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Comment by tsoukase | Hacker News Reader

I am pretty sure Google donates a great share of Mozilla's revenue but demands the following with this money:

- Firefox is alive, so that they are a theoretical competitor to avoid anti-trust measures

- Firefox has the lowest market share that remains that said competitor without distracting many users from G engagement

- Firefox emains of few steps behind in features and perforfance so that it remains in this pesky market share

- of course Firefox keeps Google search the default

- may be other under the table agreements? (Request for comments)

I cannot foresay what will happen next with the state of MV3.

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I've yet to have one single problem after running Firefox as my main driver for ~3 months. Only 2 webpages have made me quickly open Chrome instead to check them out, and the content wasn't worth engaging for long.

It puzzles me how more programmers don't switch to a real open source browser not controlled by an advertising giant which will use their overwhelming monopolistic force to steer the way browsers work so that it benefits its bottom line.

Vote with your feet, use Firefox.

I used it for many years but ultimately abandoned it because its memory use was just unacceptably high. A couple of windows with 30-40 tabs in each would eat all my laptop's memory - Chromium in a similar setup will sit around 40% used. I don't know what Firefox is doing but it's crazy far off the pace there.

Mozilla should be focusing on fixing things like that and making the browser be good before the barely related campaigning, let alone the whole "we're going to be an advertising business as well" thing.

Running latest Firefox on latest MacOS on Intel.

Hundreds of tabs open, memory usage is ~3GB for main process, 2-3GB for isolated content (ie the tabs).

Really not sure what the problem is.

Are you on Linux, Windows or macOS ?

Linux

Sounds like an extension issue. Firefox by itself uses way way less memory than Chromium-base browsers.

I had a few extensions, I don't think anything especially unusual. Regardless, Chromium with a few similar extensions (ublock is the most notable) performs far better.

> It puzzles me how more programmers don't switch to a real open source browser not controlled by an advertising giant

Let us know when you find one.

I think clearly Google want Firefox alive as a 'competitor', and they explicitly are buying that Google search is the default. I highly doubt they have any agreements limiting Firefox's market share or features though - that would undo the benefit of it being a competitor if it ever came out, but more significantly they don't have to. Mozilla have managed to achieve all that on their own. I actually think Google would probably rather that Firefox was at say 10% market share so they had a more legit argument that it was a competitor.

> - may be other under the table agreements? (Request for comments)

Google access to Firefox telemetry data?

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