They could save themselves the trouble if Firefox simply baked in its own ad-blocking, but since Google basically owns them, we all know that will never happen.
Ladybird browser is going to be awesome.
And Mozilla did develop anti-fingerprinting tech, but they can't enable it by default because it breaks lots of websites and when a website doesn't work they're not going to appreciate Mozilla for protecting them, they're going to be pissed that it doesn't work.
Fortunately if projects like Ladybird gain enough momentum, websites might be forced to cater to it. Time will tell.
If you want to inherit all of Firefox's flaws, I suppose.
> and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare?
Considering Cloudflare is a sponsor of Ladybird, something tells me they're going to grant an exception for it.
People on here love to moan about Firefox because Mozilla did one thing at some point in the existence of the company they didn't like. But then just cede the Internet to Google and chromium clones because at some point when they were a crappy junior JS dev, Chrome had some better tooling over Firebug so they just got used to testing in one browser. Maybe they also like to remember how Firefox, a decade ago, couldn't handle 1000 tab sessions.
I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.
Entirely possible that this is an issue specific to NixOS or my machine, but because of that issue I switched over to Brave.
I would like to go back to Firefox at some point. Maybe I’ll see if I can make a patch to fix video acceleration on NixOS.
I'm being tongue-in-cheek here because it seems most people just give up on safari/firefox if one thing doesn't work and go to some chromium-based browser as their default driver. That's sad.
I have never had chrome on windows 10 or 11; nor chromium.
For a year chase.com wouldn't allow me to login from Firefox. Dumb.
They will have to pry with significant force firefox with ublock origin from my old dusty finger bones... fuck the rest for selling us all out.
Even if it won't move the needle a bit, I can look at myself in the mirror in this specific regard and be content that I didnt bow my head like bland masses did and didnt work towards massive enshittification of our global society from now on.
Because thats what its all about, nothing less. With our choices, we shape future for our kids and grandkids. Shame on you, all you rich faangs who are directly helping this. Godwin's law is never too far in such cases and history wont be kind to you, no reason to be
I would rather spend 100% of my time in Firefox but that’s not doable right now.
For starters, they notoriously make configuration a difficult and shifting game of whac-o-mole to do simple things such as disabling the AI that nobody asked for:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926779
It's also become more unstable in recent years, and I'm not even talking about 1000 tab sessions. It will crash with only a handful of tabs fairly regularly on linux.
For more flaws, look at everything LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc do to make up for them.
Look how few people use it. Do you still want to claim that firefox is perfect? Because if not I suggest to read up on the last 15 years why people stopped using Firefox. Not all of which has to do with Google.
> I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.
This shows a total lack of understanding. You assume that Firefox is perfect. It is not. It is a pretty bad browser. There is a reason why adChromium won. I wish it would be different but it is not.
It's not modular, for example. You can't just use the Gecko engine in your project. To do so, you have to deal and hack through the whole codebase of the Firefox browser.
Under some definitions, the browser IS the core. You are bound at a fundamental level to your parent if you build on someone else's foundations. Firefox is probably a great one to do it but worth knowing that someone else owns the land upon which you stand.
Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either. They'd absolutely end up allowing their own "acceptable" telemetry and ads. Even if they didn't, it would be unlikely to ever be as effective as Ublock Origin. Much like how Chromium browsers' built-in adblocking is barely anything in comparison, even on Manifest V2.
And yet, for now, Firefox and Mozilla is by far the lesser evil. I like a few of the Chromium browsers well enough, but they are ultimately at the mercy of Google.
I hope Ladybird does well, too.
> Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either.
This is in a thread about how we should be happy that FF is vetting code for us. Do we trust them or don't we?
> And yet, for now, Firefox and Mozilla is by far the lesser evil.
I'm instinctively tempted to agree, but the difference is so negligible at this point that the only sign I would is the fact I'm still using FF due to momentum (as well as Ladybird not being ready from prime time yet).
FF/Mozilla has proven itself to be controlled opposition, so I'm not very interested in games of "lesser-of-two-evils" abuser logic that has infected politics and many other spheres in a race to the bottom.
GP trusts them for reviewing external extension code, and ensure that it does not contain malware, but not for not inserting exception to their own telemetry if they wrote the code themselves.
Or, more likely, they feel that having two independent actors collaborating on the extension (one by writing and the other by reviewing) yields a more trustworthy outcome than either actor on their own.
Mozilla have given us plenty of reasons to not trust them, which makes it hilarious that anybody would think it's noteworthy they're reviewing the code of Raymond Hill of all people.
> Raymond Hill of all people.
As good as he's been, he's still just one person with a hobby project. Yes please review it!
And what if he gets hacked?
> This is in a thread about how we should be happy that FF is vetting code for us. Do we trust them or don't we?
Are you joking? You brought the claim to the table, and now that people see the flaws in it you deny them talking about it? You're some mental gymnast..
Ladybird has corporate sponsors too. Sponsorship is influence. Obviously, the more sponsorships you have the less influence an individual one have but it is worth knowing.
One would hope that a project like Ladybird (which is motivated to compete with a product which was ruined by Google's sponsorship) would choose those terms carefully.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070817224229/http://whyfirefox...
Snapchat tries to block Firefox, but all you have to do is fuzz the agent to say you're Chrome and then you're in with no issues.
Ironically, if I fake instead a chromium to be on Windows (UA and Sec-CH headers), I am allowed most of the time even though my TCP fingerprint must mismatch then.
It's annoying to see what the normal web has become. Can't even read news anymore.
Ironically, all these bot defenses make it easier for bots to scrape their website, but make it harder for actual users to use them.
The only bot defense web app firewall that still works with Firefox seems to be Anubis. Pretty much all others autoflag Linux users as bot users, which feels insane if you think about less web developers must know about how botnets work.
I get this with Chrome on MacOS.
I'm becoming more convinced that Cloudflare is the bane of the internet.
If you really mean reCAPTCHA (the one with a “select all squares that have X” kinda challenges), then Cloudflare hasn’t used that for quite a while now. archive.today uses a Cloudflare-looking (old style) page with a reCAPTCHA (and they do serve it quite often), but I don’t think I’ve seen other sites do that.
Repeated problems with cf and similar like this seem to be more common for users behind CGNAT (most mobile users for example). Presumably all the other hosts sharing the same final outgoing address(es), some of which will be running bots either deliberately or because they've been infiltrated by malware, confuse the heuristics that decide how often checks should be made.
Firefox with Gecko is a different engine entirely and that sometimes causes compatibility issues or different behaviour, that websites have to account for.
Pretty sure that's not true. I don't see any YT adverts when using Brave, and I don't have any extensions installed.
"From what I know" is epistemologically equivalent to "For me".
That's how IE 6 was killed.
Also FE devs using all new Chrome shinny APIs, and their Electron junk are also to blame, and they aren't going to throw their toys away.
What killed it was IE6 not supporting TLS1.0 out of the box or TLS1.1+ at all, and that started to make them fail external audits. After years of telling them IE6 was holding us back implementing best-practise security on their instances of our apps¹ and being ignored because doing anything about it their side was too much hassle, external auditors started refusing to give them relevant certificates & such because of their systems not being up to best practise (or even good practise by that point!) and suddenly they made the effort to no longer have anyone in their orgs using IE6.
--------
[0] source: I was working on software serving the banking industry (customer facing & investment sides, not trading) around that time and years either side
[1] Even having annual conversations like:
! The pen test results say you should disable anything below TLS1.0 (and later 1.1), and you haven't. Please do.
? Are you sure? We'd *really* like to, as we've repeatedly mentioned, but that will block your IE6 users.
! Yes! You must follow the recommendations!
? Excellent. Done.
[a short time passes]
! Your application is broken for some of our users!
? Yep. They are using IE6 without TLS enabled.
? Either you need to upgrade their configurations or tell us, in writing please, to break from best practise and reenable the older protocols.
[another short time later]
! Please reenable the older protocols.Unless it's all fud in which case I shall archive this under headcanon.
Some management types might have even seen YouTube potentially blocking IE6 users as an advantage for keeping with IE6 to save bandwidth on their creaking external network links!
Which in practice means "switch to using a Firefox extension which fakes looking like Chrome, and just to selected shitty sites like ours".
The Chrome user agent starts with Mozilla/5.0, ends with Safari, claims to be like Gecko, based on KHTML, and somewhere in there is the string Chrome.
That was done exactly because people were trying to gate which browsers could or couldn't see their page by name, instead of by missing functionality.
The web is becoming a monopoly anyway... a contradiction to what web once meant.
Non-technical people do follow recommendations like installing an extension to help with a problem. Especially if they see the same recommendation from multiple sources, and testimonials as to its efficacy.
So, most sites work, but are never tested on FF, because there is no point, client won't pay for it.
Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. The whole point of the extensions framework is to allow modular extensibility. And it's much easier to vet for malware than to code afresh and maintain.
What stuns me is that most people still use browsers that cannot block ads, seem genuinely annoyed by ads, but don't want to even try switching to a browser that will easily block those ads. It's amazing how much crap people are willing to wade through when the alternative is trying something new.
No it's not.
> Yes, Firefox could do everything, but then it'd turn back into Mozilla. The whole point of the extensions framework is to allow modular extensibility. And it's much easier to vet for malware than to code afresh and maintain.
No, quite the opposite. FF has a history of adopting extensions as baked-in functionality if they prove useful/popular enough. There are tons of examples of this from the past for various features, which is great.
But that fact makes it even more absurd that they refuse to do the same for what is likely their most popular extension of all time: uBlock Origin
Edit: actually, it seems the underlying functionality was built by Mozilla themselves, just not exposed in the UI yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309020
It's been 20+ years, nobody cares about that anymore.
What I am surprised about is that none of the browsers or forks have created a specialist plugin API for adblocking and maybe other filtering. Provide what is needed and only that (keeping the surface tiny), and then evolve the general purpose API in the way they need. I don't think we need V2 of the API any more, except for keeping this one absolutely critical plugin working, do we?
Google has been trying to kill them since they moved the Chrome team into the same building as the now defunct SF office.
(Apparently they offered people a lot of money? There are some words I could use to describe people who do things they think are unethical for cash I'll leave unsaid.)
If Firefox included it by default then it would remove a layer of deniability.
It's not black and white, and your inability to see the larger context is disturbing.
You could, by the same logic, criticize Mozilla for not serving you coffee which is certainly a "user-oriented policy" "baked-in" or rather "brewed-in". But we must be realistic about how far UOPs can be stretched, Mozilla is better than the rest, which includes large corps with far more money than them. If you can do better than Mozilla, I'm all ears.
Next, an ad-blocker needs continuous maintenance - someone started a good one long time ago and apparently loves to improve it and maintain the various lists it uses - why should Mozilla strain to compete with one of their best contributors? - that would be both rude and dumb, and they'd be wasting resources too. There's absolutely no upside to your proposition but you keep insisting.
One would hope that's one of the more useful things an LLM could assist with if not now, very soon. In the meantime, there's no reason they couldn't have uBlock kept as an extension but bundled by default like they've done with other functionality over the years. Wait, never mind. There's one rea$on why they wouldn't, and it's already been $tated.