Also, switch to something non-Chromium if at all possible.
Which brings us in the paradoxical situation that if you want there to be any choice left at all in browsers then you're pretty much forced to choose firefox.
Which brings us in the paradoxical situation that if you want there to be any choice left at all in browsers then you're pretty much forced to choose firefox.
HN doesn't need much in the way of a browser, for example. Ditto for a lot of other forums out there. The sooner we get rid of the notion that the only browsers we're supposed to use are Firefox or something else by Big Tech, and the sooner developers stop drinking the Goog-Aid of "progress", the more true browser diversity will occur.
I get everyone hates on Safari but it is legitimately also a different engine and they have shown to be privacy conscious.
Orion in particular is very good IMO
As for my view, I think thats a bit extreme, though until relatively recently, Safari was slow to update and support many standards that came out in the last 4-5 years, though I think this is largely resolved, Apple does have some security and privacy concerns with APIs like the proposed File System Access API[7] that some feel is overblown and still holding the web back as a platform, specifically around gaining access to native functionality, particularly with iOS.
Also until very recently, their PWA support for things like push notifications were non-existant, they have slow rolled any web platform gains being supported on iOS and that could be perceived as protecting their App Store as the web platform becomes more app like.
My own opinion is somewhere in the middle, but this is the overall scope of the complaints summarized
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/safari_risks_becoming...
[1]: https://blog.logrocket.com/when-will-safari-finally-get-it-t...
[2]: https://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/
[3]: Even here on hacker news, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377890
[4]: Dev advocate for Safari Team addressing the statement headon: https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1491064075987873792
[5]: Op-ed by Nolan Lawson on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed...
[6]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/09/safari-team-asks-for-fe...
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...
yeah, so lets make that happen and then find out what the response is.
right now we're stuck in the "tried nothing and all out of ideas" state.
People won't switch when you get a degraded experience of Google services on Firefox.
Similarly, if Firefox was as easy to embed as Chrome we'd probably see a lot more alternatives based on it.
People switched when google (having the site everybody went to daily) started advertising on the home page "use our browser" - must be nice; and in the start it seemed like a tool for users to use to harvest data; unlike today where chrome is the tool that the data-collectors use to harvest people
Firefox dropped the ball at the time, and now even tho it has mostly caught up in speed and stability, their market share doesn't grow because it's not substantially better feature wise.
May be the adblock wars can change that, because chrome seems to be going towards eliminating adblocker.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
According to a quick statistic search, firefox has about 363 million users, while the multi-account addon has about 368,938 users - that's 0.1% of users. Compared to ublock origin, which has 7,388,295 and thus is at least within 2% of all users.
If tomorrow Google turns next-level evil in terms of privacy / steering the web, Microsoft will have forked Chromium within a week, and everyone (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc) will swap their upstream immediately.
People have this illusion that Google has an ironclad grip on Chromium, but they don’t. It’s maximally permissively licensed, the only reason they get to decide much is because they put in (pay) the dev hours.
Mozilla these days seems more happy at pumping out tech-woke messages rather than being privacy first. Hell, they’ve refused to add an adblocker to their iOS browser for years now.
3rd party WebKit browsers are more rare, thus less well-developed.
I’ve settled on using Brave.
Brave does it via their extras. Mozilla mostly via their search deal with Google.
> "Thank you for loving Firefox".
> I really resent the presumptuousness of this message. I never told you I "loved" Firefox. How could anyone "love" a Web browser? It's a functional tool: a doorway to the Web.
I am dying. This has to be one of the funniest things I've read all year.
Guess I just don't care. Some people want it. I mean I change my theme. But there's defaults and I don't have to think about most of these things and they don't affect me or anyone I know, so why care? lol
Or, Microsoft will be happy with this "next-level evil."
My fear isn't that tomorrow Google will start doing the browser-monopoly equivalent of kicking puppies and twirling a black mustache.
My fear is that Google has gradually accustomed everyone to their monopolistic dominance over the web, to the point where they can engage in blatant monopolistic privacy-destroying activities like privacy sandbox and people will still rush to their defense saying "but they haven't broken out the mustache twirling yet!"
I’m simply freeing people from the illusion that Google has “won the web” or whatever. Google is effectively giving everyone a free ride with Chromium. They aren’t forcing anyone onto Chrome (where the real tracking happens), and if they did by making Chromium private from now on, again, forks and upstream swaps would happen at lightspeed.
Between that and the embed situation FF is clearly engaged in some sorta self-sabotage cycle.
To repeat: if you can choose between two things then you've got a choice.