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Comment by aquir | Hacker News Reader

I don't know...at one point I got off Firefox because it was slow and I was never able to get back to it ever again. Maybe I should try now?

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Do it. It's the only truly independent browser left.

It's not perfect, but it works, and unlike Chrome you can have full ad blocking with uBlock Origin.

With Brave you can have ad blocking built into the browser itself and not have to depend on a third party developer.

The first party developer in case of Brave is arguably worse than most 3rd party developers elsewhere.

And Brave's built-in blocker uses uBO's and other lists, including allowing trusted filters (which can inject high risk scripts into your sites) automatically. So yes, you are using 3rd party scripts already, and no, they can't monitor all of the commits from all those lists.

I would argue that third party developer is more reliable and trustworthy than both Brave and Mozilla

> only truly independent browser

Only truly independent browser engine left. Firefox is entirely independent on google, but unlike its competitors this dependency is through direct cash payments.

Perhaps the Europeans will end up funding Firefox to get away from American corporate tech dependency. Firefox has tried valiantly to get away from Google money but it's difficult to fund browser development from small donations or without cross-subsidies from other business, like web advertising.

Why do you actually ask? Switching browsers has got to be one of the easiest software to switch, right?

Is it? I have autofill/passwords, bookmarks, etc., and you can't easily jump between two different browsers as those will get out of sync.

Both browsers offer import/export functionality for all of those things. Spend one week trying Firefox and if you don't like it, switch back. The inconvenience here is so small it might as well not exist.

After I upgraded my laptop (Ryzen 2700 => 8845HS) it has felt as though Firefox is much closer to Chrome.

While I do not think that the gap narrowed when measured in CPU-cycles, it's just not very noticable when Firefox doesn't feel slow.

I went back to it 6 months ago once Chrome got rid of ublock. It’s pretty good but then some update a week or two ago blew away all my profiles.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

Mozilla did plant the tree 20 years ago, then decided few years after to abandon it

They push millions of lines of code every year, thousands of patches and all kinds of measurable performance improvements so not sure what you're talking about.

the 2% marketshare. I'm talking about 2% marketshare that they got from being de-facto standard, to 2%

At their peak it was like 33% or thereabouts. The claim that they were "abandoned" suggests, well, that the browser was abandoned when it wasn't. It's a mischaracterization. Market share is about some combination of (1) software quality, (2) visibility and (3) distribution lock in. Chrome managed to be arguably better on (1) but it's due to (2) and (3) that it became dominant.

If (1) was all that mattered we would all be using the Preso engine version of Opera right now.

They literally abandoned the development for their toy projects until v57 (?) Quantum release. People left Firefox to chrome cos pages like google meetup and other things were not working at all. What are you saying?

Give it another go. You'll be surprised.

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