vord1080

Not sure where you got the idea that the core development team has been cut, Firefox development remains strong. For example, here's a 1,000+ line patch that just landed two days ago. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779952

Before turning this into another Mozilla hate thread, we should consider the following:

1) Mozilla China is practically an independent organization and their Firefox builds have been quite different from "Normal" Firefox for a long time.

2) That error code is 451, "Unavailable For Legal Reasons", usually used to indicate government censorship.

Under normal circumstances it would gracefully fail. If the connection fails normally the browser will keep trucking along, the problem was a bug deep inside the network stack that could've been triggered by any HTTP/3 connection.

Does this support Firefox?

average disingenuous HNer making comparisons between compilers and web browsers. Everyone involved knows Shadow DOM V0 was a rush job, as was the YouTube redesign that used it (it had major perf issues even in chrome when it came out). The standardized ShadowDOM v1 is better in every way and works in all browsers. It's pretty clear that Google wanted V0 to spread as far as possible so they could force it to become a standard, as removing it would "break the web". Shadow DOM, regardless of version, isn't critical for a product like YouTube. The "web" is only the "web" if parties involved play fair, even just a bit, otherwise it's back to IE6.

Works fine on Windows. Linux only makes up 3% of Firefox users so it's no surprise they haven't prioritized it.

That's extra strange. Because Firefox on iOS is just a thin wrapper over a WebKit Webview. It should basically be as stable as safari then.

> You would recoil in disgust.

Why would I recoil in disgust? What if I prefer ads to total dependence on a single revenue source?

Also comparing Brave to Firefox is like comparing a browser with it's owns independent stack to a browser that's just a fork of a different browser, wait!

> They certainly wouldn't have shitcanned the Servo project, really the only possible threat to Google's de facto monopoly over the web and the biggest meaningful way to fight for the open web.

Anyone that followed Servo closely knows it was a dead end. It was literally never going to ship, ever. They freaking started a rewrite of the layout component at some point. Simple pages like google.com kept breaking. It was an R&D project, the good stuff already got merged into gecko (Stylo, WebRender). A lot of top servo contributors and GFX people got moved to Gecko. The project fulfilled its purpose, it made Gecko better.

That's unfortunate, you should try updating your GPU drivers (if you're on linux there's some different things you need to change). Firefox uses the GPU for more stuff so bad drivers really heck it up.

Container tabs. Good text rendering. Support for some niche css features, the WebExtension implementation can support more advanced extensions (sidebar, runtime theme modification, dns, etc). shift+right click to bypass websites that block context menus. if a website uses the background-image css property, the firefox context menu will have the correct image options and chrome won't. i can hold ctrl and properly select HTML tables to paste into spreadsheets.

> But chrome's security and performance is miles better than firefox.

Not really. Maybe ~6 years ago but they've made insane progress. Full site isolation is rolling out now and the performance is great. Definitely faster than Chrome on my laptop.

You can turn on WebMidi by setting dom.webmidi.enabled to true in about:config, though that isn't a default so it's still a very valid criticism sadly.

> Did you not realize that the repo contains a copy of every third party lib they use?

Except it doesn't. And even if it did, my point is valid. Those libraries are being used in Chromium, and thus need to be maintained for use in Chromium. You can't just let your dependencies rot :)

> It didn't go from 5 to 35 LoC in 5 years buddy

It...did? Do me a favor, write a JavaScript engine, layout engine, crossplatform audio library, crossplatform gfx stack, webgl implementation, webgpu implementation, and about 9000 other things and keep it under 5 million lines. You can't. The web has legitimately expanded in scope to the point where we're pushing double digits on total lines of code.

> Imagine also thinking that Brave will go through the trouble of leaving the webRequest API in place and then sit on their hands and not finish the other side of that equation.

Now we're speculating about something that hasn't actually happened yet. Where is Brave's equivalent to addons.mozilla.org? Am I supposed to hope they have a perfect plan to deal with the limitations of Manifest v3 and just haven't announced it yet? I'll believe it when I see it.

> With desktop-to-mobile sync with real cryptography

Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted? My understanding is that Mozilla cannot actually read user sync data.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

The limited extensions on Android is for technical reasons. Instead of having zero extension support on release, they focused on supporting the APIs needed for popular extensions first and are working on adding the rest. It's an entire rewrite of the browser. There's still a lot of missing APIs they need to implement. Allowing every extension from AMO to work would be almost pointless because so many would be broken.

Lost marketshare is an observation. We can speculate all day.

Did Firefox lose marketshare because of:

Google intentionally making their sites worse in Firefox?

The lack of multiprocess for so long?

No support for Google Earth until 2020?

Google shipping a polyfill that made YouTube.com 3x slower in Firefox and Safari for years?

The move to WebExtensions happening too late, resulting in burnout and lost interest from the extension community because they had already ported their extensions to e10s?

Slack going out of their way to use a non-standard SDP format thats only supported in Chrome, resulting in no other browsing supporting video calls?

Microsoft Teams also does the same thing.

Mobile overtaking desktop, where Chrome reigns supreme as a platform default?

Cosmetic adblocking shouldn't be included in browsers, no. It doesn't scale and is easy to break. It just puts a gigantic target on your back.

Firefox already blocks a lot of ads by blocking tracking scripts. Including a cosmetic adblocker like Brave would lead to worse compat and broken experiences.

> They probably should't have ended support for legacy add-ons.

They should've actually. Firefox was a single-process mess for years with poor sandboxing, because Mozilla was scared of breaking everyones add-ons. The move to WebExtensions was the right one, if a bit late. If the whiners got their way, every extension would be breaking right now because of Fission. The old model also had no permission system.

Lost marketshare is the silliest criticism of them all I think. What to change that? Use it and tell your friends, that simple. It's like a meta-criticism, same as CEO salary. The quality of the product has only increased. Just in the last version they started rolling out Fission and added form filling for PDFs.

My friend, your [0] is almost a decade old. I can pull the repository and prove that Chromium is even more than 35 million sloc.

There's also nothing "incomplete" about what I said. I did say that they claim they're leaving blocking webRequest intact.

Brave also doesn't make sideloading extensions easy. Enjoy your constant nagging from having developer mode enabled. Most users won't even go through the trouble.

The compat story for Brave and Firefox is about the same. Tracking protections in Brave broke sites more often than Firefox when I used it for a few months, and there was a recent incident where iCloud was being blocked in Brave.

And despite what a lot of people say, engine interop is only getting better thanks to initiatives like Compat2021. More sites work well under Gecko than ever before. Anyone remember IE6 era where Firefox needed bug-for-bug compatibility? It's been worse folks.

I completely agree with you. Seems unlikely though :(

Firefox has pretty rich search settings, better than any other browser IMO. It's very easy to use different search engines for different things and changing the default is one click in about:preferences. As easy as it gets I think

For what technical reason would it be a proprietary blob? The Firefox frontend has been html/xul/css/js forever. Pocket would be implemented the same. I can't see why it would need to be a binary.

Pocket isn't proprietary. The bundled extension is OSS and maintained in-tree. It's also not deeply integrated. You can turn it off or use artifact builds to create a custom Firefox with it completely gone, and nothing will break, because it's just a WebExtension.

Chromium is more like ~35 million lines of code. And Brave is implementing Manifest V3, there's no choice in the matter. They'll be forced to because they rely on Google's Chrome Web Store (and chromium itself), which will stop accepting MV2 submissions in 2022. Their current claim is that they'll support the blocking webRequest functionality from MV2, that's it. You better hope Google doesn't block submission of MV3 extensions that use MV2 APIs that only work in forks.

You can change when the overflow scrolling starts by setting browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 50 (or any number you want, the unit is pixels) in about:config

I was curious if this is true, so I created a new profile. The first two tabs were the normal onboarding and the privacy policy. When I opened a new tab I did get the silly news feed so I clicked the gear icon in the top right and turned it off.

I haven't seen any nagging to create an account yet after mucking around with the UI.

And honest question, what's your idea for monetizing Firefox? They're pushing subscription based products to reduce the reliance on Google money and adding different avenues for sponsorships that aren't from Google. Sounds like a plan to me.

Also Brendan Eich had strong support within Mozilla. If I had to guess, he resigned because of external pressure. (remember OkCupid putting a banner on their service protesting Eich, that was wacky)

Well, yeah. I was talking about besides the actual terms of their agreement.

They don't? I've gone as far as disabling all account functionality with about:config and am using containers right now.