So Long, Firefox, Part One
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
I am looking forward to Ladybird, I guess for old folks like us it is the second time we are trying to dethrone the incumbent. But this time around it will be so much harder because Google isn't sitting still like Microsoft did with IE.
They have quite consistently delivered good software for years.
how so?
Have you considered that maybe, possibly, people don't want AI in their browser? Or that people consider having AI shoved at them an untrustworthy action? That maybe of Mozilla wants to spend all the time and money to shove AI, they're probably a) doing it for gross and untrustworthy reasons like spying on us or b) by spending all this money on AI, Mozilla is (still) not focusing resources on anything productive or valuable that any user wants.
" but such is the direction being taken by Mozilla that I am not anxious to sit idly by and constantly keep an eye out for new hidden privacy and AI features to turn off with obscure checkboxes. "
But here I can attest at least, that nowdays firefox after a fresh install shows a banner saying they collect data by default. And when you click that, you get directly to the options to turn it off. It is just, that I also don't trust that with those toggles now everything is switched off, or if there is a hidden other toggle or there will be one shipped with the next update.
But you can apply the same argument to everything, right? Any piece of software could be taking actions that it doesn’t disclose. Any toggle could assure the user that their settings are respected but not actually change anything. So how do you then trust running _any_ code on your computer?
Obviously I can't just look it up, otherwise they would have told us about it in the article.
There's no getting around a fundamentally misaligned incentive like that.
Zen really becomes particularly awesome if you run Linux with a alternative Wayland compositor like Sway, Hyprland, Mango, Wayfire and friends due to the window management in those environments. As a example: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen_browser/comments/1ky8rdp/arch_h... (this particular Zen instance is modded to be transparent, by the way)
A forked FF?
A forked (proprietary) chrome, like vivaldi?
The best idealistic option, Ladybird and not be able to use most of the internet (yet)?
Well, I likely also won't find out. But I doubt it will be mindblowing, as the real choices (if you care for open source, but also to get stuff done) are limited.
https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/08/12/milestone-fire...
"I can finally say I'm Firefox-free."? Like if Firefox is the plague or something.
"Just What Went Wrong?": You went wrong, dear TFA author. Choosing hype over substance? Too desparate to meet your hackaday post quota? Who knows.
Let me anecdotally recap the state of Firefox as of 2025:
- Handles 100s of open tabs with no sweat.
- Allows ad blockers.
- Firefox tab sync. Send a tab from my phone to my desktop. See my laptop's open tabs from my desktop.
- PiP videos. Keep a video playing without obstructing you from other tasks.
- Tab containers cleanly separating work and private sessions.
- Free.
Yes, there are things to be desired from the Mozilla Foundation management end. Yes, at some point (optional) integrations were shoehorned into the browser. Yes, newer browsers may offer a friendlier out-of-the-box experience for the average user (e.g. Brave has ad blocking built-in). But all-in-all, Firefox is a fantastic browser and a real workhorse. For free.
And to be fair, the dip in Firefox popularity around 2010-2015 was deserved. The experience kind of sucked at the time, compared to the rising Chrome. Also the decision to drop XUL was in retrospect the technically correct choice. It was the main reason that Firefox managed to catch up in terms of speed and security with Chrome. Unfortunately, the change was not reflected back to the browser's market share.
/EOR
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/
From their about:
A little Firefox Extension that provides a one-click toggle to spoof as Chrome in Firefox - or, in other words, to put on the Chrome Mask.
There are a lot of generic "User Agent spoof" extensions. However, this extension does a few things differently:
- Instead of overriding the User Agent string on all sites, this extension allows you to only look like Chrome on specific sites.
- Unlike some extensions with outdated version numbers and UA strings, this extension automatically updates the Chrome version it pretends to be. It does that by querying a simple API every 24 hours.
- You don't have to pick the correct Operating System manually; this extension does it for you.
- This extension also shims a few additional JavaScript attributes, like navigator.vendor or the global chrome object, to pass common browser checks.
Still pretty important.