A look at Firefox forks
lwn.net
lwn.net
The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".
Why do I think this? Three reasons:
- It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled calculators and text editors, making it being paid more justifiable in peoples’ minds.
- Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts, which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably realizes.
- Much of Firefox’s original claim to fame came from its highly flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in favor of chasing mass appeal.
Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly evolved _at all_.
I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going to be a totally safe business decision.
For me, I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private usage. Zen disqualified itself for my type of power usage very quickly, giving me a feeling of being on a small mobile device instead of a desktop PC.
[0]: https://i.ibb.co/BVmkmkLC/Screenshot-2025-03-15-at-12-34-26-...
Zen/Arc are actually much better for this use case, albeit after an adjustment period for people who’ve become accustomed to the way Firefox/Chrome do it.
The idea is that URLs are out of your way when you don’t need them and front-and-center when you do. Instead of simply focusing on the URL bar when you CMD+L or CMD+T, it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen where you’re free to do everything you can do in a normal location bar and more. It’s modeled after the command palette design in code editors or application launchers. So, for example, not only can you edit URLs, but you can search for commands instead of hunting for them in the browser’s menus. As an example, I’d never memorize the keyboard shortcut to take a whole-page screenshot because I don’t use it enough. But the other day I needed it, so I typed “CMD+L, screen” and it was the second result. Task completed in under 2 sec.
It took a few days to get used to, but now I never want to go back to the sort of location bar that Chrome and Firefox use. It just takes up space that I’d rather devote to the sites I’m visiting. Even the tab pane is easily toggled to get out of my way when I don’t care about it, which is especially useful when I’m tiling websites. I’ve developed a fondness for keeping documentation open in one panel alongside the website I’m developing, which means recapturing the width I lose from the tab pane is valuable.
I highly recommend pushing through the awkward phase where you’re sure you’re going to hate this browser design. Because once you get past it, you’ll wonder how you ever thought the old way could be better.
Incredibly tiny modal dialog. I just tried checked one, and it fit 65 characters. Compared to firefox right now, after 112 characters the URL bar is slightly over halfway filled.
I used to be a big fan of OmniWeb back in its day because it pushed the envelope in adding utility and emphasized its role as a powerful tool that put the user in control. It included things like per-page user CSS years before userstyles became popular in Firefox and Chrome.
It was paid however, and at least in that point in time there was little appetite for a paid browser, and so now it’s a hobby project that Omni Group devs occasionally tinker on and hasn’t been actively maintained in some time.
I agree. In the same time firefox' bookmarks are still better than what chrome or edge offer.
Colorways anyone? How about tabs that now look like buttons for no conceivable purpose but fashion?
I would pay for an exploer-like sidebar with folders and containers as the top-level folders. Almost have that now with "tree tabs" extension and containers, but the interface is kludgy.
This plus a privacy guarantee would be worth paying for.
I use this to bring the normal tabs back:
If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get closer to those tools they risk breaking those very addons (leading to pissed off users and devs). Likewise if they change in another direction.
The only real solution that avoids that would be to promote some addons to first class implementations and allow you to mix and match them. But that of course increases maintenance burden permanently and even then it's likely to piss off some chunk of users.
Both tabs and bookmarks currently work well in the simple usecase and can be extended to the power users' use cases. There are unfortunately though a ton of other things that take priority over that. Namely rustifying code (to reduce maintenance burden and reduce bugs) and maintaining feature parity with chrome.
Personally I think the solution is to treat mainline browsers like Firefox as reference implementations that several highly specialized forks are developed on top of. Only users with the most general/basic of needs would use the “vanilla” version of the browser, while everybody else would have a favorite fork that fits their needs very closely.
Arc and Zen are a decent example of this model in play. They’re very opinionated and not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s fine, because there’s literally every other browser if something more conducive to general audiences is what you’re looking for. Browsers don’t need to be one size fits all and in fact I think are being held back by trying to be that way.
Now that firefox has native vertical tabs it's possible that the the integration can get better in the nearer future since I doubt the vertical tabs feature (which i haven't used yet) has tabs on the top AND side.
> and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6.
Firefox 36 and 3.6 were pre-Quantum/Electrolysis. In those days, the XUL addons had an insane amount of control and could do so many things simply not possible nowadays, that if you took advantage of made a browser that looks nothing like modern Firefox.
However when it comes to web browsers, there’s been a looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial browsers.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the only people who’ve ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers have been Google; and even that’s been indirectly via upselling their other services.
Times change. Subscriptions are normalized, and tech people are increasingly aware of the hazards of "free".
There's actually an advantage to the paid business model vs ads in that you don't have to appeal to N million people in order to pay the bills: you only have to appeal to `expenses / subscriptionPrice` people. This means you can cater to those people more aggressively and turn them into fans rather than just users, while also saving time on the features they don't need (reducing `expenses`).
(I'm a happy subscriber to all three above-mentioned services and would immediately sign on for a paid Firefox fork like OP suggests.)
Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $500 million a year and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then infrastructure that supports the development which is under like administration and operations is another double digit percent.
As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for software development, there's basically no precedent for raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10 million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia, which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets. But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of existing compact between themselves and users that I think has given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption rather than software, I think has a different relationship with its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is as an example to Firefox.
I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts with a reality where they already invest more resources in that then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on the browser.
I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user donations would have any impact on market share or would even substantially change the amount of resources available to invest in the browser.
I also agree with you that direct donations won’t solve this, whether it’s 100k or 100M
Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million. So it sounds like you're saying an additional 1 million is a difference between 3% market share and 30% market share.
We seem to be on the same page about what plausibly could come in from revenue, but I just don't see how that moves the needle in ways that people seem to be expecting. I feel like the psychological comfort from pointing to that as an underutilized option is intended to make the point that there's not enough resources for software development. But if you compare it to what they're already spending, they're spending more than would ever be generated from such revenue. Which admittedly is a little bit off-track from the point you're making. It'll be interesting to see if Lady Bird does well with economics along the lines of what you're describing.
Lots of peoples "supposed" problem is giving money to Mozilla, not Firefox. If the goal is to give people a way to support FF development, then this does achieve that. But FF doesn't need _that_ (which I think you and I both agree on).
> but I just don't see how that moves the needle in ways that people seem to be expecting
Agreed. I think if it was 1M, it wouldn't have any impact, but and if it was 100M then people would complain that it's not being used on $INSERT_THING_THEY_WANT_HERE.
> It'll be interesting to see if Lady Bird does well with economics along the lines of what you're describing.
What Firefox is doing isn't growing their market share, so hitching another $1/10/100M isn't going to do anything to that without a strategy to actually make it happen. I think, honestly, there's a decent chance for a new project to survive in here. It could even be a Firefox fork, but it needs to be free of the baggage and strategy of Mozilla, and Firefox IMO - just as Edge has somehow made a resurgance as a chromium browser. I think Ladybird could work out too, if they can find a way to break through.
Spoken as a die hard FF user for almost 20 years!
The best version of the argument I think one can make relates to Firefox OS. There, at long last, in contrast to spurious complaints about the VPN, Pocket, etc. etc., it seems like Mozilla really did invest serious resources in it at the expense of browser development, and it did happen during the critical period of time where they collapsed from 35ish percent to 3 percent. But it was on behalf of a major bet of the kind that I would like to think everyone welcomed, so, a real risk, but for a respectable strategy. And, they did produce Quantum, a rewrite from the ground up with spectacular improvements in speed and stability (which makes the present day arguments feel like they are at least vestigal echoes of an old argument that was, in its time, legitimate). But you never hear critics talk in a measured way like that.
I do agree that the vocal minority would claim the donations are not being used on $INSERT_THING, which is always a different thing every time you ask (I recently heard that it was all the VC fund's fault which was a new one), and they're already talking like that right now. But I suppose it wouldn't hurt to be open to that revenue. I think it's plausible they could pull something on the order of $10MM or multiple tens of millions which I have to imagine is as good as what they're getting from Pocket and the VPN etc.
I suppose the only disagreement, or frustration I have here is with the perception of "baggage" which has, in my opinion, largely been manufactured in hn comment sections, every bit as detached from a strategy to grow market share as Mozilla's actual strategy.
> with the perception of "baggage" which has, in my opinion, largely been manufactured in hn comment sections
To bring this back full circle, the same group are the ones who want to fund Firefox-not-Mozilla. And if every comment in this thread cost $200 to post and went straight to Firefox development, it wouldn’t fund a single developer for a year.
That needs minimal effort compared to building a browser, because it doesn't involve doing any of the hard work, but just removing code that serves to line the pockets of those doing most of the work at the expense of the user.
Also the mission you are describing sounds like something that you might expect from a Chromium browser that has to regularly revert Google-driven changes. At Mozilla, they already own the browser and they could account for this in their ground-level philosophy.
By whom and on what basis? Those are non-optional questions that should have strong answers as preconditions to you posting about it, if the objective is to offer something more than simple bullshitting (in the Harvey Frankfurt sense of indifference to truth).
This also doesn't answer like 90% of my concerns from my previous comments. Who has ever intentionally had a software development approach of having one team develop features and another person revert those features, working in tandem? And why would they need donations that are 0.20% of what they already get in revenue to finance it? I feel like you're just improv riffing here.
This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted.
I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.
They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole...
> They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered.
However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.
Companies gonna company and expand in the wrong direction if they forget were they come frome.
Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).
How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay someone in Europe full time you’d need about 6k people to donate that annually. My experience here is that what people say they value and what they actually value when asked to open their wallets are two very different things
For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on company law in the domiciled country) where either full or part-time programmers would be compensated for their work.
As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance, (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new features and updates would be more timely than is the case with much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner.
Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code. The license could be structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited). This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still keep code open for general inspection/security etc.
Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.
Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also being GPL'ed). This is not possible.
Here at ardour.org, we use this:
> either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free open-source code.
(technically, name your own price for the binaries)
and retain the GPL. It works fine for us.
I understand that, and I accept it as a problem. I only used LibreOffice and Gimp as examples of large projects that have issues, I should have made it clear I wasn't suggesting they convert to a different licensing model. Clearly, under GPL-type licensing converting to another licensing structure would be nigh on impossible. Nevertheless, that they can't raises issues which I'll mention.
My suggestion arose out of what I perceive as a problem with some open-source projects. Let's take a look:
There are many open-source and commercial programs that are now effectively abandoned-ware but given the right incentive some could be resurrected and turned into useful products. View this another way: a lot of human effort has gone into making both commercial and open-source programs and letting all that effort go to waste doesn't make sense if there's a viable alternative. That said, we know that finding the right 'incentive' has proved difficult and elusive.
Both developers of open-source and commercial programs often have good reasons for stopping further development of their programs. For open-source developers often the incentive wains and having to continually maintain a program without financial reward turns into drudgery. Likewise, a developer of a small commercial program will stop further development for various reasons some of which are similar to those of open-source developers.
I'll give you an example, I still use a Windows file management utility produced by an individual developer which I purchased about 15 years ago and unfortunately he has ceased further development of the program. Trouble is that program is for my purposes the best-of-class for reasons I can't dwell upon here but it needs updating to a Unicode base (I still use it regularly but it throws errors with filenames containing non-ASCII characters).
I've exchanged emails with the developer and I fully understand why he's ceased development (he has good reasons). A very similar situation exists with some open-source developers, they've ceased development of their programs for similar reasons. Unfortunately, in both instance users are left with abandoned-ware.
With both open-source and proprietary software, many programmers still hold residual vested interests in their code even through they've ceased developing it. Often, this revolves around the fact that they don't want others to benefit financially at their expense even though for various reasons it's difficult for them to actually profit directly. (Let's face it, that's understandable—it's pretty much human nature.)
The result is an impasse: open-source code stagnates in the hope others will continue its development, which may or may not happen (and often it doesn't). Similarly, commercial code is neglected and or goes into limbo. And more often than not it ends up dead and abandoned.
Clearly, the gulf between open-source/GPL and proprietary software licensing is not only wide but also contentious. In respect of these problems I've no better solution than anyone else except to say that I believe there ought to be some better system or mechanism whereby open-source developers can at least receive some renumeration for their efforts. Providing an additional financial incentive to developers would also significantly benefit users.
Obviously—given current licensing arrangements—the halfway measure I've suggested would only be applicable to new projects, and that alone poses additional problems. The fact remains we need to find some way of providing better incentives to developers so as to ensure important open-source projects are developed in a timely and professional way as is so for the best commercial software. By that, I'm certainly not saying that all open-source projects aren't being developed in a professional manner as clearly many are. But then there are many that are struggling. How we best deal with them remains open.
So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.
Usually the theory with this kind of setup is that the Corporation is profitable and forwards funds to the Foundation so that the foundation can accomplish its work. But putting Firefox in the Foundation implies that someone somewhere thought that Firefox would be profitable rather than being the core mission that needs subsidization. I believe this was someone related to the Google deal, but it's definitely been a major problem ever since.
How many are under the false impression of "helping Firefox" when in reality their donations are used to fund advocacy campaigns [0] and managerial bloat [1]?
[0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-as...
[1] https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
That’s the most likely bet they are making, similar to Apple/Android or Safari/Chrome. Spending a minor fraction of your revenue to avoid anti-trust probably makes sense for them.
Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].
(I’ve donated to Mozilla before and recently brought in friends who gave 6+ figures. I’ve been encouraging them to, and they’ve been successful so far in, charging back for those donations.)
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
I’d even pay for forks of software that simply allow to modify their basic internals without providing any specific features, so I could augment them with programming without hard reveng (which often fails with no result). Like setting custom shortcuts in firefox.
But software doesn’t offer that. It wants me to pay monthly money for features I don’t really like on average, and they may take away anything in the next update, irreversibly. Just because someone felt like doing so, cause users can’t take away paid money in return.
I guess I wanted to say that “willing to pay” depends on what you are selling. And what “they” are selling is usually some no-guarantees always mutating fad rather than features you need.
There’s another nuance in supporting existing software even without new features. These costs are already way above all limits and must be forced down by re-designing text and image scrolling to where it should be, complexity-wise.
The UX pattern for tabs in Arc is amazing. No, it's not just "vertical tabs". It's an innovative blend of the concepts of bookmarks and open tabs. Sort of like files: they can be open or closed, and live in a folder hierarchy.
But the development of Arc stopped half a year ago (except security Chromium updates), with a well-working Mac version, but Windows version which is barely usable and no Linux support. The creators decided to focus on some sort of "AI agent" browser.
So I came looking for alternatives that would be cross-platform, have working adblockers, and preferably be open-source. There are some "Firefox transformation" projects like ArcFox, but they are clumsy to set up and usually only copy the general look, not the actually useful features like nested folders. There are extensions like "Tree style tabs" but they work a different way than Arc.
In the end I found good old Tree Style Tabs was better. I just wish it had an easier UX for creating named tab groups.
Try Simple Tab Groups. Been using it in conjunction with Tree Style Tab for a long time.
Apart from the elegant, minimalist user interface, I particularly like how it implements workspaces. It makes it super easy to switch between personal and work contexts.
I highly recommend it.
The vertical tabs and side-by-side tabs are fantastic
The Tor browser is forked from Firefox to support the Tor Network. On top of the actual tor network it's filled to the brim with novel and unique privacy enhancing features. Mullvad (the VPN company) recently did a partnership with Tor to create the Mullvad Browser.[1] It's exactly the Tor browser but without the onion protocol part. Instead it just has all the anti-fingerprinting and privacy enhancing features.
I ended up going with that browser as it's the strongest privacy-focused Firefox fork option
To me, it sounds like just another word.
/me is Danish, and the Danish equivalent would be ‘muldvarp’.
So if I get it right, people can 'donate' money to floorp project in exchange for service (advertisement).
Like when I go to the grocery shop and I make a donation, in exchange I get back home with a pack of beer.
I didn't know I was donating so much, my dumb ass thought I was just buying stuff. Got to put that on my Tax sheet.
That's on top of some products (eg bread) being actually stocked on the shelves by the supplier.
Basically supermarkets are just local distribution warehouses with everything else either paid for by the supplier or the purchaser (eg shelf picking/checkout).
It’s not tax deductible, though (and even if you didn’t get anything in return, I don’t think Floorp is a registred charity anyway).
Made me realize I never deduced all the open source project i gave to tho.
All forks depend on a strong Firefox base and no fork seems to do heavy lifting in terms of web standards, or as a prioritized feature. Instead, they focus on enhancing UX or adhering to open source ideals, but this does little to improve the core browser. :-/
It remains to be seen if we’ll have a new Phoenix moment out of Firefox…? Or does that future belong to Ladybird?
Hard forking a browser and implementing all future features on your own is daunting enough that even Microsoft - a company with more engineering resources than all but a handful of others, and for whom having a branded browser is existentially important - decided not to do it and just to reskin Chrome.
So I expect that any truly new browser comes not out of a desire to improve Firefox or Chromium, but from an independent, not economically useful, hacker-driven desire to create something cool. Either Ladybird or someone's RIIR project.
Which is a UX issue, not a Web standards issue. None of the major forks were made due to a difference opinion about how the standards should be implemented, so they are all dependent on Mozilla to implement the standards.
But in a future where a critical mass of people moved to forks because they were dissatisfied with Firefox? I think the community is too small and fragmented across forks for that.
Maybe Ladybird indeed then…
IMO Waterfox being around for 14 years warrants a bit of a closer look as to why it’s still around after so long…
And yea, I did use waterfox like a decade ago.
If Waterfox isn't about privacy or user control, who knows where it gets sold next or what the dev adds to it next?
Edit: I just realized that the dev is the one who wrote the grandparent comment. Maybe you have an explanation that would help?
Not sure I agree with your understanding wrt Waterfox not being about user control? Always has been and the feature set matches that and that hasn’t changed.
> > Those needs are privacy related and having control over the software you use.
> That’s fair enough, but I’ve tried to stay away from branding Waterfox as such to try and avoid issues like this.
I guess maybe you were only talking about privacy and not about "having control over the software"?
Lots of browsers make search engines and lots of search engines make browsers, so it made (and still does) make a lot of sense.
I understand seeing ad-tech and immediately expecting the worst, but a quick Look into what it actually meant and I never understood why people were so in arms about it?
(Just to avoid c+p massive blocks of text)
It has been complained/asked about to have the ability to enable webgl on whitelisted sites but the devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy.
Unfortunately if I'm using a site that, say, distributes 3D models then I'm likely going to need it enabled, privacy aside.
The time zone thing causes confusion with office 365, as well. It displays when meetings are in your time zone which did catch me off guard once.
It’s a position, not a fetish.
The default should be privacy if you install a browser that focuses on privacy.
Obviously not, because at that point it can no longer be used to browse the web. (That said, "do no network requests" should be the default idle state of the browser until appropriate user interaction. Allowing CORS is also a horrible default but that ship has long sailed.)
I also disable WebGL in my Firefox profile and this does not inconvenience me in any way. So I do not think WebGL support is as instrumental to browsing the web as you claim; it entirely depends on what sites you visit. (And let's be honest here, a very significant majority of websites does not need WebGL.)
Network disabled is a straw man argument.
If somebody already has made the effort of creating an extension and maintaining it, why not use that?
Please pick a different browser if it is not for you. Waterfox has less restrictions and might be a better fit.
In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following: - no automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn it off) - timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer) - login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I switched to Firefox) - WebGL off by default (you can turn it on via config flag)
I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser, but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of time spent debugging and the inconveniences.
I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch entirely from Firefox because I want my history available across devices.
For example, my config is at https://codeberg.org/accelbread/config-flake/src/branch/mast...
I enabled Firefox sync and lost all my history. It was a user error: I should have disabled configuration sync (clear history when you close the browser).
After this incident, I decided I had enough, so I uninstalled LibreWolf. I recovered my lost history from different instances, but I don't want to spend my time making this browser work.
LibreWolf is a decent browser with annoying default settings, which made me lose more time than I wanted to make it work.
Also, fuck companies that do this. I just start permanently deleting accounts whenever services do this.
Login forms are a war zone. Looking for patterns that indicate the other party is a bot and serve them (and only them) a captcha is a technique that is quite effective. But it is not perfect. Especially business customers often get forced to solve captchas in our system.
If you know of a better solution (other than: don't be a big online shop), I'm all ears.
On the one hand yes, on the other - these times call for ditching US companies and switching to local (EU) ones. So it's better to tell these local ones to be more welcome / less hostile.
I have just yesterday asked Amazon to delete my account and all my personal data and stop processing it, quoting "Article 17 and Article 18 of the General Data Protection Regulation".
I'm also planning (as in: technically planning) to move all my data off AWS reasonably ASAP, too. It's personal stuff; mostly S3, domains registered and parked at Route53, some CloudFront distributions fronting static files, SQS/SNS - not much overall - and domains are the main PITA.
I use IronFox and LibreWolf as my daily drivers, but I keep Firefox installed alongside them for the inevitable site that just doesn't behave correctly. Not unlike having to reach for the big blue "E" in the bad old days.
A user.js entry may help. user.js runs on startup of Firefox/Librewolf, so keep this in mind for your usage application.
the setting is: "privacy.resistFingerprinting", as in: user_pref("privacy.resistFingerprinting", true);
I parse this not as LibreWolf breaking anything, but instead as,
"LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are working against broken, dark-pattern websites"
Would love to see a "startup"-Dialog, where they explain these features in a bit of detail with a choice of three modes...
Finger printing and privacy protection:
- [x] Full - best for privacy (default)
- [ ] Moderate - most features work, but may break some websites
- [ ] Off - just behave like normal Firefox
The last option would be for firefox users who just want a browser working like before. Although this might not be the target audience, I think this could support funding.
However, I also ran into the issue of Librewolf deleting ALL cookies by default when it closes. I would also love to have Domain whitelist for this:
- Delete all cookies except the following websites: a.org, b.com, c.net
Oh, and another tip: Don't go to there matrix channel with your first class account, they have a spam problem and Element is nowhere near prepared for it with any settings to prevent getting spam invitations. Once you were in, you get spam invitations all the time.
Yes, I want a 'de enshitified' version of Firefox. Not a browser for someone trying to write impactful news stories who needs to follow a strong opsec.
It would be solved with something as simple as a "Privacy Blocks" drop-down menu that was prominently shown in the browser, that could visually warn about which feature is being accessed by a website (WebGL, UTC time, scripting...), and that let the user enable/disable that feature in that specific website with just 1 click.
A bit of telemetry (albeit kinda contradictory in this case) would allow to collect data on which sites tend to require which permissions, and proactively warn the users, like "Hey it seems most users of Google Calendar .com tend to disable time clock privacy; would you like to do so too?", that'd remove a lot of worries from users upon accessing an important site and not knowing which privacy settings might be breaking it.
Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they can keep up to date well into the future.
Not that work of these projects isn't good - on contrary. Mozilla has violated the trust of its users in last years with features nobody ask for and those folks pluck that stuff out.
Stil, perhaps it's a time for a proper fork that provides own code maintenance, before things will go worse at Mozilla.
The effort for entry is quite high for those...
I have found using firefox provided by my distro with something like arkenfox to be a decent medium but it sucks that this is required in the first place. I wonder if distro repository maintainers try to package Firefox with better defaults but I don't know how to look for that.
Would it really matter? Browsers are pretty much a commodity item. Of all the big pieces of software in your life, I can't imagine one easier to replace than a browser.
Consider our current situation:
- The spec is largely influenced by the same big tech companies that develop the engines
- Major engines (Blink, WebKit, Gecko) are all open source
- Significant engineering resources are dedicated to maintaining compatibility
What's the actual benefit of this redundancy? In other domains, we often consolidate around reference implementations. While I understand the historical and theoretical arguments for implementation diversity (preventing monoculture, fostering innovation, avoiding vendor lock-in), I wonder if these benefits still outweigh the costs in 2025.
I'd be interested in hearing perspectives on whether maintaining multiple engines is still the optimal approach for the web ecosystem, or if we're just perpetuating technical debt from an earlier era.
And Firefox is still the only browser engine with support for uBlock Origin, on Android too.
Have you read the first-party sources?
Here's a first party source explaining your misunderstanding of the situation: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...
And here's another credible source explaining Mozilla's mistake in making this decision based on language that was only present in a draft version of the CCPA, as opposed to the final version, but which also made it to Wikipedia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276624
Most of the conversation on this topic never moved past the first misunderstanding, just a bunch of irrational kvetching at Mozilla by people who read an (incorrect) summary of the situation.
Whereas you seem to be taking what they said at face value, which is not critical thinking.
Furthermore, at this point, that legalese talks about features that the user expects. Otherwise, in the EU, Firefox would be forced to ask for explicit consent. GDPR is so strong that when Firefox will actually sell your data, you'll know it because in the EU it will have to tell users exactly how or why.
Note that Mozilla was already hit with a privacy complaint in the EU due to PPA [1] because it's opt-out instead of opt-in. Whether they'll be found guilty by EU's DPAs, it really depends on whether they actually anonymize that data, as they claim to do, or not. Note here that the GDPR doesn't accept pseudo-anonymization as being valid anonymization.
Of course, it may take a while to find the outcome of such complaints, just note that as far as the GDPR is concerned, that Privacy Policy of theirs doesn't count for squat. It really doesn't matter what they claim in their Privacy Policy, unless they are lying, i.e., if they actually “sell the data” of users in a way that users don't expect as part of the service, then the GDPR asks for explicit consent (opt-in).
Technically speaking, they've already sold user data since 2006 because they've been installing Google's Search as the default, used, for example, for search suggestions. So everything you type in that address bar, goes to Google, and they get paid for it. Of course, search suggestions are part of the service that the user expects, but note that the user's search history can also be used for user profiling by Google. So as far as the CCPA is concerned, that's selling user data. And, very importantly, Firefox has been funded by ad-tech since 2006, much like all Chromiums and even Safari.
What's actually new is that Mozilla wants to diversify. Which is good, as the Search deal is in jeopardy and those hundreds of millions of $ they need to fund the browser aren't going to come from donations. So they would like an alternative to cut the middleman, i.e., Google. If that alternative is also privacy preserving and at the very least opt-out (though I'd prefer opt-in), then that's even better than the status quo.
People unhappy with this deal are people that hate advertising, or any reasonable monetization strategy, as if a viable browser with an independent engine could be funded via the donations of people that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
---
TLDR:
1. Nothing actually changed, and that Privacy Policy doesn't count for squat.
2. Results matter, not words, results such as that wonderful offline translation feature, which is a great showcase of privacy preserving AI tech that only Mozilla pulled ;-)
PS: Isn't it odd that whenever the underdogs get boycotted, the winners are always the Big Tech solutions that are far worse in every aspect?
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/25/mozilla-hit-with-privacy-c...
Second, Mozilla as an entity has a lengthy track record of being the only big good guy in the "browser wars" for a long time. The entire ethos of Mozilla - both the foundation and the corporation (not the same business entity, another detail the many voices weighing in on this subject aren't even aware that they didn't know, but which is directly relevant to the legalese of the CCPA) - was to preserve a free, open-source, less untrustworthy major browser, in the face of IE and Chrome, both products of companies have taken a more opaque approach to their proprietary code and have been involved in decades worth of controversial experiments on (and changes to) user privacy, unlike Mozilla. Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) want to hide their code from you because their code contains a bunch of functionality that is optimal for the business' interests, but malicious from the perspective of end users who value privacy, freedom, and their right to determine what code runs on their own machine.
This brings me to my third point, that Mozilla's Firefox is COMPLETELY open source. If Mozilla was trying to slurp up user data to sell it, they wouldn't keep their product open-source, because the community would just strip out all the bits they don't like. Contrast to Alphabet (Google), who are literally deprecating Manifest V2 to prevent the community from developing ad blockers that actually block all ads, or Microsoft's documented historical practice of waging war on open standards through "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Lengthy, obvious, and well-documented patterns of abuse like that exist for both Microsoft / Alphabet (Google). Contrast to the lengthy pattern of standing up against that very same abuse from Mozilla. Keeping Firefox open source is antithetical to the interests of an entity which was trying to surreptitiously slurp up user data the way Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) do. While each organization has merits of their own, the availability of transparent, open source code (specifically, for the final product - not just an open core like Chromium) can help ensure that power users and developers like us have ways to verify and challenge any potentially problematic practices - something that Mozilla has remained committed to, but which Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) had never fully embraced to begin with.
Fourth, If you've read Firefox's blog posts, if you've read the discussion I linked to above, if you've read the articles about the CCPA drafting error, if you've read the Wikipedia article, confirming that it did contain the incorrect draft language, if you understand that lawyers interpret everything legalistically (not the way ordinary people do), I believe this all paints a picture of an honest misinterpretation on Mozilla's part of the obligations the CCPA might put on them, in the least generous interpretation of the draft language of the CCPA. This does make me sympathetic to the possibility that Mozilla made an honest mistake, but sympathy and trust are not the same, which brings me to my fifth point below.
I'm not "trusting" anything Mozilla says. I'm reading into, understanding, and verifying all of it. And again, even if Mozilla was trying to do such a thing, their current open-source architecture makes those efforts completely irrelevant to developers like myself and many others here who can read, understand, and make modifications to, and rebuild from source. Given the established track record of Mozilla and the documented shortcomings with proprietary browsers in this regard, one might consider whether some of the criticisms (that are encouraging people to trust a narrative that results in a snap judgement against Mozilla without reading into the details) could be influenced by broader competitive dynamics. Nonetheless, it’s important to evaluate each claim on its validated merits.
This brings me to addressing your concerns directly: you make a perfectly valid argument in favor of remaining vigilant, and I support this! Keeping an eye on Firefox source code modifications, monitoring the situation over time, and so on. These can be done while simultaneously assuming Mozilla made a genuine mistake here, and isn't secretly plotting against our interests. The narrative that Mozilla has suddenly turned evil is broadly inconsistent with Mozilla's lengthy track record of standing AGAINST such abuses from Microsoft and Alphabet (Google). That narrative alone is also NOT a reason to spread FUD about a browser that, as of this moment, remains WAY more trustworthy than the "main" alternatives that most uninformed users would migrate to, should they leave Firefox.
A good-faith, open, evidence-based discussion is key to ensuring our whole community understands these complex issues, and I'd accordingly invite you to share more evidence to support your interpretation, which I will read and consider in good faith.
If the standard exists as an abstract interface then future implementors can make different tradeoffs.
In the absence of a reference implementation, the only other suggestion for consolidation is to take an existing implementation and crown that as the winner. The problem is that implementation, regardless of open source, remains under the control of its altruistic parent company. That company then effectively gains sole control over the direction of the web, which we typically agree is a bad thing. The web is (and always has been) bigger than one engine.
The argument is still the same as with OpenSSH and OpenSSL. Having a single dominant code base is a security risk. The risk of OpenSSL has been realized and we now have good alternatives. OpenSSH have alternatives, but we're one major security issue away from having to shutdown remote management for potentially days. If anything we need even more browser engines, Blink is 90% or more of the market. Ideally no engine would be more than 20% of all users.
Personally I still think it's worth it to have multiple engines, both for security, but also to ensure that enough people maintain the skills to keep development active. Or if the US government forces Google to sell Chrome, then there's no guarantee that the buyer would spend the same resource on Blink as Google does. Now I'm all for slowing down browser development (allowing alternative engines to develop and give web technologies a chance to settle down a bit) but with the wrong buyer it not only slows down, it stops, IE6 style. Having WebKit, Gecko, and more, helps push things forward in that case.
Some of us passionately hate Google and Apple for their unethical business practices and would rather cease OSS contributions altogether than contribute to these tyrants.
Admittedly I haven't tried many other options, except sidebery which was good but not quite there for me.
From a quick search, it seems that you need to make edits in `about:config` to enable tab groups and use nightly to access vertical tabs.
Chrome will be told they can't pay Firefox for nothing anymore, and Firefox will reply with a not-uninstallable crypto casino or something (why are you complaining, you can turn it off by simply changing 6 unintelligible about:settings, hiding the banner with CSS, and blocking the telemetry and auto-updates at your router...)
Grab one of these, and run a TV commercial for a week or two. You'll get 20% market share in a couple months. Hire all of these fork developers, and let them keep running their own projects as forks of yours. Pick up people who get laid off from Firefox.
Zen and Floorp look interesting, and librewolf.overrides.cfg is new to me. Making Zen your main sell for marketing purposes, but also distributing LibreWolf for people who prefer a classic setup would make sense. Or if you speak Japanese, replace Zen with Floorp.
If you think you can do better than Mozilla, here's your chance! One day we'll be explaining to people that Apache Firefox is unmaintained buggy garbage, and that when old people say "Firefox" they mean Zen.
So a group of contributors, presumably upset about Mozilla making "user-hostile" changes like displaying ads in the new tab page, create a fork of Firefox, and then solicit donations for their fork using the exact same revenue model?
There are a ton of people who complain about Mozilla taking donations. It shows up in most HN threads about the mismanagement of Firefox.
The surprising part to me is that the same applies to the forks too.
If opening a local file for the home page not a security concern, why should it be for the new tab page. I understand that giving local files access to extensions could lead to issues, however, it should not need an extension to use a local file as a new tab page.
Note: I maintain my bookmarks in a local html file, which I make into my home page, new tab page, across browsers, and then sync this file across devices using Syncthing.
HN has a really small text size for me and I usually read HN at 120-133% text size. LibreWolf does not remember this setting on per-site basis and even opening HN-to-HN link in a new tab doesn't preserve text size and I need to increase text size constantly.
In addition, posting images to Bluesky doesn't work. Every attempt results in an image of proper size but consisting of only vertical lines. For this, I need to fall back to Firefox or use Safari.
Even if the first of above problems is a "feature", the latter is definitely a bug. I haven't filled a report yet. But for now, I'm planning to test Zen.
Unfortunately I don't really understand the implications about the security issues and I don't know whether any of the issues have been solved, so I don't know how to evaluate the security risks versus the privacy risks.
* Stick to one browser engine per device as much as possible. Two at the most.
* Isolate installed browser engines as much as possible (i.e. Qubes or mobile operating system levels of sandboxed or virtualized isolation, not just containers or flatpaks for dev-environment tidiness and separation).
* Connect end-user devices with browser engines installed to the Internet only while actively using the Internet.
Also, variety is good, we have Servo in Rust (although I wish they'd make an actual browser around it too).
Liarfox: Even more corporate shitfuckery and deception.
Firefux: Porn optimised browser.
endless possibilities.....
I'm interested if HN has stats for visitor browser-agent, but also for account-holders. Since I wonder how many users actually switched in the last month, or if it was all just huff and puff.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...
I understand that a donation on the Mozilla Foundation is not a way to fund Firefox development, but i believe that the services that get sold through Firefox like Mozilla VPN do fund development. Maybe you could sign up for one (you don't have to use it) to ensure IceCat continues to exist?
Full disclosure, I have a 1 year sub to Mozilla VPN, I even used it once or twice.
I make heavy use of bookmarks and switch between devices frequently. Manually keeping those synced would be a bit of a nightmare.
Assuming that Firefox forks can use Firefox extensions, I imagine I could get around this problem by using some kind of bookmark extension. I don't know what options are available for that, though.
However, I try to minimize the number of installed extensions to reduce my own browser fingerprint. As others have replied, Firefox Sync works across most of today's popular downstream shadow-forks of Firefox (as in, forks that shadow the Firefox releases rather than truly forking the code). If you don't want to give Mozilla's enshittified corpse your email (I don't), just use an email service that supports aliases to sign up for Firefox Sync... Which is in any case a good idea generally: no two of your important online accounts should point to the same email, even if behind the scenes the aliases are all routing emails back to you.
[1]: https://floccus.org/
If you're using Firefox from nixpkgs this is already disabled by default[2].
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...
[2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.11/pkgs/appli...
It's rough around the edges sometimes, but the quality of life features are chef's kiss:
<Ctrl + Shift + C> to copy the current webpage, workspaces, even an easier profile manager (just like chrome's).
Yes, moving focus to the location bar and then copying the URL gives you the same result. It’s not the same number of steps as copying the URL without changing focus.
Ctrl-L, then while still holding Ctrl, hitting C is not the same number of steps as chording Ctrl-Shift and hitting C. Two steps vs one step.
Considering how quickly Netscape died once IE appeared, I think the market is so small that sites will never test against them and they'll never get a seat on a standards board.
That something is repeated endlessly does not make it true. In fact, it's a signal of disinformation (which doesn't make it false). And when words are used like "everything", it suggests 'nothing' specific is really known. And even to the degree it's true, the inference is weak; the question is, how much does web browser development cost?
$200M seems reasonable to me. Comparisons I've seen make it quite a bit less than estimates of Google's costs, for example.
Mozilla and the Thunderbird teams knew, however, that a breakup was needed for both Thunderbird and for Firefox (Thunderbird compatibility requirements were holding back Firefox).
The reason was that Thunderbird was a low priority for an organization that has a much more successful application in Firefox. Low priority projects don't do well; the organization naturally structures, invests in equipment, hires, manages, etc. for the high priority. You want to be a high priority wherever you are - better to be the big app in a small org than a small app in a big org (as a very general statement).
If you don't know these things, why make up sh-t about Mozilla? What do you get out of it?
the ONLY webkit based zero telemetry browser is Kagis Orion
Why would you think that? Plenty of other forks like LibreWolf and IronFox have removed all telemetry.
And extensions don't cover it since they fail outside of a webpage context, so if you have a key to change tabs, you can't just (reliably) use it - it will break your changing sequence once you switch to a protected Settings tab
Just wait until they discover that the web doesn't allow arbitrary browsers anymore, due to a certain "security" company doing deep inspection and blocking anything that isn't Safari, Firefox or Chrome.
We have all this free and open source software and it doesn't matter because they'll refuse us service if we use it. Only corporation owned computers will pass attestation. If you own your machine you will be turned away from every web site.
Also Waterfox on the surveillance phone. Seems AOK so far.
They are maintained for a very long time.
You can turn off all Firefox telemetry in the settings.
Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not doing much worse than chromium browsers
> Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser...
No, my software does not betray me. If money could buy better software, I’d spend it. Unfortunately, commercial end-user software (and SaaSS) almost always has deep ties with advertising.
I don’t mind crash reporting.
I don’t mind opt-in telemetry for QA.
There is no justification for telemetry by default, not informing of the extent, using it for advertisement, and selling your data as payment for use of software.
Companies that figured out that a steady source of ad revenue beats subscription money will always compromise their customers.
I don’t want that. And Firefox is now in the category of software that cannot be trusted until a worthy steward of a fork steps up.
In the meantime, I’m using Orion by Kagi until I have a non-WebKit alternative.
That's not the problem people have with Firefox. One of the issues right now is that there are people who have intentionally opted-in to sharing "technical data" to Mozilla for the sole purpose of improving the browser, when in fact, it's not just for that but also for improving ad-tech which was never an intent those power users had in mind: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/03/12/mozilla-has-been-s...
I compare an open source project trying to make a browser to an open source project trying to keep up with MS Office formats or Windows graphics APIs. It requires a lot of resources.
And there is no global resolution to this as long as certain nations allow rampant unchecked capitalism and innovation under the sole supervision of the profit driven corporations themselves. Because they will forever keep inventing new standards that they launch on their platforms and become ubiquitous to end users.
We need a hero.
We need a safe harbor outside of the WWW for things that actually need nothing more than HTML 1.0. And be prepared to do without the wonderful services and contents that are "offered" by big corps "for free".
Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge - for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to be downloaded like any other website by the user.
This is not true
Microsoft 365 (Office, Exchange) vs. Google Workspace (Gmail, Office Apps)
Windows/Surface vs. ChromeOS/Chromebooks
Bing vs Google Search
...?
Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..
> At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway.
Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But Google controls both. It means that Google can push for what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user. E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google not to care about something for it to impact Chromium/AOSP.
That's the whole point of competition: you want the users to have choice, so that it pushes the companies towards building a better product. Monopolies never serve the users.
Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.
Yes, Chromium and Blink are open source, but they are effectively Googles open source project. If you're unhappy with their direction you'll need to fork it.
Running a different compiler is also useful to find bugs in your project, and in the compiler itself. I would imagine this applies to the web just as well — a web browser implements an open spec (just like a C++ compiler), at the same time being much more complicated than a C++ compiler.
Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping Manifest V2 (hypothetically).
At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging, refactor after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream Chrome.
Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong direction does not always get you to your destination quicker. Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.
Plus Igalia, MS, Mozilla, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi etc could maintain a shared fork that kept stuff like Manifestv2 if they wanted.
Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford.
To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard.
Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto standards — Dart, and AMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows.
Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/
And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?
If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn’t like, they can develop their own engine based on the best one currently available. As long as Google’s direction ist satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of money by just using it.
They need to ship a good browser with Windows, because a lot of their enterprise customers rely heavily on web applications. A lot of Microsoft enterprise applications are browser apps. The purpose of Edge is not primarily web browsing.
In 2024, Microsoft generated 12.58 billion dollars in revenue from advertising, which is nothing to scoff at.
And we also have to look at future opportunities — the share of the advertising market may be small, but they represent THE alternative to Google's ads, including on all alternative search engines.
If they aren't concerned about ads or ad-blockers, then why are they so aggressive about pushing Edge on Windows users? And in the EU, when people first open up the Edge browser, why do they inform people that Edge will share their data with the entire advertising industry?
It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had worked. That was not going to work against Google, who had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike Microsoft at that point.
IE at a fairly early point became purely a market manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy browser with Windows that kept every muggle's installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one of the primary marketing points for their competitor, Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of IE and for Windows Defender.
I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.
My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together. Apple holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem, built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
IE was a completely different story, it was full of proprietary Microsoft technology (ActiveX) and a lot of Enterprise applications used it heavily.
Microsoft didn't care about browsers maybe 15 years ago, but this changed a lot. A lot of Microsoft software is just available in the browser, they migrated a lot of things to web technology. That's also the reason they switched their browser to Chromium, they needed to ship something that actually works.
Even without (conspiratorial) intent this seems to be happening unintentionally- Andreas is ex-Apple, after all, and that's why he switched development away from his own language to Swift. I wonder if it's analogous to Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza inevitably eventually ending up at Microsoft.
That said,
> Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
Sounds like too good a no-brainer to actually happen, at least under current leadership. Few of these "dream mergers" ever actually happen. Another example, Apple buying DuckDuckGo as a counter against the Google search monopoly, has never come close to happening after years of speculation.
Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers. They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla / Firefox is proving them wrong.
Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition? I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when everyone things and does the exact same thing.
China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be looked down upon.
Yup and they got it. Now we see them using that power and market dominance to further their business goals with their attempts to kill Manifest V2
IIRC one of the biggest reasons was a single misbehaving tab in Firefox being able to take down the whole browser.
Imagine a world where the state of the web ecosystem's faith is down to just Google and Apple.
My memory is definitely fuzzy, but I remember Netscape Navigator 4 wasting years on a scratch rewrite, and Internet Explorer becoming complacent.
Why would it be a problem for an open source browser engine to become dominant? At what point should we be worried if Linux becomes too popular?