EU doesn't want anything. The EU follows the wishes of the governments of the countries as one representation of the will of the people and the parliament as another representation. You want them to not break encryption? Maybe vote for better representatives next time.

You know, people say to fear AI, and maybe yes, maybe no. But I know one thing.

Fear Microsoft.

Decades of Microsoft breaking the law, anticompetitive behavior, and just acting like scum. And openai took their money. Openai is in bed with them. To me, this means openai's intentions are clear.

Because only scum, take money, and partner with scum.

> I don't feel confident any browsing data on a Windows machine is private unless you install the above Release Candidate and set your Region to EU to uninstall Edge.

You are still coping thinking you can somehow outplay Microsoft. You can't. Stop using software made by obviously hostile entities.

hey, thanks for clicking on my profile to leave a snarky drive-by comment

you can stop now

I see some hope in Vivaldi. Even though chromium based, I don't see them getting more and more intrusive into your life and machine like the other big tech are doing. Plus it is also open source now[1], so no different than firefox, etc. even in that sense.

The other place I see some hope left is the "ungoogled" chromium browser. Though the amount of hooves you need to jump in order to get a stable release (corresponding to official chrome) on a windows or mac is preposterous, you eventually do get a portable, non-intrusive and much kosher version of chrome browser which isn't bad.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/source/

The problem with these Chromium based browsers is that this is helping strangle the only real alternative to Chrome. You might not sell your soul to Google, but you still help Google keep their stranglehold on web standards, etc. Of course, a single person is always irrelevant in the big picture, but combined Vivaldi, Brave, etc. are helping strangle Firefox and helping prop up Google's heavy hand on web standards.

It's Firefoxs fault that Chromium took over, Firefox just had to copy what Google did with Chrome (which is make a version that is easily integrated in other applications). It had years to do so, and did not. I am not blaming Firefox for the rise in Chrome, but I am blaming them for the rise in Chromium. They have a solid alternative and didn't care enough to capitalize on it. Who knows in another timeline with changes it's possible Firefox Gecko rained supreme in the embeddable space.

So let's say you're a bunch of ex-Opera employees who want to start a new browser, are you going to write an entire browser engine yourself? No who has time and money to pay hundreds of developers for years just to catch up. You're going to use a off the shelf version and modify it.

Can you use Firefox? No, good luck integrating it into anything, it's extremely difficult. Firefox actively suggests not trying to embed it.

Can you use Chrome/Chromium? Yes it's easy and readily available SDK that even has thousands of implementation examples.

Can you use Webkit? Yes you can, but it's only managed by Apple and a select group of smaller companies, you are at the mercy of Apple. It also has poor support in some areas.

So you end up going through pros and cons and Chromium is the result. It's not the result of a bunch of Google loving companies, it's just pure developer economics. It gives you the best possible start.

Embedding the browser is a very small issue compared to what Google actually did: spend money, put chrome ads everywhere on the internet, spend more money, push chrome in its results and pages, spend more money, put chrome ads in physical space. The features don't matter that much - there were a couple of years where you were simply bombarded with ads about a better browser. It worked and they made normies care.

You forgot one: IIRC, Chrome came bundled with some popular Windows applications.

> there were a couple of years where you were simply bombarded with ads about a better browser

Let's not forget the whole context: Chrome's main opponent back then was not Firefox, but Internet Explorer. And it did help reduce Internet Explorer's usage share, so much that it was abandoned (again) by its developers.

> You forgot one: IIRC, Chrome came bundled with some popular Windows applications.

CCleaner is a good example of this.

I think a big reason developers don't choose WebKit is due to the Windows port requiring significant work, and most new browsers want to support Windows.

On this thread there was a rough estimate of $1M - $2M USD to do that work. It's probably not far off the mark.

https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l...

Ironically, it was copying google's chrome LAF that led to the decline in firefox since v57.

They had to kill XUL to be able to keep up with the Chrome UI changes, and at that point killed off a vast amount of plugins, leaving firefox with no real advantage over chrome, but all the speed disadvantages compared to chrome.

Yeah I don't understand Microsoft trying to push Edge so much and more so, people actually falling for it.

They're admitting that they are unable to build a good browser themselves, then they basically rip off chrome and skin it up a bit and we're supposed to think it's amazing?? And then they start adding all this scamware like the "shopping assistant" and "buy now pay later" scams. Google doesn't even go that far and they do most of the work making this browser. I didn't even know it was so difficult to get away from Bing as I only use it at work.

I see why business admins love it so much, because it is of course well supported by their management ecosystem. Also, Microsoft lobbied the top brass at companies like crazy to make it the default browser and gain marketshare. Even every call sharing a screen with a MS consultant resulted in "Why are you not on Edge yet??" :( It's like they get paid per conversion or something.

Edit: PS I hate both Chrome and Edge for their privacy invasion (as you mentioned) but if I would use either I would use the real thing and not the knockoff.

> I would use the real thing and not the knockoff.

So you are not a fan of Brave either? A lesser Devil is still a Devil, after all.

Nope definitely not.

Besides it reusing the engine supporting Google's monopoly I also don't like the BAT token concept.

Edge is bloated and spyware for sure, but there're always people who would love to trade privacy for convenience.

None of that is a problem in Firefox.

Indeed. I wrote that post, and I must say, I currently use Firefox, but I have a love-hate relationship with it.

I can list many things I dislike about Firefox, and I understand if people don't like it. But overall, yes, it's a good alternative for most people.

If only that were true.

> Then there's the fact that Edge is just Microsoft's spyware, being worse in my book than Google's Chrome. And people forget that Microsoft is also an advertising company. Even if that's not their main revenue source, they also hate your ad-blockers.

People forget that Mozilla is also almost exclusively funded by the advertisement industry. They have also experimented with including ads directly in the browser on multiple occasions. Including ones force pushed though a back door (experiments).

> And in true Microsoft spirit, it also has telemetry, which you can't turn off.

While you can turn of Telemetry in Firefox it is on by default and new channels are being added all the time which are again on by default.

Mozilla is controlled opposition with the emphasis being on controlled with opposition being more of a formality.

>Then there's the fact that Edge is just Microsoft's spyware, being worse in my book than Google's Chrome.

Out of curiosity, is there any objective proof that Microsoft-Edge is worse for privacy than Google-Chrome, or is it just a subjective "Google=Good Microsoft=Bad" feeling?

I already answered your question in the post you're replying to.

But that wasn't an objective analysis, that's just your highly opinionated opinion with which I found some flaws in, as in you're wrong about several statements.

>Google's Chrome does not do this, and searching on google.com only asks for sharing of data with Google itself.

You mean sharing your data with Google THE ad-company which then shares your data to advertisers? How is that any more private?

>And in true Microsoft spirit, it also has telemetry, which you can't turn off.

Same as Chrome on this front.

>And Edge is hard-coded to use Bing.

No it's not, you can change it. https://www.google.com/homepage/search/sp-edge-p.html

Nothing wrong with having a strong opininated opinion on a matter, but you can't just sell it as objective facts.

> No it's not, you can change it.

Aside from the big blue Bing button in the user-chrome (and the MS sidebar), and the fact that switching your search engine in Edge involves jumping through a surprising amount of hoops, as opposed to Chrom[ium/e]. I haven't counted the number of steps, but it's definitely more than Chromium-based browsers -- they seem to have intentionally buried it in Settings (it's right at the bottom of one of the pages), and you get a ton of "Bing is great!" messaging when you do finally figure out how to switch it.

P.S. That demo you linked shows an outdated version of Edge.

>switching your search engine in Edge involves jumping through a surprising amount of hoops

Settings -> Privacy, search and services -> Address bar and search

3 steps are "jumping through a surprising amount of hoops" for you?

In the past, one would right click on omnibar/searchbar/addressbar and modify search engines from there... Now it really takes a search within settings to find it - and it takes prior knowledge that these things are possible :)

TLDR: I use Edge as my primary browser.

>Edge also exposes an advertising ID, meant for Bing's Ads, much like what Chrome does for Google. And in true Microsoft spirit, it also has telemetry, which you can't turn off.

Answering the question 'what is the motivation for Microsoft to pay for Edge development?' also answers the question 'why is Edge not an acceptable alternative to Chrome?'

well i guess you can say spyware but piece of crap is probably not accurate. i mean its got the most features by far and seemingly has the most resources and manpower being dedicated for development and upgrade. crap is not so accurate.

also because a company uses a lot of tracking on their product doesnt make them an AD company lol.

but lets not get it twisted every browser is technically spyware thats the business of web browsers... i mean brave is to me the most deceitful. for one a VPN that installs background processes for windows users even if you dont want it. reinstalls on updates. and you know how much brave loves to force those background updaters on you. https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-se... https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/33726

or how the most popular browser privacy test is run by a brave employee.. hmm guess which browser scores the highest and a favorable testing environment with the settings https://privacytests.org/ he eventually disclosed his employer in the back area of that website somewhere so thats better i guess.

another one is how certain settings on brave search always reverts back on. or just one the send analytics one. if you use search on a different browser not their own. and etc.

and firefox is funded in large part by google.. do you really think they dont share information?

honestly acting like your browser is superior because no tracking is so silly lol. just use whatever browser you want and tune settings to your liking. harden if you must and move on. is it that much of a hassel? would you rather pay subscription for no tracking? youll never not be tracked by ads on a free model its too much incentive and the internet is too controlled. you know when you use these product you pay with your privacy and ads its honestly a great deal. at least for me and probably most of the users. imagine paying monthly for edge having time limit package tiers, having to buy packs of google searches, websites have a entrance fee if they dont sell products.

btw im on thorium on linux i dont have a edge/microsoft bias. nor am i some shill for big companies i tend to use alternatives. but im not a sucker anymore for the illusion of privacy nor am i a big company fear monger.

oh ya also who said they are banning ubo?

> Or if you're on macOS, give Arc a try.

Tried it and immediately deleted the app again. Seriously, asking users to create an account which isn't skippable is just plain dumb?

I understand why you feel this way, but this seems to be the trend for all the latest generation of "polished" software and I think they do this so they can retain users. (Another example that comes to mind is Warp, the terminal written in Rust.)

To be fair, as an Arc user, by logging in, I can keep my tabs synced perfectly across my personal and work laptops, which is worth it for me.

> (Another example that comes to mind is Warp, the terminal written in Rust.)

Sorry, do you mean there's a terminal emulator out there which forces you to login? I'm hoping you mean it provides auxiliary (optional) functionality with a login.

> do you mean there's a terminal emulator out there which forces you to login?

Haha yes indeed that's what I meant, I suspect this is only going to become more common whether we like it or not

In proprietary software, perhaps.

Personally I'd never consider using a terminal emulator that isn't Free and Open Source software.

> [...] I think they do this so they can retain users.

They lost me as a potential user within the first 10 seconds and I'm probably not the exception here. No idea how you want to retain users if you lose them before they even get to test your software.

> To be fair, as an Arc user, by logging in, I can keep my tabs synced perfectly across my personal and work laptops, which is worth it for me.

I can do that with Firefox, Chrome, Brave or any other browser as well without being forced to create an account.

> I can do that with Firefox, Chrome, Brave or any other browser as well without being forced to create an account.

Oh I use Chrome too, I was under the impression that you have to sign into Google to sync bookmarks, but I guess your point is the login/account creation steps come afterwards?

No, I’m not even going to give it a try; mandatory login for a browser or a terminal app (!!!) is nonsense.

I disagree with this decision by Arc, and had the same reaction you did, but I just want to note that I'm very glad I gave it another shot months later – it really is a fantastic browser, much better than FF or Chrome.

..much better in what way?

As someone who hasn't used Arc, can you explain how it's better than FF?

I feel like the only actually cool feature of it is the way tabs are organized, but you can get the same thing (even better, actually) by using the Sidebery extension in Firefox. The only difference is that it doesn't look as pretty by default, but both Sidebery and Firefox support custom CSS so you can make it look like Arc if you really need to.

How about Orion?

Vivaldi is chromium based and they've pledged to do whatever they have to to rollback manifest v3 in their browser.

As is Brave, Opera and DDG (based on edge). I have said before that I suspect the minor chromium forks such as these will end up having to fork when google does commit fully to manifest v3, as they'll have no way to remain privacy focused if they try to keep using the mainline codebase; if they all work together on a manifest v2 chromium fork for them each to base their browsers on then it probably won't be that hard for them.

> First, all Chromium-based browsers will eventually block uBlock Origin for the sole reason that they can't maintain Manifest v2 on their own

I haven't found a need for uBlock Origin with Brave's built-in ad blocking. And the effective ad blocking is really the main reason I use Brave. I just disable all the token / wallet nonsense.

Vivaldi is great, am going to stick to it untill I am forced to move to firefox.

I found Edge to be useful for Enterprise/Business environment. My previous job uses Office 365 E3 (and their email server) and entrenched with them for various external services such as MS Authenticator for SSO. It is easier use Edge for SSO since I don't need to keep typing out the complex password for my job. Whenever the password prompt show up in Edge, I click my work email account and it automatically log me in. I have one desktop and one laptop for remote work, it simpler with SharePoint/OneDrive to keep my work data synced between both computer. Edge have their uses in Enterprise/Business setting.

For personal use, I rarely use Edge. I only uses them for websites that have an issue with my Firefox with uBO and strict CORS. I avoid Chrome like it is a plague.

I use Edge (on macOS) only for Teams.

I use Chrome only for Google Meet & the like.

I use Firefox for Zoom and when I encounter a website that misbehaves on Safari (and for a couple of things that I need to use that are wholly separate from the rest of my browsing experience).

Otherwise, I use Safari.

The original article's assertion that Safari does not respect your privacy is so far from the truth that the rest of the article is questionable.

This!

"Legitimate interest" is a different basis from "consent." It doesn't matter whether you agree to it or not, you aren't empowering anything that wasn't already going to happen.

You are empowering them by continuing to use the service/application after they have quite clearly told you that they are going to try to work around the law against your interests.

> I keep seeing Edge mentioned as a worthy alternative, and I just don't get it.

Bing (now Copilot) acts like a premium version of ChatGPT in Edge. It is context aware, and gives you access to GPT4 (not turbo), for free.

Edge is also very tied in with Live services, which if you primarily use those, it gives you the most bang for your buck there.

It also has some nifty features that are a mixed bag compared to other browsers, but may be missing from Chrome or Firefox.

Some of the edge features make no sense. I will use it for xbox cloud gaming and it will tell me there are coupons available for the xbox cloud gaming website (there aren’t, its through game pass a flat monthly rate).

> In the EU, when you open Edge for the first time, they ask you to agree to sharing your personal data with the entire advertising industry, via an IAB dialog.

I didn't know that.

I do know that the GDPR requires user consent to be revocable....

FWIW I got annoyed with chrome's distracting home screen, and pondered how long it would take for a 10+ year chrome user to switch to firefox. The answer (on macOS) was 5 minutes. I was shocked how easy it was (and, frankly, how similar it was). When you first open firefox, it gives options to import all your chrome settings (including saved passwords etc). Super cool.

It's amusing to me how similar this comment is to the ones I heard in the mid to late 2000s from Internet Explorer users expressing surprise at just how easy to was to switch. :)

plus ça change!

Yeah, you're switching browsers not 3D modelling software.

It's easy people. Switch to Firefox today.

I don't use 3D modeling software, but I use a browser for like... 95% of my day. Any minor UX differences are going to be like nails on a chalkboard, given that.

It's no wonder why people don't want to switch, really.

yet huge ux changes between chrome updates are fine? *ponderingfaceemoji

It's also happening with Firefox. Stupid redesign, felt, each new version. It's not about the design.. but it is, because less readability, less contrast, less visible difference between active/inactive tabs.. and so on.. but you're right. Changing browser is a no-go, but having suddenly different UI is not???? Lol.

Are there UX changes? I haven't noticed any.

exactly. odd uh.

most firefox changes are actually to copy what chrome is doing.

like removing the search bar and forcing sending everything you type in the address bar to a search engine, having a logged in account in the browser, etc

Do you not see the irony in this? By admitting that you don't notice the (real and fairly recent and large) UI changes in Chrome you've just dropped all credibility from any argument you might have had about caring about the UI being different.

Firefox is really not that different. Even the keyboard shortcuts are the same.

I use a browser a lot too, but I almost never interact with Firefox UX. Firefox just displays a website and I interact with that.

I took my muscle memory a couple of days to readjust. Switching away from vim to anything else would take me years!

I went from Netscape to IE to Firefox to Chrome and back to Firefox. Sure they're different, but it's not jarring. It's like switching to another car. You can just hop in and drive away. Then you gradually adjust the seat just how you like it and install your favorite air freshener in a natural progression, and so on.

The car analogy doesn't quite work that way.

Disliking one browser's UI/UX over another is like trying to drive two different cars: one with a touch screen console and another one with an analog console. There are genuine reasons to want one over the other and it will color how you use it day to day.

Sure, but at the most, having to put up with a touch screen is a minor annoyance, and for the most part, you really don't need the functionality that's gated behind those controls. It's a little annoying, yes.

You might consider it minor whereas others will base a car purchase around it. Different strokes for different folks.

For example if a car refuses to work with ad blockers I'm going to be buying a different car instead.

Browsers are just a window to display web apps and pages, though. And these display identically in Chrome as they do in Firefox. Hence the interactions, which 95% of the time are with the web app, not the browser, are practically identical for the most part as well.

The differences are bigger between Chrome on Windows and Chrome on Mac than between Chrome and Firefox on one OS. At least all of the keybindings are the same.

I don't know.. but.. it's the way people may use the computer. A former colleague used exactly one window, no matter if it's word or any other software. And most important: the other programs have to be closed, firstly, before switching to eg. browsing. Even my 85y old grandfather who bought his first computer with 73y is capable to use more then 2 windows at once.

So for me, i work with chrome, edge and Firefox (main) at the same time. Firefox is 3 Windows with 150 tabs each. Chrome for quick and dirty - when I visit or do something I know I won't need it later anymore - and edge is used for being chat and/or differential search with goog and bing and other search engines (I know, it's easier to use a meta search engine, but it's ok like I do)

So.. basically. Each window is a room space in my brain for me and I store knowledge in separated rooms, so I know exactly where the tabs are I'm searching for. It's like a library where I always can look up something. Using favorites within the browser is not possible for me, because I just forget about them. Not so if I work with all the thousands of tabs open :)

So, it's possible to use different browsers without saying "maehhh.. but, I .... "

If you just like the mental separation but don‘t want Chrome, you could also create Firefox profiles with different themes. You can even tweak the browser icon, so I found that sufficient for mental separation

Yea, of course.. thank you for mentioning this, never considered..

450 open tabs? I really have to think it would be worth the time to adapt to using some kind of clipping/note-taking software instead.

No it's ok.. but you're right here. There are better suited tools for me. But I'm too lazy haha

Just got used to it and I fear notes will be the same like favorites in the browser :)

The big difference for me is that with clipped notes the full contents are searchable. I agree that browser bookmarks are generally poor for reference material, as you tend to forget what you've bookmarked. But by clipping the whole page you essentially build your own searchable database. I use Evernote for this because I started in 2012, but I would look at alternatives first if I were starting today.

>So.. basically. Each window is a room space in my brain for me and I store knowledge in separated rooms, so I know exactly where the tabs are I'm searching for. It's like a library where I always can look up something. Using favorites within the browser is not possible for me, because I just forget about them. Not so if I work with all the thousands of tabs open :)

I have a similar thing.

Firefox as the main browser for everything. I don't like Electron apps and since Firefox doesn't do PWA anymore, Edge hosts all those. Chrome for all the Google apps I have to use and streaming services (Chrome has a media hub in toolbar which can control multiple streams/PiP windows).

If you can't replace your handheld drill to another model because no other model "fits your hand that well", all the other carpenters in the market are going to have an edge over you.

How nice to not be a carpenter.

I use 3D modelling software in the browser

What like when chrome updates it for you and changed the ux? At least with firefox you have powerful user configurable scripts you can do whatever you like to how things render in the browser. Treestyle tab that fades away when you mouse off of it? Done.

All Chromium-based browsers have a feature that I can't get through my day without. I can write click on any website and say "translate this page into English".

I use this feature around 20 times a day, sometimes more. It's painstaking to do this in Firefox, even with extensions.

Once every year or two I try switching to Firefox, then I remember this is the reason why I don't use it and I go back to Chrome.

The day they add this feature is the day I will switch to Firefox.

It's build into Firefox. If you're on a page not in your default language, a translate icon will appear in the URL bar. Click, done :)

Yeah, I see they added that in the last but one release. However it's only for a tiny number of European languages, and not the one I need which is Vietnamese.

Shame, though I'd watch that space because I think they're adding more languages.

The latest Firefox now has that functionality. Firefox translations also have the added benefit of being 100% on-device, your data doesn't have to go to a Google server somewhere.

... for an extremely limited number of European languages. Great to see progress though.

Yup - it's definitely not perfect yet. Getting there though :-)

Afaik they do have an official offline translation extension Forefox Translations that would cover your usecase(maybe) Ff also does have a Translations setting in their settings page(not sure if it's by default or appears when you install the extension) and you can predownload some offline language packs.

ask and you shall receive (as of firefox 118)

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation

if you need a language they haven't developed a production model for yet, you can install the beta version of the add-on, which supports more languages

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-translations-ad...

I really hope it's getting to mobile Firefox soon.

… and it’s done locally, unlike the chrome version which uses googles servers.

Some of us handle sensitive content that must not be uploaded to Google.

Oh nice! Good to see they are working on it. Unfortunately it's only for 8 European languages to far, and the beta version only adds 4 more.

I need Vietnamese. I guess I will have to wait another few years for that. But still, it's progress.

I wonder if they will add the option for cloud providers. While I love the idea of the added privacy of doing it locally, pretty much everything I'm translating is publically available so privacy is not important to make compared to the quality of the translation.

I use this extension, it even lets you highlight text and translate just that too.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/traduzir-pagi...

Wow, thank you! That actually works really well.

I've tried quite a few firefix translation extensions and all of them either open a new tab or a popup, this is the first one I've seen that translates in place.

OK, sold. Switching to Firefox today :)

For my daily use, Firefox needs built-in passkey support. Can't switch for all uses yet. In the meantime, I'm running both.

Absolutely monster analogy.

After working for a year in 3DSMax, back in the day, someone asked me to show them something in Lightwave. I couldn't find my way about anything.

There is also a far far bigger difference between IDEs than between browsers even if compare only the big names. Compare Visual Studio, IntelliJ and Eclipse.

All the browsers are same. They were all the same for 10 years. Single window or MDI. Then Opera came with tabs, then everyone got tabs. That's it.

Basically, if we accept the notion that it's hard for someone to switch from Chrome to Firefox we accept the notion that it's hard to move anyone from any ecosystem just on the grounds of them not wanting to touch their muscle memory even a bit. You get to the same option in three to four clicks through different menues. Is it that hard?

> Basically, if we accept the notion that it's hard for someone to switch from Chrome to Firefox we accept the notion that it's hard to move anyone from any ecosystem just on the grounds of them not wanting to touch their muscle memory even a bit. You get to the same option in three to four clicks through different menues. Is it that hard?

As an emacs user in large part to avoid this, yes it us that hard.

It pains me to say that though since I want people to switch to Firefox so it can win against these spyware-laden browsers.

We are all creatures of habit. Even if something is not good in our current experience we often say "yeah, it's bad, but it's a bad I know. Who knows what will be bad in the other software?" - which shows the incredible high threshold this shitty decision by Google has reached for people to seriously consider going back to Firefox (seriously, as in "I've seen more posts about switching (back) to Firefox than in the last 2 or 3 years together")

> All the browsers are same.

Which really is a shame. Even worse, browsers (including Firefox) keep erasing whatever differences they do have in a vain attempt at attracting Chrome users while ignoring that their existing userbase chose them for not being Chrome.

You are annoyed with chrome's distracting home screen that shows your most visited sites but you are not annoyed with firefox's distracting home screen that shows your most visited sites plus some ads?

Weird, I don't see adds on my Firefox new tab screen. Maybe you accidentally checked ``Sponsored shortcuts" ? :-)

I believe it also depends on your location. I only see sponsored tiles when traveling in some countries.

"Sponsored shortcuts" comes enabled by default, at least on Windows builds made by Mozilla. If you are using Linux I suppose your distro turns it off by default?

btw in my case it adds two ads: Nike and Amazon. They come with tracking parameters that are unique to me (if I create a new browser profile, they change)

Disabling them is one click away, however.

I'm going to be pedantic and point out that it's two clicks if we count the one to pull up the settings pane in the first place

Long time Firefox user here, I’ve never seen ads in the browser.

I am on Mac, however. It looks like from the other comments, windows builds somehow have ads.

I think it's about the sponsored shortcuts in the default home screen.

I've had them as well (3 or 4, can't remember which ones. Amazon's search engine might have been one of them), removed them, done and done.

It's not a big deal, but it's still something.

You turned them off at some point. To turn them back on: On a new tab, click the cog in the top right. Tick "Sponsored shortcuts".

Compared to the Google panopticon... I can live with it.

If you have your new tab set to being blank it might never have shown sponsored shortcuts.

My new tab has been blank for probably over a decade now

Also annoyed when someone I know cant be bothered to open the settings and customize. It's crazy how basic stuff goes over heads.

It's annoying that defaults everywhere are to be visually noisy and distracting. I guess it works for some kinds of people. Let's say MS Edge used to show news and other stuff on the new tab page, or in the start menu or wherever.

Yes, good users customize this but the default means it's pervasive in people's average experience.

It continues to surprise me that people use the home screen, regardless of it being Firefox or Chrome. New window, new tab, I always set that to a blank page, in my mind that should be the default.

It surprises me that you'd be surprised. It's convenient to have your most used sites a single click away on the new tab screen, and it still opens instantaneously, so I don't see any disadvantage. If there's something there you find distracting, you can remove it.

> If there's something there you find distracting, you can remove it.

Now you'll have me manage yet another thing, I just want stuff to require no management.

On being surprised, I suppose you're right, there are about as many ways of using a computer as there are users. It's easy to get lured into the feeling that anything you don't utilize yourself is weird and pointless. I never use the "home screen", nor do I really use bookmarks all that much. For bookmarks I get why they are there, I have maybe a hand full myself, but it's not something that I use enough to pay for, or even require, a bookmarking service. So seeing someone actively use one or even depend on it because a curiosity.

I wish "new tab" could show me all my bookmarks instead because I have already plenty interesting pages bookmarked to read, but I never use them.

It continues to surprise me that people don't make their "new tab page" useful, it's probably the page you see the most everyday. Make it your own, put your bookmarks in there or whatever is useful (I use https://start.me/)

For me, a new window or new tab is something that's only active for time it takes me to type in the URL of the site I'm going to. At least earlier having content on that page slowed down Firefox, which is annoying if you just want to go straight to entering a new URL. So setting it to about:blank was a major workflow improvement.

There's no point to the "new tab page", it would be better to have a popup to type the URL into and then hit "Go" and have that open a new tab. For me it's really just a distraction. Why would I open a new window/tab if I didn't know where I'm going?

Firefox has made it unnecessarily difficult to customize the new tab.

You can have it blank or you can have Firefox recommendations. Those are your options.

https://i.imgur.com/U13r7pG.png

This resembles a dark pattern to push users toward Firefox recommendations, a moneymaker.

That explains the ton of extensions to manage that page. That does seem like a pretty dark pattern move, I recall it having three options, the last being a custom URL.

You're ignoring the fact that "Firefox Home" itself allows you to customize what it contains. You can remove the recommendations, shortcuts, recent pages, recent bookmarks etc. individually (or strip it all the way down to a search bar).

> You're ignoring the fact that "Firefox Home" itself allows you to customize what it contains.

Correct. I am ignoring that fact because I don't want new tabs to display "Firefox Home" and I am not interested in customizing what it contains.

I want new tabs to display an HTML file that I made myself. Firefox previously allowed doing so.

The replies that suggest using extensions to re-enable the disabled functionality probably have not actually tried doing so. What those extensions do is load the "Firefox Home" content, then (as if on page load) redirect to whatever you set as your custom new tab. Which is just wretched. I could have typed the URL faster than that.

And on the subject of pushing core browser functionality into extensions: Why are things like Pocket, Firefox Sync, Hello, and the like integrated / bundled with Firefox but the ability to set a custom URL for new tabs requires users to install / trust a third party extension?

See also: The deplorable state of "Classic Theme Restorer", another case of "Users who miss the disabled functionality can just install an extension."

There’s extensions to change the new tab page

It's absurd that it needs an extension. Another example of how Firefox no longer acts as a user agent.

I have the Bookmarks toolbar set to "Only show on New Tab," I don't want anything more than that from a new tab screen.

My new tab screen in firefox is a blank white screen

I've been using "New Tab Redirect" [0] on Chrome and "New Tab Override" [1] on Firefox for many years. They load a custom start page [2] I host locally which also pulls in some issues from Jira.

Also "Keep One Pin Tab" [3] on Chrome to prevent that closing the last tab closes the browser. The same on Firefox but there I don't know what setting I'm using to make it behave that way (update: browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab -> false).

[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/new-tab-redirect/ic...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-overr...

[2] https://imgur.com/610mVyy

[3] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/keep-one-pinned-tab...

about:config, close on last tab close, set to false

The way profiles (or tab containers) work in Firefox sucks compared to Chrome honestly.

I could never find a way to open in the correct profile from external applications.

Containers are amazing imo. And profiles? -P "profile name" is not that hard.

It's pretty much impossible to have them show up as separate taskbar/dock items. The workaround has always been to run Developer Edition, but that's still not great OS integration. Edge even allows you to pin profiles, and adds the profile icon in the corner.

You can also create and switch between multiple Firefox profiles by entering about:profiles in the Firefox address bar.

You can set up specific domains to open up in specific tab containers. Obviously for sites that you have never visited before this complicates things unless you have the default tab container be your “throwaway” or not personally identifying profile.

The experience there isn’t perfect and requires some effort to setup but how is that different than getting certain sites to open in specific chrome profiles automatically?

Yes but that doesn't help for domains that I use for both profiles.

Typically Google, when I click on a Google Doc I need to be able to decide to open it in my personal or pro account.

With Chrome it goes to the last focused window so it will usually match what I'm currently doing, otherwise all I have to do is focus the right Chrome window before going back to the external app and click the link.

> Yes but that doesn't help for domains that I use for both profiles

Why not? Since Google's multiple-account handling is awful, I use Container Tabs for keeping my accounts separate. In this case I'm asked if I want to use the container profile I've explicitly set for Google (my work account), or the one I'm currently in.

I find it annoying how I need a separate window for each profile in Chrome, I like that I can have one window and some windows are in the work container and some are not. You do need the (official) containers extension though.

I had to use chrome at work and the different windows for different profiles really pissed me off (like, more than is reasonable). I eventually discovered you can have multiple profiles in the same window, it just wasn't the default.

Wait how?

Try Container Tabs instead, it solves that use-case in a much nicer way.

I feel the opposite. Separate windows for each profiles make it much harder to accidentally mix the profile.

> I find it annoying how I need a separate window for each profile in Chrome

I find it way more useful to have a completely unique profile rather than bash everything together in Firefox. Profile specific extensions, for instance, don't work with container tabs. It's a non-starter for me.

You don't need profiles in Firefox, there's a much better solution called Container Tabs. If you're using profiles to keep things like work and play separate, check it out and thank me later ;)

Afaik it's better in some ways, worse in others(addon management for example)

Yes, addons are shared, along with their configuration. Not an issue for me, since that's what I want, but I've heard others complain about that.

Yes I checked container tabs, but they still don't fix my issue.

- I click on a Google Doc work link from Slack, I want it to open in my work profile

- I click on a Google Doc link from the WhatsApp desktop app, I want it to open in my home profile

With Chrome I just need to make sure that the last focused Chrome window is from the right profile.

I really want to switch back to Firefox but that's blocking me.

> With Chrome I just need to make sure that the last focused Chrome window is from the right profile.

There's a setting to always open a tab in the same container profile you click on them from. So as long as you open the page with the link in the target profile, it will open in that profile too — same as what you're saying above, I think?

There's also an easy "open in new container tab" option when right clicking a tab, and "re-open this site in ..." option when clicking on the container tabs extension button.

I stopped using that feature because I have a personal and work Gmail, and I wanted them isolated. But there was some bug whereby every time I'd click any Google link, I'd prompt me to switch to the work container. Others online had the same issue and nobody had a solution

I don't understand why people switch browsers. I have many browsers installed on my machine. For browsing I use a heavily modificated firefox. It would be difficult to use this browser for banking or even booking a plane ticket (plane booking websites can be quite fragile!).

Use a browser for browsing, e.g. firefox with a tons of plus is, from ublock, noscript and a dozen others and use a main browser like chrome for banking and some other stuff. Don't use a minor browser (opera, vivaldi etc.) for banking.

With such a privacy-first config, might be easier to use librewolf as a base instead of plain firefox.

Or https://mullvad.net/en/browser

Librewolf is debranded Firefox to remove all the sponsored crap that Firefox inserted: Pocket, Hello, new tab recommendations, default google search, etc.

Mullvad browser exists to advertise a VPN.

I would not recommend the latter in lieu of the former.

Mullvad browser certainly exists in part to advertise a VPN, but offers more privacy protections than Librewolf.

See this response from the mullvad-browser developer on exactly this:

> There are two main reasons, one which you preemptively answered:

> - the privacy model is about having a same fingerprint per platform for Mullvad Browser users, so you're not uniquely identifiable (which will be the case by following privacy hardening guides) > - it is much easier to recommend to user a browser pre-configured for an optimal privacy: some users will want to tinker, but if you don't have the time or knowledge, it's hard to do the right thing

> There are also more differences than "just a fork of Firefox", I encourage you to read the following page which goes more into the details: https://mullvad.net/en/browser/hard-facts

source: https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser/issues/1

A librewolf contributor and arkenfox developer chimes in as well stating that it's no competition that mullvad-browser is more secure here:

https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser/issues/1#issuecom...

So as much as I despise companies putting low effort into software rebrands that offer no value, all the facts point towards that very much not being the case here.

Edit: However https://privacytests.org/ shows mullvad-vpn and librewolf as being very similar wrt privacy.

> FWIW I got annoyed with chrome's distracting home screen

On macos, the Google and Firefox home screens are virtually identical: Big "Firefox" or "Google" title, seach bar, short cuts / recently used. Google is actually less distracting since it never changes.

Is anyone else having issues logging in, via username & password, to OpenAI.com with Firefox? That is the only reason I'm launching Chrome these days, OpenAI's login gives an error saying I refreshed while logging in, don't do that and try again... in a loop.

I have been a happy Firefox user for 15 years... maybe more.

I have seen people use and complain Internet Explorer in my younger days, from version 6 to 7, etc. Even though I mention Firefox to them, they stay with IE. What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. This was around 2009.

It amazes me how quick people jump to something especially when it has a big company behind advertising it.

I see this a lot in my career as well (software engineer) - when some cool, flashy new toy comes backed by companies like Microsoft, Google, Sun/Oracle. etc.

Anyway.. I only recently found out there was a thing called hardened firefox. There is me thinking "Oh! This might be worth a look" - and it is basically firefox with private settings enabled, etc, in the config section.

(which is what I have been doing for years. lol)

I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Most people, I guess, just dont care about their privacy. However, even if you use something else, I would not be surprised in modern Windows listens in on your microphone "for advertising" purposes.

I might not be able to eliminate privacy issues, but if I can reduce the best I can, I will.

Back to browsers - I hear good things about Brave. Not used it, though. Happy with FF.

Some things (e.g. Slack calls) will not work in Firefox. It’s pretty annoying. Personally I still use Firefox.

But if Slack developers would use Firefox, they could support it? Chicken/egg problem?

If we are talking about a paid service (like slack), not supporting firefox imo means it is a bad product. A service for which one pays for should not force them use a specific browser. This is essentially an argument of not using slack, not firefox.

I'll tell my employer that I refuse to take video calls because my preferred browser doesn't support it?

> What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. This was around 2009.

The power of endless money for advertising. Some users think it doesn't have that much impact, but being nudged on every other web page to make the switch is much more powerful than that nephew who talks to you about it once.

My guess is that i wasn't marketing. It was because FF was dog-slow back then and Chrome was (still is) blazingly fast

Most non-technical users don't give a crap about how fast or slow their browser was: if they did, they would've switched from IE to Firefox the first go 'round. To downplay the fact that google advertised Chrome on google.com is to rewrite history, in my opinion.

It’s not rewriting history. Firefox really was a slow browser in that time, especially with lots of tabs open. It was only with the Quantum (?) engine that FF became a lot faster. Webpages loading that bit snappier really was a big deal back then, probably for a lot of developers especially. Google was still riding on the “Do No Evil” vibes till about 2012-2014 I would wager.

> Webpages loading that bit snappier really was a big deal back then

No, it wasn't.

Quick reminder, the issue with IE was webpages loading broken, or not loading at all.

People that used that crap didn't switch because "Chrome was a bit snappier than FF", they switched because all of a sudden every webpage, many sotfware install wizard, and even billboards on the street told them to switch to Chrome. Some "toolbars" installed it without asking. They probably never had heard of FF or Opera before.

Now I get where you are coming from, that is a good take. I think amongst developers/techies it was an issue though, I remember the convos around that.

Yeah look, we cared. I know I did, it’s why I switched at the time. Your average person didn’t though, but they still switched!

> It’s not rewriting history. Firefox really was a slow browser in that time,

It will be interesting to see what happens next year in that case, because FF+UBO will be much faster than Chrome with a nobbled ad blocker. If your right and speed is what everyone cares about there should be a mass migration back to Firefox.

But I doubt it, because we have already have a similar experiment. FF+UBO on Android is blazing fast compared to Chrome on Android. Chrome not supporting extensions on Android means the situation is nothing like desktop where Chrome and Firefox are roughly comparable (and always have been). On an ad laden site FF+UBO is going to load a page several times faster. More to the point to me, ads on desktop are often "out of the way" of the main content, but on mobile that consume roughly 1/3 of an already small screen. Like the ancestor poster, I'm stunned that nobody uses Firefox mobile (I'm defining 0.49% market share as nobody). Performance wise the difference is enormous - yet clearly no one cares.

Which also means, you and I and other nerds notwithstanding, it likely no one cared about Firefox's performance versus Chrome when they switched on the desktop. Marketing, bundling, breaking of Firefox on Google's home sites look to fit the facts much better.

Yeah I've been helping people fixing up old tablets, one user got me to fix an iPad 3rd generation (the first with retina) and besides having an ancient iOS version it was just so frustratingly slow doing anything. Obviously, it was only a dual-core or something and totally bogged down by the high resolution for its day.

However she thought it was totally fine as she was used to it :S

Agreed, Opera was my far the fastest browser back in the day, and I was the only person I knew who used it lol

Maybe - but we all forget how google was the one that "pushed" javascript heavily, even if indirectly. At least that's how I remember it so many years later.

So, convenient that they pushed something that half the web and browsers didn't pay much attention to, but they did because they wanted interactive apps and things inside a browser. And hey, this was at the time fancy UIs and frameworks were popping up. Were they prescient or just riding the wave? Or were they perhaps doing that plus also pushing the wave in the direction that best suited what they were good at and also made them lots of money in advertising.

So when we say marketing, we have to include all that advertising now just for a browser, but also for everything that google was pushing in synergy with it.

Chrome was being pushed hard via installers of other software, that's how it got onto computers of regular users.

This!

Adobe used to bundle Chrome by default with Acrobat Reader for instance. - this was how a LOT of people got Chrome the first time.

Your guess would be wrong. Chrome mostly replaced old IE installs at first. And firefox was also miles ahead of old IE. The reason FF took many years to gain market share when Chrome took the same market share in months is advertising budget.

All the people coming up with revisionist bs about firefox being bad just don't realize that 1) there wasn't only Firefox, Opera was also present (chrome was basically a ripoff of Opera's ux) and that 2) the incumbent back then was IE. The gap between IE and firefox/opera was way larger than whatever people claim the difference was between firefox/opera and Chrome.

There is even more powerful marketing tool - preinstalling software. If you can pay to PC or phone makers to have your software preinstalled, then it is difficult to compete with you. It is the most reliable method of marketing.

Not even preinstalled. In the early days of Chrome, Google paid to have Chrome automatically installed--and not merely automatically installed, but automatically set as your default browser without your consent--alongside the updaters for popular software like Flash and the Java runtime. This is how Chrome infected my machine for the first time. Endlessly scummy, and I resolved then and there to never use Chrome.

>I just don't understand why people would use Chrome.

Really? That seems hard to believe.

I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse than Chrome's at the time. Not sure what the state of things is now.

This is HN, so another huge reason to use Chrome is for the devtools, which I've always had a very good experience with and know pretty well. I've always found other browser devtools miserable to work with in the past, though I admit I haven't invested serious time into learning them.

All that said, the adblocking fiasco may well get me to try out FF again as my daily browser. But personally I had very clear reasons for abandoning it originally, it wasn't just cargo cutting

"I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse..."

This is a fair point. Personally, I don't recall seeing a big difference between the two. Maybe there was. Perhaps it was not that bad so it wasn't as issue for me.

As for dev tools, I have been happy with Firefox - but then when I am doing web development I am testing on various browsers, anyway. So I use dev tools for all of them.

Performance-wise, Firefox was significantly worse up until v57 (AKA Quantum release), which was released in 2017. I've made the switch when that version hit Nighly and haven't looked back since.

Nowadays I don't think there's a big performance gap one way or the other.

The problem is that it took so much time for Firefox to improve performances and implement process per tab that by the time they finally did it, even the more hardcore geeks had switched to Chrome.

Devtools on FF are very good. Extremely rarely do I need Chrome, for tools like debugging svg animations. I suspect the overwhelming majority of devtool users don't have to debug svg.

I only switch to chrome when I need to fake response payload, I couldn't figure that out in ff. Otherwise pretty much the same functionality. They also look the same.

Firefox is still slower than Chrome (and uses more memory). For me at least.

There was a lot of talk about Firefox having poor performance, but I have never experienced any of it. For daily use Firefox has always been one of the more responsive applications on my PC.

If you experienced poor performance the common explanation at the time was that you either had a profile folder that had accumulated all sorts of stuff that somehow caused a slowdown, or had some unfortunate extensions installed.

I experienced poor perfonmance until what, maybe 2013? I really don’t understand if people really experience poor performance of if that’s just something people say about firefox.

I've used Firefox consistently since about 2006, and it is true. We use gmail and meet in work - both are snappier and break less in chrome than in Firefox. I probably spend 30% of my browser time on those two sites in work.

The fact that Google's gmail and Google Meet break more in Firefox than in Google's Chrome leads me to wonder what they are doing to make Firefox work as badly as it does.

Oh it's got to be intentional.

Firefox had a big upgrade around that time that massively improved performance (because indeed, it was clearly slower than Chrome.)

Built in translation is a big one that I rarely see mentioned.

I was long time fan of FF while living in Ireland and the UK, but when I moved to Sweden and later Germany I was effectively forced to switch to Chrome.

Being required to interact with websites in other languages regularly meant that FF (circa 2018) was just not an option. The chrome experience for translating webpages was vastly superior to any other browser, which I needed to use 3rd party translating apps to get anywhere. These were clunky, low performance black boxes that I tried to live with and failed.

I see now that other browsers are starting to properly do built-in translation, but Chrome was way ahead for a long time. So for non-English speakers I imagine Chrome was a must use tool for a long time.

I am in a similar situation I actually switched to Brave a few months ago and while the translate function is there, it is VERY slow for some reason and seems to work less often than Chrome.

I wonder if I am just imagining things or if they use a different service for translation or, if the same, if it is being throttled.

Same for another cross-EU migrant here.

Moving countries and languages means the translate function becomes a priceless necessity on a daily basis, and Chrome's and Edge's built-in translation features are second to none, so I switched away from FF when I moved country. Firefox third party translation addons exist but they always felt clunky and flaky being often slower and sometimes failing where Chrome and Edge would breeze through.

Better privacy is nice but convenience and saving time and frustration is nicer. Beret me all you want but it's not a hill I'm willing to die on.

> The performance was just very clearly worse than Chrome's at the time.

A lesson of how sometimes "ship it now and improve later" could make huge damage to the reputation of a product.

Lately I've been advocating change to Firefox more than ever. Do you want to guess what's been the reply I've heard back more? "But Firefox is clunky and much slower than Chrome!"

They had a bad experience due to slowness compared to Chrome at the time, and that impression still lives on today, putting an end to any slight possibility of migration. At least until a friend explains the situation as it is nowadays. Thankfully they mostly listened and some agreed to try it.

That was, what, 7 years ago? That's about 5 CPU generations ago. Any performance differences were solved a long time ago, although chrome seems to use a lot more memory last time I looked (I use both on a regular basis). It's worth revisiting tooling once in a while instead of getting stuck in time.

If chrome does it for you for dev tools, then use it for that. No need to use it for general browsing.

is it possible the devtools experience is one of those things that is largely dependent on where you initially learned it? firefox is my daily driver, and I can't stand chrome devtools anytime I'm forced to use them

I worked with both for years and one of the reason who made me switch from Chrome to Firefox between 2016-2018 was the devtools. I found the Firefox's ones were way better and Mozilla implemented new features way faster than Google for some reasons.

Performance? Yeah there was once a time that Chrome was a bit snappier than Firefox, but nothing significant. I think it's mostly the placebo effect of people just thinking they are using a faster/slower browser.

Development of devtools was indeed quite good early on in Chrome. But Firefox already had the Firebug extension, which was basically the first kind of browser devtools as far as I can remember. And then Firefox also eventually implemented the devtools natively, and Firebug eventually disappeared. And that did take some time while Chrome had the devtools already native. But still Firefox with their open plugin system allowed for Firebug to evolve, and Chrome's devtools (and also Firefox's) was for sure inspired by Firebug.

So why do people use Chrome really? Placebo, hype, lack of historical context, and ignorance of privacy, I would say.

I moved to Chrome on first release not because of blind, trend-following foolishness, but because it performed significantly better than Firefox. It also didn't have the bug of occasionally losing things I told it to grab into the clipboard.

Poor performance is also what drove me back to Firefox. It still has the clipboard bug, however.

"I moved to Chrome on first release not because of blind, trend-following foolishness, but because it performed significantly better than Firefox..."

This is fine. My comment is not aimed at everyone who switched -- though I am likely still referring to the majority of people.

I do remember the ACID test being the main selling point of Chrome over the other browers. Yes, from memory, I do believe Chrome was faster. My attitude to this, however, was that it was new and eventually, would be adding new features, etc.

I understand that there are people out there who switched for other reasons.

I'm using Safari for day-to-day browsing (because I like its UI and iPhone sync) and I use Chrome for development. Firefox developer tools are not as convenient to me and Firefox does not support WebUSB which I need for some tasks. Also I always found Firefox filled with little irritating bugs when I tried to switch to it.

That said, I'm not convinced by this flashmob against Chrome. I like Google direction and Google philosophy behind Chrome, including its position on adblockers. So I hardly have any reason to switch to Firefox. Chromium is open source, Firefox is financed by Google, so it's hard for me to be convinced that Chrome somehow is bad. Especially when Firefox makes one bad move after another bad move (integrating weird third-party services within Browser, like Pocket or VPN or whatever).

And, yeah, I don't care about my privacy that much, especially not on the level to actively fight for it. I care about security, and that's about it.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion.

Most people don't need features like WebUSB support.

But I do believe people want uBlock to intercept http requests before rendering the web page. And from my understanding this has always been supported in Firefox, but never in Chrome.

I have used Firefox forever, I never switched to Chrome as it knew it never was fully open-source. The point of open source is that you're able to build the thing from sources with the exact functionality as in binary file they release.

The web is extremly important for everyone, and it is important that we still build an open web for everyone. When people use projects like Chrome, they let Google decide the direction of the web, just like Microsoft did with IE.

That Firefox was sometimes slower than Chrome and sometimes lacked features has never been a big productivy hit for me. Neither has web pages that didn't work in Firefox. In the worst cases I just need to start Chromium. I lose max 1 minute. That is nothing to sacrifice for keeping the web open.

> uBlock to intercept http requests before rendering the web page. And from my understanding this has always been supported in Firefox, but never in Chrome.

The webRequest API does allow to intercept and cancel HTTP requests, it has been part of Chrome extensions API since 2011.

Yeah,I were wrong, however uBlock do work better on Firefox. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

I'm one of those who used Internet Explorer 5.0 and was there to complain about Internet Explorer in general. I'm not sure why you are amazed with Chrome transition, but let me give insights from experience.

We had Firefox 0.3 which was very, very slow browser but still much better than Internet Explorer. There was a lot of mental gymnastics involved to get pages display at least similar for both browsers.

When Chrome 1 was released, it was absolutely awesome. Minimal interface. Focused on browsing. Incredibly fast, it just executed JS stupidly quick and we could create web app interfaces that didn't lag

You can still download Chrome 1 and see what it's about. It was basically what users wanted: supports more CSS features than other browsers, starts fast, executes JS fast, provides adequate developer console, renders pages correctly.

It took all of us by storm because it was genuinely good software. That era was the era of good software, not spam advertising.

Today, in 2023. this is not true any more and you are entirely correct when asking why people would use Chrome. Answer is: laziness, lack of info, apathy, lack of knowledge.

> It amazes me how quick people jump to something especially when it has a big company behind advertising it.

Because it works. Advertising works. That's the bane of the conflict of interest between companies and users of Ad blockers. We (technical users) cannot complain that companies should not use and abuse Ads, because at the same time we (humanity as a collective) constantly show once and again that Ads do work excellently for their intended purpose.

Ads are a theft from word of mouth.

Advertising spend should be regulated.

Adverts are a theft of time and attention, they are manipulative brainwashing by companies with more resources than the majority of countries.

Ads are fine. I've discovered so many fantastic products through them (did my research before buying, of course.)

And they are also the only business model we have been able to think of that enables the free flow of information on the scale we see today. Unless governments step up to foot the bill for Maps, YouTube, Reddit, etc, ads are all we've got.

I've never seen an ad that "stole" my time and attention. They are easy to scroll past and/or ignore. If an ad is stealing someone's time and attention, perhaps they need to work on their concentration and discipline instead of blaming the ad.

Companies don't spend $1000 a year to advertise to you unless they get a decent rate of return.

Oh, ok. So next time I get one of those full page ads that darkens the entire page - I should just concentrate really hard at reading the barely visible content. Maybe it will go away if I scroll really really fast.

This is the fault of the web developer and designers, not advertisers. Let's be clear on who to blame.

Blame can lie on multiple parties.

> We (technical users) cannot complain that companies should not use and abuse Ads, because at the same time we (humanity as a collective) constantly show once and again that Ads do work excellently for their intended purpose.

Just because something works, doesn't mean you should do it. Using a gun or knife to threaten someone with death if they don't hand over their wallet works. Do you think people should complain/do something about it, or should they just let muggers get away with it "because it works"?

It was just a short phrase, but was meant to refer to conversations here in HN (or anywhere ads are discussed) where it's easy to see claims about how ads are a cancer and companies "should not" use them and find a different business model.

Which I agree, but as long as society doesn't consider it harmful enough to ban it on Law (like the other activities you mentioned are), there's no reason (save the moral one) for a company to change practices. The incentives are just not there.

I definitely agree we should keep complaining. But at the same time, until things have changed radically, it would be foolish to expect that these complaints will achieve anything at all. Votes and such, that works much better!

> Just because something works, doesn't mean you should do it.

That reminds me of that chinese restaurant that sold opium-laced noodles, to keep customers loyal: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-29312562

Humanity wants everything to work but we don't want to pay for it. I pay for my news but I wonder how soon news websites and related sites will start to block Firefox.

> Ads do work excellently for their intended purpose.

But this is the problem, because their intended purpose is not the user experience. A lot of people block the ads because they find them distracting, and actually part of the intended purpose of ads is to distract your attention to them.

There is no "users of Ad blockers" vs "technical users", using an ad blocker is not some sort of purpose of why I use a browser.

I've been a melancholic Firefox user since it was called Netscape...

Tried Brave on my phone, but it managed to generate 90mb of network traffic in 10min where another browser takes 5mb. No idea what it did, I instantly lost trust.

Started using Firefox when it was called Phoenix, then it was renamed Firebird, then again to Firefox. It does exactly what I want from a browser, not more not less.

Chrome I only use for debugger.

> I just don't understand why people would use Chrome

Because lots of people who build websites only test them in Chrome. I use Firefox as my main browser, but there are times when I'm forced to open Chrome to do something (e.g. buy visitor parking permits from my local council) even with uBlock Origin disabled. As a non-technical user, if that happens to you even once, what motivation would there be for you to go back? As far as those users are concerned "Chrome works, but Firefox doesn't".

Another way to phrase it: "Because chrome is the new IE, it's prevalence broke the web standards so you have no choice"

It's an argument, but not a good one. Don't be evil they said...

this has gotten much better due to the existence of Safari, if a website supports Safari AND Chrome it most likely works fine in Firefox as well

It is very uncommon these days for actively maintained websites to not support Safari/iOS users

"Because lots of people who build websites only test them in Chrome.."

Well I am not one of those people. Back in the late '00s I was testing in IE6, 7 and maybe 8 as well as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

I remember, back then, my boss telling me to "only worry about IE" when writing a demo web application. One day I came in and my boss slaps a peice of paper down at my desk, wondering why a customer saw this on their screen. At first I was like "WTF" as it was a bunch of rectangles scattered around. The penny dropped and tried it in firefox.. same result. It was at this point I started to care about ALL main browers regardless of what anyone told me.

It is not as bad today, but my mind set is no different.

Should not be testing on just one browser.

A decade or so ago when Chrome was first released there were good reasons to switch to it. It was better than Firefox in almost every way, especially speed.

Today that's no longer the case, but there also isn't a huge reason to switch to Firefox. They're all kind of the same, especially to the average user who doesn't strongly care about privacy.

> What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released.

When Chrome originally released firefox was better than IE but chrome was head and shoulders above both of them.

Moving to Chrome from firefox at the time was a breath of fresh air. Nowadays there's very little difference, there was a short period of time I found Firefox faster but now I doubt most users would be able to tell the difference in performance

Same here plus you get used to whatever you use in terms of how the commands and extensions and the like work. I've got Chrome, FF, Safari and others and tend to go with Chrome as it's what I'm used to. Also with FF I'm not sure how to translate the text from foreign languages. I tried some extensions but nothing so far works quite like Chrome where you just right click anywhere and click translate.

Also FF long time user. Ime FF is pretty much fine nowadays. It used to have problems, but it got a huge leap in performance around 2017 when they improved multithreading support. Since then it is pretty much fine, aside from the occasional awkward unsupporting webpage.

What I do not understand is not why people do not use FF, it is why people use Chrome instead of Chromium, Brave or some other chromium-based browser that is not google or MS. Surely it is not that much more effort to install one of these than chrome.

> I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Most people, I guess, just dont care about their privacy.

I can't think of a single way using Chrome and therefore having "less privacy" has affected me negatively.

In fact, having an internet that just works has allowed me to be more productive.

I'd love for someone to articulate how cookies or tracking has actually harmed them in any way.

>What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released

I'm not sure how old you were at the time but do you really remember that history well and did you compare the two browsers yourself at the time? I was a die hard Firefox user from the beginning until Chrome came out. I remember trying Chrome for the first time and being amazed at how much faster it was. Not just a little faster, way faster and how it could handle more tabs without slowing down. It was so far superior performance wise and that is what got me and many others to switch.

Use whatever makes you happy.

But it's worth pointing out that Chrome and Chromium are developed by Google. The whole point of using Chromium as a browser developer (Brave, Edge, Opera, ...) is to have Google own and take care of all the difficult bits, drive the technical roadmap, and decide on what is and isn't going to be in the next version. So, you don't gain much by switching to those as the teams behind those Chromium based alternatives don't actually develop most of the browser and you are not really cutting loose from Google. Brave does a little more than others but still.

Sticking with Chrome/Chromium is a bit of a form of Stockholm syndrome. People keep convincing themselves it isn't that bad and that the ads are fine and not that intrusive and that Google means well. Etc.

Firefox is technically independent; not financially. It and Safari are the only non Chromium based browsers left in addition to a small number of early stage attempts to implement a browser that don't look like they are going to be a credible alternative any time soon. Google is paying both Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine in their browser. And unlike Mozilla, Apple isn't exactly dependent on charity and also getting a lot more from Google than Mozilla because they have hundreds of millions of iphone users. Browser real estate is valuable; especially on mobile.

But we live in a weird world where we are dependent on a single company financing the development of essentially all browsers that are commonly used through advertising. I don't think it's particularly healthy and especially the Apple deal smells like a classic anti competitive move that ought to trigger some legal action. It would be nice to see the search and browser markets open up a bit. Especially on mobile. Especially on IOS where Apple enforces a Safari monopoly. Every other browser has to use the Safari rendering engine.

> It would be nice to see the search and browser markets open up a bit. Especially on mobile. Especially on IOS where Apple enforces a Safari monopoly. Every other browser has to use the Safari rendering engine.

Do that and Chrome becomes the monopoly everywhere.

Not that I’m in favour of the way Apple does things on mobile, but break the Chrome monopoly elsewhere first, then go after Safari.

The article is bollocks. Recommending Pale Moon in 2023 is plain irresponsible. No process isolation/sandboxing for tabs/websites/addons, playing constant catch-up with Firefox on implementing security fixes/mitigations (made more difficult by how far back the fork has happened), disregarding all the optimizations that brought Firefox closer to being on par with Chrome (which translates to higher power usage).

In my opinion Pale Moon should never be recommended as an alternative to Chrome for the average person; it should be seen as a specialized tool for people who are willing to trade away security and performance for customization. If you don't have customization needs that are this specific, using it is a net loss.

The reason for the article is not to give a good recommendation to people but to promote Tuta (looks like an ad campaign that started about 2 weeks ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=tuta.com).

Great point. I think this brings up the question of ethics in advertising - how far are you willing to mislead your audience in order to support your claim? It's likely that Tuta didn't even mean to intentionally mislead (10 is a nice round number, so why not throw in something completely random), but they should be held to a higher standard, considering they're speaking from a position of authority.

Going a bit offtopic, in my opinion this supports the argument that users should in general be free to block ads, on the basis of being able to filter the content they consume, based on the credibility of the source. Establishing the credibility of the advertiser seems impossible even for the websites (ad network: "just load this 10mb JS from our CDN"), so blocking ads entirely (or allowing them selectively) seems like a reasonable recourse.

Just came to comment this. Didn't they have a breach or something? Was also on hackernews. Pretty pathetic article, no idea why this content lands here. @dang any insights if this is authentic?

Librewolf ftw, or Orion

Mozilla get a lot of funding directly from Google for making Google the default search site [0]. Seems to me that this may be a problem going forward if Mozilla continue to allow ad blockers in Firefox.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

The curse of the default tells us that this will never be a problem. Do you honestly believe that 99% of the Android Firefox users spend time to change the settings on the browser? (change to DDG, block all 3rd party cookies, etc.)

I did a quick search on DDG but no meaningful results came up with search engine for firefox on android. Gut feeling tells me 'minimal'. People do like their google remembering stuff. Convenience is the enemy of security (privacy in this case).

To be an Android Firefox user, you already went to the trouble of installing an alternative browser on Android. The motivations to switch browsers might as well be the same as those which will push you to switch search engines.

I would totally expect a reasonable number of Android Firefox users, of all apps, to change at least the search engine.

(I'm with you on the general case)

Chrome is embedded in Android way more than people realize. It's at a level of what IE was with windows, probably way worse too depending on how you look at it.

I think you might be missing their concern.

The concern is that google basically funds firefox, and can choose to revoke that funding at the most inconvenient time for mozilla, risking bankruptcy. Companies ebb and flow on cash flow, and a unexpected drop at the exact wrong moment can cripple even the most well funded ones.

Or just threaten to do so to exert pressure.

DDG search (same setup, in Android Firefox) is quite slower for me than Google search, it needs a few good seconds to bring the search results. No idea why this might be.

Yes, attacking the source of revenue that sustains a project is always a sensitive prospect.

But then again, what's the alternative for Mozilla? In case of YouTube Premium we've clearly seen that even HN software engineers, demanding six figure pay, will refuse to pay other software companies a few bucks for their engineering work.

Where does Mozilla find funding to sustain itself elsewhere?

What? We're not refusing to "pay other software companies a few bucks for their engineering work", we refuse to give in to the extortion attempts of a greedy multi-billion dollar company.

I have and will keep financially supporting software I find useful. However, I do agree that it's questionable whether you can easily replace Google as a source of funding.

It's hardly extortion, watching Youtube isn't a human right

Google has massively anti-competitive practices, and especially with Youtube. They have made an explicit effort to kill competition in the online video space and have been very successful at it. We are now left, as a result of Google's malicious actions, with a single realistic option of platforms for video content creators. To have Google take these actions, then force us with the decision of "let us shove ads and tracking down your throat" or "miss a massive part of important media available, including for professional and educational reasons", feels pretty bad to me. Maybe extortion isn't the best word, but it's super shitty.

> I have and will keep financially supporting software I find useful

If you watch YouTube you presumably find it useful too?

Also, what about content creators? They get paid off the money Google gets from YouTube.

I find the videos themselves useful. YouTube just happens to be the place where they're hosted. I support content creators directly and I have a Nebula subscription.

I'm going to feel icky for being a corpo simp, but how is asking for payment for a service an "extortion attempt"? Not asking as a YouTube premium subscriber or watcher of of ads (can't pay for Premium in my country and cannot bear to watch ads, so I use Firefox and an alternative client on my TV). I find it hard to frame it as an ad free but still subscription free service I am entitled to, and any attempt by Google to circumvent my workarounds as something unethical on their part.

Google only sells YouTube Premium bundled with a music subscription in my Spotify-dominated country, because they obviously want to use their large video platform to expand into music.

Classic monopolistic behaviour.

I'm going to guess the reason for this is you would be pretty annoyed if you get ads on music videos watch on YouTube even if you are paying for YouTube premium, and if you aren't 99% of users would.

You can't have your cake and eat it, Google neither and they will get what's coming but this is not the battle to pick, they do far worse than put ads on a video sharing platform

I honestly don't see how that is relevant, unless your perceived value of just watching videos ad free is lower than whatever price they have set; you can ignore that feature, right?

It's a feature to only sell the bundled product at a much high cost?

And in case of Mozilla it'll be the CEO's compensation, or engineering pay, or the fact that there was Pocket integration or something else will be made up to fuel angry refusal to support development of the browser.

There's always SOMETHING that's morally unacceptable to people who want it for free - I bet even full, total, complete submissions to whims of such community would not result in any significant revenue.

It's counter-productive for sure.

Reminds me of the crypto controversy of 2 years back. Mozilla had been allowing crypto donations for as long as they existed.

But then some important ex-employee "rediscovered" this, virtue signaled on Twitter how wildly inappropriate this is and formed a mob powerful enough to make Mozilla take the bow and close crypto donations.

And now? Well, now there won't be crypto donations. The same amount of crypto is mined, just none of it donated to Mozilla. You've achieved less than nothing, but you did the virtuous thing. Whilst simultaneously being funded by Google, with a laundry list of ethical violations, but those "don't count".

So it is "extortion" if you are asked to pay for a service you use? A service that is available for free and is very hardware-intensive, mind you.

If they want to charge for it, they're free to put it completely behind a paywall with accounts requiring sign-in, just like Netflix does.

The problem is they want it both ways: they want to give it out for free, but with annoying ads, but then they get mad when people don't look at the ads.

Where I live, people regularly stand on the street in busy pedestrian areas and hand out free packets of tissues with a piece of paper on top advertising some business. These businesses aren't clamoring for laws or some technical means to force people to look at the ads closely; people routinely take the tissues, toss out the ad, and use the tissues, and it's ok. But according to many, many HN users with stockholm syndrome, not reading these ads closely and just trashing them is somehow "stealing", because that tissue took resources and a factory to make.

And yet Mozilla also wants it both ways - have a free browser and still be paid to develop it. What gives?

> but then they get mad when people don't look at the ads

They aren't tracking your eyes and pause the video if you aren't watching the screen. Not saying they wouldn't do that if it was feasible...

They are annoyed that you are actively preventing them from playing out the ads in the first place, and they offered an alternative, to pay for not having the ads, at what is in my opinion a very reasonable price concidering the vast array of content you have access to on YouTube.

So they are effectively making the implicit contract explicit. Watch with ads or pay for no ads, otherwise you can happily choose to not use YouTube.

If you really think hosting video is cheap, make an alternative to YouTube.

Or, I can simply decline to watch (or even load) the ads, just like I decline to look at the ads in those tissue packs that are given to me on the street. I have no moral obligation to watch any ads on video that is freely shown in response to a normal HTTP GET request.

Just don't join the gaggle complaining about your adblocker randomly no longer working or YouTube randomly blocking the page till you disable it and were all good.

What's to complain about? My adblocker hasn't had any trouble at all yet, and even if it does, it won't be long before the adblocker people update their lists or software to work around whatever attempts YT might make against them. YT's efforts are utterly futile; there's absolutely no way they can stop adblockers without going to really extreme measures (like requiring a special client viewer app, or basically turning into another Netflix). Trying to devise a technical means of stopping ad-blockers requires far more effort than working around those attempts, and it only takes one determined or bored hacker to figure out a workaround and update the ad-blockers so suddenly everyone worldwide is blocking the ads again.

If I were running Mozilla I would be aggressively investing the Google money until it's at a point where the interest on that investment is enough to sustain the entire operation.

The problem is, Mozilla is full of NGO types who don't care about the browser, and use the money stream to fund pet projects. If the spigot gets shut off, they don't care, they'll jump ship to some other non profit and will keep "making the world a better place" there. Meanwhile the entire internet will be worse off because of it.

Even at a 5% interest rate, the $500M that Google has given Mozilla over the years would be returning $25M p.a. That can fund quite a few six figure salaries, indefinitely, while maintaining independence.

But how would Mitchel Baker pay her self millions of dollars in salary if that money is tied up in investments?

Mozilla consists of a non-profit foundation and a for-profit corporation. It is the corporation which develops the browser, and Google pays the corporation.

Do you have a source for this? I found an old source that says they pay the foundation.

A quick look at the Wikipedia article for the corporation says that Google pays the corporation:

"In 2006, the Mozilla Corporation generated $66.8 million in revenue and $19.8 million in expenses, with 85% of that revenue coming from Google for "assigning [Google] as the browser's default search engine, and for click-throughs on ads placed on the ensuing search results pages."

Sources linked there like [0], albeit quite old now, mention only the corporation and not the foundation.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2011/12/5/2612918/future-of-firefox...

Not OP.

The problem is compounded by the fact that all the released financial and audit reports seem to "consolidate" the flow of money between the foundation (non-profit parent company) and the corporation (for-profit owned subsidiary). So it's just seen as income, and we have no idea how accounting-wise they get the money, and how it presumably "flows out" to the foundation. Who knows how much "licensing costs" the corporation pays the foundation as a way of extracting the money up.

E.g.:

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

"All significant intercompany accounts and transactions have been eliminated."

It almost seems like they are conflating things on purpose. They mostly use the name Mozilla without specifying which it is. Actually I was trying to find sources now and reporters seem to be doing the exact same thing.

We know they are paying large sums to the top executives. Is the corporation paying this or the foundation? You cannot donate to the corporation so maybe the donations alone (without google money) is enough for their expenses. It's more consufing because if I am not mistaken the top execs of the corp are also top execs of the foundation. Regardless, since one owns the other, they probably have legal ways to move money around. Excluding the people who are actually trying to build a browser, the whole organization is super suspect. As far as I know they never respond to criticism either.

The standard argument against Mozilla has been that they haven’t funded enough non Firefox projects.

The classic example being Thunderbird.

Mozilla should ignore these arguments. Stand-alone email clients other than Outlook (for corporate use with MS servers) are basically dead these days; they don't need any more development by a well-funded company. If some volunteers want to step up and work on Thunderbird, more power to them, but Mozilla needs to concentrate on the browser and nothing else.

It doesnt help that Mozilla waste a lot of money on useless projects

It's weird how people criticize Mozilla for taking Google money, but also criticize them for their attempts to diversify away from that.

The think is criticism is not on the attempt, rather that they are bad at it.

In fairness though, it's actually very hard. Try inventing a new tech product that generates 200-400m in revenue, that others could not easily replicate.

Say you'd have 0.5B at your disposal and a few hundred people. You likely can't do it.

It's not just about being able to pay.

Free YouTube: You can watch with ads and you are tracked.

YouTube Premium: You can watch without ads but you're still tracked.

YouTube with an Ad Blocker: You can watch without ads and without being tracked.

Google's largest chunk of revenue comes from ads. Being tracked simply means you'll be shown targeted ads in other areas apart from YouTube if you pay them. They shouldn't charge you and still sell your data.

Youtube can still track you even if you use an ad blocker.

Yes but it means keeping identifying informations to a minimum. Vs giving your credit card information when going premium ...

They can, but do they?

Yes, extensively

i religiously donate each month to mozilla but you wont catch me alive paying for spotify or youtube.

You do realize that the donations you're making do not go to the development of Firefox? Do you?

I'm not a 6 figure HN/SV engineer, don't live in the US.

But that's not the problem. YouTube premium simply isn't worth €168/year to me (I don't use it enough) and they'll still track me anyway wherever other people are using google analytics. I have a newspaper subscription to support local journalism and it is the same deal: the site is full of ads and just as bad as the free stuff, except I can see all the articles.

I use Firefox, though.

As another lowly paid EU developer, I think the money for Youtube premium is completely wroth if considering all the value I got from the creators there over the years.

IMHO it's way more valuable than something like Netflix or Spotify since Youtube is not just brain-rot and entertainment, but a source of so much educational stuff on tech, math and programming, music, independent news reporting, fitness, dancing, finances, mindfulness, cooking, DIY, car and household repair tutorials, etc, so I'm curios why you would think it's not worth the money when you literally couldn't get videos on all those things anywhere else for any amount of money let alone for free(ads).

For example if I go now on Youtube, besides the usual clickbait brain rot, there's small creators from my country explaining various topics of interest on subjects from the nation's high-school final exams(equivalent to the US SAT, UK GCSE or French Baccalaureate) far better than the underpaid and unmotivated teachers usually do at class. Complex stuff on maths, physics, organic chemistry, CS, biology all explained for dummies in the local language based on what's gonna be at the exams. Sure it's the creators that are putting the effort, but Youtube made it frictionless and accessible to everyone in exchange for ads. I would have killed for such a thing to be wildly available when I was in school, and now it's for free on Youtube for all schoolkids to enjoy.

Perhaps, Mozilla ought cut the crap like spending huge sums on CEO salaries, social justice projects, And anything unrelated to browser building.

I wonder how much the actual browser development and hosting costs,without all the marketing, sjw stuff and experiments like their phone os. If it's not astronomical, surely it could be forked and setup with a patreon style model to fund engineers

Firefox is essentially a dead fish in the sea. Depending on source, Firefox sits at 3-8 % market share. They are much more likely to lose funding because of irrelevancy than some users using AdBlock.

3-8% of the Internet users is 400 million users. I wouldn't call that "dead in the sea". Even 1% of the Internet users is a very significant amount of users. Why obsess with market share? At some point all browsers raised from 0% market share. Choose whatever fits your needs.

Market share is important because if it gets too low, no one tests on or supports your browser. And then coders start only supporting specific features of the monopoly browser and voila, IE6 redux.

I wonder how many of us get counted as chrome users. Eg. I have to fake the chrome user agent to set the full Google finance on Firefox mobile

Mozilla's rev stream from google is also antitrust mitigation.

Exactly. If there was only 1 Firefox user, it would be a Google staffer being paid to keep that number above 0.

It's already a problem. You can see that they're already scared to piss off their sugar daddy

You have an official "Facebook Container", but of course no official "Google Container" ... even though Google is the one that does actual tracking across the whole internet and has JS/fonts/etc. on nearly ever webpage

There are official "anything" containers so that's really not a problem.

The facebook container was just a way of introducing people to the container concept, and they can move to the generic Multi-Account Containers so they can really separate everything including Google.

They're also really nifty to log in to multiple microsoft tenants which are really a pain in the ** to deal with otherwise.

Firefox blocks adsense by default (tracking protection enabled) even without any adblocker.

It's been like that for 20 years.

On MacOS, consider Orion Browser by Kagi.

Very fast. Zero telemetry. Lightweight, natively built with WebKit, made for you and your Mac. Industry-leading battery life, privacy respecting by design, and native support for web extensions.

Orion offers native support for many Firefox and Chrome browser extensions allowing access to the world's largest eco-system of browser extensions. Even UBlock Origin.

Not that you need it, since Orion has been engineered from ground up as a truly privacy-respecting zero telemetry browser.

Your private information will never leave Orion by default, and to protect your privacy on the web, Orion comes with industry-leading anti-tracking technology as well as a powerful built-in ad-blocker.

https://kagi.com/orion/

Also has tree style tab browsing built in! Though I’ve found it doesn’t work 100% with all Chrome extensions; seems like it might be an MV3 issue, as it’s popped up more recently.

I switched to Google Chrome when it came out (14 years ago according to Wikipedia) and to Chromium when I got sufficiently annoyed by Google. In August I switched back to Firefox. Here are some thoughts:

- the experience is 90% the same. - Sync between Android app and desktop is just as flawless (that one made me switch back to Chromium on my first try a few years ago) - Theming is nicer - switching between home and work profile is great with the profile switcher extension - Firefox seems less well integrated into many websites. I keep entering my credit card info on many sites, because the option to use saved cards either does not appear or does not work. Same is true for suggesting passwords. So I use keepass' for both now (which might be good) -the developer tools are a little annoying. I use them mainly for Web scraping and sometimes I give up and copy the curl call from Chromium because the formatting is nicer and the network tab looks cleaner

I won't switch back to Chrome and miss it less and less. Only during black Friday and when I taught my webscraping course I missed Chromium a little.

Even when chrome was new, it was known that it included heavy tracking by google. I briefly checked out iron back in the day, a chromium version without google tracking. But I realised that even just opening the settings resulted in requests to google (for some spelling library if I remember correctly). So obviously it was difficult to remove all the tracking, and it was clear that it would be difficult to keep removing it in all versions. Also it was clear already back then that google would try to capture as much of the browser market as possible, to control the browser, many online services, and just get the power to do whatever it wants. Now they are pushing hard for DRM in the browser, to take power away from the user. Firefox is definitely not perfect, but back in 2008 it was obvious that we, the users, should not support chrome. So I stayed with firefox, and don't need to swtich back now.

I love Firefox, but for some reason I can't pull away from Brave at the moment for my daily driver. Time will tell how long they can hold out against the changes that will eventually filter into chromium. I see the future of adblocking etc being put back to the network side, things like piHole should get a 'new' lease of life.

I do both. I block at the network level with pihole, and then engage in in-browser blocking. Sadly, the combination is necessary.

I always suggest (not affiliated in any way - just been using their HOSTS for sooooo many years) the "https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/" for my HOSTS file.

While I would always advise against copy pasting from the web to your win host file, this actually looks like a really nice list to block.

> things like piHole should get a 'new' lease of life.

You could never implement what ublock origin does with simple DNS blocking. The way ublock origin works is by going after cross domain requests.

But I imagine an HTTP proxy of some kind could do it. You’d get slightly higher latency (because you’d have to parse the HTML doc twice)

But installing a chrome extension is piece of cake.

Setting up a “pi hole” or proxy will never be as easy. So if even a few percent of users don’t bother, then Google makes more money selling ads.

$$ That’s all that matters really. We’re taking about a company that stopped innovating and releasing new products eons ago. They’re just milking what they have until it dies.

I've considered the HTTP proxy (anyone remember the fantastic proxomitron?), the problem is it would have to MITM all the HTTPS.

...and interpret all the javascript. Web people love hiding their html behind javascript these days.

Pi-hole will never be an option for the 99.99%

Pi-hole doesn't work for youtube ads unfortunately

Brave won't be affected because brave shields aren't an extension and don't depend on the extension API.

Brave also won't be affected simply because they will maintain support for the specific APIs that Google removed in Web Manifest v3.

What makes some folks so attached to particular browsers?

Personally, I'm using a mix of Edge, Firefox, and Chrome. While in theory I could just use one of them (which would probably be Firefox), it's kinda like having 3 different super-profiles for a web-browser (where each browser is its own super-profile), so I'm mostly just using all 3 out of laziness.

I don't particularly trust Chrome nor Edge, so I just don't use them for anything important. Not that I'm 100% confident in Firefox, but if I've got to do something important, Firefox is the easy pick. Then I guess I end up favoring Chrome or Edge for everything else, since I don't want to junk up Firefox with nonsense (so Firefox'll remain solid for when it's appropriate). Between Chrome and Edge, I guess I favor Chrome for junk-level tasks since Chrome feels the most separated (being neither used for important stuff like Firefox nor being tied to the OS like Edge).

I get that some folks might have a business-critical app with compatibility-issues limiting their freedom-of-choice when it comes to certain tasks, but outside of such niche cases, what's the big deal?

When I was doing webdevelopment I was attached to chrome tools for that.

I'm not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing or just providing context, but for me personally it's not about being attached to a particular browser, rather it's about being repulsed by most of them. Edge is user-hostile spyware, Chrome is approximately the same but Google flavored and very very marginally better, I don't trust most Firefox forks to stay on top of security issues, and I don't use a Mac. The result is that my only options really are Firefox, or maybe some of the lesser WebKit browsers. And even then... I'm writing this comment in Firefox, but I don't even particularly like it, it just sucks less than the alternatives.

For those who can't switch away from Chrome extensions yet I recommend trying Vivaldi

Made by Opera browser Founder

https://vivaldi.com

But if vivaldi is based on chromium doesn't that mean that the same Chrome problems will apply?

In theory the answer is no, but in practice nobody really knows that, even Vivaldi devs. For example, Manifest V3:

https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-webrequest-and-ad-block...

> Will the Vivaldi Ad Blocker be affected by the Manifest V3 changes? I made some architectural choices early on that I believe should keep it functional, regardless of the Manifest V3 changes. Of course, there is always a possibility that the underlying Chromium architecture will change now or in the future, forcing us to do some extra work to keep this working.

Friends complain of FF being slower than Chrome for some actions. The CEO of Mozilla is accused of lots of things. Still - the whole Google/Chrome monopoly and tracking is just another level of irritation and I’d happily love to see and use alternatives in both browser and search. FF is absolutely okay for everyday use even the betas are quite stable. Give it a try, guys. It’s worth the effort.

Highly recommend brave (with all the crypto nonsense shut off), it's a pretty fast browser, nice features and works with chrome extensions. I've used it successfully for the past 3 or something years

When I tried Brave, it blocked website ads but gave me browser ad popups on the top right. No thanks. Stick to Firefox.

you can deactivate them. In my installation on linux they were disabled by default and it asked me if I wanted to activate them (just one time) to support the browser

Brave Rewards, which is what you are complaining about, is opt in.

They saw it by default, which means it's "opt out".

It isn't. It asks you on install if you want to enroll.

Then I got tricked. I wasn't expecting ads in the format they came in.

I feel like this comment was made in bad faith. Brave Rewards, the thing you're complaining about, is OPT-IN. That means you had to manually enable it in Brave's settings. You're complaining about something you consciously enabled.

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360027276731-Bra...

This says it's opt out, not in.

In what section does it say it's opt-out? Not doubting your statement, just that I don't see it any of the sections I looked through.

If you mean the sponsored ads on the New Tab page, then yes they are indeed opt-out. But the person who I responded found the browser pop-ups annnoying. That is a part of Brave Rewards. The New Tab page ads are not a part of Brave Rewards unless you explicitly enable that in the settings (second section of the link you mentioned).

Do I have to participate in Rewards in order to use Brave?

You do not need to participate in Rewards in order to enjoy Brave. However, note that sponsored images on the New Tab Page are on by default, but can easily be disabled. (If you enable Brave Rewards, you will earn for the New Tab Page sponsored images you see.)

The sponsored images you are referring to are not a part of Brave Rewards, not by default. GP was referring to pop-up ads, which are a part of Brave Rewards and are opt-in.

It's not in bad faith. I downloaded and set up the browser. I was unhappy with the ads shown to me - I wouldn't have checked a tickbox during set up if I had known what the result would be like.

But it's doing Google's game by being based on Blink.

Blink is the de facto web standard like it or not just like linux is for web hosting and both are open source and contributed to by many companies. Firefox is now in 5th place for browser market share and Mozilla is a dumpster fire of a company, imo it is only a matter of time before Firefox switches or completely folds.

Spoken like a true Internet Explorer believer in 2010. Nothing is forever, no matter how solid its lead appears to be.

Certainly not but believing that FireFox is going to resurrect itself from a dropping market share of 3% is delusional and the sooner we all face reality the better we can make it. I loved FireFox over the years but he’s dead Jim.

How do you know this? It hasn't happened just yet. Let's wait and see.

I still use Firefox, it's still regularly updated and it still works very well. It pretty much does the job, regardless its number of users. It'll be dead when it won't receive updates anymore.

I don't understand what good can be done by considering it dead right now.

I don't really understand this - would you not buy a car if it has too small a market share? Why not just use it? What reality is there to face?

Roads don't get replaced with ones which are incompatible with unpopular cars on a regular basis.

But current roads are compatible with this particular unpopular car for the most part.

The one odd incompatible road here and there is also mostly there. These roads or the unpopular car we are speaking about only needs a few superficial tweaks. Nothing fundamental.

I know, I'm still rocking this car. It has the best windshield wipers of the market, for the very rainy roads.

It is also free so it's not like I'm making a big investment by picking it and risking it becomes irrelevant soon. Which I don't see coming, to be clear.

They have $400m coming in every year - surely enough to keep up with main changes if engineering were prioritised, with a large stash to invest for the future.

But still - what reality is there to face? At absolute worse we...switch browser in 10 years?

Idiots still do user agent checks and block anything they don't explicitly support.

I use Firefox every day and I don't see this. Can you elaborate on how you know this?

> imo it is only a matter of time before Firefox switches or completely folds.

Indeed, it's your opinion. Development and benchmark tells another story:

https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...

OTOH, Firefox's "perceived slowness" is mostly due to your local DNS response times. On fast DNS, Firefox is at least equal to chrome in terms of speed.

I didn’t mention a thing about ‘percieved slowness’ and it isn’t my opinion it is the entire market’s opinion, I’m a former FireFox user, don’t shoot the messenger: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Brave might be the best thing to come out of the crypto era :) I hope it will somehow survive both Chrome changes and crypto dying off.

I doubt its dependent on crypto, they have enough services such as brave search, vpn and meets. They probably generate enough revenue.

>Highly recommend brave (with all the crypto nonsense shut off),

That's essentially Vivaldi. Also stores your data in Iceland for people who care about that kind of stuff and has some pretty good QoL features build in like tab tiling.

My problem with Firefox is that a new Firefox windows can only be launched from the same environment (or only from a child process?) from which the first window has been started. Even the same user who started FF cannot launch a new window from a new shell. That constantly interferes with my workflow.

Example: Say firefox has been started from the Destop already and now I want to start a new Firefox window from a root terminal:

    su desktopuser firefox

It does not work. It gives me "Firefox is already running, but is not responding.".

If you create a new profile for the different user, you can start a second session:

firefox -new-instance -P "Another Profile"

I don't have (nor want) multiple users.

I just want to open a new window for my one user.

So what's wrong with Super+N? I'm struggling to see the need for a completely new browser instance when you only want another window.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38429815

Can you do it in an alternate version such as the developers edition?

I don't want to install multiple browser versions.

I just want to launch a new browser window.

This does not work:

    sudo -u normaluser firefox example.com

So I do:

    sudo -u normaluser chromium example.com

I thought that was relevant to the question "Why bother with Chrome".

He doesn't want a completely new browser instance, he wants Firefox to open another window but depending on its mood Firefox refuses to do this.

Chrome can do this just fine btw.

Running Firefox from the command line isn't an obscure thing either, clicking a link on other apps like Signal or Telegram also use this method to spawn new tabs/windows. And depending on how you executed the first instance, you run into problems with clicking links on other apps as well.

I pretty much need to open Firefox first before clicking links on other apps, because otherwise I can't run Firefox normally later without killing the process.

No. Sorry. I have a list of complaints with Firefox but this is clearly user error. I do this literally every day for a decade or more. It works fine. It particularly helps to not unnecessarily use things that can affect the env like launching a browser with su. In fact I can I think it a list of things that could go wrong with that.

Yes, sorry. This is a Firefox bug and not user error.

On my Linux system, this works with any other browser I try. It only fails with Firefox. If this is user error, it seems every other browser handles user errors much better.

- Firefox: First window is open, running `firefox URL` from the other terminal hangs for 15-20 seconds and then shows the popup "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile.". No new tabs or windows are spawned.

- Chromium: First window is open, running a `chromium URL` command from the other terminal opens a new tab on the existing window.

- Microsoft Edge: First window is open, running a `microsoft-edge-stable URL` command from the other terminal opens a new tab on the existing window.

- Ladybird: First window is open, running `ladybird` in the other terminal opens a new ladybird window.

- Emacs/eww: First window is open, running `emacs --eval '(eww "example.com")'` on another terminal opens a new browser window.

- Netsurf: First window is open, running `netsurf URL` from the other terminal opens a new netsurf window.

- Dillo: First window is open, running `dillo URL` from the other terminal opens a new dillo window.

- Links/XLinks: First window is open, running `xlinks -G URL` from the other terminal opens a new links window.

You can see a clear pattern. Got any other browsers that refuse to run with a message like that? Or is this not a fault of Firefox, and something super extra that everything from other mainstream browsers to more obscure ones somehow handle for the user?

Exactly.

It seems to be some magic Firefox puts somewhere (In the environment?) that prevents it to launch a new window from a fresh terminal that is not inherited from the same parent that launched the first window.

I have never had Firefox do this. I've used all 3 major OS types in the last 5 years and Firefox on all of them. New windows open, no muss no fuss.

>I pretty much need to open Firefox first before clicking links on other apps, because otherwise I can't run Firefox normally later without killing the process.

The only way I imagine this happening is if one doesn't save the browser session between launches, maybe? I've had "cold start" link opens and it just adds another tab to my existing pinned tabs/open tabs/etc.

Everyone has different workflows I suppose.

At least on Windows, other processes launching web pages involves launching a browser process with the URL as a parameter.

I used to get the "firefox not responding" all the time on Windows as well, though it has gotten a lot better not long ago.

Can’t you use -P for that kind of case?

I have very recently begun to see this bug; A workaround is that if you start a new Firefox from a shell on your desktop, then running “firefox” from a shell, even a different shell window, will work fine. I haven’t been able to find out why.

Yes, that is exactly what I am experiencing.

You cannot start FF from the Desktop and then start new windows from a shell.

Unless that shell was directly started from the desktop.

So it must have something to do with the environment or process tree.

I found what I think was the problem for me: From the desktop, I was starting Firefox with the “--no-remote” option. If I remove that option, then it works. I did not use that option when starting in a terminal, but if I do, then the same problem appears.

Use keypirinha [1]. You can type "fir.." hit enter, a firefox window opens. Do it again, and a new firefox window opens.

[1]: https://keypirinha.com/

Curious what use case you are looking at for over here? I don't want to make any assumptions. I'm wondering if what you are looking for might be covered by the functionality of tab containers.

I wrote a command line tool which tells me "Now look at the following page" and opens it a browser window with the url.

Works with Chrome, but not with Firefox.

Mac or Linux? I think on Mac "open" should Just Work, AFAIK

Linux

xdg-open <URL>

Works for me..

That would open the url in the default browser (Chromium for me) with the current user (root for me).

The task at hand is to open it in firefox with the desktop user.

Just use `--new-window` and it will work just fine :).

Maybe you need to set the DISPLAY env var? Maybe it tries to contact the app via dbus and fails for some reason?

I'm quite sure this should work, and you just need to set some env var or so.

You can easily try jourself. 1) Have Firefox open 2) Start a root terminal (or a normal one and then "sudo su" 3) su normaluser firefox

It will refuse to start.

Did you try what I said? I'm pretty sure you just need to set some env vars right. (Not exactly sure which though. But some Googling should help, e.g. maybe how to setup dbus this way.)

I am probably not understand your use-case correctly but there's a `--new-window` flag on the firefox binary. You can use that to open new windows under the same profile.

You can easily try jourself. 1) Have Firefox open 2) Start a root terminal (or a normal one and then "sudo su" 3) sudo -u normaluser firefox --new-window example.com

It will refuse to start.

Erm.... that is a completely different problem.

Do the following: sudo -EHs su, then as root sudo -EH -u {username} firefox --new-window

I'll leave to you the exercise of learning what the flags do, and implicitly why it fails in your case.

this works for me

env -i DISPLAY=$DISPLAY DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS firefox

this doesn't, it gives me the "Firefox is already running, but is not responding." message

env -i DISPLAY=$DISPLAY firefox

I'm not sure what you mean. What I try to achieve is start a new firefox window (for the normal user) from a root terminal. So part of the command has to be "sudo -u normaluser" or "su -l normaluser" or something.

You have to pass those environment variables to Firefox through sudo.

sudo has a --preserve-env=list option but you must know the value for DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS. That's usually

  unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus

where 1000 is the id of the user Firefox is running for. Your root console could have no DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS or have a different value for it.

To be 100% sure of the value, as you are root you could look into the environment of one of the running Firefox processes. Or wrap Firefox in a script that echoes that variable to a file before starting the browser.

Assuming it is "unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus", what would be the command to start Firefox as the normaluser with that setting?

I didn't test it but probably

  DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus \
  DISPLAY=:1 \
  sudo -H -u normaluser \
    --preserve-env=DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS,DISPLAY \
  firefox

I'd add -H to the options of sudo to make it set the home to normaluser's one.

I assumed that your DISPLAY is :1, which is what my Debian has set for me. That's another variable that you could read from the environment of Firefox.

You might have to pass/preserve other environment variables to make Firefox work.

Whe don't you test it? It takes less time than to guess and have a back and forth via HN comments.

Because this is not a support forum or a stack exchange. I give the idea, then all the test and debugging is for who has to actually make the code work.

The parent gave all information which should help you in figuring it out by yourself now. The message it, it should work with the right env vars, and you have multiple example env vars to check for (DBUS related, DISPLAY, etc) and Google for. This is your work now.

(You could also test the extreme case: Just copy all the env vars.)

Why are you using root terminals in the first place? This has always been considered poor security practice. Consequently, your workflow is a very peculiar one, and while you personally might feel inconvenience, I don’t think that this frustrates many other Firefox users out there.

He's using 'su' to switch to desktopuser, that's not necessarily, and quite likely not, an account with root privileges. 'su' stands for 'switch user', it's not just to become root.

He uses the term “root terminal”, he writes “Start a root terminal (or a normal one and then ‘sudo su’)”, and he says he only has a single user. One will naturally assume the worst, and in spite of repeatedly posting here he hasn’t exactly made much sense about his workflow and needs beyond launching the browser.

You're right, I missed the root terminal part.

Correct.

I use a script in a root terminal to control a lot of my workflow. One thing is that I start browser windows from it when needed. I start them with

    sudo -u desktopuser chromium example.com

Because

    sudo -u desktopuser firefox example.com

does not work.

I thought that is relevant to the question "Why bother with Chrome".

desktopuser of course is the normal user which would also start Firefox if I did it via the Desktop gui.

pass a URL!

su desktopuser

firefox about:blank

I believe --no-remote should get around that if using a separate profile doesn't. Of course, you should ensure the distinct processes are not using the same config/cache files.

To make this work you need to set the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable to the same value it has in the environment Firefox is running in. For example:

    sudo -u desktopuser XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000 firefox --new-window

Please try this for yourself. It does not work. Gives the same "Firefox is already running, but is not responding." dialog.

I did try it. It even works from a different VT directly logged in as root if I also specify DISPLAY:

    sudo -u desktopuser XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000 DISPLAY=:0.0 firefox --new-window

If I now switch back to the VT running my desktop, a new Firefox window has opened.

Maybe your root terminal has other environment variables set that break it? A different DBUS session maybe?

Oh wow, you were right! This solves it:

    sudo -u desktopuser XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000 firefox

Sorry for messing it up the first time I tried!

Man, you solved it!!

Thanks a 1000 times!

No problem! Glad it works now.

Please, Firefox, for the love of everything, add a good, easy, natively integrated, one-click-to-enable vertical tab list like Edge's. That's the only thing keeping me on Microsoft Edge and it's a dealbreaker for me. The extensions that add ones are just not as good.

Vertical tabs are The Reason why I stick to Edge despite the constant annoyances Microsoft throws my way. That, and the fact I can still hide most annoying things (like the tools sidebar and bing chat and stuff.

Has has also gotten split screen tabs which is awesome, though I keep forgetting about it and don't use it.

Consider switching to Vivaldi.

Vertical tabs aren't a good reason to stick with Edge. Vivaldi is better and supports vertical tabs, but is still Chromium. If you want a Firefox based browser with vertical tabs there is Floorp.

I tried to switch to switch to Floorp and while it is pretty good, there are things like tab pinning and tiling that work so much better in Vivaldi (compared to every other browser I've tried) that keeps me there.

I tried moving to Firefox a year ago but found that the lack of Tab Groups really killed me.

There are several extensions that try to emulate this behaviour, but I didn't find that they worked particularly well. And then there are the security concerns.

I guess when Chrome break uBlock Origin next year I'll give Edge a go, or one of the various chromium builds

Give it another go. Mozilla's own extension called multi account containers is pretty good and it has more features than just grouping tabs together.

And there's also the panorama view extension, which looks really nice and I've seen people use it extensively.

Does it allow "saving" tab groups and having them sync with what you've actually put in them? Last I checked this was still an experimental feature in Chrome (it might be auto-available now), but it's a killer feature for me (it auto-syncs with whatever you add to or remove to the tab group also).

Mozilla providing the same would be required for me to make the switch altogether (though I happily use it for some things already)

Yep, the extension support syncing your groups across devices. You'll need a Mozilla account for this.

I'm not sure this is the case for panorama view.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/02/06/multi-account-c...

What is the security concern of Firefox over chromium?

Not the browsers themselves, but the extensions that provide tab group functionality - they often have the `Access your data for all web sites` permission.

Maybe I trust the developer right now, but one day they may sell their plugin to someone else. Obviously its the same story for uBlock Origin, but I prefer to restrict the number of extensions with these permissions, and its a shame to need an extension for what is provided by all the other major brwosers.

I don’t think those permission mean that they can collect the data and send it home. I think it means more something like „ accessing all code of website to block scripts“.

If the would send data home I would be a bit irritated. Could someone please clarify this ?

Because I know some extensions do exactly this . There was a talk from the ccc about this. But is this a Firefox specific problem ?

Thanks for responding anyway

Its FF specific as in, in chromium you do not need to install them as its a native feature

Maybe Vivaldi would be a good fit for you?

Just in case you're open to something new: Tree Style Tabs is my goto extension to managing tabs on firefox

You manage your tabs vertically in a sidebar, organized as a tree. Every new tab is opened as a leaf from the tab that you came from, grouping your tabs by branches following your navigation on the web. This make managing groups of tabs by topics really natural.

Tree style tabs is not new. It predates containers and might even predate chrome

Addressing grandparent's comment regarding lack of tab grouping, I'd like to share a custom stylesheet for TST that somewhat tries to tackle this:

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/discussions/3369

Try Tree Style Tabs. It's different but works very well. Edge even stole vertical tabs, I wish Chrome also did.

If you like tab groups, try Arc.

I like how every single person who recommends Arc never bothers to mention that it's Mac-only.

You need Vivaldi if you like tab groups.

I've switched from Chrome to Firefox couple years ago. Very happy with ad blocking. The few problem are: PayPal asks for an SMS code way too often, some PayPal checkout flows don't work and occasionally some website form isn't functional because they didn't test in Firefox - for those cases I just open Chrome.

Cloudflare also loves to bully Firefox users with incessant captchas.

Some interesting data point in the discussion is in the unlock origin wiki article.

„ As of January 2021, the uBlock Origin Chrome extension had over 10 million active users and the Firefox version had 5 million active users „

There are 5-10 times more chrome users then Firefox . Chrome users are for some reasons using less ublock then Firefox users.

Although I personally use Firefox and actively promote its use, I believe that a significant number of users may not be aware of the developments and will continue to stick with Chrome.

From a pragmatic standpoint, it makes sense to advocate for the rights of Chrome users as well, even in the presence of alternatives.

The best way to help Chrome users is to get a significant number of people to stop using Chrome, so they Google needs to compete for users properly again, and backs off some of these changes.

Complaining without action won’t do anything.

I have been using many different browsers over the years. I regularly use safari, firefox, chrome, and occasionally even Edge and so on.

I keep going back to firefox. Why? It has some power-features I haven't really found in many other browsers. It lets you easily explicitly search through your tabs (% in url bar). It has first party plugin for containers, letting you log in to multiple accounts on the same domain without having to log out all the time. It's also worth noting that Rust, the language, as far as I understand was essentially invented to make features in firefox memory safe.

With all the praise for firefox, it should be mentioned that their business model is centered around passing on searches to google.

ublock origin and not ublock. there is a very important distinction. please fix this

Agree. This is important! Hope someone will fix the title.

What’s the digference?

It’s the original project that the original developer gave to somebody else, but then decided to continue working on the project anyway under the „Origin“ moniker.

At some point ublock was sold and to quote Wikipedia: „since February 2019, uBlock began allowing users to participate in "Acceptable Ads",[21][22] a program run by Adblock Plus that allows some ads which are deemed "acceptable", and for which the larger publishers pay a fee.“

Originally, Raymond Hill developed uBlock, but he gave it away because it was too much work. However, the new owner of uBlock turned it into a spamware, so Hill forked uBlock and created uBlock Origin, which is still under development today.

Honestly I've been using Firefox for more than 10 years and never felt the need to switch. Every time I try a new browser there's features from Firefox that I end up missing. And seeing the shitshow with the ad blockers in Chrome there's no way I'm trying that lol.

I've found two major roadblocks when switching browsers: 1. Migrating your passwords, 2. Migrating the bookmarks.

If you use an external password manager (Bitwarden, 1Password, even KeePassXC) and an external bookmark manager (Raindrop is excellent, Pocket is barely usable) then switching browsers becomes very easy – to the point where you could switch to a new one every month if you wanted. The browser is no longer a place where you store your stuff, it just becomes a UI to browse the internet.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-data-another-bro...

I don't understand this at all. Both password and bookmark import have worked flawlessly in Firefox for, well, as long as Firefox have been named Firefox as far as I can remember.

These days i am switching between Firefox and Brave browser.

Missing functionality in Firefox:

* WebSerial/WebUSB - needed for IoT projects, flashing devices like drones etc..

* Firefox Android honestly feels a lot slower than Brave on my device.

* For some odd reason Google Meet has stopped working on my Firefox since last month.

* Touchscreen support by default on my 2in1 laptop.

* Super annoying to have to restart firefox whenever i do a firefox upgrade via. package manager

Missing functionality in Brave: * Proper Tree style tab.

* RAM usage is probably not as low as Firefox

Is there an extension which stores a history of all my visited tabs, also with some kind of window id in order to group them per window?

I'm not talking about the integrated history which will be lost when cleared (and may have a limit of how long entries are kept)

I've (and Google as well) found my Chrome's Activity History to be pretty useful when I need to search for something I was looking for years ago.

I would, if Mozilla focused on features users want :)

What's your wishlist? Browsers feel pretty complete to me in that I can open all the websites I want to open, and atleast with FF I can easily block ads.

Two things stand out: 1. native vertical tabs 2. native tab groups

Yes, I know there are extensions for these things, but I, personally, find them horrible.

> native tab groups

that addon is semi official

which one?

Multi account containers is a extension developed by mozzila.

Mine is very simple: functional autofill and page translations. In most countries it’s a battle to turn it on. Even then, it’s not so reliable.

This is why I haven’t switched. Language translation support for most languages is completely missing on iOS. They just don’t support translate outside a handful of languages.

Actually, one nice-to-have: built in, performant ad blocking which is extensible (preferably compatible with existing lists), like e.g., Brave or Vivaldi does.

sounds a waste of time to build considering how well uBlock Origin works

I disagree. For me (can't speak for others), ad/tracker blocking is an essential part of the browsing experience. I want a built-in, performant solution instead of depending on a 3rd party addon.

Are you asking because you have the power to implement some of the missing features, or because you will tell me I don't actually need what i think i want.

1) i never could get password/autofill syncing between several devices working quickly and reliable as in chrome.

2) no app mode in Firefox

3) on desktop i don't like the UI and i would need to install userchrome stuff to "fix" it.

Some links I want to open in 1 container profile, some in the other.

I need a native switcher, or better profiles support. In chrom/ium browsers with velja (open to alternatives which support ff profiles), I can click a link and it prompts me in which profile I want to open. Only thing blocking me from switching to firefox. (and figma perf is bad on ff but that's not really a ff problem)

Try multi account containers mozzila extension. Works great.

So stick with chrome where the chrome team focuses on features that make the Web worse, like manifest v3 and cohorts.

This is a false dichotomy.

How did you infer from their comment that they used Chrome?

I didn't, I guessed and I might be wrong.

If I may ask: What features are you missing that prevent you from switching?

See above :)

To add to the other anecdotes here:

I've always used multiple browsers at the same time. On my local workstation I used Edge (used to be Chrome) for corporate and customer stuff, Firefox for everything else. Firefox runs faster with less headaches than the others, even with ADO, which is funny to me.

When I encounter environments where only Chrome is available (e.g., jump box or application server in a customer's network) I have to deal with Chrome eating up too many resources. I often have to kill other users inactive sessions due to how much memory their Chrome process is using. I've seen it affect production performance due to it eating up so much memory.

The only user app I've seen that sometimes uses more memory on those customer hosted systems is Oracle SQL Developer.

Firefox is simply better for me. However, I won't argue with others on personal preference, hence why I don't just uninstall Chrome where I find it. Also I don't want those people to lose their bookmarks and browsing history.

I use both Firefox and Brave.

No, I am not disturbed by Braves "involvement with crypto". It took me all of 3 minutes to deactivate every crypto-feature the browser has, they are pretty obvious in the settings. It forces nothing on me, works great, and the best builtin anti-tracking features of a non-TOR browser I have ever seen.

I have yet to check out Vivaldi browser.

One of the impediments in migrating to another software are different UIs. Let's forget for a second that Chrome and Firefox have a really, really similar UI for the sake of this example.

Let's also discard that UI is changed for the sake of itself. It has changed to benefit the software somehow. How to get around the need for someone to redesign the UI and the expectation of a user to have a same routine workflow every day?

Standardize more keyboard shortcuts. Standardize important browser settings under a tree, with prescribed OIDs and such. Start supporting keyboard workflows for all the actions in the software.

Keyboard is the most stable interface there is. Everyone looking to advance in his domain needs to start using the keyboard. Even if you're in construction, engineering, architecture, visual design, you'll find out your software suite has extensive shortcuts and macros or scripting that can boost your productivity N-fold.

Am I the only person who is obsessed with Autoplaying media? Ads are one thing, but even a news site or blog that immediately blasts moving pictures greatly bothers me. Very often you hit a small X which then doesn't do its job as an X, instead moving the media into a floating window.

X is the new "open in separate window"

Chrome is vicious when it comes to forcing auto play.

Brave+Turn off Scripts works great.

Turning off scripts helps in many other ways to make the web more readable. Wait, I should emphasize my unique use-case here: in contrast to apparently the vast majority of web users, I actually like reading words, and sometimes the words are a whole page long. When flashy, talky, moving stuff is in between the sentences and words, they become difficult and frustrating to read.

If there ever was an anti-trust argument to be made against Google this is it. You don't want a dominant search company, dominant advertiser and a browser vendor to be the same entity (or closely related).

At the same time: this also goes for Microsoft/Edge.

Firefox is an amazing browser. Especially since they finally fixed Webauthn on Linux a couple months ago, so I can log in with my yubikeys in passwordless mode. It was the last thing I still used chrome for sometimes.

I use Safari with AdGuard and everything works perfectly fine. I like "hide my email" feature so much from iCloud that this is a dealbreaker now. As well as obvious password sharing with the iPhone.

I use Chrome profiles to separate my work and personal (and other) identities. This is helpful per se, but of course especially helpful because my different identities have different Google accounts.

Last time I looked, Firefox lacked this feature. This isn't the use case for Firefox "Containers" and indeed they could not be used for it. There was something very inconvenient involving starting Firefox with different command line flags to create instances with different profiles. For this reason I could not switch to Firefox.

Firefox even supports uBlock Origin on Android. It's priceless.

One of the best things about switching to Firefox was that it has the option to "Close tabs to the Left". I never understood why you can't do that natively in Chrome.

It's weird to me that no one on Hacker News has pointed out the MV3 version of uBlock works fine. At least I haven't noticed any difference except for the rare minor annoyance of cosmetic filtering (which gorhill removed for political, not technical reasons)

Whatever you feel about the politics surrounding MV2 and webRequest, MV3 is by no means blocking uBlock, or ending adblock on Chrome across the board. That's FUD.

It's far more convincing to speak about the on-the-ground technical facts than the paranoia of these gossip rags.

HN has always been an echo chamber :-)

I've been using the MV3 version for months because it does not require permissions. It works just fine.

And in the rare case where I do need cosmetic filtering, I can simply click the extension icon, drag the slider to "more" and grant an individual permission for the site. It's great.

Another benefit is that a permissionless adblocker works in many corporate environments which would otherwise block any extension with far-reaching permissions.

> rare minor annoyance of cosmetic filtering (which gorhill removed for political, not technical reasons)

Please clarify.

No political motivation went into uBO Lite. It supports cosmetic filtering just fine -- it's a matter of picking the appropriate filtering mode.

I'm misremembering from the initial "uBO Minus" release [1]

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/a559f5f2715c58fea4d...

This was the first commit, and the commit message is accurate about the technical limitations of this first version.

If you want cosmetic filtering and other advanced filtering in the current, more mature version, you need to explicitly grant host permission for either the site or everywhere.

Unfortunately, Firefox isn't quite keeping up.

One issue is that for me at least, Firefox crashes too often, and when it does, the entire browser goes away, not just the tab. That's annoying.

Another issue is that something seems to be lacking performance-wise. I messed around a bit with Invoke AI, and the canvas is painfully slow even on modern, high end hardware. I thought it was just the code sucked. Nope, it's silky smooth in Chromium.

YMMV. Firefox hasn’t crashed in years for me.

Same. I vaguely remember a time where this happened from time to time, but that is years and years ago.

interesting. I can't remember a time where a browser crashed on me during the last 15 years or so. and I do heavy dev work with them, and also browse with tens of open tabs multiple hours pretty much every day.

I use Firefox daily as my default, have roughly about 250 tabs open at this stage. I've not closed my browser in the last 6 or 7 months.. It's not crashed yet.

Is it possible that it's some specific website your visiting?

Is your browser or system unpatched since then?

.... Let's not talk about that ;) But yes.

There appear to be two specific issues for me.

One is that I use Bluetooth headphones, and with my coming and going sometimes something gets into some weird state. Youtube freezes, and sometimes Firefox locks up and crashes as well. This is probably Pipewire's/Fedora's fault primarily, but Firefox gets caught in it.

I also notice that a network drive getting stuck gets Firefox killed. Like if a NFS drive (which I'm not using right now, mind you) just isn't mounting because the VM that provides is down, and I open a file dialog, Firefox will get stuck then get killed after a few seconds.

I guess you could say that neither is exactly Firefox's fault, but I'd say it needs better error handling.

These issues aren't present in Chromium browsers?

Chromium at the very least doesn't crash entirely. Yeah, it gets stuck for a while on hung network drives, but then it keeps going.

I’ve not seen a single application yet, which handles audio system failures properly when it happens during runtime, and most of them fails even when it happens before starting them. And it’s quite frequent unfortunately with my gazillion different Bluetooth and wired headsets across multiple laptops. It’s definitely not Firefox specific. It’s basically standard.

There's probably something to blame in pipewire/fedora's configuration.

I know that at least Pulseaudio has a "null" output driver, so if the audio hardware suddenly disappears, at least under PA it's possible to have applications happily deliver audio into the void without noticing a thing, and then switch back to hardware when it comes back.

I'm not sure if Pipewire deals with this worse or just isn't configured right.

Had to install an auto-reload extension to reload the Slack page every 15min, as it would live-leak some js or DOM stuff causing Firefox to run out of memory eventually (ie 10s of GB).

Haven't checked recently if it's been fixed, I just leave it on.

I use Firefox, Edge and Vivaldi on a 8 year old mac book pro. I do not notice any difference in performance with any of them.

Same installation, just different browsers:

https://daleglass.eu-central-1.linodeobjects.com/videos/fire...

https://daleglass.eu-central-1.linodeobjects.com/videos/chro...

As opposed to the other comentors here, my Firefox has crashed, but only because I've ran out of ram due to having loads of electron based vscode windows open eating up all my ram. Although Firefox wasn't the only app that crashed and this wasn't a Firefox specific issue.

Definitely not RAM. I've gone for way overkill and put 128 GB into my desktop because launching 32 GB VMs is a thing I do.

The vast majority of time that leaves an insane safety margin.

Too small RAM should never be an issue (except in very extreme cases, like a given data cannot fit in RAM at all, or there is no swap), especially not when another app uses it. It should just slow things down, because data transfer between swap and memory.

I had Firefox crash regularly when my GPU started failing, don't know why. But before that and after getting a new GPU zero crashes in years with 100+ tabs open regularly.

that is plain false info. firefox is running each tab on a different process. also invoke AI works fine.

either your ff configuration is f'up (which kinda is the browser's fault) or you are doing something wrong.

Interesting. If you go to the canvas and try to paint something there, how does your brush move?

For me it's very noticeably slow, for the entire UI. Zooming, moving, drawing, is all slow.

I've used solely Firefox for years and I can't think of time where it has ever crashed. What triggered yours?

The "silky smooth on chromium" is because people code specifically for chromium, the way we used to for IE. Usually its a small change, but no one bothers, and we pretend like a browser engine mono-culture is fine and dandy.

Yesterday, Firefox crashed on my girlfriend's PC. I can't remember seeing this happen before at all. It was such a rare thing that I'm investigating what happened now so I can send logs and/or create a bug report.

> thought it was just the code sucked. Nope, it's silky smooth in Chromium.

Is that a Firefox problem, or did they maybe code it Chrome-first and use some of Google's forced web "standards"?

I stopped trying to understand why people don't use firefox. It's been the only browser worth using since opera died. Vivaldi is a fun toy, but it's still got chromium baggage that keeps it from true greatness.

Now, where's the arm64 linux builds? Currently have to rely on the distro or build it yourself. Is it too much to ask of their automation?

I'm like 50/50 on firefox(for linux).

Spotify doesnt work on it. I have far more issues rendering 5,000x5x000 px images on firefox than Chrome. Might not be an issue for most people, but when doing AI art and making 10x10 images, it is common.

After a side by side comparison, I use chrome for nearly everything. I weirdly use firefox for everything google services lol.

I love the firefox screenshot feature that they have making it easier to screenshot specific div/containers

I would consider Firefox if Mozilla wasn't a total sucker for Google's money. They'll get onboard with anything google does sooner or later. As it stands now, I don't see much difference between aligning with either of them.

One additional bit of recommendation for Firefox: the Tridacyl extension only works on it.

It's a vim motions extension that works much better than the ones on Chrome/Brave. You can use it on every page except the Firefox settings, etc.

My main issue with Firefox is the unavailability of a decent profile switching. I know there's some hacky way to get the profile system done, but it is not comparable with Chrome's current profile-switching

Won't container tabs fit your use case?

Not the same thing. I want them to be completely separate, just like Chrome profile.

Some people say use browser that supports manifest v2 extensions, but where will anybody find such extensions? I think Google will remove all manifest v2 extensions eventually from their store.

This is the beauty of the Web - an open set of protocols and standards. You just change whatever you want: browser, server, language interpreter, proxy, etc. This is highly underappreciated.

If you plan on switching to Firefox, consider using an User-Agent extension that tricks Google web apps into thinking they're interacting with Chrome. Improves performance for me.

Coming out swinging saying Safari is a Big Tech Privacy Invader, and then providing no further commentary on why.

You can say many things about Safari, but I don't recall that being one of them.

Is it weird that Google should go to all the effort to advertise Chrome as much as they do? I'm thinking of the las Vegas grand Prix, and the sphere lit up like a big chrome ball

How is Internet Explorer mainstream browser? It has finally died and can't even be used anymore on Windows (unless you're running some old version with updates turned off)

YouTube? Chrome? uBlock? Firefox? What's all this fuss about?

Just avoid the youtube.com domain like pest, period.

Set up a Piped instance or use your favourite one. You even get your playlists and subscriptions over RSS feeds instead of using Google's stinky, unstandardized and limited APIs, how cool is that? And wire it to Platypush + yt-dlp if you want the ability to scrape the media URL and cast it wherever you like.

If you still go directly to youtube.com to consume videos, without even using a Piped proxy as a digital condom, then it's your own fault. Ad blockers can only do that much against overtly hostile businesses that have enough engineering resources to invest in their overtly hostile practices.

What else is Google supposed to do to tell you that you can't trust them with anything? Is Sundar Pichai supposed to wear an evil mask like a Marvel villain before you understand that that company and whatever it touches is rotten and morally bankrupt to its core, that the only thing that prevents them from turning their products into big billboards with zero added value is the backlash from their own users, and that they're trying to find a sweet spot where they can enshittify their user experience to a point where they maximize the money they make out of data collection and ads, but without pushing too much to the point that too many users leave the platform?

The only way out is for EVERYONE to STOP sending a single direct byte to youtube.com. Pirate the shit out of them. And I honestly don't give a f*k anymore about hurting the creators that are still on YouTube. If you're a creator still publishing videos on that sewage, even if so many alternatives are available today, then you're part of the problem, and I no longer care if you lose your revenue.

An interesting thing about posts like this: you would recommend, and you think everybody is using Firefox. But in fact everybody’s using Chrome Firefox user base is just so tiny

I use Librewolf (https://librewolf.net) which is a fork of firefox and truly privacy oriented.

With uBlock Origin working as it works best on Firefox, I get a 3-5 sec lag on launch [0] as it prepares the browser to block ads.

With Chrome, the launch happens in an instant. I should also mention that Firefox has always had a slow start up time on my machine.

While am sure there is a setting to turn the uBlock feature off, it probably won't make enough of a difference to beat Chrome's start up time.

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

I fail to understand this line of thinking. How often are you restarting the browser that this makes any significant difference in your productivity?

It was significant enough for me to notice. And it's about the subject. Doesn't matter how many times a day I launch my main browser.

> I get a 3-5 sec lag on launch [0] as it prepares the browser to block ads.

uBO is typically ready in a fraction of second, so "3-5 sec" is not normal. In Firefox all extensions sit in the same process, so it's possible another extension is preventing uBO to be ready in a timely manner, this has happened[1].

[1] https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/issues/13163

The only thing I miss from chrome is the easy tab grouping.

Wish can see more of these from mainstream/corporate medias, so I can just share them on Facebook/iMessage/Whatsapp with Friends & Family.

Google is effectively willing to sacrifice part of their moat to reenforce their core. Is this move born out of (over)confidence, or desperation?

I'm happy with my Lynx/w3m browsers.

I don't get why FF is mainly advertised as a 'privacy first' browser. I think most people first want ease of use and features, not privacy. And for them, Firefox may look like a niche program only for those who are paranoid or have something to hide. But in my opinion even if we don't count privacy, Firefox will still be a serious contender in all other areas and winner in many. At least for me it's not privacy that wins.

Firefox for Android, unfortunately, is plagued with UX issues, which makes switching much more difficult.

I cannot even render HN well.

Edge is easy to switch to and could be a great way to break the Chrome dominance.

Safari also started catching up over the last 2 years

Edge is based on Chromium. You're better off with Firefox.

Is there any evidence that edge won't switch to manifest v3? As far as I understand Edge merges in Chrome updates.

Safari oh my lord

I would not recommend Safari as I have completely stopped supporting it many years ago due to Apples hostile approach towards developers and the fact it's broken beyond internet explorer levels and has been in this sorry state for at least a decade. I don't know if people still using it have some special use cases or just don't know you can install another browser.

Oh for crying out loud, no, it is not broken "beyond internet explorer levels".

are you high?

Librewolf is a conspicuous omission from a list of privacy-focused browsers that (for some reason) includes Brave.

My Firefox says its DNS-over-HTTPS provider (default Cloudflare) can't find this domain. I wonder why?

I would but only Vivaldi lets me customize all app shortcuts. Vimium doesn’t always work in Firefox.

While switching would be nice, you don't have to. You can just use Firefox to browse YouTube.

Anyone knows if that manifest v3 is going to be pushed into Brave and similar chromium browsers?

I almost exclusively use Firefox personally and Chrome for work.

I couldn't switch to Chrome for work because some google services are randomly broken on Firefox.

At time google drive will fail to load at all (not that it's great on chrome either) and YouTube uploads will randomly break. UI claims it's uploading but no network activity at all and upload is stalled.

uBO also works well in Firefox Android, which is much less well known than it should be.

All I really need is 1Password, and I just installed that extension. Let's do it!

I really hope uBo for Safari would get some love thanks to chrome banning

Because I don't want to support the (in)actions of the Mozilla Foundation

Unpopular opinion: I don't care about 'privacy'.

What’s the website support of Firefox like? I tried switching to Safari last year and a small minority of websites didn’t work as expected. Even though it was small, it was a big enough problem that I switched back to Chrome.

Everything works. In some cases you have to disable the strictest security level, a bit like disabling your ad blocker. Even that is very rare. I do the remember encountering actual problems that would affect my experience.

Good. Personally, I haven’t encountered any big issues with FF yet, just the occasional bug in the web version of ms teams.

If you’re on Mac, try Safari. Otherwise, yes, go Firefox.

Don't Google give Mozilla lots of money? Presumably at some point they will just stipulate that blocking WebRequest be made unsupported?

I mean, speaking as a Firefox user who never switched in the first place.

Google give money to Mozilla primarily as a hedge against monopoly status. Forcing anticompetitive requirements into the bargain defeats that purpose.

Fair point.

It's just a web browser, not your wife.

Why not just use Firefox until that hypothetical point comes, then switch to another if there still exists one?

Of course, there are ways to continue after end of support, you can stay on the same version and stop updating, which is unconvenient in some websites and might block some, but if many people do it, then websites won't be able to safely rely on the features being available on their users browsers.

You can also fork it or use a fork someone made, but browser dev is a lot of work (in the engine mostly) and disagreements.

Never gave up on Firefox, still my primary browser.

The problem with FF I find is being a bit slower on the uptake of new features. WebGPU being the current best example. It's annoying to have to swap to Edge for specific pages.

Which specific pages are you referring to?

Pages that use the features that are enabled in edge but not in FireFox. Such as WebGPU.

I just use Adguard as a system-level ad blocker. Works in every browser, and unlike simple DNS filtering it can inject userscripts.

or any other browser that is not Chrome; Brave, Vivaldi (which use the same engine) or Firefox.

The moment uBlock Origin stops working I'm switching to Firefox. Websites are completely unusable without an ad blocker.

Honestly, in Google's eyes, nothing of value will be lost here. And Firefox gaining some market share will help get regulators off their back, so it's a win-win

(semi-sarcastic post ensues:)

Folks.. come on.. some of us have invested in Google stock (ok.. it's not much, but it is what it is). And for the Google stock to go up people have to use Android without a firewall, Chrome browser in all their devices, Gmail, and so on.. so they be tracked, their data to be harvested and sold x10000 so that the ad machine makes billions and the stock price goes up.

I decided to STOP pestering my friends on switching to Signal, Firefox, etc. and instead I just bought stocks of Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.. Since people don't want to protect their own privacy and the one of their children, and I cannot help them.. well then I can help myself.

I will 'forever' use FF and suggest it ONCE to friends and family, and then move on with my life (on the 'consulting friends & family on privacy focused solutions).

EDIT: Unfortunately I am not joking on the above.. it made me throw up a bit in my mouth the first time I sat down and bought Google and Meta stock (I was a mutual funds guy until then). I use "dollar cost averaging" so I buy a little, but very often (monthly). I got tired of debating with people on why THEIR privacy is CRITICAL for them and their children. Insurance companies will screw them in the future, Pedophiles are monitoring their instagram, Google (and everyone they sell the data to) knowing where they keep and spend their money, Google knowing who they email and what/when/why/etc. It is insane what type and how much data 'we' are freely giving away, only to bite us in the a$$. For me the cost-benefit of convenience vs what-will-come is very much against us.

Don't you aspire to do the right things, or at least to avoid doing the wrong things? I don't understand what drives you. You were pestering your friends to switch to Signal and Firefox for privacy reasons and then you bought GAFAM stock? Aren't you actively going against your ideals by doing this?

Also, what a mix up! You managed to mention pedophiles in your comment?!

Your reasoning is very hard to follow.

You mention being semi-sarcastic and then you write "Unfortunately I am not joking on the above". What a mess. You really need to clear up your writing if you want to be understood.

And that "Unfortunately": you have leverage on what you do, you know? If you find what you do "unfortunate", change something! We can't do it for you.

Not mutually exclusive. I can feel bad for my friends who insist on using WhatsApp, Gmail, Facebook. That's their choice to do. I am not friends with 7bn people. I am extrapolating and considering that majority of humans care more for convenience and much-much-less on Privacy. And since I cannot do anything about it, I am doing what I can do about it. Make sure my family has a better future.

People feel both good and bad when eating junk food. In this case, people consume Gmail, and I merely bet on the horse that will most likely win (GAFAM/FAANG).

I warn people of the risks of plastering their kids' photos all over the social media - thus potential exposure to pedos. That's also a privacy & safety issue.

https://fortune.com/2023/11/27/social-media-addiction-teens-...

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/former-facebook-exec-wont-let-o...

You've been in HN since 2017. You must have seen these/or similar discussions and links. Big bosses of social media don't let their kids consume their own services. Yet these companies make billions.

I don't drink coke, pepsi, etc. Many people do. It hurts them. You can't call me out for buying Coke or Pepsi stocks. I feel bad for them, but I feel good for me.

I don't push people to use Gmail, that would make me an accomplish. But hey, if they WANT to use Gmail, thank you, I will gladly take that dividend, while some insurance company 30 years from now will screw your kids over the premium for a life insurance, and YOU (the parent) caused it.

Yeah, but there's a difference between eating junk food (once in a while) and investing in a junk food company, isn't it?

Surely you can invest in something else?

But you do you of course :-)

Do you expect Google stock to go even higher?

Won't it? These guys net billions every year. As long as there is online ads, Google will be raking it. Unless there is a technological game changer OR 95% of all users globally start caring for their privacy.

I think you mean, Time so switch to Brave!?

gentle reminder that chrome people are doing "web environment integrity" bullshit. use firefox or any non-chrome based browser if you like the open and free web.

When I open the firefox I see the following [0]interface rows :

2. Toolbar-bookmarks row | Button for unfolding the bookmarks that don't fit in such row.

3. Pinned tabs (they are only icons) | < | Tab_1, Tab_2, Tab_3, ... | > | + | unfold vertical list of the opened tabs |.

4. The page for the selected Tab.

This allows us to use two bookmarks visual groups, the ones that are unfolded through the Menubar-bookmarks, and the ones always visible when Toolbar-bookmarks are enabled (what in reality is a subfolder from menubar's bookmarks) and are shown as 2nd row in my interface. Also the easy access to Containers and the CookieAutoDelete, uMatrix, uBlockOrigin current page options are essential.

In the Toolbar-bookmarks, for being able to visually have more folders as "quick access" row line, I use acronyms as folder names (just for the first ones until fill that space). This between separators, and also mere url icons bookmarks (by removing the bookmark title name its just showed the page icon).

When one push one those folders are unfold all the related sub-folders and sub-bookmarks.

Also, equally important, the folders and bookmarks that don't fit in such row are easily accessible by pushing an icon at the right corner, what unfolds a vertical list with the rest the bookmarks. This is important because in such toolbar one usually have several hundreds of independent bookmarks and folders by topics, with infinite sub-folders and their respective bookmarks, etc.

This let us in Firefox with:

Pinned tabs, the current session opened tabs, the usability of to have the Toolbar-bookmarks with folders as topics by clicking the folder or icon, and a second different visual group of bookmarks through Menubar-bookmarks. By other side, if one want to add to those folders/topics the page that is being visited it's just needed to drag and drop the url there. Also all those bookmarks' folders have their option for to open their content in tabs.

I cannot think of browsing comfortably without such an interface and tools as a starting point.

[0] Thankfully and fortunately, with Firefox it is possible to have a browser focused in usability by enabling its options, and also to do adjustments in the interface under our needs with custom stylesheets. By default in FF the tabs are shown over the url bar, but in my case I use as base [1]customcssforfx for to put the tabs under toolbar-bookmarks, and from there I add a couple of lines with custom padding, sizes and icons. [1] https://github.com/aris-t2/customcssforfx

Use Brave instead!

yeessirr

Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

why is this absolutely oblivious, joke of an article voted so high? web browsers are bloated and insecure, and there is practically no difference between them. tor browser tries (keyword) to reduce fingerprintability to make tor actually work as intended, beyond that there is no difference between firefox. icecat, palemoon, and all those forks are just firefox with 0.01% of the bloat removed. any "privacy" or "security" plugin just increases your attack surface and makes your fingerprint more unique (and 99% of websites collect this fingerprint and use it).

browsers are bloated and unfixable. consuming "privacy" and "security" products does not fix this.

> Mullvad Browser: Best Built-in VPN Support

this text is literally written by a bot

There are many other good Chromium-based web browsers. Arc, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi...

But they are still based on chromium lol

FF has so many bugs, it literally unusable.

It works perfectly fine for me. Maybe you fubar'ed your OS.

Isnt Firefox trying to copy EXACTLY what Chrome is doing with extensions?

Yes, except for the parts that stops adblockers.

Firefox is also supporting Manifest V3, like Chrome, but Firefox is not removing support for Manifest V2, unlike Chrome.

How long is that going to last?

No, there are some meaningful differences in the Manifest v3 implementation in Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-fi...

One such difference (and not the least) is:

> Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3. To maximize compatibility with other browsers, we will also ship support for declarativeNetRequest.

Can you elaborate? Firefox had extensions before Chrome existed. Firefox has always been the most versatile and secure way to browse the web. The only reason Chrome is even in the discussion is because Google abused its monopoly to push it on people. And yes a lot of people will say it's faster, all that speed lead you straight into the claws of Google doing whatever they want with you.

> Firefox has always been the most versatile and secure way to browse the web.

Currently, a Chrome full-chain is notably harder than a Firefox full-chain, with the former being at "state actor ITW" level, and the latter being at "your friends started a never-heard of consultancy and they decided to do the classical trick - pwning Firefox at Pwn2Own" level.

Yeah but if Google keeps removing the ability to block content then Firefox will be more secure simply by filtering dynamic content from unknown domains. Drive by attacks are the most common way to spread malware, this is exactly what extensions like noscript prevent.

This isn't the first time Chrome has crippled user ability to filter content on a deep level.

So it doesn't matter how much hardening Chrome has if it allows for drive by download attacks from unknown domains.

Sure, I just hope people move to contribute hardening features to Firefox, and the first step would be singing out loud that Firefox is not the most secure browser right now.

Oh, and I suffer from using NoScript (currently on Chrome, unfortunately) every day, I very much want to have a secure enough browser to not giving me decisions like "do you want to whitelist cdn.jsdelivr.com [1] or click four times for each page you read".

[1] It distributes arbitrary shit on github, so good luck whitelisting this "known" domain.

I don't think these are especially relevant to the threat models of average users. Security for most people means not getting malware from random sites and not having all their data given away, and noone is blowing an 0day sandbox escape on an average internet user.

Adblocking extensions go a very long way in terms of keeping average users safe. If you're a potential target of sophisticated actors (of any level of sophistication above script kiddie) then you're not really the target audience of generic browser advice.

Indeed. Consider my view points biased cause my threat model does contain being popped by North Korean hackers. And I can't use the Internet without a functioning ad blocker so :(

Firefox has dropped its own extensions to follow Chromes extension model for a long time now

the issue was more of a security / architecture than just following chrome. xul needed to change and webextensions was already open and tested.

that said, i still miss a couple of xul extensions

> more of a security / architecture than just following chrome

They could have gone for something entirely different but instead they decided to blindly copy Chrome.

They're not making Manifest V3 mandatory. They're implementing it, sure, but that makes sense to ensure compatibility with Chrome extensions.

Google's marketing is sooo good.

Instead of giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt, many people are instead instantly complaining that Firefox is not better and it's worth sticking with Chrome anyways.

Chrome has not been supporting proper content blocking for years. E.g. Chrome will not wait for content blockers to initialize before sending out requests, so the first website that opens when you start Chrome is probably not content blocked.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

I'm pretty sure this is fixed with the new API for blocking network requests MV3 added. This list of rules is persisted between browser sessions.

Firefox is supporting Manifest V3 but with extra APIs which are needed by adblockers like uBlock Origin.

Sadly Firefox doesn’t translate most languages like Danish in the iOS app. They have chosen not to add that feature for some reason. It rules out Firefox for me because I want bookmark and history syncing between mobile and PC. A LOT of people are waiting for better language support on iOS.

Since it is open source, couldn’t it be added by a dedicated developer?

Maybe because all browsers in iOS are Safari with a skin? Apple doesn't allow other browsers. I guess it is too much work for Mozilla to make all features available.

I won't use Firefox due to the way Mozilla is wasting its money and mismanaging its projects.

So you'd rather watch ads? Seems like a weird take.

Sure it's pretty bad, but the chrome team isn't any better mandating manifest v3, experimenting with cohorts, etc.

weird take on so many levels.

as if google is any better.

I really, really want to switch from Vivaldi to Firefox, but I am just too accustomed to the workflow. The interface is too slick and it "just works".

I use vertical tabs with different workspaces, and although I am aware I can do it with extensions or userchrome in Firefox, I've found both variants pretty rough and unpolished -- and I don't have the time and energy to polish stuff that bothers me.

The biggest question for me is why nobody creates browsers based on FF engine and everyone uses chromium as a backbone for the browser. I would love to see something like Vivaldi or nyxt based on FF engine.

I've used Tree Style Tab before and switched to Sidebery (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/). Never used Vivaldi, but you might want to give that a try. It works well in combination with container tabs.

Hmm, looks like that was what I was looking for. I'll check it out, thanks for recommendation.

Firefox looks ugly, I really can't accept it. The only way of it looking less ugly is to do some unofficial tweaks which break from version to version. I was a Firefox user for years until they've changed the UI, and now I can't go back because of how it LOOKS.

Also, the Mozilla ideology. Why can't the browser be just a piece of software and that's it?

I just use Vivaldi.

Edit: I can sense that Firefox zealotry is strong in this topic. People who downvote: you don't accept that someone has a different aesthetics than you, or what's the reason? That just reinforces my choice to stay away, people who Mozilla attracts are not really on the same wavelength as me I guess.

Funny, I use Firefox and think Chrome looks a bit uglier. A lot is simply what you're used to. Don't let your initial aesthetic reaction dictate your browser choice. It's really not ugly; just a tiny bit different.

Same here, I much prefer the Firefox UI. Chrome feels somehow dated to me.

Same. Specially the developer tools. I don't know how people can work with chrome's developer tools when Firefox's looks waaaaay better.

> Don't let your initial aesthetic reaction dictate your browser choice.

Why? Also "initial reaction"? You mean, "fake it till you make it"?

For others this may be a nitpick, for me it's a barrier I'm not able to cross.

I guess because it seems a trivial reason to dismiss what could otherwise be a good bit of tech.

Of course, if it really bugs you after using it for a while, then that's fine. I just think most software takes a bit of getting used to.

> I just think most software takes a bit of getting used to.

I was using Firefox since version 1. First bomb was the removal of XUL -- Firefox has lost most of its appeal to me then. Then there was those changes to tabs. So it's not like I wasn't used to FF.

Guess you really don't like it now then!

Uh where do you see the browser? You mean maybe the settings pages? Otherwise I only see a standard window frame around a webpage, and can't even imagine it being different.

The look of website tabs. They were perfectly fine a few years ago, but they had to change something to show that something changes.

Don't switch to FF if you're a heavy user. I am on Firefox as my main browser for web and mobile since 4 years.

I am just in the process of switching back to Chrome, as Firefox got continuously worse over time. Can't handle lots of tabs, crashes/freezes randomly, weird UI bugs... It's just very disappointing :/.

I don't have this experience at all, not even close.

I am sorry to see you have a bad experience with FF. It must be you and only you. I am sure that in your BAU you enjoy being tracked for everything you do, every page you see, etc. etc. I've been using FF since 2005 and I cannot remember when was the last time it crashed. Perhaps it did in 2008 (I remember having problems and FF crashing - and I was living in 'that flat' at the time. But no probs since.

I've had a similar experience. I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix and I can count on my fingers the times when the browser actually crashed.

Could this be your particular profile acting up? My experience is that it is pretty stable across multiple machines, multiple OSses and for many many years.

Works just fine for me.

Probably referring to firefox on android. There way they rewrote it, and put an alpha version in the hands of end users was pathetic.

It was a long time before it even had extensions again, it was horribly unstable, it lacked functionality, and it still does.

You really couldn't work harder at torpedoing a product, than do what Mozilla did with Firefox on Android. I've often wondered if Google offered the team in charge a hire away, and massive pay raises to do this, because what else would allow for such incompetence?

Something is horribly broken at Mozilla.

There still issues with the FF on android, I have apps that redirect a page (eg for authentication in most of the cases) to the web browser and waiting back a response from it to continue, this works on on chrome but alas not FF

Obviously this shouldn’t be like this in the first place, but potentially you’ve got profile corruption. If you’re going to switch anyway, you could try resetting your profile from about:support first.

Using Firefox exclusively on Linux, macOS, Android and iOS. I have none of those problems. Perhaps some obscure addon you're running?

I switched to FF from Chrome about a month ago, I'm very happy, no issues.

Firefox can't handle lots of tabs?! What are you talking about?

I completely lost track of how many tabs I have open. I lost track of how many windows I have open, and each window has way too many tabs. It must be hundreds. I have a serious problem.

But Firefox doesn't. Firefox keeps churning along nicely as if my current tab is the only one I've got. Firefox enables tab hoarders like me a lot better than Chrome ever did.

I think you're over generalising your bad experience on desktop. I've used Firefox since it was called Phoenix on numerous Windows and Linux machines and I don't recall ever having those problems.

Mobile Firefox I completely agree. That was a complete mess after they rewrote it. Crashes, UI bugs, you name it. I tried, but eventually couldn't take it any more and switched to Opera for Android which works nicely enough for me. The only thing mobile Firefox had in common with the desktop is the product name, they aren't the same software at all. Very disappointing.

> Don't switch to FF if you're a heavy user

I currently have over 250 tabs open, all actually open actively running things in the background, and I haven't closed my two Firefox windows in the last 6-7 months. I constantly run fairly heavy CPU-usage web apps and FF's not crashed in the last 6 months at least..

Let's not generalise your experience to the rest.. Like "It runs on my machine" isn't a valid statement usually, "It doesn't run on my machine" also mostly isn't.

(Firefox user here and I'm not planning on switching)

Your argument also works against yourself.

> Can't handle lots of tabs

As someone with a tab counter routinely in the 60s (Tree Style Tabs is life), I can only offer you a "it works fine with me (tm)" counterpoint. I only noticed show-stopping performance issue way back when I tried to dabble my feet in the Apple ecosystem back in 2009 (I began using FF shortly after it was renamed from Firebird).

i have close to 2000 tabs and have stellar performance and no crashes.

chrome on the other hand, tabs will randomly crash if left open for more than a day or two.

I've used mozilla/firefox for over 20 years (this includes mozilla browser before FF) on desktop and 10+ years on mobile, and don't have these problems.

Multiple firefox windows per virtual desktop with dozens of tabs each, no issues.

I use Chrome too, mainly for development (its JS dev tools), so I know what to compare to.

My anecdote can beat up your anecdote!

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