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Comment by seneca | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla is an absolute joke of an organization, and it's tragic that they are still the primary alternative to Google having a total monopoly on browsers. I suppose you shouldn't expect much from a company that is just there to maintain a facade to fend off regulators.

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We're at a really dangerous point with browsers at the moment where there's really no consumer-friendly option available.

I'm scared to say that Safari comes closest but you're just in Apple's walled garden then instead of someone elses'.

Our only hope seems to lie with Ladybird, if that even ends up being good and it seems extensions aren't on the agenda at least for a while.

The issue is bigger than that. The web standards process relies on two independent implementations for something to become a web standard. This just about works when there are three big players, but if Mozilla drops out, then it’s just Google and Apple arguing. It’s bad enough that two out of the three rendering engines that participate in the web standards process are funded by Google. We really need another independent rendering engine to step up. Hopefully Ladybird will get some traction.

Less churn in web standards would be a good thing though.

I'd say we're past that point. Less than 5% of global users (and going down) and NO mobile presence at all. The newer generation of devs and power users won't even care.

You're absolutely right, but I'm trying to retain a shred of optimism, especially with a high amount of focus and interest on this area lately with projects like Ladybird and even new Gopher and Gemini clients.

If the vast majority of endusers want to live in the moat, I can't stop them, but at least I'd like an alternative to explore interesting content even if my bank, etc will never support it.

At least banks are regulated enough that I don't expect their websites to be running full-page video ads anytime soon.

It's past time to give up on Mozilla.

I told our dev teams to not even bother testing because, on our b2b site, Firefox usage was under 0.01%. That is not a typo. I can't spend dev time on that.

They're doing the same, and now playing VC, an industry at which they have no apparent expertise.

Have you heard of Brave? It's a great browser with a built-in ad blocker founded by Brendan Eich, one of the co-founders of Mozilla and the creator of Javascript. I'm not a shill, I swear - I just think it's a great initiative that should be more well known than it is.

Brave is Chromium/Chrome.

Every browser alternatives you can reasonably choose today is going to be either Blink (Chromium-based) or Gecko (Firefox-based). And then you have WebKit (Safari).

Ladybird, Flow and Dillo are really the only true alternative browsers in active development other than a few others running on niche operating systems (to which I'm throwing in all of the DOS browsers...).

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