In 2024, please switch to Firefox | Hacker News Reader

In 2024, please switch to Firefox

roytanck.com

1,776 pointsVinnl810 comments

I switched back to firefox last year and haven't looked back. I still use chrome on another laptop sometimes, the performance difference from my human perspective is literally zero.

These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.

The only site I've found behaves terribly in Firefox is LinkedIn. Weird pauses on page load that lock the whole browser (not just the tab) for like 5-10 seconds. No idea what they're doing to make this happen, but it's odd.

Which is, well, fine, because LinkedIn is mostly a dumpster anyways.

Any site that is on the edge of performance (often due to bad engineering, which you can blame on time constraints) will perform vastly better in Chromium.

I don't much care, TBH. Having worked in the Chromium codebase before, I know what an absolutely mammoth amount of engineering hours goes into that.

V8 on its own is a technological miracle.

But all funded by a firehose of crazy privacy invading ad revenue.

So. I'll live with the odd pause and a bit of battery drain. I gave Google 10 years of my life as an employee in exchange for $$, I'm not interested in giving them the rest of my life for free.

I get it, it's a nice story, but here's a nice little life-hack:

What if you could take the benefits of the spending and jettison the side-effects?

It's called Brave, they have their own ad blocker in the source code written in C, so it can't be hamstrung.

Crypto crap, no thanks.

This isn't an intelligent statement. I have used Brave for years and literally never see anything related to "crypto".

If you're trying to go "chrome but better" than Brave is a move in the wrong direction, given its bundled cryptocurrency and ad platform.

Perhaps you haven't heard of Chromium. If so, that may be because Chromium doesn't spend as much on marketing as Brave.

https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium/

It's funny because I worked in that repository for a few years, and routinely built a custom "shell" (what Chromecast is) and when this guy suggested Brave my thought was... eh, yeah, sure, but I could also just roll my own or just run stock chromium :-)

I personally like that Firefox isn't based on webkit/blink.

Social networks really have no business being "on the edge of performance", FFS.

Look, Google and Facebook are just mom and pop businesses - they can't afford to support all these fancy browsers!

(I absolutely agree - especially when it's google turning off features when you're using FF... it feels blatantly anticompetitive).

Okay, well, they're using React and most React engineers aren't very good so it ends up being a clusterfuck that most people don't even notice given how well Chromium is optimized.

This prompted me to check LinkedIn after months of having it parked in a tab and it worked with no problems.

When I have problems with a site it's usually because I'm blocking most JavaScript with uMatrix and I have to find the correct combination of scripts to make the site work for me without having to give away my soul to the gods of tracking.

As a software developer, it's been years since a customer told me that the sites I develop on Firefox don't work on Chrome or Safari. I don't even bother to check anymore. I couldn't check with Safari anyway and they are OK with that. The point is that if it works in Firefox it works everywhere. Of course we're not using any Chrome-only API but we never had to use one of them as far as I can remember.

Also checked LinkedIn, no issues in FF on a mid-2014 mbp.

Ubuntu 23.10 on Wayland, Firefox 119.0 from Snap, only extensions are uBlock Origin and Bitwarden.

Long weird pause.

Bigquery studio is an absolute dog in Firefox even on S-tier desktop hardware. It works better in chrome. Go figure.

Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites. However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with "Multi-Account Containers", "Temporary Containers", "uBlock Origin", and a few more. These are amazing for privacy and productivity, but will occasionally cause broken websites.

Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.

I don't mind breaking websites, if I can fix them on my own terms.

Nah, there's plenty of examples of sites breaking on Firefox. For example, the recent degraded performance on Youtube linked to Firefox User Agent strings.

Yeah but that's not on Mozilla in any way. That's just Google's anti-competitive practices. Firefox refuses to jump on Google's attempts to ban adblockers with Manifest V3 so Google wants to punish them

What matters for the end user is the experience. If using FF will lead to a poor experience on certain websites, then why recommend it?

Do people honestly believe that if they keep recommending FF, people will magically switch to FF and Google will be forced to stop its anti-competitive practices?

Yea - because Google is just outright acting evil in a number of ways. A good example is the fact that background blur isn't supported in google meet in FF and that audio translation is similarly blocked in FF. These are just arbitrary ways that Google is degrading the FF experience because of their commanding market share.

I use Google meet with Firefox on Ubuntu. Background blur works for me, as well as auto-caption. Haven’t tried auto-translation though.

> What matters for the end user is the experience. If using FF will lead to a poor experience on certain websites, then why recommend it?

Because holding that against Firefox is exactly what Google is counting on. And the more you recommend it the harder it is for Google to continue its anti-competitive practices.

The more you fall a fool for Google's (or Microsoft a decade ago) practices, the worse the experience for everyone is in the future.

Anyways, there's simple extensions that will sidestep Chrome's bs. In addition, you'll soon to be able to get an adblocked experience that you can only get on Firefox. That means less network traffic, faster loading websites, and better user privacy

Speaking of adblock experience with Firefox (and uBlock origin), Google has managed to slip ads into my Youtube experience. So far I can skip them after watching the first 5 seconds so it's not too bad.

Before that they had a popup that would timeout after 15s (?). At that point I tried disabling uBlock on Youtube but found the ads stacked up to much longer, so the 15s delay was more acceptable.

As expected, this will probably continue to be a cat and mouse game.

My adblock on Firefox works seamlessly (0s downtime) and I dread the idea of having to navigate YouTube on any other browser.

Immediately giving every bully whatever they want with no resistance is certainly one way to navigate life.

Well, there's also the fact that Google is currently being prosecuted for antitrust violations on both sides of the Atlantic...

Do you honestly believe that it's OK for Google to just keep being anti-competitive? Or that this is a completely inevitable and unfixable state of affairs?

We can, should, and will hold Google accountable for its monopolistic conduct, and this is absolutely part of that.

If you want an experience that includes privacy violations, knock yourself out. Personally, as an end user, that is exactly what I don’t want, which is why I use Firefox

What good does not recommending it achieve? Maintaining the status quo which as well discussed elsewhere in these threads is hardly generally desirable?

My move back to FF has been slow (as mentioned already too) but I've been recommending it to others, who don't have my self-inflicted blocker, for some time. Maybe some will stop listening if I keep mentioning it, but people online I'll never meet in person are hardly a great loss in my life. The sort of people who are going to take such issue in RealLife™ are likely those just paying me attention in exchange largely for free tech support (the matter isn't likely to come up in other contexts) and they can do one anyway too.

Manifest v3 does not ban adblockers, nor does the Chrome web store

It doesn't ban a blockers outright but does severely hamper them. It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin, and also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves and forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store.

Both of those will seriously hamper a more advanced adblock like UBlock Origin

>It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin

The limits are 30,000 static rules and 30,000 dynamic rules. Running tens of thousands of regexs for each request can lead to a performance impact. Allowing for even higher limits may result in people having a worse experience from the browser becoming slower. The API was designed such that these limits can be increased in the future as available computation and user needs change over time. Getting extension developers to design their extensions in a way where they have to think about not slowing down the browser too much I think is a good thing and I would not call these current limits severe.

>also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves

declarativeNetRequest lets rules be added and removed dynamically by the extension.

>forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store

The Chrome team has said that configuration can be updated outside of a store update. What the Chrome web store does not want are extensions that download and run code. This policy does not related to mv3.

It bans the ability for them to block or reroute network requests. Some adblockers might still work on some sites, but it'd mostly be an aesthetic feature. Your browser is still receiving the data, your network is still clogged, and websites are still slower.

I feel like it doesn't matter how many examples of Firefox not working properly you are faced with, you will simply respond "well that's not Mozilla's fault, that on the website developer" for each and every one. At the end of the day it's the Firefox user who is faced with the problem.

I do feel that there’s a difference in kind between: “a website was built with Chrome in mind, and has problems rendering in Firefox”, and “a website was built specifically to degrade in Firefox”.

If no engineering time was spent on Firefox, and it’s broken in Firefox, that’s a Firefox problem.

If active engineering time was spent on _deliberately breaking_ Firefox, then yes, I don’t think that’s a Firefox problem. I think it’s a website problem at that point.

which means other than a small handful of power users most people will continue using chrome, and websites will continue prefering to put it first, continuing the cycle

im curious to see what effect ublock not working as well on chrome as it will on firefox will have to the demographics, if there's no shift then that's a hurdle that has to be overcome by either firefox by some sort of engineering, google, or via legislation

Nowadays there's very few websites that work on Chrome but not Firefox. Hell I'd even throw modern Safari in that. Interop 2021-2023 has made a huge difference

Besides specific Google products, most everything works across all 3 major engines.

In addition, Mozilla adds specific code to Firefox to counteract anti-competitive practices on specific websites

And Netflix STILL refusing to play above 720p on Firefox if you’re running Linux, which I’m sure many here are.

I'll just keep pirating personally, I don't see why I should be treated worse if I'm paying.

To be fair, this is not a Firefox issue.

Unless you use Edge on Windows you still have the same limitation (or the windows store Netflix app).

One solution is not to use poorly coded websites.

It is unfortunate that Firefox doesn’t do more to help us avoid sites programmed by devs who are too incompetent to follow standards, really.

Firefox doesn't. But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does. I keep Chrome up for VirusTotal to scan PortableApps.com releases. In Firefox, it'll throw broken ReCaptcha prompts over and over and over after a certain number of scans per day (pick the thing, next, pick the thing, next x10, etc). And that's with all extensions disabled. Possibly related: VirusTotal and ReCaptcha are owned by Google.

When these sites break I prefer to spam their support or just not use them. If they won't support firefox then they don't deserve my patronage.

It's not patronage if you don't pay. Google would rather not have you as a user if it costs them any amount of time to support you. The relationship here is adversarial on both sides and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

if firefox users keep flooding their support line with problems then that means firefox users are costing them money. eventually it will be cheaper to build software that actually works.

For those that don't know, Virustotal saves all samples and provides them to researchers.

Google chooses to provide those services for "free" which means thez actually do benefit from the users.

> But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does.

Honestly, we should take the same stand against them. Those who are hostile towards Firefox should be publicly named and shamed for sheer incompetence and/or malice.

I have chrome installed. In the rare occasion that Firefox does not do a good job I just switch to chrome for that website and then go back.

This is usually the case if there might be forms or something like that. It's minor enough that it doesn't bother me.

Now, on the other hand, tab management is so much better with chrome and I've considered using Chrome for that reason alone. At work I do use chrome because I usually have 10-15 websites open at a time (for example I like to keep one tab group per ticket and every related item to it there).

I do use simple tab groups on Firefox but it's not good enough at least to replace my workflow at work.

Have you tried Tree Style Tabs [1]?

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

This extension alone is sufficient justification to shift to Firefox.

Hey! So I finally felt inspire and made a demo of my Firefox userchrome.css and Tree Style Tabs customization and CSS on my Github here [1]. It makes it so that the Tree style tabs expand and contract over the page, showing just the favicon and number of sub-tabs when contracted, along with a few other things, like reducing border sizes and adding better indication for sound in a tab. It's pretty nifty I think; I hope someone finds it to their liking. :)

https://github.com/jessebeard/firefox_settings

I wish tab groups to be implemented natively. Or that extensions can manage the tab bar instead of using a sidebar. That’s the best experience we can get so far, but it does not feel right to me.

"Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites" .. for you.

I regulary ran across something that does not work or has a broken style. And I know how to turn UO off.

And why should that be a surprise? FF has way less manpower than Chrome. (And even fired lots of engineers, to raise the CEO bonus)

Chrome leads the way and probably the vast majority developes for chrome and with chrome dev tools. So most of the time FF works, but not always. And performance is just worse, but not noticable on a desktop and on mobile it is offset by the working adblock. Meaning perceived performance is usually better, because ads are blocked, unlike in chrome mobile.

This has absolutely not been my experience. Must be a different extension you installed.

Or I just visit different websites?

Not the worst idea to avoid a website for breaking in FF (or take a chance to touch grass), but unfortunately when you can't pay your credit card bill or need something for your work and it only works in Chromium it can't be avoided.

Then we can compare brave and firefox in terms of speed. I don’t see any noticeable performance difference (I use both on linux and macos)

Then ... maybe have a look at some numbers:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks

And sadly it can be worse, with my quite complex app, that I absolutely did not tailor for chrome, but gone out of my way to also support FF - the result is that chrome is just 3x faster.

Thank you, never looked at these. The benchmarks show a big margin, but still, I use both daily and do not notice such a gap

> Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites.

There are definitely websites that don't work with Firefox out of the box. Just one example that annoys me is https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com. "Firefox users: Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection may interfere with Sign In. Temporarily disable it in Firefox Privacy Settings to load the sign in screen."

Yeah, I find more broken websites out of the box with Firefox than Chrome (even disabling extensions/ad blockers)

I use Chrome at work (corporate provisioned device) and Firefox at home so both get a good amount of usage

It's probably third party cookies but not for long, Chrome will also remove them next year so they will have to do something about it.

Are you sure that your tracking protection is set to "Standard"? You'd have to change it manually to stricter protection.

I know of several sites that break if you go beyond Standard, but none if you don't.

Alternatively read as: “We are actively hostile to user-chosen browser privacy settings such that we develop our application to coach our users to turn these settings off as a necessary means of accessing their account”. I guess that’s what they call a death spiral given that the behavior discourages me from attending any would-have-been-DCI events.

There is a filter list for ublock origin that bypasses such things (and cookie consent popups).

That’s not “working out of the box”, but leads to a much less broken experience than chrome (especially with the manifest v3 BS).

> However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with "Multi-Account Containers", "Temporary Containers"

Never even heard of these... hmm

It’s probably the ublock origin breaking websites and not the multi-account containers, right?

Shouldn't we say "Some sites break user browsing experience"?

I use Firefox with uBlock Origin. I don't use containers but I do use profiles.

Yes some sites are "broken" with uBlock Origin. I don't find it to be many, however. I run into paywalls much more often than I do problems with my browser settings.

There's some more you should do to increase privacy: Disable Firefox sending each keystroke into the address bar to all the numerous search engines (includes google). Best to just enable the separate bar for search and disable search suggestions entirely.

> Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites.

Firefox doesn't cause broken websites. Websites developers that target only Chrome cause websites to inadvertently become broken in Firefox.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Be evil

> Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.

I have good luck just using a private window, since that has no extensions by default. Bonus: It's really fast; ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-c enter

> ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-v enter

FTFY

EDIT: Mine was wrong too. Thanks to ipython for the correction.

Wouldn’t it be Ctrl-v not ctrl-p? To paste instead of print a blank page?

Yep! My mistake, nice catch.

I have had sites that are definitely broken in Firefox even after a stock install with every last toggle/extension/script blocker turned off. It's fairly rare, but there are a slowly growing list of sites that don't behave properly under Firefox but work in Chromium.

I always read that some sites don't work with Firefox but the writers never mentions which sites are broken.

So I'm curious, which sites are broken in vanilla FF?

One of them happens to be the educational site https://www.deltamath.com/

OK so what is broken? The homepage comes up fine and a few clicks seem fine. Do I have to sign up to see issues?

I use a home video appliance called camect which is accessed through a web interface which explicitly only works in chromium browsers. Oddly, I often find that the bbc news page doesn't load images on the first attempt in Firefox, but always does in Chrome.

The question is if the problem is Firefox or the webpage.

Remember when Google killed the Edge render engine per YouTube problems?

I only use Firefox, and I very rarely notice any kind of broken sites. I remember one bank site last year had a minor issue.

Yeah im still a bit surprised that Github doesnt work in firefox for me. It wont load a repository page, its just blank with nothing but the navigation on the page. This happens after turning off all plugins. dont know if github has made it so only chrome works but thats a pretty major site for firefox to not work with.

GitHub works with Firefox. I use that combination every day.

That’s something weird with your setup, GitHub works just fine on Firefox for everyone else.

Might have something stuck in your profile that's causing that. Wiping your profile can usually fix that, even if you re-sync your preferences.

i also use ublock matrix so i get to play "which third party hosts are needed to make this page work" for every new website

Not sure about the others but uBlock Origin allows you to disable it for specific websites and remember the setting.

I have two profiles for firefox dorkily called "hax0r mode" and "normie mode", each with different theming so I can tell the diff. I try to do as much as I can in hax0r mode, which has uBlock O, NoScript, auto cookie delete and a few other privacy settings like no 3rd party cookies. Sites usually start pretty broken before I tweak NoScript for them, which I'm OK with.

Occasionally, sites are obstinate and I need to use Normie mode (e.g. for Maps)

Normie mode just has uBlock O, containers. I really have zero problems with sites breaking here.

Multi-account-containers doesn't really break websites in my opinion. It's just like running a separate browser (in fact it's simply a firefox profile under the hood).

What can go wrong is if you've set a certain site to always open in a certain container and another site redirects you to this site. This can happen with Identity Providers like Okta, ADFS etc. They will then open in a different container (the assigned one) and lose context. Especially microsoft services have an annoying habit of redirecting through 25 different URLs on every sign-in. But if configured correctly it's a godsend, you can use this tool to sign into multiple MS tenants at the same time, something with chrome and not even Edge can do right now (switching teams between multiple tenants is a nightmare).

But I don't think it's the multi accounts containers at fault here, it's the user. Just don't do that :P

consent-o-matic lets a lot of them through.... I need to find an alternative that works better

I also had problems recently with an online notary service... they forced me to use Chrome...

Not the same problem, but I wonder when faxes will disappear... For example, Progressive Insurance wanted me fax, mail pictures or bring them in person... email didn't work... Of course they didn't have a safe way to transfer them digitally but I would not care if everyone in the world saw those emails.

The useless requirements that they set just proves that they don't understand technology.

In general, browsers do not cause broken websites

This, again, can be restated as incompetent developers cause broken websites (!)

("... do not attribute to bad faith that which can be explained by stupidity")

you might want to try

    about:profiles

create a new profile and use that for testing

> ”who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome”

Exactly, simply use a second “plugin-less” FireFox profile.

And if you really need a Chromium browser, Brave is a better choice than Google Chrome (for privacy reasons…)

Zero broken websites here, and I use those and more extensions. I also use FF on Android and iPadOS (although that's a Safari reskin, it provides some niceties on top like send tab to device).

Temporary and Multi-Account containers do not break websites.

This is a funny comment - why'd you leave Firefox to have to come back to it?

If GP is anything like me, they used Firefox before Chrome was released. The Mozilla/Netscape suite that spawned Firefox is older than Google itself.

For a time, Firefox performed worse than a rabid dog. Chrome ate their lunch and gained market share fast. I and many of my colleagues switched around that time.

This exactly, I should've added that context

That’s what I did.

> Chrome ate their lunch and gained market share fast.

That isn't the main reason they gained market share fast. It's sabotage: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116871245021220875.html

In my case: Because Opera stopped using Presto and switched to Chromium. That does says a bit about when I switched.

I used Firefox pretty extensively, then switch to Chrome when Firefox fell behind on speed, but the developer tools absolutely sucks in Chrome, so I tried Opera which had a great feature set, speed and wonderful developer tools. It was a pretty sad day when Opera dropped Presto, and more so when they where bought by some Chinese company.

I've been using FireFox for about 4.5 years now, but I have to have Chrome installed for a few reasons unfortunately.

- Some websites still will just not work in FireFox. It's not super common anymore, but if I sense something is fishy, I pop open the console and see some strange error and swap over to Chrome. Things will just work then. All extensions disabled even. I even ran into this on Vanguard's website, albeit for some obscure forms.

- When I worked at a company that had a larger web app presence, I would have to test in Chrome. That's a given, but my Chrome counterparts did not do the same with FireFox. I would fairly regularly (few times a quarter) find things that were completely broked on FireFox.

All that said, I don't really care about my choice in browser very much, but I'd rather support Mozilla over Google still. Especially since they're the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company. I'd like to help support a more open web, even if it's just a little bit.

> Some websites still will just not work in FireFox

I run into this as well, but I just use Safari as my backup browser and that usually is good enough. The only thing I still need to use Chrome for is my Nest thermostat.

> Especially since they're the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company.

You know, it's not necessarily a bad thing that another enormous company is competing with Chrome. It might be less than ideal than Firefox having Safari's share, but it still eats at Google's monopoly more effectively.

Unfortunately I had to move over to Vivaldi after using Firefox more than a decade due to performance.

On Linux, it consumes so much memory it actually slows down my machine...

I unfortunately switched back to Chrome last week after having used Firefox for years due to not being able to use sites I frequent. I constantly ran into issues with Heroku, GCP (go figure), and a few financial sites I'd log into regularly.

I know it’s mentioned elsewhere, but this does it for me:

* Try the same site in a private window (assuming plugins are disabled when in private)

* If on dev or nightly, try those sites on the regular release.

I haven’t bumped into anything in GCP that fails to work on ff, though likely don’t use the console as extensively.

What do those sites say about the problem when you report the error to them? Do any of them acknowledge their error?

did you check if you have any funky plugins enabled?

>\ Hot take:

I tried FF for a long time but finally switched to Brave. Yes, I'll be downvoted for saying this but it's objectively one of my top 3 favorite browsers rn.

1. Brave

2. Edge

3. Safari

I like each of them for different reasons. Brave (after disabling annoying features such as crypto and VPN) is awesome and its iOS app is the only one which can play videos in the background, has dark mode, and syncs really well with the desktop app.

Edge is so tempting esp. with recent Microsoft Copilot which makes it so useful (I can summarize pages right in the browser, organize my tabs by telling so to the Copilot, etc.)

Safari is not a good browser per se and lacks many features and plugins, but it's minimal and doesn't drain the battery like Brave and FF.

I really wanted to like FF but it's just not cutting it anymore.

Brave is really good and always surprising me with features while largely staying lean and out of my way.

They recently added a chatbot that runs locally they call Leo based on llama2. It's pretty impressive that you can perform LLM tasks on the current page without the use of any 3rd party service. And of course you can pay them for the souped up version. https://brave.com/leo-release/

Feels like I am alone in thinking the crypto features of Brave are cool. And not because I think that industry generally isn't full of slime. But micropayments for content has been a good, latent idea for a generation, and here they've simply built it as a default feature.

I still use FF and Brave equally because of my experience with the first browser wars and my mistrust of Chrome, having become the new IE.

I have tried Brave multiple times. I find its desktop version as bad or worse than Firefox for things not working or bugginess.

I have used Brave more on Android. I have bounced between Firefox, Brave, and custom builds of Chromium for years. I am currently on Firefox.

Brave opens 99.9% of websites for me and I'm using "Aggressive" mode.

This also where I landed with Brave as it seems to be working great for all of devices. Runs smoothly and I don’t really have a problem full with many sites on aggressive mode. I’ve had the sync’ing feature go flaky a few times, but over all good experience.

My big gripe with FF honestly is the lack for PWA ( progressive web apps) If they resurrect that effort I’d give it a shot. I’m not really interested in running another browser for that feature.

Also the brave privacy settings are remarkably better “by default” across all my devices. I’m sure Firefox can be configured to be hardened I just have other ways I’d like to spend my time. Heck I’d even pay for better option for all my devices.

Brave and Edge are just chromium.

Bro. You’re still using chrome.

Chromium !== Chrome.

How much do they really differ? Chromium browsers for the most part are just going to appear the same to site owners.

It'll all render the same using Chrome/Blink, but forks might take out tracking by Google (and potentially add other tracking), add adblock outside of plugins, or re-add support for Manifest V2 to name a few. Chromium forks can actually be pretty different.

Chromium is over 20 million lines of code. No Chromium fork is meaningfully different. Come back with that BS when Blink has 25% of its contributions coming from one of these Chrome skins.

That is true, but the Chrome/Chromium ecosystem is largely driven by Google. And Google makes use of this power position to push through web standards that benefit them, but not the users. Therefore I choose to use Firefox, to support a more open browser ecosystem.

It’s literally a technological monoculture controlled by one company that can’t be trusted.

Ironically, focusing on the window chrome does not matter for a healthy web, let alone a healthy open standard.

I use FF on my desktop and Brave on mobile. I tried FF on mobile and it has too many issues, unlike its desktop counterpart. And there are no good maintained de-googled chromium alternatives on Android other than Brave.

Brave is my primary also, but Orion is creeping up. It’s still a little buggy, but nested tree tabs is very nice.

Brave on iOS uses the WebKit engine right ? How can it be so different from Safari ?

I just switched back to firefox yesterday. Not a long sample period, but so far I completely agree, less painful than chrome.

Firefox became better, Chrome became worse. Every week one time I have to start Chrome for something.

I've been using Chrome for years and I never have to start Firefox for something.

Same, but other way around. Don’t even have Chrome installed. I don’t know what websites people are using, but I’m glad to not need them. The idea that a site could fail to render on any reasonably common browser seems pretty absurd.

The few times Firefox hasn't worked is on incredibly niche and outdated sites like a local kennel to board my dog or my university parking system.

Edge works fine in those incredibly rare instances since I can't get it off my computer anyway. I think I have one

Chrome is the new IE6

We need an updated version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sKppwrLBY8

I'm a FF-first user but I definitely have had to keep Chrome around for a few things— my investment banking doesn't load in FF nor do some parts of Office 365.

Which parts of office365? I don't have any issues using it on FF. That said I'm not a heavy user (mainly outlook, word, sometimes PowerPoint).

Teams maybe? Tbh I'm not totally sure as I'm new to office so I don't spend a lot of time trying to make it work when it's being hinky.

I'm fully switching to FF at home now. I'd half done it but had a large collection of tabs open in Chrome which kept pulling me back as I couldn't be bothered with reassessing them all (a fair I should have closed) and recording the ones I still wanted to keep elsewhere. Chrome gave me the final push the other day by completely forgetting most of those open items during an update.

I'd not encountered anything broken in Chrome that was fixed by FF though.

I'll still be primarily Chrome in DayJob though, as most of our clients' users are (with some on Edge, a few using FF, and a couple of idiots still not off IE though we don't officially support that) so that makes sense even though I very rarely touch anything front-end these days.

one-tab or supatabs extensions

SuperTabs is Chrom{e|ium} only which doesn't help as I'm moving to FF. OneTab looks partly useful, but often where I came from is important as well as the current tab location, if I've travelled through links “normally” rather than opening in a new tab every time, and I wouldn't expect it to keep that history.

Really, I need to get away from using tabs for long-term state rather than finding a better way to use tabs for that. It would make switching UA easier when I want to, and switching machine too for that matter.

Also, I've been burned by tab and/or session management extensions going stalky (TheGreatSuspender & friends), or stagnating and failing after a time.

I want to move as much state beyond active interactive use away from the browser. I've never kept passwords there or gone in for built-in sync options, but feel the need to take this further. The older I get, the more I see tight integration as a lock-in rather than a benefit.

I've been using Firefox for regular browsing for years now, but I use Chrome for streaming videos (Firefox streaming quality is noticably worse) and LibreWolf for YouTube (blocks ads). It's annoying to have 3 browsers open basically all of the time.

I'm slowly migrating a lot of my browsing out of Safari and into LibreWolf, and using the opportunity to document accounts/passwords that i want to keep.

If i were willing to get an iPhone, then i'd be quite happy with Safari (i don't have Chrome installed on my Mac), but I want the ability to have my bookmarks available on multiple phones & computers... so firefox profiles (in LibreWolf) is the mechanism i've decided to use for that (for now)

I love & support Firefox but feel nervous about going all in on it when Mozilla appears to be pivoting away from investing in it.

What would be really cool is a Firefox plugin that allowed you to replace the entire browser tab with a Chromium renderer on a specific website if you so wish, and remember that setting. That way there would really be no need to install Chrome for a few one-off websites.

Considering both Firefox and Chromium are open-source it should be entirely possible.

Same here. Chrome was just too buggy for me. This year was when I finally made the switch.

What helped me was that I switched my phone browser to DuckDuckGo browser. This kind of opened my horizons.

As someone in the Apple ecosystem, Firefox is not a very compelling alternative. I've certainly tried: Firefox Focus was my main iOS browser for a few years (I know it's Webkit-based) and I've tried switching on desktop as well.

On desktop, various Firefox updates would change my settings subtly and nag me about features I had no interest in. On top of that, it was simply a slower browser, both with DOM manipulation and Javascript.

For example, when I made my latest research project (https://pl.aiwright.dev) Firefox would routinely struggle with the large complex graphs (over 100k nodes, though only a few hundred nodes attached to the DOM at any given time). Safari handles it with no issues whatsoever. I'm sure there are likely workarounds to speed things up on Firefox, but I don't have the time or energy for something like that since it's a research project, not an end-user facing product.

Maybe you can make the argument that switching to Firefox will incentivize improvements, but so far that hasn't been my experience. I've now moved away from Firefox to things like Orion (which is still quite buggy, but useful enough). Safari seems to be getting better over time, with things like containers now and extensions like Userscripts [2].

[1]: https://pl.aiwright.dev

[2]: https://github.com/quoid/userscripts

Same, it's simply easier to use Safari on my phone and Mac. The performance is fantastic, syncing is perfect, and switching between the two devices is effortless.

If I used windows or Linux I would probably give it a try again.

Not to mention on iOS your choices are really between Safari and Safari with a different skin.

No, on iOS the choice is between Safari + Plugins (official Safari) and Safari w/o Plugins (Chrome, Brave)

Brave on iOS is a, more or less, perfect Youtube Player. I haven't seen ads in months and it just works while also supporting the download of videos and creation of local playlists.

Oh yes, I totally agree (and I hinted on this in my other comment here). Brave on iOS is a blessing.

The YouTube app is also a perfect YouTube player, so I’m confused…

I haven’t used the official YouTube app, but I seriously doubt it’s ad-free and that it lets you download videos.

It does both, actually!

Are you saying that, by default and without any account, the official YouTube iOS app does not display ads? Then why are there so many alternative frontends which have ad blocking as a feature and Reddit is littered with threads asking how to block ads in the app?

Nope, the question was whether or not the YouTube app played video without ads and allowed downloads. It does both.

Under the assumption that you have an account and have paid for Premium, right?

Yes, with both the app performs as described. Nobody has thus far come in the night to snatch me for watching unapproved content, and the $8/mo seems like the least I could do to support the product and the creators on the platform.

Ah, so now you're packing being a student on top of it all. So, let's reiterate: Brave vs. App + Account + Subscription + Student subsidy. Anything else?

Yes, App + Registration to + Pay for the content I consume as a + student who is literally assigned videos to watch (TED, SciShow). Seems fair to me.

Or should I be stealing this content and leave everyone involved poorer for it?

It only does it if you have a paid account, which is clearly not what the original commenter was referring to.

It’s your prerogative to not block ads and to spoon feed all your watch data to Google for easy monetisation and tracking, but it’s clear the original comment wasn’t talking about that route. YouTube is clearly not “the perfect app” in that person’s view when it requires an extra paid service and a higher loss of privacy.

Frankly, from your other replies it seems like you realise this. Which makes this exchange a massive waste of time for everyone. Please don’t purposely fuel disagreements.

What I realize is the content you’re so brazenly feeling entitled to cost money to produce, and the idea that your loss of privacy justifies your theft is absurd.

You’re not starving, this isn’t food.

The only absurd thing is your assumptions about other people. You have zero idea if I even watch YouTube, which creators I support or how, or what my feelings are on the matter.

Understand that I’m not advocating for not supporting creators, that argument is entirely in your head. No one is after you.

The position that what I said is in any way problematic is the position that creators should not be paid for their work, whether you understand that or not.

More importantly, you need to learn what the “royal you” is. It’s not literally about you, specifically.

> The position that what I said is in any way problematic

That’s not what was said either. You keep putting arguments in other people’s mouths and assuming the worst version possible.

Unfortunately it has become clear there is no point to this discussion. You’re bent on only rambling about the point in your own head instead of what was being discussed.

I wish you a happy new year, but I do not wish to further this interaction.

…what? The conversation is happening in front of anyone reading this. Bold of you to try to gaslight over text. Unlikely to be effective, but very brave! I’d be happy for you if your behavior weren’t so blatantly manipulative.

Merry whatever though, hope things go better for you than they did in this interaction.

I have had a lot of success with Orion on iOS. I can use both Firefox and chrome extensions, all on my iPhone. It seems like even YouTube works better in Orion than in Safari.

I also love having the Apple Pay and automatic SMS OTP integration. Those got me to start using Safari again from FF, and the only thing I'm really missing is uBlock Origin (Adguard is doing okay in its place)

I don't know what browser you've tried, but it certainly is not Firefox Quantum. That browser in my experience is on par with Chrome's performance.

Legitimately curious. Considering Firefox Quantum was released in 2017, is it even possible that my M1 is running any other version of Firefox? Doesn't seem likely considering the copy on the Mozilla site [1] for Firefox Quantum:

> Firefox Quantum was a revolution in Firefox development. In 2017, we created a new, lightning fast browser that constantly improves. Firefox Quantum is the Firefox Browser.

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/quantum/

Firefox has shipped Quantum in mainline for years. It may be on Chrome's level (I never tested), but regardless, it's nowhere near as performant as Safari.

Try running a very compute intensive script (that chokes your CPU/GPU). In my experience Firefox becomes unusable, Safari is still buttery smooth.

Now maybe Safari simply performs better, or maybe that's some OS level prioritization unfairly advantaging Safari, but to me as an end user, that's irrelevant.

I seem to be the only one, but I swipe to go back one website, and Safari for some reason shows the old website but freezes for 1-2 seconds.

> On desktop, various Firefox updates would change my settings subtly and nag me about features I had no interest in

If Firefox suited my needs 100% as well as Safari, this is why I’d still not use it. God damn is it noisy. You’re a browser, I have no interest in engaging with you more than necessary, whatever-I-was-trying-to-do is what I care about. Please stop acting like a kid who’s not getting enough attention. It’s off-putting.

It's been a long time since I've had a fresh install of ff (I do recall some notification bars in the window you have to close out), but as a very longtime user, I have no idea what you're talking about...example?

They pop new tabs, little “hint” boxes, et c, all the time. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to become blind to as a power user (but is annoying if you do notice it), but that murders UX for lots of folks.

Unless you mean the random tabs when an extension e.g. tampermonkey gets updated and shows a change log I don't think I've seen what you mentioned. Definitely nothing "all the time".

Been using it since quantum, it happens after some updates, recently there was some modal about some feature I didn’t care about, and I had to click twice to close it. That was only a few weeks ago.

> God damn is it noisy

What is this noise you're referring to? I'm 90% Firefox and 10% Safari and I don't understand this comment.

I kinda do. Safari feels very much like a simplistic browser, but a damn good one, except when it's not. Firefox tried to do a lot, tons of features baked in, Safari outsources a lot to the operating system and as a result the interface and interaction becomes simpler, but less flexible.

The primary reason I don't use it 100%, but 90/10 like you, is due to extensions and those few sites that doesn't work in Firefox.

And much of the “noisiness” stems from tooltips, popups, etc explaining changes and additions. I can see where some users might want those but it should be possible to disable those entirely, or at least make them more “quiet” (e.g. a notification icon with red news count pip on the new tab screen where changes can be seen at the user's leisure).

> Safari outsources a lot to the operating system and as a result the interface and interaction becomes simpler, but less flexible.

Yes, definitely agree with that. But I think of "noise" as stuff that interrupts your normal interaction with web sites and in that regard I don't think Firefox is particularly noisy.

There are definitely a lot of features, settings and extensions with Firefox and while I don't use very many of them I do really appreciate the ones that I do use.

I know what he's talking about. Firefox has constant nag screens. I just restarted Firefox and got two separate nags[1]. I am certain that within the next week it will nag me for at least one more thing. Maybe it'll want me to try Pocket, or sign in with a Mozilla account, or set up sync, or the absolute worst offender - when I launch the browser it will say "heyyyy I gotta update and I treat this like it's 1998 so you'll need to wait, and then I'll need to restart". Firefox is VERY naggy.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/dLr6E0C

Ok, but obviously in this case you can check the "Don't show me this message again" checkbox and, like me, you'll have had to endure the burden of responding to this nag just once in years of using Firefox.

I may be forgetting about nags that don't allow themselves to be disabled, but if so, they're infrequent enough that they seem insignificant and obviously non-memorable.

Edit: I should add, when I had to have Chrome installed I really didn't like the fact that it updated itself automatically via a daemon process. I don't think having a constantly running background process for a browser, especially one from a giant advertising company, is a good alternative.

> in this case you can check the "Don't show me this message again" checkbox

I had literally just installed Firefox minutes ago (inspired by this thread). During the install it asked me if I wanted to make it the default browser, and I had said no. This is what we mean by nagging. Firefox needs to know when to shut up and get out of the way.

> you'll have had to endure the burden of responding to this nag just once in years of using Firefox.

Twice. For this one particular nag. Next time Mozilla releases some shitty VPN or AI program, it will nag me again. If I don't log in to a Mozilla account, it will nag me to. If I don't try Pocket, I will be nagged to try it.

And Chrome does this too. They want you to know about new features, and they're easy to dismiss.

The only reason Safari doesn't is because they aren't developing it because it's too broken already. So much doesn't work with Safari.

That's just comically false.

Safari is under active development, gets new features all the time, and has a dev blog you can subscribe to over RSS [0].

You may not like Safari, and you're welcome to your opinion about it, but you're not welcome to your own facts.

[0] https://webkit.org/blog/

Maybe his personal experience was how he learned that Safari doesn't work with several websites.

Well, Firefox hasn't nagged me in a long time and you've just installed it, so why not give it a try for a while?

> shitty VPN

The Mozilla VPN is a rebranded Mullvad VPN, AFIK which I understand is very good.

Even if there are a few more nags than Chrome or whatever, I guess, I'm happy knowing that I'm making it a bit harder for Google to know what I'm doing online.

Me as well. Firefox doesn't annoy me with any popups. I've used it for 5 years now as my daily driver on windows and macOS. Sure, I've gotten maybe TWO popups in that time asking me to try the VPN, but I honestly can't think of any other popups that genuinely annoyed me. Compared with Chrome it is a clear winner.

That's literally a dialog that every browser gives you after installing/on start if not permantly disabled (and there is a convenient button, there), and you are calling out FF? Also regarding pocket, as an almost exclusive FF user I didn't know what pocket was until some years ago when it was in the news, similarly Mozilla VPN I found out about through the news, not a single nag. This compared to lots of "the web works best in Chrome..." nags I got when visiting google websites over the years.

Let's not even talk about Apple and their dark patterns (the whole green bubble messages as one example).

This is after installing and after I had already said "no" during the install.

Firefox for many versions now has no way to disable update notification messages, which will repeatedly appear as a popup from the addressbar on every launch, unless one creates a new file with particular content.

Even if one wants a particular version for testing. Chromium doesn't do this ime. And this isn't to say it's a reason not to use FF but it is a counter-example to simply being able to dismiss something without it being annoying.

Not just every launch, but also if you leave it long enough, it'll pop up again during the same session. This was what made me finally uninstall it.

And while Firefox has lots of flags and ways to tweak things like this, it's not straightforward and requires time to interrupt my workflow to address. Definitely not worth it for me on macOS. I might change my tune if I switch to Linux, but at that point I'll likely look into something like LibreWolf.

This is asking you to make it the default browser, like every other browser does. How is that noisier?

I have found it quite easy to turn those features and their accompanying nagging off. I do it precisely once when I set up on a new OS install and never see them again after updates. Never understood these stories.

I don't know if it's the same "noise", but for a period of months I used an extension that replaced the New Tab page. When you do this with Firefox it pops up a notification the first new tab you open each session stating "your new tab has changed, keep settings?" I mean, I installed the extension to change the new tab page, so presumably I wouldn't need to be asked a second time.

The noisy part was this notification steals focus so you can't type into the search bar immediately, you have to hit escape or click out to gain focus again. And the popup kept appearing until I realized you had to specifically press "yes, keep changes" on the notification to get it to stop (usually I canceled out of it reflexively to do actually important things). If you just hit Escape or tried to use the URL bar it would come back next session and steal focus again.

It sounds like something minor but the idea of stealing focus to re-confirm a change you already confirmed is a mild source of headaches, and not necessary in my view. Not to mention, this process would repeat itself for every Firefox installation synced with, since the extension counts as a fresh install each time. In a world where switching browsers is trivial, I think minor annoyances like those are best removed.

There was this, a couple months ago:

Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page (382 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360

I tabbed away from Firefox for a bit, and when I tabbed back I had a full screen popup ad for Mozilla VPN overlayed on top of the webpage I had been using.

Once every three months, one gets an upgrade tab showing release notes. Upon occasion (and I mean, occasion, not regularly) they may try a new feature like Sync, save for later, etc.

Once I get the browser installed and running, what you describe matches 0% of my experience with it.

chrome has to be worse. now there's that ad privacy option that you have to remember to change

Google and Apple get to engage you frequently all the time for free. You have no choice in the matter. Every surface is theirs.

Firefox doesn’t need to get me to “engage” when I’m already in their browser.

Firefox needs to make money.

That’s why I have to change the default search engine.

Most of what they’re nagging me about won’t even make them money. It’s marketing-changelog pages nobody reads. They could save some money by keeping text change logs where people who care can find them, and dropping those altogether.

Indeed, their CEO wants her fat paycheck.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

She needs to go. 100% of the money should go to engineering and (actually skilled and focused) product people.

I use Librewolf and Orion on MacOS, Orion on iOS/iPadOS (which is Safari I suppose, but the shell is awesome)

I’ve tried using Orion but I found it very slow and does not work fully as it should with a single chrome plugin I tried. Back to Safari!

Orion was extremely buggy for me which is a shame, I was looking forward to the extensions and being able to use touchID.

Safari is much smoother on my Mac. I was recently running a very compute intensive script. Firefox was dropping frames so badly that the UI became nearly unusable. In contrast, Safari was still a buttery smooth 120fps.

Combine this with the fact that I still get E2EE sync and better integration with my OS, Firefox is no longer tempting to me. And I used to be a Firefox power user for years.

For me, the enhanced plugin ecosystem and additional control that Firefox offers simply isn't worth a slower browser that isn't as well integrated.

similarly, on mac this bug is a showstopper for me, so I'm using Brave currently: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1149826

(the bug is that text replacement does not work in FF on mac, something that saves me so much time daily)

My main Problem is that fn+E won't open the emoji picker.

I have to go to another app, insert an emoji there and copy it over.

I tried switching to Firefox like 3 times this year, but there's always something putting me off. I really really want to though.

If this is on macOS, what about ⌘ ^ SPC to get the emoji picker?

Nothing happens.

But sometimes, it "works" but there's no opening animation and it instantly runs the closing animation of the pop up and it's gone again.

It's really weird.

Sometimes fn+E does work, but it writes an unwanted "e".

On macOS, the most annoying thing for me is the inability to use the native login to authenticate to apple web services. I have to type in my apple ID, my password, and then the code sent to one of my devices every time. On chrome and safari, I can just use my fingerprint or laptop password and done.

Yes. This bug makes the UX on mac just feel broken and frustrating reminds you every time you do it. Tried to bear it for a year but I use text replacements so heavily that I had to switch off eventually. Firefox: for the love of Jobs, fix it!

> I've certainly tried: Firefox Focus was my main iOS browser for a few years (I know it's Webkit-based)

TL;DR The truth is, no one has ever used Firefox or Chrome on iOS.

You say you know it's webkit based... but the entire engine for any browser on iOS is Safari, not merely webkit based. Apple doesn't have a policy of "your browser must be derived from webkit" they have a policy of forcing browsers to use the literal same engine built into iOS that Safari is using - i.e you are just using Safari with a different UI, there is only one browser engine on iOS.

This is an annoying detail to have to repetitively explain to people, and Apple benefits from this blurring of the lines in the army of users defending them for browser diversity. Honestly, if i had an iOS device I would use the Safari app - and as a web dev and a user I fucking hate Safari, but what's the point in using a different UI, they are all the Safari engine, the main browsing experience is by definition the exact same.

Exactly. I use Safari and I hate it, but Firefox is just a reskin with a worse WebView.

I use Firefox on macOS as my primary browser it’s great no complaints at all.

Same here, using basically nothing but FF for maybe 6 years or so.

I somehow was lugging around up to 2,400 tabs for much of last year and it handled it surprisingly well. Got down to 30 at one point, now back up to nearly 400 :/

Very rarely a website won't load, I just change the user agent to Chrome and refresh and it almost always works fine.

Weird, I have very little problems with Firefox on macos. I had performance issues with Chrome for big tables. Firefox was sluggish, but Chrome took 30s to render it (about 3000 rows, 300 columns). I ended up writing something that displays a small view of the table using absolute positioned divs which depend on the scroll bar. Now it works smoothly on all browsers (including some older tablet). It was not a simple workaround, though.

Orion is also webkit, but buggy, isn't it? I don't care for it.

Firefox is not my primary browser on macOS for similar reasons. Given how similar iOS is to macOS I wouldn’t expect the situation to be much different with a hypothetical Gecko-based version of Firefox for iOS — the performance and efficiency isn’t quite there compared to WebKit-based stuff.

There’s platform-agnostic issues too, however. Firefox is my primary browser on Windows and Linux, but it has a pile of UI papercuts which I’ve kinda-fixed with userchrome.css hacks, and the result is underwhelming (as is the possibility of these hacks periodically breaking with updates). It’s enough of a frustration that forking Firefox to properly fix them would be tempting if keeping up with the firehose of security patches from mainline weren’t so daunting.

My biggest wish is for Gecko to re-gain embedding support on desktop platforms so I can build my own browser around it, making keeping it secure as simple as updating dependencies.

I had to stop using Safari for development when I discovered the cache wasn’t clearing, even when I asked it to. That was a few years ago, and frankly, I’ve never looked back.

I've had one too many times where Firefox crashed and I lost all my tabs. Then had to go through weird steps to recover them. Too much annoyance. Just use Safari now, happy as a clam.

Firefox proper is available for Mac but remember that on iOS the "firefox" is not using its own browser engine and there are not any add-ons available.

Using Safari on Apple’s stuff seems fine. What really matters is not supporting the chrome-alike push toward monopoly.

Somewhat off topic, but thank you for putting into code what has been floating around in my imagination since high school. I haven't tested your project yet, but I really do hope that AI assisted roleplaying becomes a mainstay in the game development world. I got a taste when toying around with AI dungeon, and if this isn't the the next step in meaningful interactive storytelling, then I don't know what is.

I use Waterfox on Mac and it is great. Safari is slow in comparison and the only thing that leads me to use it is integration with TouchID.

If you keep feeding the Google monster you soon won't be able to browse the internet without a 3rd party attesting that your computer is worth browsing that site.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...

This was reworked to be a more limited proposal specific for Android Webviews, IIRC. Fairly recently (last month)?

And after that's normalized, then Google will enhance your user experience by bringing "Android Webview security" to Chrome on android, you know, it makes you really secure, it's really to help you keep safe.

A few years down the road, a surprising amount of companies insist you can only use their product on those secure smartphone browsers because of it's enhanced security, so Google helps you out by adding a special "Android Secure Mode" to desktop Chrome.

Unreasonable and unsubstantiated expectations.

Web sites want you to visit them, they have no reason to barrier you. Some sites I use still have http and if a site wanted you to visit it in a specific way they'd use an app. If the model is to make web sites less accessible for profit it would need a compelling reason to visit it in spite of the barriers. It will never happen.

Websites want all the real visitors they can get, webapps are not quite as concerned with that. I remember the Microsoft Silverlight days

Nothing unreasonable or unsubstantiated. This is exactly what happened with app geolocking, privacy sandbox/topics, SafetyNet/Play Integrity API, etc. All of these are supposed to improve security and privacy and yet none of them are under the control of the user. Clearly implying that the user is the biggest security/privacy threat to them.

Which sites require those? How would that allow them to make more profit?

I literally said if they want people to visit anywhere they use a site and if not they lock down the experience with an app, and you said they lock down apps as 'proof' that they'd lock down web sites because somehow they are equal. Apps have never been about freedom. Starbucks doesn't want user choice and privacy when they ask you to download their app.

And I'm yet to see what business model it would work for. I'm going with 'none'.

> Which sites require those? How would that allow them to make more profit?

Practically every banking site (or more importantly banking apps). And a lot of weird cases like bus/train timings app, mobile operator apps, etc. You don't see that a lot with websites yet because the web isn't so severely constrained as mobile apps are. But the moment they appear, it will go the other way. One good example of this is AMP - which thankfully fizzled out for other reasons.

> And I'm yet to see what business model it would work for. I'm going with 'none'.

You can go with whatever you feel like. But the real world experience corroborates what the other commenter said. And one good reason for this is the corporate security culture. 'Our app isn't secure if it doesn't use the PIntegrity' type of argument. They'll all fall for it even if it's detrimental to their users.

Making a website less accessible doesn't make any sense. You've given an example of apps like before and you've yet to substantiate any points you made, maybe bank logins have a reason to be secure but that forum you go to doesn't, and wouldn't do this.

If they wanted to make it less accessible they could easily do that by forcing you to use newer browser versions which some boilerplate sites with frameworks do, from lack of expertise. No "safety" required. I'm not going off feeling, I'm going off facts. It will NEVER happen.

Netflix will not deliver the highest resolution video unless you have a DRM supporting browser.

Website operators don't need to outright block you, they can just start putting certain features behind "the wall".

Publishers, already pushing back against ad blockers and now suing because their sites were scraped and incorporated into LLM weights, would love to have clients "attest" to the "humanity" of the user and "integrity" (read: no ad blockers) of the browser. It's not hard to imagine that, if given access to the feature, they'd jump on it as soon as it ways feasible and make the user experience for non-attesting browsers progressively worse to force the change.

Your point is that struggling publishers will stay relevant, gain subscribers and afloat/make more money by implementing ad blockers, worst user experience and safety checks to make their sites less accessible. I'm sure it'll happen any day now.

Absolutely, yes. They will be empowered by tools they don't yet have to make it feasible to slowly "boil the frog". Remote attestation is just such a tool.

The frogs already moved onto 4chan, twitter, TikTok, reddit, or YouTube for news. Even here at HN everyone uses archive. Publishers are dead. Nobody checks fox/cnn for the latest breaking news or needs to hear some anchor/journalist tell them what their handlers told them to say.

This is not true outside of a small bubble.

In Europe traditional media still enjoys relatively high public trust and high circulation. Weekly reach of traditional news media is at 80% to 90% of adult population in the Nordic countries compared to 50-70% of all social media combined, depending on the country.

After all the intense backlash they faced, they made it a 'limited' webview feature rather that dropping it entirely. Now that it's away from a standardization body, what's to prevent it from being developed unimpeded by public opposition? What's to stop them from expanding it to browsers once the 'feature' is ready? After all, this is exactly the pattern we saw with FLoC, 'privacy' sandbox and the Topics API.

Yes, but it's the sort of creepy that they can't just undo by saying "nevermind".

It will come back again and again, and each time there will be less public outcry. It'll end up being normalized and eventually accepted. General purpose computers give the unwashed masses too much power.

"Users often depend on websites trusting the client environment they run in. This trust may assume that the client environment is honest about certain aspects of itself, keeps user data and intellectual property secure, and is transparent about whether or not a human is using it."

Double-plus-good rights management!

This reads like someone hopelessly out of touch with actual users.

Most users don't give a shit if their client is "honest", or if it's respects intellectual property. These are concerns of web admins and media companies. Users just want something to load websites.

No no, it's not the users that care if their client is honest, it's the websites. But users want to use those websites, and therefore whatever is in the website's interest is in the user's interest.

There's a lot you can justify with a creative thought process.

I think it depends. When I use an ATM, I want to make sure it's the official bank ATM and won't steal my information. Also, spam is a tax that websites must pay and we as users are indirectly paying for this tax regardless of whether we intend to or not.

> When I use an ATM, I want to make sure it's the official bank ATM and won't steal my information.

sure, but in that situation, the "client" is you, and the "server" is the ATM. as the client, its not your job to worry or care if you are being "honest" with the "server". your concern is only getting the money. its the banks job to secure the ATM from bad actors, not yours.

I admire how they barely try to hide the fact that it's just a way to bombard you even more with ads. They don't even care to pretend at this point.

I am fine not browsing websites that require this bullshit and fully embrace the small selection of niche communities that will be Internet 2.0

First they required attestation on Facebook but I did not speak up because I do not use Facebook.

Then they required attestation for Amazon but I did not speak up because I do not use Amazon.

And finally they required attestation for Uber Eats, but there was nobody left to speak up for me.

I switched to Firefox earlier this year, having used Chrome since 2008/2009, previously having used Firefox. Mostly out of laziness.

Can't believe how good Firefox is now, and how great it is on Android (addons, config).

Being able to control anything on the browser is fantastic. Want to increase a certain UI elements font size just a tad? Sure! Want to tweak every aspect of the UI? sure! Want a myriad of config options, sure go ahead! Love the concept of Nightly, has worked great for me.

One UI feature that I love that Firefox lets you change is the scrollbars. I forget the precise settings, but I set them up so that they are always present and always big enough for me to see how far down a page I am (yes, like I'm using Windows 95!). That might only be something that matters to a few people, but the fact that it is customizable to that level is one of Firefox's greatest strengths.

This sounds great, but for web developers I feel it’s a risky change if you want to see your sites as your users do.

You raise a good point. Fortunately, I'm not a web developer but I will keep your point in mind in case I do any web development later.

From a web development standpoint, the scrollbars do seem to be an ignored feature for a lot of web pages. Adding scrollbars actually fixes a lot of issues with some sites. For example, some sites often have a frame inside of another frame, and this reveals the scrollbars for both frames. If I were to use my mouse wheel, I might scroll down inner frame or the outer frame, and I wouldn't know which one would be activated until I try, but with the scrollbars on, I always know which one is which. This was a surprise benefit to this change.

Web developers should be in the habit of checking against many different configurations anyway. I've lost track of the number of times that I've stumbled on a scrollable area that wasn't meant to be scrollable, which would have been caught if the developer had opened the site in the browser with always on scroll bars.

That's why I still develop using pluginless Chrome, even though I've always used Firefox as my default browser.

Unless you're on mobile, in which case you'd find it to confusing, so they removed the option, unless you're on nightly, with all the issues that entails.

It took a long time, but the situation improved a couple weeks ago. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/11/28/open-extensions-o...

Great, it's still too bad about all the QoL options only accessible via about:config though.

At the risk of losing credibility in this community, I'm going to voice an opinion which I think belongs to the silent majority: I do not want to customize anything. I want to read the news and check my bank account with as little drama as possible. More customizable settings always means more things that can break. If the best feature of Firefox is that it has lots of things to configure, that's a negative for me.

But this is coming from somebody who really would like to embrace better privacy...sigh...

Holding out hope for the DuckDuckGo browser on Windows. The current beta is decent, but extensions are yet to come, which means no ad blocking at the moment. That makes it essentially unusable with today's internet

Brave. Seriously. Turn off a few things at first boot, it won't bother you after and is just nice and clean:

https://i.imgur.com/tuMGc3c.png

Still based on Chromium though, so the Manifest v3 drama about Google trying to sabotage adblockers still applies.

Doesn't. Brave's adblockers are not an extension, they're integrated directly into the browser so they don't care what happens with extension APIs. Same reason they can do CNAME unmasking, which uBO can't on Chromium but can do on Firefox.

Sane defaults are always good, (which firefox has, IMHO), but not allowing the user to tweak basic stuff is a pain.

I use Firefox as my main browser. I love Firefox and I want it to succeed.

However... a person who uses Firefox as their primary browser must generally still keep Chrome installed. A person who uses Chrome as their primary browser has no need to keep Firefox installed.

Firefox should endeavor to fix that.

First, Firefox should honor age-old tradition, swallow its pride, and spoof 99% of the Chrome user agent string. That's how upstart web browsers have fought against sites breaking things for them for decades.

Second, Firefox should endeavor to be as compatible as possible with Chrome with regard to the DOM and JS, being sneaky if it has to. I think O365 webmail is the first good place to start, since it's widely deployed. USG websites as well, like DFAS MyPay or Marine A-PES do not work well on it. Obviously, it's difficult for Firefox devs to test on these sites, but that's all the more reason to take bug reports seriously.

> First, Firefox should honor age-old tradition, swallow its pride, and spoof 99% of the Chrome user agent string.

This leads to the larger issue of not knowing who your visitors actually are. If 75% of all Firefox installations spoof Chrome, then you won't know that they are actually FireFox users. This can drive adoption rates down as they stop caring about making things work on Firefox.

No. Fragmentation is not a feature of the web, and delusions about developers caring about Firefox and its ~2% of web traffic are not helpful. The way to make sites work on Firefox is to convince them to stop serving broken shit to Firefox. This is the way the web has always worked.

It's already the case that companies using "Real User Metrics" will miss many Firefox users -- client-based monitoring is indistinguishable from client-based tracking (intent notwithstanding) with the result that if I need to disable three separate sets of protections (ETP, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin) before my browser will report my useage of my employer's website.

Not everyone using Firefox will be quite so determined as I am, I'm sure. But it's still an issue that I try to raise with people who want to use browser statistics for anything.

It's also worth noting that Firefox does spoof its user-agent in some circumstances, if you visit `about:compat` then you can see a list of sites that have user agent tweaks applied to them. See also: webcompat.com

Yeah, hard to recommend a browser that breaks on certain sites for subtle reasons to family members who aren't as tech oriented for instance.

Yeah, and apparently Google deliberately makes their sites work worse in Firefox. So for Firefox to by default spoof their user agent to be Chrome for those sites would be great. I actually installed a user agent spoofer plugin for this, User-Agent Switcher.

MS Office webmail works well for me in Firefox under Ubuntu.

Till the time they fix it, there's this add-on which fixes the issue: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...

Ultimately, Firefox can't fix that. The only ones who can are Google, who deliberately degrade the non-Chrome experience on YouTube in some cases.

Of course Firefox can fix that, the same way web browsers have always fixed it: copying user agent strings. There's a reason Chrome claims to be "Mozilla"

What exactly do you think the logic Google implements would be?

Why do you think Google wants to get rid of user agent strings?

We all switched to Firefox back in the day because it was better.

Better than IE, there was no chrome and safari was a joke.

Entreaties and ‘trying to make Fetch (firefox) happen’ won’t work, evidently.

How do we make Firefox obviously better?

I’m core market for Firefox and just use Safari. Better battery life. And it’s just as good for privacy.

At least that’s my impression. Is it wrong?

If I don’t use it there’s very little chance people will change the defaults.

Defaults are powerful.

Firefox + uBlock origin is far better than any other browser without UBO.

I've been using Firefox for about as long as I can remember, and really don't notice sites not working. I do notice, however, that using any browser without UBO makes my eyes bleed in an unending agony of capitalist garbage. It's like using a browser and then putting sand in your eyeballs.

Mullvad browser

That is quite literally Firefox + UBO. Like it's literally a fork of the tor browser (which is downstream firefox) with a custom config and preconfigured addons.

I don't mean this as a dig or anything but it's literally what they described.

> Like it's literally a fork of the tor browser (which is downstream firefox) with a custom config and preconfigured addons.

Yes, which is not Firefox with default settings

Yes for the GP but UBO on firefox isn't defaults either. The bulk of the benefits you get from mullvad browser past what you get with default firefox + the same extensions are easy config changes. Things you can accomplish by just scrolling through the settings and flipping on a few settings with "more secure more better" worded descriptions.

For the average user there's not really a particularly good reason to jump for a downstream browser unless you are specifically using their main features (tor or VPN). It's easy enough to get 95% of the way there with 30 seconds of config tweaks off stock upstream.

The mullvad browser defaults would get it chucked in the bin very quickly by the average web user.

The extreme bent towards privacy and not retaining any identifiable or fingerprint-able behaviors is exactly what its target audience wants, of course. But it leads to a markedly more inconvenient experience than Chrome or default Firefox or Safari.

Brave's built-in Adblock is just as good as Firefox+UBO in my experience.

"better" is completely subjective. From my point of view dev tools are way better in Blink-based browsers, so Chrome is my default dev browser. The browsing experience is really good in Safari, I love the compact tabs and minimalist UI, so that's my default on macOS. Edge has a really nice productivity feature that lets you split a window to see two different pages at the same time, so that's my default on Windows. Other than being open source I don't see what would compel me to go back to Firefox in 2024, the competition improved a lot. Also I personally lost faith in the Mozilla Foundation.

IMHO, Brave Browser + uBlock origin is far better than any other browser without UBO.

So, perhaps the real difference isn't so much the browser as it is UBO?

(I Know that BB is basically Chromium with some changes, just like Chrome. And, that Chromium is not Chrome)

Yeah, I actually switched from Firefox to Safari this month. I didn't know Safari had tab groups, the feature I missed from Chrome when using Firefox. No speed differences and Safari has less of a battery impact so far.

Hard to complain about a browser that still cares about privacy, but with tighter OS integration.

What Adblock do you use with Safari? I would also like to try switching from Firefox to Safari but I haven’t found anything that can compete with uBO

AdGuard is good. Not as good as uBO, but 98% of the time it gets the job done.

My deshittification suite is NextDNS (Pi-hole as a service), 1Blocker (ad blocker, bought pre-subscription model), Rekt (block bags, redirect AMP), and Vinegar (replaces YouTube player).

I use UBO on Chrome and find the above experience comparable.

> 1Blocker (ad blocker, bought pre-subscription model)

Worth noting they continue to have a lifetime plan.

Thank you! It is great, and I now feel comfortable recommending it again.

I’m not the person you asked, but I’ve been happy with 1Blocker. As a bonus it can also block ads and trackers outside the browser (that part only works on iOS).

Been using wipr, I never see ads.

I recently switched to Wipr [0]. It’s dead simple to use, and will auto update its filter lists in the background. It’s a one time purchase, not a subscription.

Adguard [1] is a decent free option.

I also use a Pi-hole [2] on my network. That blocks ads in apps (not in the browser) like Letterboxd for example.

[0] https://kaylees.site/wipr.html

[1] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-safari/overview.html

[2] https://pi-hole.net/

Talking about complaining: On iOS I find it an absolute no-go not to have the choice of which browser I use because technically it is Safari anyway. So yes, you can't complain that Safari is worse than Firefox because Firefox is no real Firefox on iOS.

However, I guess you are talking about MacOS.

> Defaults are powerful.

This is true, though the current dominance of Chrome is evidence that a lot of people will switch. Chrome isn't the default browser on any desktop, after all, and yet a majority of non-technical users have deliberately switched to it...

It is the default browser on many phones though.

> Better battery life

do you have metrics for that or it's just a feeling?

> it’s just as good for privacy.

ublock origin isn't available for safari, which greatly increases the probability of safari not being just as good for privacy

Orion, which is based on Safari [1], supports uBlock Origin [2].

[1]: https://help.kagi.com/orion/why-orion/orion-vs-safari.html

[2]: https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ublock-origin...

> Entreaties and ‘trying to make Fetch (firefox) happen’ won’t work, evidently.

Pop culture references aside, `fetch` was also a browser! Sort of. `fetch` was a CLI predecessor to `wget` and `curl`.

If battery life is all you care about, I'd argue you are not "core market" for FF. You're core-market for OS vendors, who will always be able to give you a better battery life by leveraging all the tips and (typically undocumented) tricks that a cross-platform project cannot touch.

Google's got a major conflict of interest with adsense and I'm sure they'll eventually ramp up the war on adblockers to a degree that will make manifest v3 look like a joke.

If Firefox decides to not implement blocking restrictions they will then have the chance to be the only browser people will still be able to normally use the internet with. That's the only chance they have for any kind of resurgence from their currently laughable 3% market share.

Small gimmicks like privacy, battery life, customizability, stability, etc. are frankly what 99.9% of people don't give a half a shit about. They will only make the switch from default once they're genuinely annoyed to the point where they can no longer use Chrome/ium. For Firefox users that moment unfortunately happens every time a government website doesn't work.

Quoting myself:

> Hmm.

> Using Firefox because it has a particular technological feature is a political choice. That political stance would lead users to turn to other browsers as fast as tech is added or removed.

> I use Firefox for political reasons and for what it stands.

> Which means that when Firefox gets worse I still use it and support what it stands for.

> It's very Stallmanesque and let it be clear I am not saying the choice to favour superior tech over ethic concerns is wrong. It's just a different choice.

> That's what I tell people when talking about Signal and messenger, Chrome and Firefox.

> Also, I don't think Mozilla is a white knight and in my opinion they fucked up some good things over the years (tech or ethic). But the good still largely surpasses the bad.

Let's say Firefox was the open platform it is today but with the exception of, hmmm, tabs ? No tabs. Well, using Chrome because FF has not tabs if fine of course but you are trading convenience for a Google controlled Internet viewer. At some point Microsoft tried the EEE tactics with web browsers (jscript and box models and the whole DHTML hell, etc.) and the argument was the same: "do we want a web that is controlled by MS, a web where MS is the only gateway to how content should be displayed/accessed and where MS totally control the evolution of the tech ?"

Instead of trying to figure out exactly what features would accomplish that, I wish they would focus on making it embeddable. Personally, I like the UX of Arc. Arc uses Chrome under the hood. And if anyone else wants to make a browser specifically for some small subset of users, they're going to pick Chrome.

Why not make it easer for developers to embed Firefox and let a thousand small, weird browsers bloom? Some will be terrible, but a few might be brilliant.

If they don't do this, I'm holding out hope for Servo.

I use PWAs extensively and Firefox decided they won't bother to implement them, so that's going to be a no from me.

Rather than wanting the web platform to be first class, they really want it to languish as a second-class citizen. Really sad, seeing as they also fired devs, and invested in "AI" instead.

Indeed:

> Firefox and Safari do not support installing PWAs on any desktop operating systems... Chrome and Edge support installing PWAs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks. [1]

Any idea what Mozilla's motivation is here? (Apple's at least is easy to understand, even if you disagree.)

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

> Firefox and Safari do not support installing PWAs on any desktop operating systems... Chrome and Edge support installing PWAs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks.

That's not actually true, MDN needs updating. PWAs are installable as standalone apps since macOS Sonoma and Safari 17 - https://webkit.org/blog/14445/webkit-features-in-safari-17-0....

There are workarounds for using Firefox web apps: https://forums.puri.sm/t/firefox-web-apps/21499/

I have tried to switch out of curiosity, but the lack of PWA support in addition to missing features like WebUSB really limits how useful the browser is to me.

When I need webusb or webserial, I use edge or chrome. So far, that's been twice, ever.

I don't know anything in detail about those protocols though, and don't know why Firefox doesn't have them.

I like to see Firefox the browser as something that will have a life independent of Mozilla the (crappily managed) corporation. When they finally go down in flames, the open source community will continue to work on it in some fashion. It started as a skunkworks project, and I expect it will continue to have a life after Mozilla.

That, or something else will fill the void (maybe something built off Servo, I dunno), but that seems less likely.

we really need a wealthy tech founder type (especially one who made their millions or billions on the web) to start a new foundation that will actually care about Firefox rather than see it as a liability. Mozilla has completely lost my trust and support

What's the real use case of PWAs?

They just seem like another way to attempt to shift users from the 'proper web' into a place where blocking ads is more difficult.

Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of 'apps' from the world, they shouldn't be apps in the first place, most have no need to run native code, they should be links to websites, sites that can work on more-or-less any device in any browser.

> What's the real use case of PWAs?

Letting companies save money while still claiming they have "desktop apps".

> They just seem like another way to attempt to shift users from the 'proper web' into a place where blocking ads is more difficult.

Extensions still run in PWAs on Chromium-based browsers, so I'm not sure that's the intent behind implementing them.

> Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of 'apps' from the world

Out of curiosity, where do you draw the distinction between an app and a website? PWAs are largely just websites with an OS shortcut, and in some cases more integration via platform APIs. I'm sure you're familiar with the term "web app", which perfectly highlights how muddied the line is with modern tooling.

I used to be the maintainer for Nativefier (which made web apps into native apps via Electron). It was very popular because many people don’t want certain sites to be one of X tabs in one app, especially when those sites act like they’re own apps. So we gave users the ability to treat these web “apps” like any other apps.

We actually shut down the project because a good PWA implementation does this better than we ever could. PWAs can have extensions like ad blockers (very difficult to impossible in Electron). PWAs get automatic browser updates (very difficult with Electron).

PWAs are great, and FF’s implementation of them is not.

I love having relaxingjazz.com open as a "webapp" in an independent non-browser small window on my linux desktop. Mint makes it very easy.

On Windows the Twitter, Instagram, TikTok apps are PWAs. I like to use them because I can pin them to the start menu, have them start on a separate window by default and remember the window position.

> What's the real use case of PWAs?

Having apps that works as well as native ones, while using the same codebase and open technologies, and that is naturally as decentralized, safe and accessible as the web.

Also not needing to be politically correct, approved by Google and Apple or share large percent of revenue and marketing data with them.

It could be happening if Firefox took it more seriously and Apple didn't prevent it from happening.

I use Elk Mastodon client - being able to install it as a PWA is great - I get a nice icon on my mobile screen same as any other app, and it runs full screen without an address bar. I can switch between it and other apps, I don't see the downside really

Cmd/Alt+Tab

On macOS this is even more important because switching windows within an app does not use most recently used order.

Getting a full screen view without having to go through the insane hassle of Ionic and the Play store every time you make a one line change? Really useful for various offline control web apps, though I admit it's a rounding error use case that most browsers are more hostile to every year with arbitrary restrictions around HTTP connections (did you know Safari's ATS policy now blocks fetch over unsecure connections, lmao). Web games come to mind as well I guess?

I'm still baffled that mobile browsers don't have the desktop equivalent of F11. Or a console for that matter, the ADB is good and all but it's not always an option.

I personally hate PWAs even the ones I use on mobile (with firefox). Not being able to open a link in a second tab for example. I much rather just open the web app in a normal browser. PWAs just seem to reduce functionality over a normal web page.

Poorly built ones, sure.

But in all fairness, it’s easier to build one poorly, and there isn’t much incentive not to.

Curious, can you give some examples of PWAs you use, and why? I've rarely seen any benefit of actually installing a PWA vs just bookmarking the site.

On mobile, I could see privacy reasons for wanting to use a PWA vs a native app, but every time I've seen a site that supports a PWA, they also support a native app and the PWA is usually a sad substitute in comparison.

Along those lines, does macOS 14's Safari's support for "Add to Dock" count as installing a PWA? I have a couple frequently used websites in my dock, acting more or less like regular Mac apps (or at least like Electron apps). What would a "proper" PWA add to that?

(Not a leading question. I'm genuinely asking people who like and use PWAs: is there something cool I'm missing out on?)

You're correct. I'm actually not sure what installing a PWA does that visiting the website in your browser doesn't, but it's essentially opening the website in a headless browser. So very much like electron except instead of having to bundle the browser in the executable it uses your machine's browser.

> headless browser

I think you mean chromeless (an amusingly confusing term when it's chrome hosting the PWA). If it were headless, you wouldn't see anything at all.

Ah indeed I mixed up the two.

I use PWAs for YouTube Music, Slack, and Readwise Reader.

Sometimes there is a standalone app available, like with Slack, but often the PWA has the same features and doesn't duplicate the entire Web Platform stack (Electron), which saves some battery.

Thanks, the Slack example is a good one, I just use the electron app now but there is no reason I shouldn't use the PWA.

Any online IDE is a much nicer experience as an installed PWA compared to as a browser tab. VS code server for instance, since you don't get a the address bar at top like https://code.visualstudio.com/assets/docs/remote/vscode-serv... (without having to go Full screen on browser), and you get a standalone icon in task bar, and standalone window so you can Alt-Tab between it and other apps like web browser of choice quickly.

Photopea, it's a web based photo editor that is really really great. If you install it as a PWA, it works offline. Similarly, excalidraw, monkeytype, google calendar all work offline if you install it as a PWA.

Apart from that, I have youtube music, slack, discord, whatsapp web just for convenience of having it in alt+tab rather than cycle through a thousand tabs (admittedly, this usecase is nullified by tab search)

>(admittedly, this usecase is nullified by tab search)

Cmd+Tab is far quicker than tab search for me.

It's decidedly non-ideal that it requires an extension and a native helper, but https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/pwas-for-fire... works.

I didn't follow this PWA stuff very closely, but from what I understand, Mozilla didn't want to implement the PWA protocol proposed by Google because it contained things that weren't compatible with the open web view focused on the benefit of the users which Firefox has. I'm happy there is a browser that takes this stance.

I would’ve considered switching to Firefox if they hadn’t shipped their Pocket “redesign” earlier this year.

It’s one of the worst most user hostile updates I’ve seen from any app or website in my 20 years on the web. It’s completely broken, frankly.

If you open a saved article and then switch apps, Pocket kicks you back to the Home Screen. Tapping the “view all” button—which should take you to your saved article list—brings you back to the article you were viewing. Awful awful awful.

Mozilla is still finding ways to antagonize its users with Pocket? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

I stopped using Firefox when they started pushing Pocket so hard. Maybe I’m remembering too strongly, but my recollection is that when I complained about it I was told this is the future, you’re being a crank, and it’s totally normal for a third party exension collecting data to be baked into a browser that claims to support privacy and respect users.

So I just started using Safari, and I’ve never been happier. Apple seems to at least know how to get out of its own way. And they seem at least a bit more credible on privacy than Chrome or frankly Firefox.

That doesn't make any sense. Because they offered a service that you were not interested you switched away and consider the less privacy friendly than a big corporation which runs one of the largest advertisement business in the world and tries to lock everyone into their ecosystem?

Seriously, why do you hold Mozilla a nonprofit with a proven history of putting privacy of their users first, to a much higher standard than the largest corporations in the world with proven disregard (and profit motive to ignore it) for their users privacy?

> In addition to the information that you provide to us when you register for a user account, we collect information about the URLs, titles and content of the web pages and other information you save to Pocket. The types of information we collect includes your browser type, device type, time zone, language, and other information related to the manner in which you access the Pocket Technologies. If you are on a mobile device, we collect the advertising identifiers provided by Apple on iOS and by Google on Android. [...]

How is Safari less privacy friendly than that? As far as I know, Safari doesn't phone home with my reading list. If it did, that would be completely unacceptable to me. But maybe Apple can defend it by saying "well it's only what the most privacy friendly browser, Firefox, does"?

> Seriously, why do you hold Mozilla a nonprofit with a proven history of putting privacy of their users first, to a much higher standard than the largest corporations in the world with proven disregard (and profit motive to ignore it) for their users privacy?

Do they really have a proven history of putting privacy of their users first? Because to me, Pocket looks like a proven history that they will sell the opportunity to collect data from their users just like any other company.

Even if Mozilla really did have a proven history of putting privacy of their users first, that would in fact be a reason to hold them to a higher standard. I expect more from people I think highly of, than people I know usually do bad things.

It seems to me that Apple actually has less incentive to sell my data than Mozilla. I'm paying Apple for their device and their software, and if I don't like the way their software treats my data, I will stop paying them. Mozilla has no way to make money other than bundling software that collects data from their users (google search default, pocket). So who's really incentivized to ignore privacy concerns?

I switched away from Firefox about 3 years ago (after more than 10 years of using it) because I got tired of them breaking stuff (and my habits) with unnecessary redesigns every 6 months or so.

What did they break? I've been a Firefox user since forever and I don't recall any breaking changes on desktop for the last 15 years or so (really since they deprecated xul). Now on mobile you might have an argument, but Firefox on android was bad before the recent redesign and is by quite a margin the best mobile browser since.

One thing they did was hide close all tabs button behind menu. Because they thought users was too stupid and would press it accidentally... I think I'm just too smart to use Firefox as main browser... I absolutely detest people treating me as an idiot...

You can just disable Pocket. I've never used it, and never had an issue with it. My Firefox experience is great.

Hi, macOS user here. I know Firefox is great, and I'd love to use it (again), but Mozilla's decision to remove all user-facing, OS-level scripting capabilities from it (i.e., AppleScript) made me drop it a few years ago. Getting anything out of FF on macOS, locally, is a major pain in the ass, actually. Try to grab the current URL from the active tab…

Add to that the non-macOS text handling, macOS-unlike font rendering, its insistence to not use the system-wide spell checker provided by the OS etc. It feels a bit rude at times.

I think it's a super-solid browser that unfortunately doesn't give a shit about the platform it's running on. Irritatingly, it's fine with being a black box, so much more than the Chromiums are (for all their various faults).

If you are using Safari on Apple’s platform, you are already contributing to the user base of the browser that isn’t headed for monopoly. IMO, you are probably contributing better than us Firefox users; Safari remains large.

I wonder if, like in Apps, Apple users are known to be more likely to pay for things…

Also a macOS user and I don't use Firefox for the same exact reasons you listed, despite really wanting to. It just behaves very rudely on macOS and it seems like more and more they are stripping out features, for example in the latest update they removed macOS Vibrancy support, so now my toolbar can't have any transparency, which looks horrible.

Not to mention they let that super noticeable bug with the system font not spacing correctly just linger for over two years. It's finally fixed but there is still a lot of weirdness with the way Firefox handles fonts on this platform and it's very obnoxious since macOS has best-in-class typography everywhere else.

I'll rejoice on the day Safari gets a proper extensions API. I'd 100% make the move to it if I could just run RES.

I use Firefox because it's the least bad option remaining, certainly not because I believe it's the last remaining ethical web browser. I have no confidence in Mozilla's ethics or mission, and no longer contribute directly or financially for that reason.

I agree with the implicit point. From the ethics standpoint, regardless of what happens at the top, Mozilla's waywardness isn't reflected in the browser, unlike Google's web and user hostility with Chrome (manifest v3 etc).

Firefox user since before it was Firefox.

Daily: Firefox with probably too many blockers, tampermonkey, umatrix, Stylus. I aggressively block any and every element on sites I visit regularly. You get no stats from me.

Also daily: Firefox Developer Ed for frequently visited sites where I need to login and every site is in a container tab.

Brave - my daily puzzle fix for Wordle, Wordiply, Travle, Tradle (no logins, clears data on exit).

Edge, in Private mode, if and only if I cannot get a site to otherwise work.

Also nextdns.io to block as much as I can including all Google, all facebook, all Automattic properties and more.

While I'm sure some data is being collected I am very happy with how my internet looks.

do you have any other recs for firefox extensions?

Archive Page

Bypass Paywalls Clean

CSS Exfil Protection

Decentraleyes

DDG Privacy Essentials

Ghostery

NoScript

Privacy Badger

Privacy-Oriented Origin Policy

Stylus

Tampermonkey

uBlock Origin

uMatrix

Yes, there is overkill in there but that's fine. It does not impact my browsing experience.

So when you want to enable JavaScript, you have to click around in both uMatrix and NoScript?

I have to temp-trust some elements in NoScript, then look in uMatris for the specific items I'll set to green. That probably sounds like a hassle and I get that. But I've been doing it for so long it's the norm.

If I need to unblock trackers in NS, I close the tab and go on my way.

And every once in a while I'll factory reset both NS and uM.

This probably sounds very tinfoil territory but as I've said I'm happy with my internet experience.

Doesn't many of those extensions due the exact same thing? Like why have Ghostery, DDG Privacy Essentials, Privacy Badger and to some extend uBlock Origin and Decentraleyes (maybe uMatrix as well), either one would do.

Agreed, but which one?

As I have said I see no effect on my browsing so I'm happy to just let things lie.

Maybe one day I'll find a good in-depth comparison article.

heads up, I think Decentraleyes has been superseded by a "LocalCDN", it's more frequently updated and I thing Decentraleyes has bee abandoned by the devs.

Thanks - will look into that.

For extensions, I recommend people follow the recommendations[1] in the arkenfox repo and either harden their firefox or use librewolf. Umatrix is unmaintained since 2019.

[1] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions

The article has good points but for the love of god please stop with the passive-aggressive "here's why you've been eating apples wrong all your life" headlines

Maybe I should write a blog post titled "You're writing passive-aggressive articles wrong, read this to do better in 2024"

"...the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox"

That's pretty rich. Firefox did irreparable harm when they decided to funnel all Americans' DNS lookups to an abusive, monopolistic, for-profit company, Cloudflare, WITHOUT ASKING.

That's sleazy, and every network I manage now has the "use-application-dns.net" canary domain because of this.

No matter how much people try to frame this as, "they're protecting you from your bad, evil ISP", they're doing things surreptitiously, without consent, without any reason to believe Cloudflare, who are happy to host spammers and scammers, is any less evil. "Privacy", my ass.

Address this, Firefox people, and maybe I'll trust you a little.

I just read a bunch of comments yesterday [1] talking about Mozilla and its CEO putting little energy and money into Firefox. I am supportive of the sentiment but when Mozilla doesn't seem very committed to Firefox, it's hard to get onboard.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308

I'm an on-and-off Firefox user, and I always find these pleas kind of lame. It's a good enough browser, but the other arguments aren't very convincing.

It's a contradiction to claim Firefox is better at privacy when Mozilla makes most of its money by funneling people to Google's spyware network. Not only is it anti-privacy, the other side effects include things like only blocking "bad" trackers, not including ad-blocking/umatrix functionality by default, etc.

And the browser monopoly argument isn't that strong either. We have Chromium from Google, and Mozilla Firefox funded by Google. Look at DRM video - it made no difference.

> And the browser monopoly argument isn't that strong either. We have Chromium from Google, and Mozilla Firefox funded by Google. Look at DRM video - it made no difference.

I agree. The sooner Firefox goes away, the sooner people stop pretending we don't have a duopoly between Chrome and Safari already. From then, people need to work for Chromium improvements, perhaps consolidate in one good "ungoogled" fork. And let Safari be.

I don't necessarily want Firefox to go away, but as it stands right now it's not independent from Google and can't take a hard stance on privacy or web standards.

Firefox is the web browser equivalent a dying language. It will be a tragic loss for the culture of the web for Firefox to fade away. But, there are powerful macro forces pushing us to that outcome. "Switch, please," calls to action are a noble but insufficient countermeasure.

Is that a common belief on the Google Chrome team?

You'll have to ask them. I left Chrome in an exasperated huff several years ago.

The browser ecosystem as we know it is in a tenuous state. It is unhealthy for the web that Chromium has become so dominant. It is a symptom of this imbalance that users line up to defend Apple's choice to lock out other browser engines from iOS. This kind of popular user sentiment would have been unthinkable to me in the era when Firefox first rose up to fight back against the IE singularity. Yet, here we are.

Maybe not dying (yet) but it is technologically behind with a lot of things by now. This is annoying if you want to try out new web platform features. Sometimes, there isn't even a signal from Mozilla while Google marks a feature as stable.

Average people probably don't care about the latest features but Google pushes Chrome very aggressively, so they end up using it anyway.

What annoys me the most, however, is that several things simply don't work in Firefox and the associated report is over a decade old, so with close to zero chances of ever getting addressed. Copying the content of a canvas element as an image to the clipboard is one of these things. In Chrome, this takes a right and a left click. Firefox didn't have such a basic feature last time I checked. There used to be a workaround, opening a blob URL in a new tab and then copy that, but this got broken later, I believe by a stricter security policy.

Firefox is essentially the browser equivalent of Fairphone. It's the most ethical option but it inconveniences you left, right, and center.

Is Fairphone 5 such an inconvenience you describe it? On paper, it seems pretty usable

I can't comment on the Fairphone 5 specifically but some of the issues reported by the community sound similar to the two predecessors. My personal experience with two Fairphone 4 phones running Android 13 isn't great. Apps sporadically stop reacting to taps and auto-rotate in combination with standby somehow locks up the phone, usually with a black screen. The picture quality isn't good, the stock camera app misses half of the button presses and there's a 2-4 second delay until it actually takes a picture.

Case in point, Nvidia video super resolution is buggy in Firefox, it will randomly stop working until you restart the whole browser.

> This is annoying if you want to try out new web platform features.

You meant Blink platform?

I feel like Google breaking ad blockers on chrome will ensure survival of browsers like Firefox.

> Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data

This is true for Google, etc, but definitely not for Apple. Not saying Apple is perfect in every way, but they actually have a track record for privacy protection.

Firefox has ads doesn't it ? for the homepage links.

(I am not complaining. long time firefox user)

Firefox’s default search engine is also Google Search, full of ads and spam.

This is what pays their bills. Major source of income for Mozilla is Google paying to be default search engine

Brave runs on Chrome and has some of the highest privacy protections.

I love Firefox, but just questioning if there aren’t good solutions available on Chrome.

And while Apple may not have a business model as focused on selling data, they still have a growing ad business + weaker protections against fingerprinting and ad blocking

Brave’s internal ads and crypto weirdness are enough for me to be uncomfortable with it.

What internal ads? I see 0 ads while using brave because of its internal ad blocker.

Crypto features are an easy toggle to disable. The toggle isn't hidden, doesn't re-enable itself, and isn't weird in any way.

They’re talking about the ability to turn on ads within brave and get BAT as a reward.

In addition to getting nagged on the regular (every update?) to turn on the ads.

> weaker protections against fingerprinting and ad blocking

Citation?

https://privacytests.org/

It's worth noting that PrivacyTests tests default configurations. If a browser has a good suite of privacy features but doesn't have them on by default, they'll score low on the benchmark.

Firefox, for example, can be hardened very well with options and extensions, but has many bad defaults (like Google default search with search suggestions on).

The site is all baseline, not potential. Not peak potential, not press a couple buttons potential.

Apple definitely makes a lot of money from advertising...probably more than they make from selling Macs (based on 2022 results).

Also I think this quote might be technically right, but Mozilla's revenue is almost entirely paid from advertising companies who pay royalties to have their search engines by default in Firefox. So they are very much coupled to the dynamics of the ads industry.

Not doubting you, but do you have a source for that? Best I could find was their last quarterly earnings report which does have “Services” ahead of everything but iPhone, but I would imagine includes some big money makers like AppleCare.

Apple gets 36% of Google's advertising revenue from Safari's default search. So Apple is earning from Google's advertisements.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/google-witness-a...

Apple makes money from ads in their App Store. Do they make ad money from Safari? I couldn’t find that info.

Apple gets 36% of Google's advertising revenue from Safari's default search. So Apple is earning from Google's advertisements. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/google-witness-a...

Well FF is too, so not sure that’s relevant to TFAs claim that we are discussing in this thread.

Just a small correction. Large parts of revenue are obtained though sharing ad revenue between Mozilla and a search engine, not for being the default search engine.

The engine monopoly point has been kind of stupid for a while now. Blink is open source. It's a stable target. It's not vendor-locked. There is no problem with it having a monopoly, and I am sure the industry can decide to fork it or start over if the leadership goes absolutely cuckoo. When it comes to good open source projects, we WANT to be converging on that one leading project and ensuring it's the best it can be. If Mozilla got their team to work supporting Blink and integrated it into Firefox, we'd probably all be better off.

Google is constantly inventing new JS APIs. Some websites adopt those, which then breaks the site for all other browsers. That's good enough reason for everyone to avoid Blink.

> Google is constantly inventing new JS APIs

like what?

http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/android/android-4.0/e...

that's specific to chrome

also it's weird argument "constantly inventing new js apis"

so what? their usefulnesss should be determined in their own context, not by the fact that they're a js api; unless you're a child who wages weird programming language culture wars on the internet and thinks anything that isn't the language they use is inferior

Mozilla could contribute to Blink, but that would not help it prevent Blink from adding e.g. Web Environment Integrity ("DRM for the web"), or other additions that are user-hostile. Being in control of an engine gives way more sway over that engine.

This is why browser diversity is where the action happens. Firefox and Brave can just nix the DRM components. Similar to how Brave itself or Ungoogled Chromium cut down Chromium's telemetry components. One engine underneath, many interfaces and options for power users and the concerned. We all save on the extremely hard work of building an entire other browser engine, and then expecting the whole industry to support it.

The fact that Blink is open source is totally irrelevant; sure it may mean that some niche browsers can exist with a few tweaks, but any serious attempt at forking would require a legion of developers.

If Microsoft isn't able to maintain their own browser, the idea that some other org out there is going to have the resources to fork it is laughable.

I would not use the "we" word with quite that much confidence.

You are essentially arguing that a monopoly position in this particular industry minimizes what is known as "welfare loss". That would be quite an exceptional claim, IMHO

This in general only happens within market areas that appeal to the formation of so-called "natural monopolies" - typical examples being water, postal services, electricity, and the like (utilities). The rationale being that the monopoly formation in this case spares society as a whole for excessive costs as these industries are characterized by a very high proportion of fixed costs (infra, machinery, ect) relative to variable costs.

With browsers it seems that on the contrary the overwhelming majority of development costs are indeed variable (man hours) which -- all else equal -- would support the assumption that competition in this market would be better for society as whole, and that a monopoly here would be a loss for society (and eventually it would fall).

We would absolutely not be better off. Engine monopoly is harmful to security. When you have an exploit for the only engine, all users are at risk. If there was even just 3 engines with comparable market share, that would increase the costs for attackers, and make it easier for people to switch if their current engine is compromised.

The microsecond manifest v3 is forced upon me, I will switch. And I'll be bringing my entire family tree and friends along with me!

What does everyone think about LibreWolf vs mainline FF? It reminds me of Waterfox: https://librewolf.net

Why re v3?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...

It nerfs adblockers so the current net convenience of using Chromium vs Firefox becomes a net inconvenience. Manifest v2 disablement day might as well be Firefox Switching Day.

>The microsecond manifest v3 is forced upon me,

Protest before if even happens by switching now, maybe?

Your loyalty is commendable. But we all forgive you if you make the switch now.

#LibreWolf much more lightweight; bloat, telemetry removed.

Happy to chime in regarding LibreWolf and Waterfox, as it comes up alot in our support forums[1]:

This question comes up every now and then, I'll base my currently updated reply starting with my previous response[2]:

> Now, ignoring feature differences between all the forks out there, I'd like to present a different perspective and consideration that I think gets overlooked when comparing forks like Waterfox to other forks (if I am incorrect regarding Librewolf, someone please correct me).

> Waterfox provides signed binaries for download. Librewolf (and most of the rest) do not. Checksum's are all well and good, but IMO, not enough. Code signing provides trust.

> Librewolf does not provide auto-updates. There are 3rd party tools out there, but IMHO that brings in its own set of problems, and breaks the chain-of-trust.

> The most important one that I believe, maybe apart from Pale Moon, only Waterfox does, is offers _accountability_. There is (and has been since 2012) a legal entity behind Waterfox. That used to be Waterfox Limited, then it was System1 and now BrowserWorks (the entity I control). Laws must be abided and the end user actually has an entity to hold accountable. GDPR, CCPA, the rest are things that _actually_ need to be followed. The other projects, who are you _really_ going to hold accountable if things go wrong? To me this is super important because a browser is used for sensitive information. It's just not worth the risk otherwise. This also goes hand in hand with the code signing.

> Above all else, Waterfox has been around for 12 years

> Don't get me wrong, things like EV code signing certs are a bit of a racket, and yeah you can jump in and code audit all those other forks too. But really, push comes to shove, they can just disappear into the aether.

Separately, I'd say the end goals of each browser are different. Librewolf seems to aim for privacy on a rolling release. Tor and Mull will both target ESR (extended support releases, which is where Mozilla aim for my enterprise friendly releases of features being set and instead security/bug patches applied only). All of them will sacrifice compatibility for privacy/security. From my above comment, I'd go with Tor if you're willing to sacrifice speed, Mull if you want better speed but broken websites. After all a web browser probably accesses the most _sensitive_ data it can, I'd put my faith in a piece of a software run by a legal entity so you can have some legal recourse on matters.

Waterfox's goal in terms of privacy is a usable web that still leans heavily to privacy but doesn't want to sacrifice the web experience for that to work.

Waterfox has done a lot to reach that, from careful curation of preferences to supplemental infrastructure such as DNS over Oblivious HTTP (DoOH). These aren't just features that "might" help; there's real benefit to it. For example, users have reported being able to access censored websites when using Waterfox. In my opinion, I've reached Waterfox's goal perfectly here: privacy and web compatibility.

Then, there's all the other "sugar" on top:

- Customization

- Reverting features removed by Mozilla but are genuinely useful/should've remained in Firefox.

- Adding features when Mozilla is slow to do so (better JPEG-XL support for one).

- The only fork that AFAIK that supports DRM content, for watching Netflix, Prime Video etc. Considering how difficult this was to achieve I doubt any will get support any time soon either.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/18g8tez/comment/k...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/14seevh/comment/j...

Why wait until the final nail has been hammered before escaping your coffin?

> LibreWolf

Why are FOSS names always so bad...

Surprised nobody mentions this: Firefox DevTools are so, so much better than Chrome's, especially shining in two areas: (a) inspecting layouts with flex/grid; (b) inspecting websocket traffic.

Been using FF for 10+ years, never looked back.

What about performance insights? Chrome is pretty good at this

I've never used it tbh

>1. Privacy Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data.

Mozilla tracks and gives (sells?) unique information about every download to Google unless you choose to grab it from the FTP servers.

https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-...

does that apply to installations from apt?

It does not. Those binaries are signed by your distribution and the same for everyone.

I'm honestly curious why they don't also track the FTP server downloads.

My best guess: <1% so statistically not relevant.

> (sells?)

An accusation like this would benefit from some evidence.

By not offering any evidence, you get all the benefits of sowing doubt without having put in any of the work necessary to have an actual discussion about it.

Here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

     Firefox by default also sends marketing campaign data to Adjust, our analytics vendor, which has its own privacy policy. Campaign data includes a Google advertising ID or Android ID, IP address, timestamp, country, language/locale, operating system, and app version.

Smells like a sale, but by not using the word sell, they get all the benefits of sowing doubt without having put in any of the work necessary to have an actual problem about selling it.

Can you explain the process by which Mozilla gives the unique identifier to Google?

The article quotes Mozilla saying they can correlate the two, but it doesn't state how.

I use to be a supporter and I am a customer of Mozilla Relay, but I refuse to use their browser while they are financed by Google. It makes them nothing but controlled opposition.

I do appreciate the moral consistency of at least supporting alternative revenue models.

Any Firefox user who is concerned about privacy should definitely read the Firefox Privacy Notice:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

The name "Google" appears multiple times, sometimes within the phrase "data to Google".

There are also currently references to "third-party ad platform" and "a third-party referral platform", along with other companies/organizations.

Some people will claim that it doesn't matter because some of this Firefox functionality that involves data collection and/or third-parties can be disabled, or that it's fine because it has been disclosed, or it's somehow acceptable because Firefox maybe doesn't send as much info as some of its competitors do, and so on.

I don't buy into those arguments. If Firefox was truly privacy-respecting, it would never collect nor send any data beyond that necessary to provide its core web browsing functionality.

Any functionality that might compromise a user's privacy should not be bundled by default, and would have to be explicitly opted into by manually installing an extension that provides such functionality. This would include Firefox's/Mozilla's own "telemetry".

That's bad. But not as bad as a binary blob from Google that is the browser.

Since I use Linux I don't download FF manually.

Nope. No thanks.

First, Firefox literally makes their money from Google ads, and has Google search suggestions on by default. So much for privacy.

Second, the Foundation. A bunch of people more interested in leftist activism than in building a aolid tool for the user. Or just trying to score coolness points by having a sneaker designer make time-limited themes - sorry, colorways with names like "Activist" and "Expressionist".

But the politics. In "We need more than deplatforming", the organization in no uncertain terms said they were a-ok with others deciding what I should see on the Internet. Not okay, sorry. Why would I support an organization that hates me while the competition are doing things like allowing me to tune my own search results, or have options menus like Vivaldi's with more customization than is reasonable?

And lastly, it's just not a great product. Security on Android is trash and there are no PWAs or tab groups among other things. There's just no case when I could use competition that's better and either doesn't hate me or can at least manage to not be emotionally incontinent with their hostility because the browser is what matters?

Nowadays when a site functions in Chrome/Safari but not in Firefox, what are the common culprits?

Usage of experimental Web APIs? Specific CSS properties? Deprecated features still supported by Chrome/Safari for backward compatibility?

I ask because I'm wondering if it's possible for an extension/userjs to, if not polyfill, at least detect and warn users about attempts to use such features. Nowadays when a site doesn't appear to work correctly in Firefox I reopen it in Chrome, but this is a not-insignificant source of time-waste because about half of time I find either that the site is working as the developer intended, or that the site doesn't work in Chrome either. Having some overt indication (visible without having to open devtools) that unsupported browser features are being accessed could be very helpful here for reducing user uncertainty.

Relatedly: I'm glad Firefox is planning to add support for IE's non-standard (but widely used ime) CSS zoom property: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390936

>when a site functions in Chrome/Safari but not in Firefox, what are the common culprits

site written by google

no, not at all. Pretty much anything Google does works across all browsers.

The most common culprit by far are local and regional sites. Local bank, doctor's office, random public website from the municipality, school homepage and so on. The few software developers they have on hand simply don't bother testing against Firefox any more so things just break and aren't fixed.

Right now I use Chrome because I use several PWAs. Chrome lets me install them and even gives me options to auto-start them when my system starts. Firefox doesn't seem to have equivalent functionality.

Researching it some, it seems Firefox used to support this but removed it as part of Mozilla's continuous own-goal of ... whatever the heck they're doing.

Why use Chrome when Brave is pretty much the same but with better privacy?

Maybe they wouldn't need people begging to use FF if Mozilla used its money exclusively for the browser and web initiatives, instead of political and ideological projects.

What are some examples that have put you off?

All of them? Mozilla is even worse than the Wikipedia foundation. They are a one trick pony and should just focus on their one trick ...

Funny enough I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for well over a decade, but lately I've struggled to continue letting that remain the case just because of how badly managed Mozilla appears to be.

The weird AI website builder thing they released was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. Besides my many objections to current AI, my bigger issue was that this demonstrated a general lack of focus and carelessness on their part.

That seems like an odd reason to not use a browser, especially considering how the company that makes the dominant browser is also a mess.

I mean, mess is a bit subjective in Google's case. Sure, they tend to take on a lot of side-projects only to inevitably abandon them, and they did slip behind in the AI race, but there's a huge difference between "stagnant giant with way too much money" messy and "if our browser market share gets any lower government websites won't support our browser" messy.

Mozilla is badly managed[1], at least from the perspective of users and developers.

Nobody outside of the executives can possibly say Mozilla is well managed with a straight face when they fire hundreds of developers and then turn around and pay their CEO /seven million fucking dollars/[2], all the while Firefox continues to slip further into irrelevance.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

[2]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...

This being HN, I'm really surprised no one has mentioned Brave. Brave is what Firefox was a few years ago (and what firefox claims to be but isn't) in terms of privacy and comes pre-loaded with an ad-blocker that uses the same list as ublock. It's also faster and less of a memory hog. I switched from firefox as main driver and haven't looked back. It is chromium based but I don't see this as a drawback. But this is 2023 and using a single browser is an artificial limitation (and makes no sense if you're a web developer) so I don't know why people make it sound like it has to be one or the other. It's not exactly like choosing an IDE. I pretty much use every browser except Edge.

People here have a major hateboner against Brave. Some of it is crypto, some of it is Eich, relatively little the product itself.

Yeah, it does have all the crypto bloatware, but it doesn't force it on you so all of that can just be ignored. I actually think Brave (and maybe Safari) is the least opinionated browser in terms of features it forces on you and it's somewhat easy to turn off or ignore what you don't want. I might be deluding myself but it's always feels like the lightest browser that I use.

It's so bloated: https://i.imgur.com/tuMGc3c.png

I do use it but I just wish crypto wasn’t baked in.

Agreed, though I recognize that they need income too to avoid Mozillas's problems, so I can tolerate some amount of them experimenting with revenue strategies.

That said, I turned off the crypto stuff on day 1 and it has stayed off and I never even think about it anymore.

Brave is great and I think more people should give it a shot.

One of the more interesting options they provide the user is the ability to pay for an ad-free Brave Search.

I will not.

You can't beg me. You can't scare me into it. You just have to quit fucking up Firefox.

I'll use Firefox forks. But I'm not using Mozilla® Firefox™. Period. They've treated me like they don't care if I choose it for the last time. If they want to quit pushing pocket, quit preaching to me about expressing myself via themes, quit resetting my configuration upon update, quit limiting the extensions I can use and pretending it's for my benefit, quit changing UX arbitrarily, and generally quit treating me like they don't care if I use their browser or not, I'll consider it. Trust is lost quickly and gained slowly.

If it's any consolation, I won't use Edge, Chrome or Safari either.

Me, Very hardcore Firefox user for years, today looking at switching to arc browser becasue firefox is thrashing my system. one time. macos swap inscreased to 60gb where firefox was using 48gb. i have 16gb ram. :( also video freezes time to time )

it is probably one of my own about:config changes Though than firefox.

There is no support for touch screen navigation gestures in Firefox on Windows and that is the #1 reason why I cannot switch. I use the touchscreen on laptop while browsing every day.

Touch screens on windows isn't something new. They became common around the time of the release of Windows 8 in 2012.

There is a 6 year old feature request on bugzilla. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1443710

+1: They've been ignoring this one for years.

How are the Firefox dev tools these days? I feel like every time I try to switch, the dev tooling has felt subpar compared to Chrome, and I don't like using one browser for regular use and one for development. It's been a couple years since I tried though.

for css they are best in class IMHO, especially the visualizations of flex and grid

Not as good for networking and performance as chrome dev tools, but the visualizations for styling are notably better.

About as good as Chrome in most areas, but the performance is poorer. They're serviceable.

I still keep Firefox around and it's not horrible but have been very happy with the Chrome variant Vivaldi and some key extensions. Fast and not vanilla Chrome.

I’ve been using Firefox almost exclusively for years with two exceptions. The web dev tools in Chrome are really just better. And recently my work made the decision to only allow Chrome for security reasons. I’m annoyed about that but I understand why, it’s not necessarily that Chrome is more secure but the central management tools are stronger and if they were only going to support one, they picked the one more people use.

No, https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-...

If you really care, there is LibreWolf https://librewolf.net/

I recommend Firefox with zero additional plugins, but configure it to automatically clear the cookies when quitting. You can now click 'accept' to every insisting site, knowing that they will be soon forgotten.

I switched back to Firefox like 6 years ago and it's the input browser I use regularly. I do unfortunately have Chrome installed on all my machines too since once every couple of months I'll find some usually government website that only works properly in Chrome.

Firefox for Android is excellent too, especially since you can have add-ons. Between my Adguard VM in my tailscale network and Firefox ublock, my phone is an ad free place. Other add-ons that make the mobile internet more tolerable:

Google Search Fixer - Google give Firefox users a crappy old search UI. this extension forces the new nicer UI.

Old Reddit redirect - just redirects all reddit links to old.reddit.com. this bypasses the age verification nonsense Reddit introduced given I refuse to have an account there these days.

Video background play fix - this one just means any video you are watching in the browser will keep playing if you minimise the browser - some sites try to be helpful and pause the video.

ClearURLS - removes all tracking junk from URLS - make sharing links less miserable

Dark reader - essentially just a way to make any website dark mode.

> the only remaining ethical web browser

I hate associating ethics with technical debates. Chrome didn't win by being ethical, it won by being better. Plain words cannot save Firefox from losing its market share. I know battling against tech giants is hard, but appealing to ethics will only lead to hostility for some people.

What if the ethics come at a performance cost? Then you have to lead with what you value (and hope the market agrees)

I'd argue that it "won" (read: achieved the majority of market share) because it was relentlessly pushed by Google, the search engine with the majority of market share.

Chrome won by being unethical (and continuing to do so), for a while every time you visited some Google site you were bombarded with "switch to Chrome" banners.

At the same time they often artificially slow down Firefox on Google sites (see e.g. the recent news about some code on YouTube)

I have a couple of issues that keeps me using Safari. First off is the insane battery usage. It’s like 2x battery usage of Safari. Then it’s all the noise like Pocket, sign in this and register that.

And then a very specific problem that has annoyed the crap out of me: extension windows close if Firefox loses focus! That means that using Bitwarden to do this: 1) open Bitwarden and find some login details 2) alt tab to the program you’re trying to sign in to 3) paste the username 4) alt tab back to Firefox/Bitwarden and there you go, the Bitwarden window was closed due to Firefox losing focus and you now have to open it again, search and find the credentials again and then paste the password 5) open Bitwarden a third time and search yet again for the OTP code… A huge pain in the ass that makes me want to use another browser just because of that.

for bitwarden, you can open it in your sidebar. but I admit, that is super annoying when opening bitwarden from the extension icon.

The Mozilla CEO earned $6,903,089 in 2022 up from $5.6 million in 2021, while Firefox continues to lose market share. If you think Mozilla's priorities are tied to making Firefox the best browser on the Internet, at least in terms of privacy, freedom, and features, you're seriously blind.

Dear Mozilla Foundation, in 2024 please act like you really want Firefox to be used by more people. Thanks.

If it didn't change already then it likely never will.

I use librewolf，a Firefox fork, because of the things that corporate Mozilla keeps doing: from pocket to selling vpns and sponsored stories, they do enough user hostile things it ends up being a better experience on librewolf.

On android I'm using iceraven.

Switching to Firefox is like asking python devs to not use CPython.

Firefox in the current ecosystem is the least innovative or open tech. It is not modular, you can't use it for anything but Firefox. The technology is designed only for FF, you can't use it for your own purposes without metaphorically reaching in and pulling out wires. They don't have the resources or the engineers necessary to make technology. All they can do is try to play catch-up with their browser. This is why everyone else (not webkit) saw the writing and went chromium.

If Firefox was the optimal browser everyone would have forked it instead. They would be using it in their own stacks.

I recently switched and then made an extension called FoxColorBox which allows you to change and customize browser Window colors. When you open a new window, it will have a distinct color.

This can help you differentiate between home, work, and school. It can also be useful when working in development, staging and production environments.

* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxcolorbox/

* https://github.com/jftuga/foxcolorbox

Firefox has been my main browser for a long time but I've also been a mutlibrowser user for a long time. Right now I'm typing this in firefox, chrome is in my second monitor running twitch, and I will be using edge for my work.

Recommend doing this on mobile as well, if you are an android user. You get adblock and a URL bar near your keyboard.

The price is that occasionally there are sites (approximately 2% in my anecdotal experience) that you'll have to use chrome for.

My other grief on Android is that I often get the dead tab bug. Sometimes when you reopen a tab and try to navigate, the tab just ceases to function and you need to close it.

Also they changed something in tab management, and it feels like nowadays I always have 40 tabs opened despite myself (which kinda defeats the purpose).

Other than that, I never have issues loading any website, unless they're actively detecting the agent and telling you to use chrome.

I opt for firefox nightly on android, giving me a chance to contribute to their development roll outs.

Firefox is noticeably slower on Android than Chrome. That's where Brave really shines: as fast as Chrome with a built-in ad-blocker.

I couldn't tell you what the difference is between Chrome and Firefox. But that is the reason I was able to switch. I didn't get slowed down at all in the switch. And the reason I switched is because Google has been consistently suspicious about data. Plus, Mozilla seems to be better for the internet, and I want to show my support.

There was a long time in between using either where I was using Brave. Actually, when I ditched Chrome like 7 years ago, I made Brave my default and installed Firefox developers edition. It took a couple years before my default swapped.

> Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data... nefarious technologies that hurt your privacy.

I think privacy activists need a more compelling "so what" than "it's better for privacy" to convince people it's worth switching. They seem to operate under the thesis that people were being duped, as opposed to having made a more or less concious choice to trade privacy for convenience, which maybe was true 10 years ago but feels antiquated today.

At least my public interaction suggests the opposite - people aren't making these compromises willingly. They just don't know any better. No one chose to stay with Chrome after the problems were explained to them - especially not after showing them what browsing looks like with UBo on Firefox.

>In the early 2000’s, Internet Explorer had a massive 95% market share. ... This was a very bad situation, which hindered the development of the World Wide Web.

What hindered development was Microsoft resting on their laurels thinking they won the browser war. Google on the other hand is continuing to invest resources into Chrome. As evidenced in the past if Google stopped investing into Chrome, and stopped taking community contributions to chromium eventually another better browser would come around to overthrow it.

Just want to add:

Despite its limited number of extensions, Safari has a great "reader" mode that other browsers with readability extensions can't come close to, in terms of zapping the crap, killing almost all nags and popups (sometimes, that's all you need to get past a nag-wall) and creating truly readable articles, savable as PDF.

I also use Firefox and Opera, which are fine, and which have their own universes of extensions. Opera is chrome-compatible in this respect. Both have versions of ublock-origin.

I’d take the uBO element zapper over Reader Mode any day. Some anti-Adblock scripts have figured out how to prevent you engaging reader mode.

I've used Firefox on desktop for years, even through some of the bad times. Today, FireFox is a really great experience and works well everywhere for me, except for some very specific use cases like internal company websites where some employees have deemed it "not suitable" for their web app (even when proven it works), and to use web apps that utilize APIs that I don't entirely like (namely, WebUSB - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/USB). But I keep a spare chromium around if I really need/want to use those apps. 99.9% of my browser use is Firefox.

I think the bigger push should be to get people using FireFox mobile. In my experience, it is a much better, more customizable browser than Chrome. It works well with my browsing habits and general use of my phone (screen UI positioning, gestures, etc.). The most obvious benefit is the extension support, which makes browsing some mobile websites tolerable. Showing people the difference between browsing genius.com (lyrics website) with and without ads usually shocks them. At times on Chrome, the web page is completely unusable due to ads and pop ups.

Firefox is fantastic!

Please try it out both if it would be your first time or if it has been years since the last time.

Also, if you do any web development at all please make sure to test your code on Firefox.

I keep having to phone up companies when their webpages don't work on Firefox and ask to talk to someone related to IT (yes, I do this and it does work).

It is a bit of an awkward discussion when I'm told that their developers have tested the code on Chrome, and I point out that Firefox and Safari also exist.

"Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data. There's been a lot of talk about websites tracking users using cookies, fingerprinting and other nefarious technologies that hurt your privacy. But owning the browser puts Google, Apple and Microsoft in a position where they don't even need those tricks. We need to use browsers that are independent, and right now that means Firefox."

Firefox is not independent. It is financed by Google and all web search queries on Firefox go to Google by default.

Mozilla has stated over and over that the web "must" have advertising. Sometimes advertising and privacy are incompatible. But to Mozilla, who is totally reliant on Google to survive, the two are _always_ compatible.

"Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data."

Where is this information coming from? The people who wrote Chrome for Google previously worked for Mozilla.

The annual salary of the CEO of Mozilla is over $600 million. How is Mozilla making this money. Donations?

Perhaps it is coming from sales of advertising services performed by their business partner, Google.

Browser vendors do not need to "sell personal data" in order to profit. For example, Google, Apple and Microsoft can sell advertising services.

Mozilla might be one of the few if only examples of a browser vendor selling personal data. Mozilla gets paid for sending search queries to Google.

Typo: s/600/6/

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...

While i wholeheartedly agree, these aren't really reasons. Playing devil's advocate reveals nothing useful.

"Its happened before"

That's not an argument, in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt. On top of that, the internet was very different back then.

"Its actually good"

I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser? I'm very comfortable in my opera/edge/chrome browser and I'd have to change my workflow.

> "Its happened before"

> That's not an argument

It's a subheading to "2. Browser engine monopoly". The subsection's purpose is describing how bad things were during the IE monopoly to reinforce that it's something to be avoided.

> in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt

That would be agreeing with the article, unless I misunderstand what you mean.

> On top of that, the internet was very different back then.

In a way that now makes it harder for truly new competing engines to pop up due to increased complexity of the web.

> I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser?

The points made in the article are:

* Increased privacy, opposed to willingly giving your data to an ad-tech company

* Helps avoid a browser engine monopoly which would effectively let Google dictate web standards

* It’s fast and has a nice user interface

Onto which I'd add:

* Content blockers work best on Firefox (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...), doubly so once Manifest V3 rolls out

* Allows more customization of interface and home page

* UX improvements, like the clutter-free reader mode, aren't vetoed to protect ad revenue as with Chrome (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467)

I use Firefox as my default browser on my desktop and netbook (Windows/Linux), as well as my phone (Android), since the addons I want to use are available there and there's no Manifest v3 weirdness. The UI and performance are both okay (though content process limit is no longer exposed through the UI which isn't that nice when your netbook has like 4 GB of RAM), I quite enjoy the DevTools in particular, even more so than the ones in Chromium browsers.

However, I got some Apple devices for development and it seems like Firefox on the desktop breaks access to some sites (Private Internet Access, the one that got bought out by Kape, either in OpenVPN or WireGuard mode, same issue), which was apparently a known issue last I tried figuring out what's up. So there, I kind of moved to Brave which seems pleasant for the most part. It's also honestly be nice if Windows let me get rid of Edge or replace it with Chromium/Brave as my secondary browser easily instead of sticking around as bloatware.

Maybe that's just me hating on software nowadays in general (since it isn't always very nice to the user, for a variety of reasons), but Firefox is pretty great when it works!

I don't understand. How does Firefox on desktop "break" access to some websites? They ban any IP address using Firefox desktop? And somehow detect when the same person uses a VPN service?

> I don't understand. How does Firefox on desktop "break" access to some websites?

When I checked, I think there were DNS resolution failures for some domains. This was regardless of whether PIA DNS or the existing DNS servers were used. It was also regardless of whether OpenVPN or WireGuard were used, or which VPN server was used - the only pre-requisite was that the VPN be active and Firefox be used on a MacBook in particular.

It was very odd and hasn't ever happened on Windows/Linux with Firefox either, nor did happen on the MacBook with Brave afterwards either. I didn't care enough to dig into it, but some people had similar issues:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/18nh...

https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/14yl...

It seems that the suggested "fix" that worked for the other person is to disable IPv6 altogether:

> This is a bug in Firefox, you can fix it by opening about:config in Firefox and set network.dns.disableIPv6 to true

Not like it makes me like Firefox any less, it's just odd that we get super random issues like that for relatively basic use cases (albeit maybe various VPN implementations aren't necessarily that common, who knows). Would be nice to live in a world where everything "just works", though.

I've been using Firefox since it was still called Phoenix.

It's amazing how we find ourselves in the same situation we did 20 years ago, at the mercy of a tech behemoth dominating how to access the Web, with the same Mozilla being the last man standing in the way of a true monopoly.

I may have some reservations about decisions and actions from Mozilla these past few years, but they do what they must to survive, and still provide a net benefit to our world.

I want to use Firefox so badly yet they make it so hard:

- Bookmark bar icons are not synced. So they’re the same gray blobs until I click on them one by one after connecting to VPNs they’re behind, and do that for every new installation. Not a problem with other browsers.

- Google Docs & Sheets render terribly due to kerning problems on canvas with 150% zoom on a HiDPI display. The text becomes almost unreadable. This is a 6 year old bug on Bugzilla.

Chrome became defacto because of techies and now techies are actively destroying the web by no longer swapping people to firefox, I guess it doesn't matter anymore, activism in general is dead, people just sit and let us all enter into a dystopia willingly.

Cannot wait until unskippable ads even with "Premium" are a thing, just like cable, and our community will have been complicit in enabling it

I predominantly use Vivaldi, although I occasionally use FF as well. Mull and Fennec are good choices too, and in the past I used Bromite.

I would switch when they only focus on developing browser, instead of putting their noses under some privacy violating company

I switched to the Arc browser this year, and I love it.

The best feature is that it auto-closes tabs. It makes having different spaces for work and personal browsing easy, and they are constantly adding convenience features.

It runs on Chromium. I don't know how that intersects with the ethical and standards issues around Chrome.

I agree with everything the Author said and I do have Firefox installed for those reasons although my main Browser is Brave (Win/Linux) and Safari (Mac). Nowadays Firefox is as good as the Chromium alternatives, there is no doubt on that.

The question is: What would it take for the majority of the Internet users (enterprise, users with low literacy, Developers, Powerusers, etc...) to switch to Firefox ?

15 years ago it was clear. Firefox was vastly superior to IE. Nowadays is not vastly superior to the competition, in fact, I cannot think of any major compelling reasons which would make all those groups of users to change.

As for me, I used Firefox before it was Firefox or Mozilla and I do plan to join the cause and use Firefox in 2024.

I switched to Firefox both at home and professionally in 2020. Previously, my web browsers have been (in chronological order): Netscape 3.X, Netscape 4, Opera, Phoenix, Konqueror, Firebird, Firefox, Chrome, and now back to Firefox.

I have exactly one very negative thing to say about Firefox. It absolutely sucks on machines with spinning rust and no SSD. It's the only piece of software I have that literally takes more than 2 minutes to start. With disk-IO pegged at 100% during the entire startup period.

I'm assuming it reads through the myriads of files it has stored on disk, and that this is rather slow due to seek-times on HDDs. However, this is the major point I have against Firefox.

Having used some machines with older HDDs up until recently, I can definitely sympathize with you there. If you go to `about:config` and change `cache.disk.enable` and `browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl` to false, your cache will be stored solely in RAM and this should speed up your experience somewhat.

I'll get downvoted for saying this but Safari isn't as bad as people say. The only reason I use chrome is for one singular extension for a single site (and they would release the extension on Safari if it didn't cost $100 a year to do so)

Love to... Just allow customizable hotkeys.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/customizable-hotkeys/id...

I use FF as daily but haven't been able to use any site with Cloudflare gating. I get agressive very slow loading captchas. But these same sites work fine in Chrome. I haven't figured out why but it's super annoying.

I despise CF with a passion.

We could have a great browser in Firefox but it's been infiltrated by the same corporate virus we see everywhere. They need to just stick to creating a browser first before other initiatives. They need to listen to their users.

I actually finally just switched to Chrome (I'm a long time Firefox user, all the way back to when it was called Firebird), because of this issue:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/microsoft-defende...

Windows Defender flags things in the Firefox cache as a Trojan. It probably isn't, and it could also have something to do with uBlock Origin, but until that is resolved (I'm keeping an eye on the above link) I can't risk it.

i haven't seen that at all. Perhaps a refresh, clean install after deleting the hidden app folders in home?

I haven't done a re-install, but deleting the cache folder alone doesn't make it go away. Starting Firefox re-creates the folder obviously, and Defender gets triggered again.

If you like customization, I recommend the Firefox fork Floorp. It's the only fork where you can hide the native horizontal tab bar and use a vertical tab instead. And instead of using Tree Style Tab, try Sidebery.

Only issues I’ve run into since switching this month is just some weird jank from 1pass not always filling in forms. It’s been a while since I last used Firefox and I’m very pleased with how much it’s improved.

I've been a happy user of desktop and mobile Firefox for about ~3 years now. If you take the time to configure Firefox for Android to suit your needs and wants, it's a very formidable browser.

I did it for ideological reasons. I don't want Chromium strong-arming web standards (I really do hope it's not too late for that).

The only switch I've been unable to finish is the default search engine to something else. As much as Google's search results have become somewhat useless, sometimes DDG returns unrelated results. Bing as well. I've not yet tried Kagi.

I wish Firefox would support faster profile switching. I consult and have multiple customers who all insist I use their Gmail or Outlook accounts, so I need about 6 profiles on the go. I can't use containers because it means I can't default, for example Google to my Personal container, which I want in my standard profile.

Having to create shortcuts to load each profile or keep about:profiles open is frustrating compared to the Chrome experience.

It's not enough to stop me using FF as my daily driver, but it is enough to stop my partner using it for theirs.

Switched to Firefox a month or two ago, mostly for ublock origin on android, and unlimited history (seriously, why is this not the standard?)

I've tried to like it but honestly it's been painful. MacOS Sonoma seems to have a hover bug, which has been unresolved through the last 3 bug fix updates. Performance is "fine" but seems to lag with many tabs open which was never an issue in chrome (this is on an M2 pro!) PDF reader also seems significantly slower as well. At this point I'm considering going back to chrome.

Unlimited history is nice but I hate how history works out of the box. I might be doing something wrong but ctrl+h pops up a sidebar which shows every single website visited today in no discernible order. I've learned about ctrl+shift+h which is better but even there, the UI is a bit lacking compared to what Chrome has out of the box. Is there anything I can do to improve this?

There's a filter at the top right if I remember right, change it to Last visited

Have you tried Brave?

The Chrome web development tools are so much better than Firefox's

Firefox is my daily driver on my Ubuntu laptop, but for video streams and Google Meet (including virtual background[1]), I can see it still isn't utilizing my Intel GPU as much as Chromium (beta channel) does, so I split my usage between the two browsers to reduce the CPU usage for these specific cases.

I've followed the basic recommendations (from e.g. Arch Linux wiki) but still getting less utilization with Firefox according to intel_gpu_top.

[1] Well, at least virtual background works on Firefox now after their GSuite improvements.

> Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data.

Firefox makes almost all of their money from Google, so...

> If that’s the case, web developers can easily write sites that work on all browsers

Not sure what the point is here but if everyone is using Chromium/Webkit obviously this issue goes away too.

And, oh, that's it. I thought this was going to have like... a list of reasons. This feels like a very odd post to be #1 on HN right now, it contains almost no information.

I enjoy Firefox. Occassionally, I run into issues using it. I attribute this to bad website design as this often occurs with government, and large bureaucratic organizations.

Already did a few years ago. My only current annoyances with it are that the NixOS search page is blank in it for some reason, at least on Nightly (https://search.nixos.org/packages) and that I can't access its password store on iOS. (iOS added Google Chrome password access from any app's GUI right around the time I switched from Chrome to Firefox... UGH)

I would but I don't want to support the Mozilla Foundation

Why?

Maybe use the unbranded build of firefox? It has the great side effect of allowing you to actually edit and install extensions/add-ons without having to use Mozilla's security theater automated signing portal.

When some rare website doesn't work in my daily driver freedoms-respecting browser I'll load up Mozilla Firefox unbranded to do what needs to be done then close it.

To Mozilla: In 2024, please switch to WebKit.

Gecko had a good and honorable run, but no longer sparks joy. It's not a differentiator, which means that the resources you're applying to it are a waste of time and money.

Please thank Gecko for serving its purpose in our lives and let it go, before its reputation gets worse. Firefox's market share has slipped so far that most web developers no longer test with it.

Adopt and contribute to WebKit. Focus on things that matter.

Mentioning Gecko repeatedly without mentioning WebRender, the rendering engine that many users are using today in Firefox, and which will become the default/only rendering engine at some point in the future,[0] makes it seem that you have no idea about what you are speaking of.

  0. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where

Gecko is the browser engine.

WebRender is a component of Gecko, specifically a GPU-based 2D rendering engine. It is not a browser engine.

Yes, WebRender makes up the compositor portion of the browser rendering engine. A very large, critical portion of it. Thus, saying "Gecko had a good and honorable run" is disingenuous to the large-scale changes and progress the developers have made (and continue to make) on the rendering engine.

I think you think I hate Gecko. In fact, I've used it since it was NGLayout and think it's one of the most important pieces of software in computing history. I have deep respect for the world-class engineers working on WebRender and other Gecko components.

I simply think that it's time has come. Remember that Mozilla itself once intended to replace Gecko with Servo.

I have no doubt that WebRender is brilliant, but WebRender will not save Gecko, and Gecko will not save Firefox.

If Firefox is worth saving — and I think that with hard choices, its decline can be reversed — then Gecko and its components are non-differentiating ballast that must be dropped if the balloon is to get over the mountain. IMHO, of course.

I'm still very happy with firefox. Not as much with Mozilla as an organisation though. They are losing focus. They're still playing the big corp game when at this stage in their marketshare decline they should focus much more on the grassroots movements of privacy.

And their attempts at detaching from the big Google deal are minimal. A deal with mullvad that's not really interesting for example. I'd much rather see a paid premium sync or something. Or something like iCloud private relay for web (which is much better for privacy than a simple VPN like they're offering)

But as a browser it's great. It offers some great features I didn't see anywhere else like the web containers which I can no longer do without. And the real full ublock origin, bypass paywalls etc.

The reason I switched to Firefox was for plugins. Then I switched to chrome when an update killed all my plugins and settings for them. Every time I tried Firefox it seems to do it again and again so I'm on ungoogled chromium until there's a good reason to switch. I used librewolf or iceweasel occasionally but there's not a good reason to switch since plugins don't delete themselves on chrome (as often).

I switched back to Firefox in 2016 when Google began hampering uBlock Origin.

I have Chrome installed on my work PC for the one or two work-related sites that just won't work properly without pants-down mode.

On personal equipment, I just use Firefox (on Linux). The sites that don't work properly are few an far between, and the usually don't work because they're waiting on a number of third-party tracker scripts to load, which I disallow.

Ive tried many times in the last 10 years. Whenever I do, FireFox slows down after a few days. And then just has issues I've never seen on chrome before

I am on Mac and while Safari is still much more snappy, more and more websites are a topping to work on Safari but work on Firefox.

If only Mozilla thought just switching to making every release a major number release wasn’t most of the job done.

Besides with every release something I had set just days back changes. And the experience doesn’t feel seamless at all. There are pages, popups with every release. So all this tells Mozilla learns nothing.

I have.

I recently switched from Windows to Linux (Windows 11 drove me to and I'm thankful) and Firefox was installed by default. As a result, I decided to give it a try and I'm happy I did; it's far better than the Firefox of yore and it tries to be more user friendly than the commercial browsers we have today. There are still sites that break in unexpected ways with Firefox, but it's now my daily driver.

I’m probably one of the few users in the Apple ecosystem that uses Firefox for desktop but safari for mobile. Was really into Firefox on both, but ended up switching to safari for mobile because it’s less hassle to use UI wise + more feature rich esp when mobile typing is slow. Definitely losing out on the whole syncing benefits. If Firefox mobile supported adblockers and other extensions I’d make the switch.

I got a new laptop and didn’t install Chrome. I don’t miss it at all. The only sites that are slow on Safari and Firefox are Google related. Go figure.

Always used Firefox and always will while it lasts. But this year I found out that Google Maps is getting really broken to the point where I have to run chromium just to use it. Anyone having the same issue / knows how to fix this ? Pretty sure its just a case of Google wanting me to migrate but that won't happen.

(While OSM and alternatives are probably quite good I'd like to keep using GMaps though)

I use Firefox, switched this year for the same reason.

If I were rich, I would buy Mozilla, strip everything out but Firefox, and fund its development, even at a loss.

I use different browser with multiple profiles, so i've a clean history and separation of work. Though i love some basic features like searching tabs, it was very limiting wrt privacy/blocking.

I've tried my best to adopt, the major issue was default color management and couldn't disable it. It keeps changing my display (brightens). I wish a browser releases a feature to consume less memory!

I found Firefox to be much more response when operating lots of tabs and opening and closing tabs quickly with keyboard shortcuts on Windows. My direct comparison is Microsoft Edge (Chromium based) which is noticeably sluggish on CTRL-W and then trying to type a new address.

Even after days of usage, my Firefox process might grow to 3-4gb of ram usage with no noticeable performance penalty.

I do use Firefox as my default browser (Linux).

My only complaint is that from time to time they see the need to change the user interface and break compatibility with whatever CSS hacks you've had to use to get it the way you like (e.g. tab position).

I wish they'd make UI layout/customization config-driven rather than relying on CSS, and commit to backwards compatibility of any such config.

I switched to Firefox as the default mobile browser on my android phone and the experience is excellent. I have not missed Chrome one bit.

I wonder how is mozilla VPN business going.

It was obvious to me that they should have gone into that business sooner as VPN are all about trust and they are one the few orgs committed to privacy so they can turn that trust into something valuable to them. But I am yet to see an ad for their VPN product while on the other hand I am bombarded by ads for SurfShark and NordVPN.

I switched to Firefox on android when Chrome removed the "open on new tab" menu item and then ignored everyone's complaints about it for a year. It's decent although it hangs for 10 seconds or so on first startup (the fault of adblock I suspect), and sometimes hangs for half a minute or so during usage. Still worth it for adblock though.

My main browser has been firefox for awhile now and I've been slowly migrating to chrome for performance reasons. firefox is just not good with memory in my experience over the last few years. I have to restart it a few times a week so my computer becomes usable again ;( i wish this wasn't the case because i don't really want to migrate

It's a nice sentiment but Firefox' market share has dropped to 3%. It's going to take more than a blog post scolding readers about ethics to reverse that trend.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2017...

I was using it, though I _think_ it was causing intermittent hangs and crashes on my Win 11 machine. It's hard to be sure, because it was so hard to repro, and could've been due to something else just interacting with FF badly. But it seems like Brave doesn't have the problem.

Which is a shame, I'd like to use FF, and still do on other machines.

But even with Firefox your whole activity is being tracked. There is no privacy anymore. Your data is being collected massively to build a map to identify individuals. You can't protect yourself anymore from being a victim. This is so utterly bad that I even would recommend/advise to not use any computer or the Internet in total anymore.

I've been using Firefox on the PC and phone for years now. I had the temptation a couple of years ago to use Chrome due to some issues I had on Linux (I don't remember what exactly) but then I concluded the obvious: using a browser made by a company that profits mainly on abusing user's privacy? Nah, I think I'm gonna pass.

This could convince some more people:

Google settles $5 billion privacy lawsuit over tracking people using 'incognito mode'

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/30/1222268415/google-settles-5-b...

I've been using firefox exclusively for years.

No, slack.com, I will not switch to chrome. Fix your "huddles" to support Firefox.

For some reason, on my Windows 10 laptop that I use for music production (Ryzen 3500U, Vega 8), Firefox installed from Microsoft store takes 5-10 seconds to start, while Edge starts instantly.

I always liked Firefox, both practically and ideologically, but the annoyance is so high I never use it from that particular laptop.

If anyone knows the cause or a fix, please share.

cause: Edge browser is started when Windows boots up, it sits there started but invisible, first window open is fast. It adds up to your windows start time and memory consumption.

solution: start firefox during windows startup, too.

https://support.mozilla.org/gl/questions/1085268

however to start it invisible and behave like Edge, it may take additional tweaks. of course, it costs extra startup time and memory. Also, you can switch off Edge boot-time startup, if you want.

It's a bad situation because of Mozilla management's incompetence, and the lack of alternatives to Firefox exacerbates the issue. Instead of investing in 'Ai' perhaps they should focus on a massive marketing campaign for their main product, which is what the majority of people here are primarily interested in.

Use Firefox if only to put up a decent fight against Chrome's massive play to control your data and the ad ecosystem.

The only reason I don’t is because, when I’m on my MacBook, I’m worried about sacrificing battery life by not using safari

Mozilla is a political organization. No thanks.

I’ll stick to safari, chrome, and brave. I’ll drop chrome if it ever removes v2 extensions.

I switched to Firefox in 2019. But the recent UI changes through me off.

I'm now on Vivaldi and loving it! Both macOS and Android.

I might move for a slightly weird reason. I have Chrome and Firefox and tend to use whatever's the less annoying. Recently there's a weird glitch in Chrome that in Twitter that if you scroll down by hitting space it kind of slowly keeps scrolling. Doesn't happen in Firefox so there you go.

I would switch when they only focus on developing browser, instead of burning money on stuff that doesn’t matter

I've been using Firefox since about 2008. I've never had a problem that switching to Chrome fixed, and only encountered a few old clunky sites and apps that were IE specific. Those sites are so old they're looking for the wrong user agent and don't work correctly in Edge either.

Long time firefox user, absolutely love it. My only grudge is that on Android some tab will just randomly go black and blank. This problem has been there for at least 1 year, I think it has something to do with os memory collection but I can't prove anything.

And I still use chrome, because of the Chromecast.

Why are Mac users forgetting the hen laying the golden egg aka Safari. It has impressive performance on Mac OS. I just ran browserbench and Chrome and gang do not even come close to the performance. There are enough Mac OS deployed out there to make a dent in the Chrome monopoly.

The main short coming in firefox for me is the ability to create different profiles for different use cases like one for personal and one for work etc.

It is doable but is hidden behind special settings:/// etc sort of and switching between them also requires something similar.

Firefox Multi-Account Containers is far superior to multiple profiles, IMO.

They are not a like for like alternative.

Profiles allow for greater separation of browsing personas: I can have a different set of passwords, extensions, bookmarks per persona I have like Work, Personal, Focus etc...

And while Firefox does have profiles, its not a great user experience. Theres no quick switching, the UI to access it feels outdated, and in general as much as it pains me to say it, Google has done a great job at implementing it.

I'm sure Firefox will get there, but as of right now its a sub-par experience.

Multi Account Containers don’t sync with Firefox Sync. I assigned hundreds of websites to various containers only to lose them all when I rebuilt my Mac. Safari, Chrome, Edge all have this functionality and until Mozilla add this, Firefox is DOA for me.

Switched back last year and even use their services, even one pain one: firefox relay to mask my email

*paid

Gladly, provided that Mozilla gives me a way to install 1) my own custom web extensions and 2) custom default search engines on standard vanilla Firefox WITHOUT their involvement.

Until then, I'll stay with browsers that actually respect my authority as the user thank you very much.

Until my Windows became unusable, I was using Chrome about 90% of the time and Firefox about 10%. Since then I've been trying to get along with Ubuntu Linux only, and it came with Firefox. Haven't even installed Chrome yet, and I don't think I will.

i really like firefox to shine. but it’s very ugly and turns me off every time i use it. it's been around forever but the UI has never looked good, I’d argue that in recent years it’s gotten even uglier.

recently i’ve been using duck duck go browser on macos, it’s literally my main browser for the past 6 months and I’m very happy with it’s simple and beautiful UI.

i mentioned duck duck go browser because of multiple reason, first of all, there are many of us who are willing to ditch chrome, and a lot of us can live without all the goodies that come with chrome, a lot of us can live with a browser that is a bit slower than chrome, but i’m sure there are also a lot of us who cannot force themselves to deal with an ugly browser.

There is no reason to use Chrome. It might be more performant, have a better UI, whatever, I don’t care.

It is developed by Google, the number one enemy of the open web.

Use Firefox. To be honest, I always felt a little dirty when using Chrome so I always ended up switching back to Firefox.

I think 2024 is going to be ruled by the Arc Browser when it is fully released for Windows.

I use it on Mac and it's amazing, but as soon as it's available on Windows, I think people will start recommending it everywhere and everyone is going to start using it.

https://arc.net/

At the end of the day, Arc is a Chromium browser with a novel UI paradigm. I used it as my daily driver for six months, but I concluded that whatever problem it solves isn't really worth solving. Rather, it doesn't offer enough of a difference to me to warrant switching from Safari or Chromium.

I use Firefox exclusively, and I love the Rust language that took shape at Mozilla, but it makes me sad to see HN censor comments that point out Mozilla's despicable behavior when they fired Brandon Eich because he didn't espouse gay marriage.

He actively gave to organizations that were formed to restrict freedom.

And the LBGTQ community, we're not going to sit and be quiet about those sorts of things.

> He actively gave to organizations that were formed to restrict freedom.

> And the LBGTQ community, we're not going to sit and be quiet about those sorts of things.

You seriously don't see the irony in this at all?

Retaliation against someone for what they do in their personal lives is... what, exactly, if not restricting freedom?

Purporting to speak for an entire community without any authority or consent is... what, exactly, if not restricting freedom?

Workplace retaliation for private lawful activities should never occur. That seems like a principle that the GLB community should embrace.

Do you not know what protected statuses are? There's a reason those exist. There's a reason it's allowed to penalize someone for being bigoted but not for being gay. This is not a symmetrical/both-sides thing.

I can't quite tell if you're trying to discuss policy (which is currently being discussed in this thread) or the law.

If you're trying to discuss the law, then your summary is both paradigmatically flawed (conflation of legislative versus constitutional protections, protected status versus suspect classification, etc.) and factually incorrect (being gay was not a protected class in 2008 in almost any jurisdiction, and making a political donation is not an action subject to the Civil Rights Act).

If instead you're trying to discuss principles, then your explicit embrace of being unprincipled seems... odd. Principles always apply symmetrically and to both sides. That's what makes them principles.

You're trying to treat a game theory problem as a philosophical consistency problem.

We have a group of Christian Dominionists that would kill us if they could, and only those consequences stop them. (And sometimes, such as the Pulse shooting, not even then.)

In my lifetime, we had these same people saying "thank God for AIDS" and fighting funding for research because they cheered our deaths. There is no moral equivalence here.

Then there is a group that wouldn't explicitly kill us, but actively fights against us having equal rights. Prop 8 was exactly that. Prop 8 was forged to actively tear families like mine apart. We were (and are!) being attacked and philosophical consistency has little use in a firefight.

Omar Mir Seddique Mateen was not a "Christian Dominionist" and I'm pretty sure you knew that already.

"These same people"—which in this thread means Brendan Eich—did not say "thank God for AIDS." And I'm pretty sure you knew that already too.

Please stop.

Did you see "Then there's another group" there?

The difference in the groups are a function of what they think they can get away with. Do you dispute that Prop 8 was an effort to tear gay families apart?

> Do you dispute that Prop 8 was an effort to tear gay families apart?

Yes, for three reasons.

First, the text of the ballot initiative said and did no such thing; indeed, it left domestic partnerships untouched, which apport "the same rights, protections, and benefits, [as well as] the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties" as marriage. https://web.archive.org/web/20091116180023/http://www.leginf...

Second, Prop 8 did pass and was the law of the land until 2013, and—predictably, since, as stated above, the text said no such thing—it had no such effect.

Lastly, when not explicit in the text, divining the intent of millions of people who voted for the initiative is an exercise in folly.

By contrast, death threats and anthrax hoaxes tend to have a pretty negative effect on families. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_Proposition...

Just to be clear, it is readers themselves who flag and bury comments on HN

Submissions about Firefox, Mozilla, or Rust that get a lot of comments often remind me how I wish this site had a setting like "showdead", except it disabled all moderation.

With that setting enabled, there would be no grayed-out comments, no dead comments, no reordering, and no whatever else might be done based on a comment's ratings.

It's annoying how what are often perfectly reasonable comments are obscured or hidden, and it's also annoying having to work around that obstruction just to read them.

How would you want the comments to be ordered then, chronologically? Or are you saying you want them ordered by rating, but not colourized or minimized? Note also that you can vouch dead comments with the vouch button if you believe they're reasonable.

Which readers? I've been a reader for years, yet I cannot flag any comments.

You need at least 31 karma.

I'm using Firefox everywhere I can, but in all honesty, this whole flagging issue is making me want to switch to Brave.

Dude, he wanted to outright ban same-sex marriage.

The Web is the single most successful application platform of our day and age: it’s free, open, and unencumbered, and it’s cross-platform, available on expensive iPhones to sub-$250 Android phones just the same. Let’s make sure it stays that way.

My main gripe with Firefox on Windows:

You can’t drag a tab out of one window and hold it against the side of the screen to snap that tab there as a new window. Chrome lets you do that, and I use that feature all the time.

I’ve mostly gotten used to everything else at this point.

I will when FF doesn't regularly lose my sessions. Thanks.

Dunno how bugs like this continue to exist.

I've had a couple "scares" like that, i.e. an entire window full of open tabs disappearing (usually closing it by mistake), but normally they come back with just a Ctrl+Shift+T. Not saying that's what happened to you, just sharing my experience.

I switched (back) to Firefox a few years ago, and love it.

My only complaint is that it forces me to restart the program occasionally, for updates. Does anyone know why this is done? Is it a technical necessity? Why can't I postpone it for a few hours?

I would have switched to Firefox a while ago as my primary, except that it doesn't support PWA features in the same way as Chrome.

I use PWA apps regularly. Once that feature is available and capable, I'll gladly run to the Firefox team.

The killer feature that everyone is waiting for Firefox is... "chromium tab". If I can open a "chromium tab" inside of Firefox for some sites that work only on chromium browsers I swear I will not look back :)

I’m online a lot and I go to a lot of different websites. I believe people when they say they’ve had issues with Firefox, but personally this is never been an issue I’ve only had to turn off ublock a few times over several years.

In 2024, font rendering in Firefox on Windows is quite bad compared to Chromium based browsers. You can see it a lot with Microsoft websites like outlook and azure devops. I tried, but switched back to Chrome (Ungoogled Chromium)

Firefox needs bookmarkable containers. It is almost there ...

Bookmarkable Containers are opening bookmarks in a specific container. And I don't like the hacked extension that implements this feature as a workaround using container sites.

Can't you do this by telling a container to auto open certain URLs?

Yes, but when it comes to links like outlook and gmail, where i want to keep separate work accounts and personal accounts.

Makes sense. Good example.

Someone yesterday mentioned this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c...

As I understand it, that would allow you to add a bookmark for `ext+container:name=MyContainer&url=https://mozilla.org`, which would open mozilla.org in MyContainer.

Not a fail. It has the annoyance of after clicking the bookmark, it closes the tab I am in and opening a new tab. This cannot be reversed by ctrl+shift+t. I end up losing my history of the closed tab.

Otherwise, it works.

For the Firefox fans here who care deeply about stemming its market share losses and keeping it viable consider this goal.

Please switch at least one other person to Firefox - anyone from your friends, family, colleagues etc.

I did this with my spouse last year

I tried so hard earlier this year to move back to FF from Chrome. I actually found the desktop experience great but the mobile app on iOS was so clunky, and I rely enough on sync, that I had to move back after a few months.

yes, i use firefox too and i love it. however i recently learned vivaldi has tab tiling and it's WAY better for me to use at work because i can see multiple tabs at once. wish firefox could implement this feature too

Tab management in Vivaldi is excellent, it's the main reason I can't switch

Vivaldi has been my browser for quite a while now, the customizability is great. Many of the features can be replicated through extensions, but the cohesive experience is unmatched. The bookmarks, window, and the (new) sessions are extremely useful and make tab management a breeze.

Mozilla and me are tight. There's always a few complaints, but until there is another alternative that respects me I won't even consider changing to another browser. -written on Android Firefox Nightly 123.0a1

If it weren’t for the unique to Firefox audio/video sync problem, I would.

In 2022, I switched from Firefox to Safari and haven't looked back. In 2024, I'll be staying put.

Either I just don't go to them, or I have really good luck, because none of the sites I visit are "broken."

My company's antivirus for some reason blocks "firefox.exe" . Is there an (updated) recompiled version somewhere with another application name ? Palemoon seems to be quite out of date.

I will never switch back to Firefox. Not until Mozilla as an organization fundamentally changes.

They pretend to be the "good guys" but they're a very different organization than they were 20 years ago.

Nah, too many things break or are weird. I don't care if its because Google is a bad company and hates Firefox, I have no bone in this fight, I just want to browse the web without issues.

My family uses Apple's keypass for everything password. Is there an easy way to get passwords working like Safari?

I currently do Search Passwords, Search website, Copy password, Paste in Firefox manually.

The easiest way to get the easy of use of Safari's password manager in a different browser would be to use a different password manager that works in other browsers. Common recommendations are 1Password (my personal favorite), BitWarden, etc.

This might not fulfill your needs though, since it sounds like you'd like to use the Safari password manager in a different browser, which is not possible outside of the Chrome extension [0] that Apple provides. This means that it wouldn't work on Firefox.

[0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-wachtwoorden...

There is not, unfortunately.

Apple has an extension for Chrome ("iCloud Passwords") that lets you use the keychain passwords there, but nothing for Firefox. It's less-restrictive than it used to be, since the extension used to only support Chrome on Windows, but they gave in back in July of this year and made it easier to use Chrome on Mac.

Apparently, Firefox removed a bunch of password-related APIs back in Firefox 57 that broke some existing keychain extensions[1], so it might not be Apple's fault that they've not provided a Firefox extension. There's no progress on Firefox bugs related to making such an extension possible again, that I could see.[2]

[1]: https://github.com/jfitzell/mozilla-keychain/issues/88

[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650212

Firefox is clunky, slow and bloated on mobile. That is my deal breaker.

Not only switch, find a way to contribute too, as this is an open source project. One can start with something small, like translations, answering to questions on forums, or triaging bugs.

In the near future I will probably stop using the Web as much. I'm certain now that soon the Web will at best be about as open and user focused as Android and iOS are today.

I’ll switch to Firefox when they fire their overpaid CEO who keeps getting hefty pay raises despite Firefox losing market share and whose big idea for revenue is “AI services”.

You have no issues with Google? Every exec is paid just right, every endeavour is pure and good?

What tends to rub people the wrong way in situations like this is hypocrisy. Google hasn't claimed to be a virtuous nonprofit, so people accept it when they do shitty things. The Mozilla Foundation is an ideological nonprofit, so people hold it to a higher standard.

This may or may not be productive, but it's how people tend to work. :D

I can appreciate that to an extent

Though there’s hypocrisy in only critically analysing the actions of one party and giving the other a free pass too

I switched to firefox nighly in Android and I don't think I'm going back to Chrome. The amount of ads, tracking and the overall experience was getting out of hand.

No, everybody please switch to Chrome and then sue Google for creating a browser monopoly. Firefox and Mozilla are paid by Google only to prevent this from happening.

FF is great! The only stopper for me to uninstall chrome is google meets. Background blur only works occasionally on FF but it has gotten a lot better this year.

What bothers me is that all their recent ad campaigns just revolve around the premise of "We are not Chrome", which really doesn't sell to me.

I hope that Firefox on iOS gains extensions soon. That's the main reason I still stick to Edge. It has AdBlock built-in and it syncs with my desktop.

The only way I'm getting off Firefox would be if google actually makes the Web completely DRM'd and i can't do banking without chrome

I've used Firefox forever. I've tried for many years to convert people to it...but they can't live without "muh chrome".

Question regarding the Mac version: Is it more battery-consuming because its core on Mac is still Intel-machine-code-based and not ARM-based?

Firefox on ARM Macs runs as an ARM process, not an x86 process.

I used Firefox as my primary browser until last 2 year (chrome was performing better). I will give a try again for sure (Debian and Mac user)

Yep, I realized I was using Chrome out of nothing but habit and convivence. Made a concerted effort to switch to Firefox, Mullvad, and Tor.

I wish I could! I can’t until they have better account/profile switching. I use that on Chrome heavily for test users and debugging.

check out firefox containers. You can launch a specific container as a new tab with the hotkey "Ctrl+shift+#", depending on what you have set.

I have ctrl+shift+1 for personal, 2 for work, 3 for banking.

It's a super rapid way to run multiple contexts in the same window. Really recommend it.

Will in 2024 Firefox finally start supporting desktop installation for PWA apps? I'm not going back to Electron crap for it.

Unfortunately, no matter how evil Chromium gets, I just cannot switch to Firefox. I've been using it for 15 years already.

I started using brave a few years ago and I just can’t really switch back tbh, but if I could I would switch back to firefox.

I gave it a fair shot but somehow I ended up with Edge as my full time browser…

I am looking forward to Arc on Windows, it’s been nice on MacOS

I use Firefox for everything. Chrome for the Google products except search. I have secondary Google account for Firefox.

Does anyone know of a way to replace the browser and search engine of the search bar at the bottom of an Android phone?

Firefox provides a search widget

In 2024, please support translation on iOS. How can there be zero translation support for iPhones and iPads?

Can Firefox allow me to kill individual tabs without closing them? It's my favourite feature on Chrome.

Navigate to about:processes and click the X to your heart's content (it's also from Tools : Browser Tools : Task Manager )

Thank you! I do believe I'm ready to switch!

If Firefox makes a New Year’s resolution to fix the horrible battery drain while streaming video on my laptop whether running on Windows or Linux, I’ll make a resolution to switch to it when it is fixed. This has been an issue for years so I’m not holding my breath. Yes I have tried it again recently and no I’m not going to play around with flags trying to get it working acceptably.

In 2023 I had to switch my work web browser to Brave because Slack decided to stop working on Firefox.

When they will support installing progressive web apps (PWA) like Chrome does, I'll consider it.

Firefox for Android is a big ux improvement between adblock and dark eyes.

There is one annoying rendering issue though

I made sure all new computers at my work include Firefox. I also encourage staff to use adblockers.

Here's a tip re. a nice built-in function:

about:memory

You can reclaim quite a lot of memory there when your Firefox seems laggy.

I went librewolf and love it. Highly recommend everyone switch to a firefox variant.

In 2024, I'd like to not fry my battery when browsing a simple website. Thanks.

I'm really getting tired of hearing the excuses from really smart people in tech sticking with Chrome.

Yes, you will find a thousand excuses to not switch.

Yes, you will find things that are worse (you will also find things that are better).

Yes, things are different.

Just suck it up and make the switch. You're smart. You'll adapt. We'll all be better for it.

There are plenty of alternative browsers based on Chromium that are way better than Firefox, and I don't see any good reason to switch on it.

I went away from Firefox a few years ago and am very happy about it.

I also think that the "free web" arguments are bullshit. Blink is open source, so any wrongdoing from Google can be undone.

An organization like Mozilla that is able to develop and maintain his own engine could achieve the same results by forking Blink. It would probably reduce the costs by more than 10, without any ethical compromise, resulting in a far better browser overall.

If they wanted it, they could lead the way to bridge projects like ungoogled-chromium or the various attempts at reviving android extensions in a consistent and ethical fork. Probably even convince others like Vivaldi, Edge, Opera or even Apple to join the initiative.

I would happily switch, but Firefox’s tabs are not sufficient for 2023. Vertical tabs are essential for me, and none of the Firefox plugin-based workarounds come anywhere close to Edge (and Brave). I prefer Firefox as a browser, but as a tool it’s growing more and more outdated.

Not until they do better in power draw. Safari or Orion for me until then.

I switched to Firefox two years ago and never looked back.

Don’t even have Chrome installed.

I have been using Firefox for more than 20 years and I am happy as ever.

No. Please switch to a firefox spinoff. Mozilla can fuck off and die.

I switched to waterfox after the whole ads-in-your-address-bar debacle.

I'm already switched over! I can't switch over any farther!

If you’re not careful, you might wrap around to IE.

for mobile, fennec is a great firefox alternative.

https://www.devx.com/terms/fennec/

Chrome feels so much better to me, I can't imagine switching

Used it religiously since 2002 when it was then called Mozilla.

I am not going back to Firefox anytime soon after they kicked out Brendan Eich for his personal views. Whether we agree or not with his personal views, open source should not be influenced by political agenda, neither by wokeness

Being publicly against same sex marriage is a business liability in San Francisco.

at the time he made the donation, it was the majority opinion in California. He even said that he had changed his mind/opinion had evolved. But it wasn't enough

They have customers all over the world. It was a bad business decision, regardless of the local liability. They could have just swept it under the rug like they do at almost every other company.

It was more than a personal view. He paid a lobbying campaign for a policy that is diametrically opposed to Mozilla's organisational views on diversity.

A CEO should stand for the values their organisation represents.

Is there a way to use Apple's keychain with FF?

1. pwas 2. Filesystem and other APIs for extensions.

I gave Firefox many chances during the past 5 years but every time had to switch back to Chrome/Edge because many sites I use are just optimised for Chrome. Sad but it's a fact.

Firefox seems slow for me, Chrome is blazing fast.

Chrome is the only way to do Chromecasting, right?

as a frontend web developer there's a reason I use Chrome and bought an iPhone. It's so I see what my users are going to see

The list of bullshit Mozilla has tried to pull over the years weighs heavily, and although I have had plenty of complaints with Chrome's decisions also, Mozilla's strike me as much worse.

Not interested until they completely disavow those strategies in a convincing way.

We know they know we know. Google is evil but the uproar about Mozilla is about the fifth columners trying to wreck it. Like, our last hope with a consumer facing browser that has any hope of keeping up with Google spamming disfeutures into the web space.

Well I don't know what you mean by fifth columners, this is just my own opinion but it's quite widespread because they really sold out people's trust. The thing, though, is that Mozilla is in the perfect spot to get better, any time they want. Which means I'm not personally letting off the hook. Whereas there's no point hoping for any change from Google.

I never stopped using it. Firefox is great

In 2024, please fix tab tearing. Thanks!

If you use firefox, consider donating!

Firefox is my main browser it’s great.

I'll give it yet a another go...

The Firefox Developer Edition rocks!!

What do you think about ARC browser?

The Mozilla foundation pays millions to its CEO [1] while reducing funding to Firefox development and Firefox market share is falling year after year, but hey, please switch to Firefox. Right. Let's face the reality: Firefox is dead and Mozilla itself is putting the final nail in the coffin.

[1] https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-...

No. Plus the browser engines argument is...meh. Webkit and Chromium are open source. Why not build on top of that? What's the added value of having more than one rendering engine? All the arguments are talking about major browsers. Why not mention other, non major browsers? Oh I know why, because those are actually pretty decent alternatives and you wouldn't want to have to explain why Firefox against those as your case would be weaker.

I got so tired of dealing with Google's AMP so I switched to Firefox just on mobile. It's fine, tho the url bar doesn't work as well as on chrome. Other than that I've gotten used to it well enough. I'm starting to hate everything Google does. All their products are steadily getting worse and worse as they get more bloated. I'll consider switching to Firefox on desktop.

Lots of us are tech "influencers". Lets use that influence to spread Firefox.

Need my icloud passwords

I won't, thank you. I'm happy with Chrome. Yes, I also have YouTube premium.

YouTube Premium works fine on Firefox.

I'll switch to Firefox when they get proper vertical tabs like Edge's. I know Microsoft Edge has a really bad reputation, but damn it I can't live without its vertical tabs, and I can disable most of the idiotic AI crap. I know there are plugins, but they all feel quite hacky and are simply not as good.

I finally got sick of a lot of the crap that was getting added to edge (like the stupid button on the right that opens the right toolbar), plus I didn’t like MS stealing my data.

Not a day goes by that I don’t strongly miss vertical tabs though.

> I finally got sick of a lot of the crap that was getting added to edge (like the stupid button on the right that opens the right toolbar)

FYI you can disable it, along with most of the additional button things.

I miss chrome cast.

Thanks for the reminder, I will give it another go - the latest Chrome redesign looks bad to my eyes, and I’m on the fence about whether I enjoy Arc or not. I’m still forever grateful to FF for leading us out of the dark days of IE6

I like Safari

Eh, I tried unfortunately and it's not the same. Especially with video processing, my older Macbook Pro heats up very quickly when using Firefox vs Chrome.

Firefox's history bar is still superior though

FF is great!

Done.

Maybe Arc.

From yesterday's Firefox thread:

Firefox has multiple compelling reasons to use it:

  Sync[1] only what you allow, bookmarks/history/extensions/etc
  Containers keep sites separated nicely[2]
  Tree Style Tabs[3]
  uBlock Origin on Android[4]
  Open Source since 1998!
  Not based on Chromium

[1] Be wary of sync on a fresh Linux install, it might sync the default bookmarks and merge them with your own. Not a huge deal but definitely an annoyance.

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

[3] Tree Style Tabs requires several extra steps to remove the tabs at the top of the window. You have to set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true, then create a "chrome" (lol![5]) directory in your profile and add a userChrome.css file to it. https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab

[4] uBlock Origin on mobile web makes a massive difference. You can even use the same rules that modify the style of the page you're viewing, such as setting HN to a dark mode via:

  news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(95%) hue-rotate(200deg); background: white)

[5] I'm aware that the Mozilla UI was called Chrome at one point, not sure if it still is.

On [5]:

It's not that Mozilla named their UI "Chrome", but that "chrome" is a graphical user interface word. For a browser it refers to the stuff around the web page content, but it's more general than browser use (you could refer to Blender's chrome around the 3D viewports to refer to its toolbars, etc).

i.e. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Chrome

I still hate Google for naming their browser Chrome for that reason. They made a perfectly good and useful UI term almost unusable.

Ironically, the modern web also led to UI chrome being harder and harder to distinguish even in native applications.

Feels a bit Microsoft'y like for example "Word".

Ah, thank you I learned something today!

My apologies for editing my comment and breaking your [3] reference. I'm trying to imagine just how much work it would be to enable footnotes in comments that others can link to. It would be nice but quite the effort to get right, and I'm sure people would prefer other features first such as more formatting. (or a full implementation of Emacs in the editor window with org-mode as the markup language, with citation links. lol!)

About 2:

If you work with multiple AWS accounts, there is a web extension that automatically places each new account in its own firefox account container.

As far as I know, chrome has profiles, but I am not aware of any automated way to assign new profiles.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...

That is really nice! I currently use AWS Extend Switch Roles extension[1] to switch profiles, but an automated way to confine those roles to their own profiles would be very neat.

[1] https://github.com/tilfinltd/aws-extend-switch-roles

On [1], also note that Firefox's sync is end-to-end encrypted by default. Contrast that to https://palant.info/2023/08/29/chrome-sync-privacy-is-still-....

> Sync[1] only what you allow, bookmarks/history/extensions/etc

Chrome also allows you to choose what to sync.

I really wish Firefox just implemented a high quality first party tab solution.

I’ve been using Arc on my MacOS devices and Edge on windows devices because I just like a nice first party vertically tabbed browser.

Oh absolutely agreed. I use Tree Style Tabs (TST) and consider it essential now, but I wish Firefox would embrace vertical tabs as a way to remain distinct from Google Chrome.

I have 15 tabs open right now. The tabs' titles are easy to read, and different sites have different colours assigned to them. My Kagi searches open in new tabs, which are automatically set as child branches/leaves of the parent tab, which helps me to organize my work. If I go over about 30 tabs, I can just scroll the TST view with the mouse wheel, it's very easy and is non-intrusive to my workflow.

I can also bookmark tab trees, which is nice when I want to switch context from Python to Terraform for instance.

Container tabs really is the killer app for me. At work I might need to be signed in and accessing multiple Microsoft 365 admin portals across tenants. Or at home, being able to have containers for my homelab/dev Microsoft 365 account that can run entirely separately of my main browser profile.

Like you said, you can use multiple browser profiles in chromeium based browsers, but managing multiple whole windows when I just need 1 browser page seems like such a pain in comparison.

> "Privacy Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising"

This is BS. Firefox is funded entirely by Google's Ads. Even if you donate to Mozilla, those donations won't be invested in Firefox. At this point, all 3 major browser engines are funded by ads.

You may argue that Mozilla doesn't directly make money from advertising, but that's irrelevant because they'll never do anything to upset their cash cow. And Google can always kill Firefox by avoiding renewing their search deal, without much of a loss, as most Firefox users would switch to Google anyway, much like what users did when they tried switching to Yahoo as the default.

---

UPDATE — A good reason to use Firefox is if it's simply better for you. For me, Firefox is better than Chromium-based alternatives because:

    + History sync is full and actually works;
    + DNS-Over-HTTPS works in parallel to corporate DNS (fallback to system);
    + Tree-style-tabs;
    + Bookmarks management;
    + Reader view (Android & desktop);
    + Great Ctrl+Tab;
    + Non-admin upgrades;
    + uBlock Origin;
    + Total Cookie Protection;
    + Android: multiple search engines;
    + Android: Open in app;
    + Android: Dark Reader, uBlock Origin, Cookie AutoDelete, other extensions;

It also has some issues:

    - poor battery life on macOS, and I fear that Chromium currently has an edge there, even if both are worse than Safari;
    - problems when scrolling on Android, poor performance for certain websites (e.g., Mastodon, Twitter);
    - incompatibility with certain apps (e.g., Microsoft Teams), but in fairness, they've been investing in compatibility, see their recent work on Google Meetup;

Firefox on Android has many issues, and the people denying it aren't doing it any favors. For me, the add-ons more than make up for it, it's my main browser, but I'm still uncomfortable recommending it to family.

I hope Firefox continues to evolve and differentiate itself from Chrome because ideology isn't a good enough reason to prefer it over alternatives, not when Chromium is a thriving open-source project with multiple large companies contributing to it.

That's another Lala land of obliviousness. Browser is a complex piece of software that needs effort. Users are not paying for it and those who will pay for itthen will probably require access to those users, for sure.

Firefox is a dwindling piece of software and maybe they themselves should take some responsibility of where it is heading today.

User adoption is merit driven and not mission or ideology driven.

EDIT: Typos etc.

I want to pay for Firefox. I do not want to contribute to the Mozilla CEO's outrageous US$7M compensation package. How do I do that?

How much does the Mozilla CEO deserve? I know the tech salaries and I believe a comparable role (senior director or VP) in a Faang would at least be 7 figures, can we try to ballpark by how much we are over (or under) paying the CEO?

I have no desire to get into a general discussion over US/tech officer compensation.

However, as I understand it, most of Mozilla's income comes from the Google search deal, not from any product that they make. Whatever argument someone might have for the compensation of the CEO of a corporation that generates revenue by selling a product rather than access to an ever-shrinking set of users, I don't think it applies here.

There’s no way to do either. The Mozilla Corporation doesn’t take donations. (The Mozilla Foundation doesn’t make Firefox.)

There's no way to do both simultaneously. You can, however, donate to The Mozilla Corporation and help pay their CEO's salary.[0] It won't help Firefox one iota, but you can do it.

  0. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990-ty22-public-disclosure.pdf

That’s the Foundation. But yes I was wrong and Baker is paid by the Foundation.

You can't. FF is opensource, and in theory you could pay someone not employed by mozilla to work on it and submit patches. But really you're still contributing to money to mozilla in that labor == money.

If you wait a year, you can instead contribute to the next $8.5M+ compensation package. It will be announced at the same time Mozilla announces that they're shutting down the browser and committing to becoming an AI cryptocurrency.

>User adoption is merit driven and not mission or ideology driven.

Yes, Google telling everyone to install Chrome, and Chrome being the only "other" browser installed on many corporate networks is totally merit driven.

WebKit is founded by Apple selling their devices and it runs perfectly fine on Linux via Epiphany. I don't see how it is related to ads in any way?

Google pays Apple billions in their search deal, per year ($18 billion in 2021).

Apple may sell devices, but it's safe to say that at this point Google entirely funds Safari. Apple is unwilling to upset that cash cow without risking those tens of billions, even if we are talking about 5% of their revenue. ;-)

And you really think Apple, selling their devices with the privacy label, would leave the browser market to 100% in google's hands? This would incredibly undermine their marketing strategy.

And what makes you think Safari R&D is solely funded by the search provider deal they have with google? Safari is a product that is sold as part of the "Apple universe", there's definitely more value to it than just a place for the google search box.

> And what makes you think Safari R&D is solely funded by the search provider deal they have with google?

Google paying them 20 billion per year is more than enough to fund several browsers and still make a profit, that being Safari's direct revenue stream. You don't need any more than that.

You're also making too many assumptions about Apple's motives and marketing, but can't get around the fact that money talks. In the future, things may change, but right now, Google funds Safari.

Anyone else remember Mitchell Baker (Firefox CEO) calling for more than deplatforming?

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

Yep, one of the many reasons I won't support the organization.

At least capitalist/for-profit organizations are honest about who they are.

Yeah, when I think of "honest" I think of Google...

Granted, that statement by Mozilla left a sour taste in my mouth. I'd like my browser vendor to be content-neutral. I'll decide if something is bad or not for myself.

Awesome blog post, thanks for sharing!

All in all we need more of this, rather than the bland milquetoast garbage we are spoonfed by media. The insurrection attempt is a huge deal that is being treated with kid gloves. What in Baker's proposal specifically do you disagree with? I'll copy/paste them here:

- Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.

- Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.

- Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.

- Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.

He is saying platforms need better tools than simply banning. I don’t see a problem with this aside from a headline that is a bit provocative.

She is saying that the "open web" Mozilla envisions is one where Mitchell Baker and her friends get to censor and manipulate content directly in the browser.

Obviously, people of the same ideology as her will agree with that, because they hate openness and debate. This is an excellent reason to stay away from Firefox. Using it is getting very close to being a political statement, which given the blog post, could mark its users as those in favour of in-browser political censorship.

Edit: very strange that some people cannot see this. She is extremely explicit:

> Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet [...] to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy [...] and he won't be the last [...] changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors

Let's rephrase that: she claims the "architecture of the internet" - that's the web - has "dangerous dynamics" because (she thinks) it helped a Republican. Not some specific website, or some specific incident, or even some specific politician! The whole design of the internet itself is dangerous, and hence she demands "solutions" to make a "better internet" that goes beyond mere "permanent removal of bad actors" but rather solves the problem pre-emptively before "untold damage is done". Nobody who runs a browser should have this kind of revulsion towards what the internet is.

Can you be a little more specific about where you are reading that she would like to "censor and manipulate content directly in the browser"?

I read the entire linked post, then searched for "browser", "user agent" and "software" and still don't see it.

The only point in this piece that sounds like that is “Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation”. It’s fair to disagree with her on that point but also consider that in conjunction with her call to make feed algorithms transparent. So she is saying to give preference to NYT over Breitbart by default but also make it obvious that is what you are doing.

Where was that said? Please provide a quote.

After reading your link I'm not sure I see the problem you're pointing to.

I do remember, which is why I will never use Firefox again. Our culture is already far too censorious, I have no desire to support those who want to go further.

I hadn't read that, thanks for sharing. The recommendations were shockingly reasonable, despite your framing.

The issue with those recommendations is that they are worded to sound reasonable, and that they sound more reasonable when they target people you already dislike. For example, "promote factual voices" is in principle amazing, if it could be pulled off.

The problem is that it's hard to pull that off: One of the chief challenges of current day is that people have a hard time even agreeing what the facts are, and what some people hold to be factual aren't necessarily so.

The "factual voices" promoted by Facebook in the linked NYT article, for example, are just mainstream media which shares Mozilla's political slant and which have a built-up reservoir of respectability from earlier days when they were higher quality, but which aren't exactly paragons of factuality or careful reporting today, having spread outright misinformation and been quiet about important events. To put it another way, should we promote say, Fox News, because they're mainstream? That's probably not wise, if you ask just about anyone here.

The thing is, Fox may have been first, but every news outlet has drifted in a Foxified direction of catering to an audience and telling them what they want to hear instead of challenging their preconceptions, which ends up with many outlets made a killing hyperventilating about Trump, for example.

So the issue ends up being that Mozilla's just fine boosting that hyperventilation, which is part and parcel of the polarization and "we can't even agree what the facts are" problem. The issue of people lacking trust isn't solved by browbeating, but by earning their trust. It's presently really, really hard, but still in principle possible.

In the end, I don't want my browser maker to have that attitude. Brave and Vivaldi don't: They just make browsers and other services and give me more and more options. Brave even lets me judge sources and adjust my search engine should I want to. Supporting these teams that focus on giving me control and making better and better tools for me is an easy choice.

Some of the other bullet points have genuine upside that would be wonderful, but they also have costs and downsides that aren't immediately apparent.

> ethical browser

> "we need more than deplatforming"

No.

Firefox single-handedly destroyed their reputation beyond belief with that article in my eyes. They are supposed to support the exact opposite instead of being evangelists for censorship, centralized control, lack of ownership.

That Google pays their bills from them keeping Google as the default search engine isn't even as bad as that one article made them appear.

Wow, I just googled that[1] and it's absolutely shocking. I want no part of a browser vendor who thinks they should be in control of what is and isn't on the web.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

Just let it die. We need something new or at least a CEO with a vision that is not steered by the tides of LinkedIn hype

The thing is we can hardly have something new.

A new browser engine is an incredibly hard thing to program and historically they have always been financed by multi-millions (now billions) companies. Even Firefox via Google.

If you want another engine that is not WebKit or Gecko and you want it open source, you are asking for something that the free software community failed to deliver for the last 30 years and that is harder to deliver everyday.

If Firefox happens to die, we are basically stuck with a Webkit-only internet. We may have open source browsers but nobody is going to pay for the Gecko development (which is not just maintenance but keeping it up to date with the web specs) and nobody is going to pay for a new engine.

Just fork it. I don't have a problem with the tech I have a problem with the corp that governs it. Because in their last Annual Report they see the future of Mozilla in AI services...and that's not what's going to get usershare back.

You can fork it but Google will still be the main maintainer but also the promoter of new APIs so your fork will be forced to either implement those new APIs or to accept their upstream changes.

With multiple engines that have a big enough user base, you force the actors to negotiate standards.

What will you do with your fork when Google will start to implement a replacement for HTML like they tried to do with Dart or AMP ? With enough competitors, Google is forced to make those unilateral evolutions backward compatible with what works everywhere.

With only one engine they can force their new tech in the engine and bet on the fact that it will be integrated in the forks because it’s mostly one pull request away on GitHub.

Maybe that would work if the fork somehow managed to evolve as fast as Google on Blink. But this literally means that you need Google’s kind of money amounts.

We are talking about Firefox.

These fear-mongers that make everyone hate needs to stop. Multi-millionaires that give their own agenda and anything else is anti-this or stupid needs to stop.

You also probably say you hate "Cancel Culture" while cancelling things including coke.

Wrong thread?

>the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox.

Calling Firefox, or rather Mozilla, ethical is like calling China a paragon of protecting human rights.

So no, no thanks. Firefox can and should die, because Mozilla should die.

I have it on Firefox but it's a forced snap install so I can't download anything because snaps are sandboxed.

I switched it at some point to the app version and uninstalled the snap.

but it came back as a snap somehow!!!

Canonical is another problem that should be dealt with. I haven't trusted them since they put Amazon spyware links in the start menu bar.

Snaps are one of these strange antifeutures that somehow get forced on the users anyway.

https://cdn.ponly.com/wp-content/uploads/No-Memes-15.jpg

Firefox on Windows and Safari on macOS. No developer should daily drive Chromium-based browsers today except when needed for ensuring correct behavior as a target.

No thank you. I have absolutely no interest in it nor need for it.

It’s your job to make me switch, and frankly I see zero reason to care. Chrome and Safari work fine.

Brave is more ethical. Firefox is just a vassal Google. And it is run by San Francisco bugmen.

I know it's Chromium-Based but I've been a very happy Arc Browser user all year

As soon as they bring back xul

People who use Chrome, or any Chrome-based browser, are inherently self-destructive and greatly confused.

Chrome, and Chrome-based browsers, perform worse, are buggier on; especially on non-Nvidia drivers and especially on OSes other than Windows Have what is considered an ideal AMD+AMD Linux box? Chrome, nor any Chrome-based browser, is for you. For extra irony: Chrome on Android and Android Webview sucks on any Qualcomm-based phone. Firefox? Smooth, high performance, nearly bug-free.

A lot of the sibling comments here tell insane stories like "I use Chrome because I once used a broken website." Fine, if a website goes out of its way to write HTML, CSS, or JS that is so non-standard and broken that it can't work on Firefox, then use Chrome for that website specifically; use Firefox for all the websites that actually are spec-compliant.

Side rant: I don't even know how webdevs are getting this wrong. There aren't webdevs in the traditional sense anymore, just a bunch of kids that are using whatever popular bullshit framework is out today, banging out some flavorless souless crap so they can collect a paycheck like the rest of us. Like, they're using React + one of the popular React UI things (Next or MUI or whater), or they're using Tailwind + something for the JS, or any one of the popular combinations... guess what? THEY ALL WORK ON FIREFOX 100% OUT OF THE BOX.

How are you screwing this up?! The work is already done for you! Stop going out of your way to break it!

Problem is it's not the best browser out there, Chromium is. I wanted to switch to Firefox many times, and while for regular websites it's ok, the performance in more complex web apps simply sucks. And the developer tools are dogsh* compared to Chromium's.

The developer tools are pretty similar in my experience. I think it's maybe just that you're not used to it. And did you know that developer tools like this actually started in Firefox with the Firebug plugin?

Firefox is not slower with more complex web apps, you either have a (site) specific problem or are not judging fairly.

And even if you use Chromium, you are supporting Google's power position in browser technology influence. Which they use to push through web standard that benefit them, but not the users. Firefox has a more open ecosystem that is not focused on the benefit of one particular company.

What a pointless post.

I will use whatever browser I wish , thank you very much.

Firefox is rubbish. I prefer Safari. I don't care about the 'monopoly' the free market allows us to decide which is best, why would I use an inferior browser just for that reason?

It has very bad UI/UX very typical of open source/techy software.

There are zero reasons to switch listed in this article.

Maybe if they don’t align with Google agenda so much, I’ll switch.

What’s the ethical of switching if Mozilla is just the non-profit arm of Google?

Are they still receiving funds from Google?

Around 86% of Firefox’s income is from Google, yes.

soo....yeah..

Do you take the number from here? https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...

86% of revenue of Mozilla corp are royalties, which encompasses any search engine that shares revenue with Firefox, not just Google. But the remaining 14% is not only revenue generated by Firefox, but also by e.g. Pocket. So from their financial statement, it's pretty hard to say what percentage of Firefox's revenue is derived from Google.

Isn’t Google the only one?

Are you talking about the payment Mozilla receives for keeping Google the default search engine on Firefox? Just change it.

I believe Mozilla falls into a difficult non-profit grey area. Having another browser on the market isn’t as critical to humanity as providing anti-malarial medicine to millions of Africans, yet I think we can all agree that a world without any browser competition would suck for people rich enough to use a browser in the first place. It would be hard for Mozilla to attract $400M/yr of relatively strings-free cash from anyone other than Google.

Google’s search dominance won’t be cured by Mozilla ending its partnership. It will only be cured by innovative competitors who discover an even better way of organizing the internet’s information (perhaps OpenAI or LLMs generally?), or by government regulation. In the meantime, I like to think of Mozilla’s siphoning of cash from Google as a good thing while we all wait for a proper long term solution that may never arrive.

A similar philosophical question ought to confront us every day about many things we use without thinking, both on the internet and off.

> switching to the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox

Mozilla is actually not an ethical organization, if ethics mean the things that are espoused in this article.

Mozilla receives literally billions from Google[1] every year -- $26,000,000,000.00 in 2021 alone, with only 3% market share. That's a lot of zeros -- some startups might be rather happy to see an annual 26 billion funding round!

Mozilla forced privacy-rejecting products like Pocket[2] into Firefox.

Mozilla secretly-installed advertising extensions[3].

1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/27/23934961/google-antitrus...

2. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/the-firefox-brows...

3. https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-touting-mozilla-caught...

CORRECTION: a comment below correctly points out that Mozilla wasn't the only recipient of that $26B in 2021; it appears that Apple was the biggest payee.

I love Firefox and I hate Mozilla.

That $26B is for paying all browsers, not Mozilla alone. Mozilla is not receiving literally billions from Google every year; a recent year was $450M. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

It's still a lot of money, more than I suspect Firefox's market share would allow. It seems more like a payment to maintain a monopoly while keeping anti-trust concerns off of Google.

These attacks don't feel like they're being made in good faith.

1. This is patently false. If you read the article you linked you'll see that $26B is Google's total spend on being the default search engine across all platforms including Apple and Samsung devices. Apple gets $18B of that alone. Firefox is a much smaller share, and it's not clear at all why taking this money would be unethical in the first place.

2. Firefox is up-front about the fact they use Pocket to generate revenue, and make it simple to disable.

3. I agree that Firefox should have been more up-front about what gets installed when participating in studies, but it should be noted that Cliqz has since been removed, and this article is 6 years old.

I would like to, but Firefox behaves problematic in regard to auth urls like

https://name:password@news.ycombinator.com

1: When you bookmark them, it shows the auth part when you hover the bookmark with the mouse.

2: When you open them from the command line

    firefox https://name:password@news.ycombinator.com

And then ctrl+click links on the site, it opens the new tab and shows the auth part in the tab title as long as the link loads. It seems the "current url" in Firefox code is stored with the auth part, and it passes that part on to local links.

These issues make it insecure to use auth urls because as soon as someone looks over your shoulder (or there is a camera like in many cafes), you are p0wned.

I wish we had a better way to log into a website from the command line, like ssh keys. But for now, we are stuck with what we have. And Firefox makes it insecure to use it. So for now, I continue to use Chromium.

You save passwords in plain text (bookmarks) and then complain that people can read the plain text over your shoulder?

Yes. The auth part should not be displayed when you hover over a bookmark. Chromium does not display it.

In the end, every security mechanism is "plain text". Even ssh keys. When someone gains access to your ssh key, which is just an ascii string, they can log in as you.

My SSH keys are protected with a password, on top of that I have a biometric lock (MacBook fingerprint reader) on my SSH keys. So they would only grant access to someone that 1. has access to my computer, 2. knows the password (which only I know) and 3. has my finger. Definitely more than just plain text!

I strongly suggest looking into multi-factor authentication, or other modern authorization/security mechanisms if you want to see examples of security systems that are not just plain text.

> Chromium does not display it.

Security by obscurity is not ideal, although I can understand that the lack of this feature in Firefox hinders your usecase.

Same here. You can't just access my auth data over the internet.

You would also have to get hold of my machine and get past it's security mechanisms.

You can put as many layers on top of what you call "obscurity". But at the bottom it's still just a simple string that holds the power to authenticate you.

And "multi-factor authentication" does not help with the situation "User is allowed to use this script, so they are also allowed to use that website. Let's open it for them.".

You're literally putting the password in plain-text into the (unencrypted) browser bookmarks (and also into your terminal where it's likely logged to your ~/.bash_history).

That is the bigger security issue you have, not how Firefox is handling the display of the URL.

If anything, Firefox is highlighting your insecure security practice.

I'm not typing them in my terminal. I have scripts that automate my workflow. And part of it is logging me into websites.

Regarding storing them in plain text: That's not much different from ssh keys. When someone can read your ssh key, they can log in as you.

If you know a better way to automatically log a user into a website, let us know!

Every modern password manager has this capability built in.

I have a hard time believing you even do what you're claiming. The number of sites that support logging in that way is basically (pun intended) 0. In fact, firefox is the only browser that warned me that someone is probably trying to scam me with a url like that, the other browsers just dropped the auth part and went to the site without logging in.

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