Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut the mold off the tasty cheese that is Firefox
The overwhelmingly vast majority of the world population uses Google Chrome with no adblocker, on Windows, and have no desire to change anything. Even if you actively try to persuade them towards other browsers or operating systems.
Why is that difficult to understand? Most people are not technical and do not have the same concerns or gripes as we do... their current software stack is familiar and does what they need it to, and that's all they care about.
Mozilla seems to have a string of bad leadership but when compared to Alphabet, I don't see how there can be any choice. Use Firefox or one of the niche privacy focused forks.
My uBlock Origin works perfectly well.
1. Hint detection seems much more fragile than vimimium. For example, some links don't get a hint when pressing f on their own :tutor page.
2. The ctrl+, shortcut to focus doesn't work always, requiring a mouse click to start working again.
3. Pressing tab doesn't autocomplete in command mode.
And some other minor quirks.
Which makes it trivial to switch. There's really no justification for sticking with Chrome. Switching to Firefox takes about a minute, you can import all your saved logins and bookmarks, and then maybe spend a whole whopping 30 seconds adding Ublock Origin. Complaints about Chrome amount to "I am too inconceivably lazy to spend 90s switching to a browser that doesn't hate me".
I only keep a Chromium based browser around because of Mozilla's asinine decision not to support Web Bluetooth and Web USB that are needed to interact with devices, microcontrollers, etc.
All that I care about is that I do not see a single ad in or on anything while I browse. It's a fight but firefox makes it doable.
It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company.
It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.
Lots of products and services have small market share and are better than the market leaders.
The great thing about Firefox "losing" the "war" is that Chrome users' ad viewing essentially pays for my internet, and with only 2% market share, nobody will pay any attention to those of us still blocking ads. Sometimes you lose the war, but still end up winning the battle :)
Firefox, originally "Phoenix" when it was first released, originally had 0% and made it up to 30%. There's no technical reason why it can go higher from 2%.
If the folks that started Phoenix/Firefox thought the same way you did, when IE was the top dog, we wouldn't have it in the first place because they would have things were "lost". They decided things were not lost and to make an effort.
We can again choose to consider things "lost", or we can try to turn things around.
It would be possible for a surge in contributors to bring it back up to a double digit percentage, but I don't think manifest v3 is going to be the catalyst for that.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/
And that doesn't even count the dark years of OS9 in the '90s. Have they lost the operating system wars?
Firefox is more divisive than AI?
So if you really don't want to ever see ads again, you need something at the application layer.
What are some examples
I observe the contrary among the sites submitted to HN
Without access to other subdomains and other domains plus a Javascript interpreter, the ads and tracking don't work
Usually when the website is not part of an ad network, but instead runs their own ads.
Are these "sites" as in "websites"
Or something more akin to Netflix, endpoints accessed with an "app" on a "TV"
The parent comment's HOSTS file method will fall short, for sure
But a zone file that functions as an "allowlist", cf. "blocklist", can do the job in most cases
If the ads are in the video file then downloading makes more sense than streaming
Ads can be removed from the file, or skipped in the video player
Brave and Vivaldi strike me as being at least not worse.
Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1ebbeas/why_...
> so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway.
Ads are hardly an example of an ethical product to begin with, hah.
It's URL prefixing
Vivaldi claims they don't collect data from "Direct Match"
No way to verify this claim is true but that's beside the point. It's another web browser sending traffic to it's own servers
Vivaldi is Chromium-based
This week an "I'm quitting" blog post from a former Mozilla employee was on the HN front page. He more or less recommended Vivaldi, i.e., Chromium
The problem of advertising is not solved by choice of browser vendor where _all_ the vendors are trying to make money from ad services, partnerships with Google, affiliate marketing, cryptocurrency, etc.
"Not as bad as Chrome" is a pathetically low bar to meet
These browsers take longer to compile than an operating system. Absurd complexity and vulnerability
The Vivaldi default settings are just as bad as any other so-called "modern" browser, i.e., they have to be changed
It's a fool's errand to compare these browsers to each other. They have far more similarities than differences. They all suck
A self-respecting hacker would choose a piece of tech that is well-maintained, not one that only recently added profile support after all these years, or one that still offers an ancient bookmark and history UI.
They also break down spending into a pie chart of different types and development gets more than anything. If you look at their actual budget or the published changes to new releases it tells a different story than vibes based internet comment sections. But you have be approaching conversations in an open-to-new-information kind of way.
Besides... the real compensation for big-tech executives or for early startup employees isn't a fixed dollar amount, it's the stock options. Let these vest and cool down for 10 years or so, and when you look at them again, they can easily be worth a billion a year. That's how a bunch of "angel investors" in SV got their money, they profited massively off of a good exit event in the past and now invest a chunk of that profit.
I’m using Brave and I’d rather people support a degoogled fork of chromium that supports ublock origin, than keeping Mozilla on life support.
And if you don’t like Brave just fork it again.
Edit: Someone on Reddit compiled a list of various fuckups. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_b...
It's nonetheless the thing you can overwhelmingly trust the most in the long run.
Anything Chromium based is tainted. They will not be able to keep out all of Google's shitty decisions because they are not building a browser, they are building a skin on top of somebody else's browser.
1) I think it's well established (or perhaps not well established enough) that "non-profit" is the only way to go for base level computing things like this. Profit motive (as distinguishable from "keep the lights on money," e.g. with Wikipedia) makes you do unnecessary and often harmful experimentation.
2) It's a fork of the thing you're trying to beat. Now, that may not be a deal-killer, but given Chrome's dominance, getting outside of that entirely seems smarter.
Funny how people always blame Mozilla's good faith critics, but they never engage into hearing them out on why so many people rip mozilla to shreds in the first place. With a "stop being mean to my favorite billion dollar corporation" attitude.
Gee, maybe there's valid reasons on why so many people dunk on Mozilla. Hear them out before you snarkily dish on them. And it's Mozilla who should hear them out the most, if they actually cared about FF's market share, but they don't because those Google cheques keep clearing.
>That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars
And where has the EU been all these years on this topic? Where is it now?
They could just easily have blocked google from pushing MV3 on anti consumer and anti competitive grounds alone. End of story. But they didn't.
That "keep the web open" nonsense is a myth, spread by Mozilla press releases
People who use Firefox, not all of them, "keep open internet [read: www] alive"
If Firefox exists and does the job for them, then they'll use it. These users write the add-ons to do "ad blocking", not Mozilla
If Mozilla closes the door on "ad blockers" then these users will move to another solution, maybe a Firefox fork, maybe a non-browser method, who knows
Mozilla gets ripped because ultimately they are "in it for the money", not Firefox users, and the money, they believe, is in online ad services. Mozilla advocates for having all www content supported by ads. Effectively they advocate for companies like Google
By pure coincidence I'm sure, Mozilla relies on dollars from Google to line their own (management's) pockets. Without an ad services company like Google to partner with, Mozilla's business, sending search queries and possibly other data about Firefox users to Google, cannot survive
But Mozilla communications reframes this operation as something like "we take money from advertising services companies like Google to keep the web open"
Except they will not mention the money from Google part
Then they will lead off press releases with some bizarre assumption like "a healthy online ads ecosystem is essential for the www to exist"
This might make sense to Mozilla but it makes no sense for www users who don't like ads