> Meanwhile, the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox every time the subject arises...Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition.
It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings in about:config and make edits to userChrome.css
It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into. Users who are seriously concerned about what Mozilla is prioritizing, and who are genuinely worried about what is at stake.
I hope people here never stop bitching about Firefox. Refusing to talk about Firefox's problems wont help make them go away. Keep discussing what you'd like to see in Firefox and what things you hope they'll focus on and prioritize. There are Firefox devs and mozilla employees around here. If we're lucky, a few of them might see and listen to some of what we say. It's the most tech savvy users who disable all the telemetry and data collection, so our feedback isn't really going to be seen any other way.
> It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings in about:config and make edits to userChrome.css
On the one hand, you're totally right. Pushback should exist.
On the other hand, I have seen some seriously lazy and wild justifications for sticking in the chrome universe because tech users aren't immune to justifying a bad product through inertia (and, honestly, are probably champions at it).
I have seen and heard plenty of firefox "can't handle all the sites they need" and I have always been curious as to what these people are doing because I've been on FF for decades and the ONLY time I switch to a chrome browser is for VIA (and that's a whole google did a standard no one else wants to do situation).
To be fair, I suspect some of that has to do with major web dev stuff that I don't have to do, so it is very possible I'm actually just missing the mark here and the tooling/use case is really that much better in chrome (although I know that's its own issue since that's kinda the problem), and there are those who've found some major feature on a chrome spinoff that they just love and FF doesn't do well.
Still accounting from those, I'd safely bet money a lot of people who claim firefox just cannot work for them haven't really bothered to try to adopt. It's functionally identical to me outside of the whole "better adblock" and "arguably better bookmarks i forget to use".
I will go further and say that people hate on Firefox because they care.
We don't see many people here hating on Edge for instance, they may hate the fact that it always wants to force itself in, but not the browser itself. And that's simply because they don't use it, they don't even bother trying, they don't know what to hate about it and they don't care. Occasionally, some people say it is actually good, they get ignored.
I'm not sure about that. I think there's plenty of people who shit on Firefox to justify to their own ethical standards their preference for some Chromium-based browser.
I'm failing to parse the "own ethical standards" as it relates to chromium-based browsers and this conversation about firefox..can you maybe explain, does removing the ability for users to block adds seem more ethical than not?
Is this being done for the benefit of the users? The question applies to many decisions in Chrome. It's the ethical side of the maker.
Is letting Firefox slip into irrelevance (by not using it) in the interest of the users, writ large? What developments should we expect if this happens? This is the ethical side of the user.
People often will tell lies to themselves and other to support their personal ideology. Product A is bad and so is product B. So why should I move from A to B? They are try to rationalize their belief system versus looking at realty.
Reality is that non-tech people to know what surfing the web is like with Ad-Block vs non-Ad-Block browsing. Once you teach some one it becomes night and day.
Without teaching someone very few people will step out of their comfort-zone to self educate.
I've seen people complain about Firefox in terms of performance and compatibility to justify using Chrome, but there aren't many chromium-based browsers appealing to those with ethical standards to choose from. Ecosia maybe? Ultimately is seems to come down to choosing your moral compromises more than anything.
Firefox performances have been good for so many years that I can't remember when it was the last time that I felt it to be slow. I only remember that Chrome used to be faster than FF (mainly the JS engine) and then it wasn't. Maybe it loses every single benchmark, I didn't check, but it is fast enough to be my primary browser, the one I use when I work as web developer and also when I'm not working. I run FF on a 2014 Debian laptop. Windows and Mac, who knows.
About compatibility, there are some odd sites that use a Chrome only API or something that FF didn't implement. They are really rare but people that must use one of them to do their job don't have a choice.
Then I intentionally break every single site by using privacy add-ons like uBO, uMatrix, PrivacyBadger etc so sometimes I have to play with them and find a configuration that lets me use a site. In the case of uMatrix it usually means finding the minimum set of scripts that enables enough functionality leaving out all the 3rd party tracking and then saving it. When it's too complicated and I will not use that site again but I must use it, I either disable every add-on on that site or I run Chrome.
Finally, I run integration tests with a headless Chrome, but I develop with FF. If it works with FF it works with Chrome and Safari too.
BTW, I use FF on Android as my primary browser too.
I worked at Mozilla for quite a long time. I can tell you that MANY employees will be reading every comment in this thread. Hello mozillians! Don't forget to do something good for the web tomorrow!
> MANY employees will be reading every comment in this thread
That's interesting - why? Why torture yourself with abuse and ignorance?
It's somewhat like athletes who are told not to read social media. I'm sure many do, but what is the point? The people commenting know nothing of value about what you do - you're a professional working with professionals.
At least athletes are in entertainment so some aspects of public reaction are significant (not their advice on how to shoot the ball).
That said, if they're reading - hello! You guys do some of the best, most important work. The world without Mozilla and Firefox would be much less.
Not like Chrome, Chrome feels like it LOVES hanging out with me, looking over my shoulder, telling all it's friends about what I'm working on, what I buy, and how much money I make.
Sure, but Firefox doesn’t have to be Chrome to be unacceptable, and Chrome isn’t the only alternative. I reject the idea that Firefox can transgress as much as they want as long as Chrome has gotten worse.
Chrome is the only alternative unless you have access to Safari. Brave, Opera, Edge, etc are all Chromium and will all deprecate Manifest V2 eventually. The V2 mess is just one example of how Google can continue to stangle the web even if you're not using Chrome itself.
Most of the Chromium-based browsers remove Google's telemetry and integrations, so if someone has a problem with Chrome "looking over my shoulder", then they have many more alternatives.
And sure, Manifest V2 will disappear in all those forks, but many browsers have built-in adblocker instead, for example both Opera and Brave claim to. And other than adblockers, what else is lost in Manifest V2?
Mind you, I am still using Firefox, but saying "the only alternatives are Chrome and Firefox" is completely incorrect.
The future looks pretty clear to me. We will have to use two browsers. One government approved, google (or some other thing) vetted browser for all the official and banking stuff. One other for all the other causal stuff.
This would be bundled as a single package, with something like firefox containers automatically switching to the "approved" browser based on domain loaded in the tab.
I use Firefox and I like it (especially being able to use uBlock Origin), but I really dislike what Mozilla has become over the last ten years or so. I think that's the key distinction, I can mostly manage Mozilla's crap by turning off a bunch of stuff in my Firefox settings, but I think it's really important for the web to not use a Chromium based browser.
AFAIK, from reading the annual reports years ago, this nice sum of money belongs to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works on making a better web. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity that makes Firefox, doesn’t seem to have as much as it needs. Hence MDN Plus, Mozilla VPN, and other services.
On Android I use Firefox despite the rough edges simply because the usability gain of the mobile web with ublock Origin is insane. Also it's nice sending tabs between desktop and mobile.
But how could it possibly? For work, sure, this kind of minor efficiency means something, so I'll stick with Chromium-base. But for my own phone? This is like the exact type of thing that proves the monopolistic dark patterning. Personally, the modicum of convenience feels super short-sighted compared to the ethical/privacy hangover, not to mention the risk to future availability of a viable competitor.
Hate that they recently implemented PWAs, but didn't bother making sure the icon for the site worked, so all PWAs have the genetic Firefox icon. The most valuable feature of PWAs is to identify a tab as a standalone app and there's no fix for this in sight.
There are forks which will keep the sanity alive, but I worry about how long Firefox will survive if everyone moves to them, and I have doubts about how well those forks will be maintained after Firefox is gone.
If 99.9999% is on WWW, nobody will move to Gemini. There is no business to build on Gemini, no publicly accessible, culturally broad community exists on it and none will exist. You'll only find programmers on Gemini. No authors, philosophers, non-IT engineers/makers with their projects. WWW has organically grown. Gemini has to be equally or more capable and more user and business friendly to have a significant contributor base.
But seriously, web is asymptotically approaching zero usefulness precisely because of all those "capabilities". In those circumstances, can't you see a million nerds muttering "we'll build our own interweb! with blackjack and hookers!" And one of them might even get lucky, and get a tipping point. Gemini's just an example.
I don't think web's ever going away for corporate stuff, but I can imagine the cultural party moving next door, to a less capable protocol.
It's like Reddit and Lemmy. The majority of users did not switch to Lemmy but the ones that did seem to engage more and share cooler stuff. They are there on purpose, not because it's the default platform.
This is the most insane cope. The old web was good because a naive user could find the coolest thing imaginable. The naive user isn't digging into a forum, finding a reference to a niche forum from the other forum, figuring out how to install or access it, and then actively engaging in it. People don't know passwords can have spaces now.
This is exactly and precisely why open source exists, for both the "never upgrade frozen version" case, and the extension into "fork it and make your own" case
Something like Firefox is so complex that I could not fork it and make my own. I mean, I could, but the amount of changes I could put in would be trivial unless I'm getting paid full time. Even if I was paid full time, realistically, one person paid full time, no matter how good, just can't make an impact in the browser today.
I'm not paid full time to work on a web browser. As a volunteer, I can't find the time to dedicate to that. I could do a few lines here and there if I really got dedicated, but like most people, I have a life. I have kids and such. My retirement account won't fund my midlife crisis to quit my job and work on a web browser, so I depend on something to build a good browser. And that is assuming I even would work on a web browser if I could afford to do whatever I want full time. There are a ton of other activities in my community that need volunteer help, some of which I'm helping a little bit, but I could do more for.
I, like many here, have wished that we could donate a small amount to Firefox every month to fun development, however it turns out that the Mozilla Foundation does not fund development of Firefox and so any money would go not to Firefox but to other causes of which I may or may not support but are not a web browser which is what I want to support.
Finally someone talking sense. I understand forking if it's, say, a simple android app to view images, because the owner sold out and ads got put into a bunch of things that used to be a foss code base (coughSimpleMobileToolscough), but the actual task of forking and maintaining 30-40 million lines of code and weekly security updates is unrealistic. That intensive process effectively became Google's moat.
I actually think this is an interesting case for AI not being evil, because I think it's at least plausible that it could close the gaps between big dogs and little guys, though in the long run it might just prove to be another form of acceleration.
A lot of existing forks are just Firefox with a couple features added or removed. It's very different from a fork that continues being independently developed as a separate project.
Chromium forks are not the same as Chrome but it does help Alphabet keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology. And eithr way, monocultures are bad, a surprise vulnerability could nuke 70% of users overnight, which could be partiularly bad with features like WebSerial and WebUSB.
What does "keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology" even meant?
Does "make Firefox compatible with more web site" make chrome stronger?
A thought experiment: if Firefox can use all chrome extension, does this make chrome stronger? I guess yes, right? What makes a website different from extension?
[ I am trying to show the "chrome ecology" argument is ridiculous, not saying we show stop supporting website ]
It's like IE6 was - whatever Google/Chrome wants to do effectively becomes mandatory because nearly everyone is using it.
Firefox has to follow along because of all the web developers who only test things in Chrome and expect all browsers to work exactly like Chrome does. If anything about your browser is different, a website doesn't work, and if you complain the response will be "We don't support Firefox, you should use Chrome or Edge instead."
For a browser, that's not really possible without a significant team of over-the-average and paid developers. There are a lot of complexities in a browser. It has to have its own GPU driver, JIT compiler, optimized scheduler to pull page components, another scheduler to run JS, a cross-platform rendering abstraction, hacks for 30+ years of WWW. All of that should be fast. Because everything else is extremely slow and wasteful on Web.
People who can handle this complexity are extremely mobile in the industry. They can always find employment in a much better paying place than Mozilla. And a competitive browser has to have such developers on generous payroll.
One of the issues with Firefox is its codebase. Some parts of it are slowly rotting and it has its own fair share of 20-year-old bugs. Mozilla is slowly failing to keep up with the ever changing landscape and dealing with the age of their codebase. There is a reason why Electron could be developed with Chromium but not Firefox. Mozilla really tried this as well, it just didn't work.
If you're forking, Chromium or Safari are a better start point than Firefox.
The moment it comes to that level of complexity is well past the moment it matters for browser diversity anymore. There is no shortage of open source browser codebases or random forks using them, there is a shortage of development paid in some form other than selling out the users.
How does Mozilla fund Firefox right now? I'm genuinely curious for a free product, how can they generate revenue without doing shady ad and data collection stuff?
At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests, they just give everyone a decent free browser, bring back the oxidation effort and overhaul Firefox to be all our Rust as Quantum was aiming towards.
Someone needs to take Firefox from Mozilla itself and provide it better funding under the understanding no more shennanigans.
> At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests
I don't see how cloudflare buying firefox would keep it from being a victim of corporate interests. That'd just make them subject to the corporate interests of cloudflare instead.
Cloudflare is corporate interests. What makes you think they or any other big corp is above messing with products they acquired? Remember when google used to be the good guys?
It is also very bad if the company that gets to decide which user agents get to see a webpage owns a browser. I could easily see some kind of fingerprinting mechanisms built into the browser if cloudflare is in charge. For your safety, of course.
Cloudflare is a vile company, who has destroyed large parts of the web and is almost certainly involved with intelligence agencies. Buying Firefox would push away what users they have left (many of which are due to Torbrowser)
> Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads
oh ok I'll change to Chrome then surely they would never do stuff like this
I mean people do sincerely argue that (edit: they're literally doing it in this same tree of replies as yours), and I think they do it precisely because it hasn't occurred to them to think in comparative terms.
So I think if you're going to be ambiguous on a point where ambiguity is inexcusable you deserve to get nailed for it every time.
Firefox has indeed done things that are worse than anything Chrome has done, such as abusing a privileged update channel to push content advertising a TV show to user’s browsers without their knowledge or consent.
That was nowhere near what chrome does. This is why I have trouble taking Firefox haters seriously. A 1 time thing that they the haven't done again. Installed an add on that was never enabled or did anything at all unless you went through the trouble of enabling it. Needed you to have the Firefox studies checkbox enabled which all of us who would even care turn off first thing.
Chrome: no blocking ads on websites whatsoever. The comparison isn't even close.
Chrome and Google have not done worse than a nearly-10-year-old incident that was walked back 3 days later and hasn't resurfaced since? That's truly your position?
i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain. my opinion doesn't matter more then the next guys.
but when you see where this is headed because you've seen it countless times, there is always the "it works fine for me" guy and that is the most infuriating thing ever. a great example is microsoft teams, which is by every metric the shittiest application on my computer and there is always a "i don't have a problem with it" guy somewhere.
the frustration i have with that is the "i don't have a problem with it" crowd is the poster child for lower standards and shittier software experiences. there seems to be no meaningful way to convey "hey, you should care about this".
firefox fumbled super hard earlier this year trying to push their on-by-default AI. it took entirely too long to get them to backtrack a little. you could feel the insulation between customer feedback and their teams working it, they already have the operating models in place to try and force an enshittified offering and you can tell their new MO means they are hungry to do it and i expect more bullshit from firefox up ahead. hopefully we have other options locked and loaded before we get there because they're playing with fire considering how much user share they don't have. mozilla has completely shifted its priorities and structure, i do not expect them to move independently in a direction that benefits us anymore. no one should be surprised if/when they resume shipping some real bullshit up ahead
> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain.
It could be a generational thing, but I've always associated "power user" with the DOS/Windows crowd and it isn't so much about knowing more as, well, treating a computer like a computer. That is to say that the person who uses scripting in Excel is as much of a power user as the gamer who tweaks power profiles or overclocks their processor. On the flip side, someone who uses the basics of Excel or the gamer who buys the fastest GPU is a consumer of products, rather than a power user.
Funny thing is, I never hear that term being used on the macOS or *ix side of the fence -- even though there are certainly people who who would qualify.
As for the AI thing: AI is something that nobody wants but "everybody" expects. I don't blame them for pursuing it, even if it's a type of integration that I really don't want.
> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain.
That's fair. In this case though, the divide is pretty massive and also important. A lot of people couldn't tell you what a browser is. They just know what button to hit to make Facebook appear on their screen. A few would know what a browser is, but couldn't tell you what engine it used or why that would even matter. Many of the folks around here know about browsers in a way that goes far beyond what is typical. We've sought out and experimented with several. We've written websites, extensions, and applications for them. We understand how browsers work, and the standards and protocols involved in what they do.
The result is that we tend to hold stronger opinions about web browsers than many others would. Our knowledge matters especially to Mozilla because the user who couldn't tell you what a browser is isn't going to bother going to their app store and searching for a new one. We are the ones who go to our friends and family and tell them about Firefox. We encourage them to install a new program on their devices and to learn to recognize and use an unfamiliar icon whenever they want to search "The Google". The more users like that Firefox pushes away, the more they'll miss out on the benefits of that kind of evangelism.
It used to be a whole lot easier to recommend Firefox. I could tell a moderately skilled person to download it and install it. If someone weren't comfortable with downloading and installing software I could install it for them plus an extension or two in just a few minutes. I knew firefox would work for them, and not try to exploit them. That's no longer the case.
Now firefox provides an enshittified product out of the box, and every update threatens more harm. While I might be willing and able to keep an eye on whatever new bullshit Mozilla pushes and make a bunch of config changes and customizations to work around it, I can't expect my less technical or passionate friends and family to do that.
>It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into
The problem isn't that they're frustrated it's that they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about.
They don't just complain for themselves, they think this is the causal explanation for Firefox declining market share. Which it isn't because what they complain about 99% of people have never heard of. Nobody out there cares about who the CEO of Mozilla is or what detail of their Term of Service for telemetry they've changed. Power users is the only thing Firefox doesn't lack.
> they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about.
The average user doesn't really understand what a browser is, or how it works, and will never bother to look for an alternative to whatever default browser shipped with their OS. If Firefox plans on surviving by appealing to that audience they're doomed to fail.
Firefox got what success it's had by appealing to the people who care about browsers. They installed Firefox and then convinced the other people in their lives who couldn't care less about what a web browser is to install and use Firefox. It was easy for power users to recommend Firefox because it was a good product that offered clear advantages and didn't exploit its userbase. Alienating the people who know and care about browsers by enshittifying is probably not going to work out for Mozilla, and that means we all lose.
This is complete revisionist history. Mozilla actually did the dang thing with project Quantum which was a massive overhaul of performance and stability when the browser was arguably at its lowest point in terms of a performance gap with Google Chrome
They completely revitalized the browser and... kept losing market share. Because it's 99% about distribution and Chrome was distributed by the world's most visited website and the pre installed default on over a billion devices.
In fact, we have a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to execute on features perfectly, listen to core user concerns, getting first to market on mobile devices, and outcompeting on customizability and features as well as experiment with every imaginable fundraising model you could imagine. Opera was that company, and to this day I maintain that nobody has a better browser engine than Presto at its peak, I still think even now, in terms of features, innovation, customizability. Opera was the best browser company that ever existed. If being a perfect browser company was rewarded with market share we would all be using Presto right now. But browser economics just don't work that way.
Also, there's a history of curbing browser monopoly dominance by giving users choice (antitrust case against Microsoft in the '90s), and Mozilla's market share issues would be solved overnight if Android users had to choose from a list of browsers. The narrative that market share change has anything to do with feature development is a hallucination born in the backwaters of internet comment sections and completely ignores the actual drivers, which are the flexing of monopoly power and pre-installed defaults.
> when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company
What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow.
Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.
It's not an either/or situation. For many years now people have been begging Mozilla to allow them to give money to help fund firefox (and only firefox) but Mozilla has refused. I can't promise that allowing it would provide all the funds they need, but certainly every little bit helps. People could continue to contribute code to the project, but that requires a lot more time, effort, and no small amount of skill compared to the time it takes to enter your credit card number and submit and an online form. Contributing code to Firefox is still a good thing, but it's a process (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...) that won't be for everyone.
There is no precedent for donations on the scale of what Mozilla gets from search licensing. The best online fundraising drive on the planet is Wikipedia with orders of magnitude more users and they don't raise half of what Mozilla spends on keeping up with Google.
It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.
How is it that we can have a plethora of different Linux distributions, the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the OpenBSD kernel, GIMP, LibreOffice and several other large projects that are run and maintained by donations and volunteers.
Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at least that was the argument for some of what they were doing.
At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.
We've got a live one. Most of their expenses are developing the core browser, the side bets (with a few exceptions, notably FirefoxOS, which I think was a GOOD side bet and worth the effort) were not that expensive. They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat.
>At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
They already do that, they have a huge endowment set aside. It's obvious that people don't actually care about it because they don't know, and they only mention the possibility to make the accusation, never to give them credit once they discover Mozilla already does this and has been doing it for about 2 decades.
>And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.
Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users. And that's the best pure online fundraising program on planet Earth. Again, people only think this through to the point of being able to make the accusation not to the point of figuring out if it would actually work or not.
Normally I'd agree but at this point it's basically "Firefox is mismanaged, updoots to the left my 1337zors" behavior. It's basically a meme. It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted. Yes they make mistakes. Yes they can be frustrating. But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.
People whine about the features every time. Guess what? I like sync. I like having a dedicated container for the rare times I must log in to google. I like some of these "useless" things they "tack on." Not every change must be met with "nobody asked for it." I actually don't want a super basic, boring browser - that's what I have mullvad browser for! FF is my daily driver, sometimes they roll out stuff I legitimately want and expect.
Who complains about sync thought? What tilts me is Pocket, AI features, integrated ads, and a plethora of other random acquisitions and side projects that constitute outsized expenses yet do zilch to drive adoption.
I also used to be a Thunderbird lover, but I was forced to ditch it due to crippling freezes, crashes, and slowdown when you have a lot of emails. Mozilla just feels like an awful steward of their projects at times.
EDIT: I also subscribed to Mozilla VPN for almost two years and was forced to ditch that too, due to... solvable technical issues, again. Mullvad was just a greatly superior product for the same price. I still use Firefox for all my browsing on desktop and Android at least.
Totally agree they lose focus and spend a lot of time on things that are questionable. But again, they do release things that are super useful. There are probably people out there who like pocket. As for AI, as much as I was raising my eyebrow, I watched a whole threat of people the other day raving about Kagi’s AI implementation. Maybe Mozilla will make something useful shrug
> But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.
As much as Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of Good, the existence of Worse shouldn't make anyone stop demanding Better.
Generally, while I know it can take time away from working on other things, I don't mind if firefox adds optional features like Sync, FlyWeb, Pocket, or Hello as long as they can be easily and permanently disabled.
Ideally they wouldn't be installed by default and users would be informed about what the features are, told what the risks of installing/using them are, and given an option to enable them or not first.
There are half a dozen quality Firefox forks that can (not) do that for you. That’s the beauty of Firefox if you ask me. Just use a stripped down version like Mullvad. Thank god Firefox exists so we can have it.
> It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted.
That’s because this mismanagement has been going on for nearly 10 years now, nothing is being done to address it, and if anything, it seems to be getting progressively worse.
This rant reminds me why Linux has limited penetration. Its user base is made up of opinionated users who view compromise along the way to something larger as a moral failure.
There’s an old mantra from organizing: “no permanent enemies, no permanent allies.” You will never align with another group or person 100% on all things; the secret to making change is to build a coalition of those with whom you agree on an issue without holding it against them that you disagree on a different one.
I disagree with Mozilla about many things, but I agree with this article - I use Firefox because it’s the only browser out there that isn’t Chrome or WebKit, and that’s worth enough to me that I’m willing to disagree with them on other issues.
What's different about the Awesome Bar from Chrome? IIRC Chrome had the unified search/URL bar before Firefox did, and I don't remember it being very different from Firefox's implementation. If anything, I remember it being easier to add search engines in Chrome (unless it's gotten worse in the past few years since I switched to Firefox).
Am I missing out on cool features of the URL bar in Firefox?
This is what bugs me every time I have to use Chrome. I know why Chrome does it, it has every incentive to put people through search at every opportunity.
There is no way to put results from the history on top.
You can start typing words that were in either the title or the URL of some thing you vaguely remember visiting last month, or last year, and the Awesome Bar will reliably surface it for you. I hardly even use bookmarks; I just count on the Awesome Bar finding everything for me. If I had to choose between it and uBlock Origin, I wouldn't even have to think twice. Ads I can deal with, if I have to. I've been outsourcing my memory for the web to the Awesome Bar for decades. It's part of my brain.
Not sure if chrome has an equivalent but FF bar allows limiting results, e.g. adding a single % in the bar will search tabs, ^ history, * bookmarks, (+ searchs tagged bookmarks? there's no shiny icon)...
I'm sure it varies from person to person, but I find it very frustrating to use Chrome's equivalent of the "Awesome Bar" when I'm forced to (eg work computer); Firefox just seems to do a much better job of surfacing open tabs (yes, I'm a tab hoarder), bookmarks, history, etc while Chrome seems like it'll surface some dubiously relevant options and try to railroad you into search. Even when I know I have a tab open and I know the domain name or a substantial chunk of the title it is legitimately rare for Chrome to offer to switch me to that tab, and often times it will surface one or two tabs that seem utterly unrelated. Bafflingly bad performance from what used to be a search company.
I might be the odd one out but I hate the awesome bar. What I do like about Firefox is I can make the awesome bar just a boring address bar and have a separate search bar.
It's absolutely critical, and worth mentioning, that even after substantial reductions, there are a lot of Canadians still working on and contributing to Firefox!
I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a selling point for everyone to switch to it?
Agree, and not just that, it allows to escape the hijack of your right click (something google does not tolerate), but they also degraded a lot the experience the last year or two. Number of modal dialog boxes every time it updates (and of course repeat for how many machines you use), also every time there is a pending update, the performance seems to degrade until you close and update, and those updates are very frequent. I don't know if it is my machine but it seems to be struggling when there is more than 2 or 3 video streams on different tabs (increasingly common now that every news websites seems compelled to live stream video on their front page whether you want it or not).
File should be located in $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR/distribution/
$FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR is the installation directory for firefox, which (for default setup) probably will be printed by this:
sed -nE 's/^\s*exec (.*\/)firefox .*/\1/p' $(which firefox) # and it's probably /usr/lib/firefox
When you decide to update you may temporarily replace policy for permissive one, or you may just install new version in a separate $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR.
Even better, I switched to the esr release. It gets updates every week or two, but only for security issues. Otherwise the browser has a stable feature set and no new features.
I got very annoyed by the pending update pop-ups and the "Restart to keep using Firefox" messages when I opened new tabs, so I switched over to Librewolf and now I get no distracting modals at all and can update it precisely when I feel like it.
Yeah, and when you think about the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine, we are very unlikely to see a new browser engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if a browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
I think OP didn´t mean the "real" web standars (W3C) but what Google rules that is the actual standars in practice. Edge had to move from his own rendering engine to blink (crhomium) because of that. So "even" Microsoft could not fight that trend. Sorry for my english.
The dismissal of gendered language as politics is arguably “defensible” in a “I wrote this in a way that allows me to hide behind it” sort of way. It was wrong and needlessly dismissive in a way that clearly communicates he disagrees to anyone who understands typical internet discourse tactics.
If he really did not want “political drama” or whatever there are far more effective ways to handle it that don't allow you to also signal your disapproval/disagreement with the content.
TL;DR: he handled it in a way that expressed his disagreement while staying plausibly deniable.
I completely agree that he was unnecessarily prickly/political in his response. I only disagree that it validates xgulfie's implication that he is in the "so bad we should disparage whatever he does" category.
If I was dealing with the same type of "person" that's only "contribution" to every github repo is to just go and ask for language policing I would intentionally be as prickly as possibly to them while telling them no.
what is wrong about it? I have issue with diversity that it allows someone to game the whole system. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion looks very good on paper, but in real world implementation it fails abysmally. I can tell because some of my friend who don't know anything got into companies by the same diversity and highly talented friend were rejected.
Not talking about you. But a white supremacist would be ok with only white people formally employed because whoever is not white wouldn't get a job without gaming the system. Pick the lesser evil.
That fun example does not provide evidence of what you accused the developer of. Not even close. I think if you’re going to accuse someone of what amounts to racist paranoia, you’d better have clear evidence of it. The fragment you linked to simply shows Kling being uncomfortable with racial discrimination in hiring, which is a mainstream, probably majority, attitude.
no, the fragment shows kling is completely blinded by his own privileges as a cisgender white guy and completely missing the point of diversity by instead making it all about himself and other cisgender white dudes
its unfortunately very common for privileged people to not realize how good they have it compared to people with less privileges. you have to live it to really know what its like
diversity efforts being seen as "discrimination against [privileged group]" is exactly how we don't fix the problem
In the 2020's, this is just another genre of petty hatred. As time goes on, one "type" of person's historical privilege becomes less and less valid as a reason to reduce them in any way, as compared to anybody else (giving the benefit of the doubt that it ever was "valid"). Similarly, "diversity efforts" are laudable in theory, but in practice they are frequently just discrimination in the opposite direction of what is typical.
None of this has anything to do with "white replacement", or being "blind to privilege". You're stretching a totally reasonable viewpoint into "evil racism" because you don't agree with his point of view.
So you try to slander and discredit anyone who thinks differently than you. Same playbook every time, so boring.
You might think differently, but I think hiring someone based on their race to meet arbitrary racial quotas is insulting.
Here at HN, we regularly expect evidence of lesser known claims. It’s actually a pretty cool way to form understanding based on reality. My original post was openminded, and stated that I tried to learn more about what your post on my own to not waste your time. When I could bot find discourse or articles about your statement, I asked for a source. That is a natural and valid thing to have happen. If there is basically no validation of your strong statements, maybe think about what you post and what it’s adding to the discourse.
It would be nice to have a browser with excellent ad blocking capabities that doesn't use the money of donations to fund "whites not welcome" initiatives, so people would be able to choose browsers based on their skin color
And it's not going to amount to anything major. Rewriting in Rust properly requires architecting things from the beginning.
> No they don't.
For a long time, their policy had been "no third-party code". Eventually it became untenable, so they started using third-party libraries. But they still ended up reinventing the wheel at least several times.
The only brokenness is misalignment of text on the tag cloud. I took a glance, and it has the content marked as scrollable with the min-height of 0, height of 20 and line-height of 24. I have no idea what _is_ the correct behavior in this case.
Brave's adblocker does a good job. As far as I know Firefox started using some of the Rust written components of that engine.
Interestingly on fingerprinting test websites, Brave also did significantly better than Firefox + PrivacyBadger + ublock Origin + one or two more which I forgot. When I ran some tests a couple months back.
Firefox was slow on my computer (old Thinkpad). I tried using Degoogled Chromium but it kept crashing. So the closest thing for me (Chrome minus Google) was Brave.
Vivaldi is cool (I loved Opera 20 years ago) but very laggy on my machine. (They did the UI in JavaScript or something.)
I use both now (Brave and Firefox), when I want to use a second account. And Firefox scrolls PDFs more smoothly. (But Chrome-based browsers have sharper text rendering in PDFs! Can't win 'em all!)
Firefox probably has the best support of the best ad blocker (uBO), which is really nice in a lot of ways, but whether or not that means it can be the only "quality" one is completely subjective. Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker, let alone debate the differences between the top implementations.
> Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker
I hate that you are right about this :-)
It really hit home for me today. My project manager was sharing her screen so we could see the free planning poker webapp our team uses. I had it open locally on my machine. She had ads, I did not.
She's not a programmer, but she _is_ technical. She's worked adjacent to programmers for many years, and she's very adapt at writing SQL to query our DB. But she didn't think to install an ad blocker.
I guess I really do live in a bubble where I think _most_ people run ad blockers.
I’ve never been enough of a uBO power user to say conclusively - but I am extremely satisfied with Brave - in particular its ad blocking on YouTube. I also think Brave is by far the best ad block available on iOS.
People say this, but seeing ads is very rare for me with AdGuard on Safari. I’ve no doubt that it’s technically less comprehensive than the best Firefox ad blockers, but in practice it feels more than “good enough” for me.
Brave is even better since the ad engine is actually built in (lower level) and written in Rust if memory serves me well. And before anyone says anything about crypto: pay a small fee for Brave Origin or use it for free on Linux.
This is a brilliant browser for iOS/Linux usage, and now its UI is minimal, and its settings are filled only with stuff for my benefit. It feels like the early 2000s again! This should be much more ballyhooed.
The last lifetime license I bought expired when the developer was bought, stopped releasing updates, and the software stopped working the next major OS upgrade. It is on a clock, and you don't know when it runs out so you can't value it.
60 USD for a lifetime license for software is a lot in 2026? For a browser that's arguably the fastest, most lightweight, privacy oriented and with best AdBlock available?
"Hey, we recognize that normal Brave is exploitative and user-hostile by default. We'll fix it if you pay us $59.99 in mutual acknowledgement that you're a chump who can't install UBO."
I'm glad (and unsurprised) that Brave's vision for the web never hit the big leagues.
Maintaining browser takes a lot of effort. And, fighting with google implementation takes it to whole new level. $60 is very reasonable amount as it is a lifetime license.
I don't trust Brave to fight the good fight against Google. Brave wants to sell their own ads and push Web3 slop, making them an ethical tarpit with questionable motivations.
It's not their "vision for the web" it's just an attempt at funding development of the browser given they aren't an ad-network behemoth like Google. Like Kagi charging for their search engine, a company charging money directly for the product is a good idea all things considered. How do you expect them to pay their developers?
I don't use brave, and I'm mostly going by this comment thread, but if the free brave is user hostile by default in an attempt to steer people over to the paid brave, that's a very legitimate thing to complain about. you can't compare it to kagi.
No one is steering towards paid version. Every for profit feature can be disabled in free version. Whoever said hostile absolutely abused that phrase to make their point. And be the judge of it yourself: try it.
Ethically, for one. I'll be fucked if you expect me to "donate" to a browser that thinks my friends and family deserve a lower-quality browser experience.
Many opponents of Brave online are thoroughly convinced that Brave Rewards (which gives you their Ethereum coin in exchange for showing ads as OS notification) is on by default, when it isn't. They also claim that this replaces blocked ads on webpages (this may have been true very early, I didn't use Brave back then).
uBlock Origin (non-lite) only works on Firefox as far as I know. Brave purportedly has a built-in ad blocker that uses the same lists, but I can't vouch for it personally.
Brave maintains its own fork of uBlock Origin for Chromium and hosts it on its own servers but they themselves have admitted they're unsure how long this state of affairs can go on for.
Their built-in adblock is quite good but still not nearly as sophisticated as uBO which intelligently intercepts and modifies requests from advertisers to stop tracking. uBO is much more than an adblock tbh
From my POV, an adblocker's perceived quality is primarily weighted on whether it can block visible ads without impacting performance. While uBO on firefox is a more capable blocker, I honestly don't browse enough sites to know one where uBOL provides a worse experience in this metric than uBO.
I prefer vivaldi's UX to firefox enough that i am willing to settle for technically-worse adblocking. If I notice this becoming practically-worse, I will consider switching.
With this attitude you can expect uBlock Ultra-Lite and then uBlock Nothing in future. Mozilla is the only remaining obstacle to stop big tech from deciding everything about how the web is rendered. If we don't support Firefox we will get what we deserve.
Might be, but I can't take on every battle. I switched from chrome to vivaldi in the hopes of they would keep the v2 api alive. They could not. Currently I can't be asked to switch browser again. Maybe at some point.
But OP asked if "is this not enough of a selling point" and I wanted to answer that honestly.
Some people seem to enjoy ads, maybe they feel like they'll be first to know about the next hot thing.
Just look at how many people pump positive comments into influencer's posts that are nothing more then ads (sorry, collaborations). While some are bots, plenty seem real.
Or the new local takeaway that's just opened and all the reviews saying "I keep seeing this place appear so I had to check it out"
Few month after I started using bare Chromium instead of Brave, and consequently started to see ads, they often felt like a cool joke. I even had an occasional urge to share it with colleagues, like "Look, what they are showing me, haha" But novelty faded, and they became nuisance again.
Occasionally see someone go to yt without ad blocking and I'm blown away, feels like I'm from the 1800's sitting with someone in rush hour traffic - what is going on?
YouTube runs worse on FF if you have uBO. They do it on purpose. But if you were to use a clean Firefox install it's pretty comparable. Ofc YT is optimized for Chromium which is another factor
That second part was indeed pretty self evident years ago, but I regularly watch 4k content on YouTube on low powered machine these days and can't say I see the difference anymore.
Eh, maybe, maybe not. I watch YouTube content, not power usage graphs, perceived performance is good enough for what I do with it. If I'm on battery I'm probably not watching in 4k anyway, at which point the difference in power use should be pretty negligible.
I switched my family off Google after almost 20 years on our own domain. In hindsight it was ridiculously easy, although there are still some weird Google account required links that ultimately have me just moving on. Yt does run worse on FF but that's because of unlock (I believe) they tend to stall out intentionally instead of showing you ads and attempt to get you to switch.
Yeah, I believe the stall-out issue is sabotage, but it also visibly takes longer to just render the page. On FF, a YT page jumps around for almost two whole seconds while it renders for me (not to play the video - to render the page). This may also be sabotage by Google, I don't know.
Part of the blame for what's wrong with the web right now is on web developers:
- We "need" firefox or else everything's just chrome
- Forks of chrome don't count as different browsers because they all use the same engine
- Using the same engine makes you basically just chrome because you can't diverge from upstream
- You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
- You need to keep merging with upstream because upstream is implementing new web platform features
- You need those web platform features because if you don't add them then websites will stop working in your fork
- Websites will stop working in your fork because web developers don't support older browser versions
- Web developers don't support older browser versions because... they don't care?
If web developers had a culture of supporting, say, 10 years of previous browser versions, then chromium would lose a lot of the power it has to drag the forks (and firefox) behind it. I don't really see this happening without some sort of major culture shift, though. Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.
There are more layers, if you'd like to look into it.
- Web developers don't support older browsers because they lack the skill and economic motivation for it.
- The managers of web developers will not support them, because there is no money to be made in supporting older browsers. Nor are there career benefits in maintenance projects. No developer or manager will get promotions for it.
- The actual management of the companies will not promote or compensate engineering managers or developers for maintenance projects since it doesn't contribute to "line goes up"-economics.
For those interested in how the alternative browsers are doing, I just put up an alternative to https://wpt.fyi (displays the WPT test results of each browser) which is IMO easier to navigate, and shows Servo / Ladybird by default:
So Ladybird is catching up with the other pretty fast! Although it's worth noting that it still has a bunch of extra work to do with regard to performance.
(my engine Blitz whose website this is on scores 42.2% for specifically the `css` subset, compared to 50.3% for Servo and 72.3% Ladybird)
(the results above exclude the `encoding` suite, because that's 1 million test ~50% of the whole suite, that doesn't really measure rendering capability).
I love WPT (I even have a bookmark comparing all of these browsers as well as Flow[0] that I check regularly).
But this is absolutely NOT how this site is meant to be used. For example, Ladybird jumped from about 30% to over 70% when it added a bunch of unicode logic. Secondly, these tests aren't all even officially agreed upon standards. Some are specific to Chrome features that are still in the draft stages for W3C. Many tests are written by the developers of the engines themselves. Chrome, having a larger team, will naturally contribute many more tests relevant to whatever feature they're prioritizing
Firefox is the best of a bunch of bad options, but isn't above critique. It does suck when they do anticonsumer stuff and shove weird stuff like pocket in, but you can't leave which makes it similar to the democratic party where you can't really do anything, but they keep making really poor decisions.
I am using firefox, but it is pretty hard to keep using it. I don't want the whole world to converge on one browser engine, but I also want things to work, and Firefox does not make it easy.
Firefox on my laptop has a propensity for eating lots of RAM, and constant CPU usage, even if nothing is going on. Task manager is useless. Profiler just shows "GC collecting".
Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not. And don't even get me started on the "new tab" [age - it gives me 6 choices and all of them are "AI" ones which never show what I want. The only way to show a manually curated link list is "collections" and those do not get synced, and occasionally disappear for no reason.
I don't know why but I have a different experience. My daily driver is a 13 year old Thinkpad with 16Gb memory, I use Firefox all the time, I routinely have 50+ tabs open, I really have no complaints.
I also use Firefox on Android, I have less experience of using other browsers on mobile but what I've got is fine for me.
I'm not questioning your experience but I would like others, who might be considering using Firefox, to know that different people have different experiences.
For what it's worth, I've been known to have 300+ tabs open all in separate windows (I just forget about them and they tend to accumulate), and for the most part it handled it just fine (it did use quite a lot of RAM, of course.) That was on an i7 7700k with 32GB of RAM.
I don’t know you, but most people I work with for some reason keep so many tabs open, the tab bar is squeezed so you can barely see a favicon
Probably due to my age, I religiously close every tab after I read it. If that gets more than a dozen, I literally quit the browser and declare bankruptcy because it’s not worth it to sort through the mess of tabs I clearly am not using.
Firefox is old too. I’m sure it could manage memory better, but couldn’t we all? If you have tabs in GC and using CPU when you aren’t using them, kill them maybe? What else is that tab doing all day when you aren’t looking?
I’ve never understood why people keep so many tabs open and why they’ll literally switch to an entirely different browser platform rather than change a bad habit
I'm around middle age and keep tons of tabs open simply because I have a number of projects/tasks or soon-to-be projects/tasks going at any given point and managing associated websites is easier with tabs than it is with bookmarks. In other words, bookmark management UI/UX is inadequate and tab hoarding is the band-aid.
There's also a higher chance that things will slip through the cracks and be forgotten if I bookmark them, whereas with tabs they're staring me in the face any time I'm using my computer.
tab groups, a very recent feature, help a lot at keeping tabs organized. you can even archive whole groups if you no longer need them but don't want to throw them away
I have maintained Tab Wrangler for both Chrome and for Firefox for years: it auto-closes tabs based on a configurable timeout and when they were last active. I'm not sure how people keep dozens or hundreds of tabs open either. It's FOSS, no ads, no tracking, no monetization:
I wish I had that level of executive functioning. I open tabs at a high branching rate, and faster than I have the impulse control to (for lack of a better word) run a garbage-collection pass over what I'd just done.
When it balloons into the low thousands and starts hurting performance, I dump Firefox's open-tabs store (file called recovery.jsonlz4) into a different file and start over. At some point I'll point an LLM at that junk pile and see if I missed anything important. (Probably not).
You could probably just use an extension that unloads inactive tabs from RAM, and maybe another that closes tabs that haven't been touched in over a week. Between those and an extension that closes duplicate tabs, it's pretty easy to get down to a sane number, no LLM required.
If a tab is important, you'll be using it more often than once a week. I have a similar rule with impulse purchases: anything I want needs to sit in the cart for 24-48 hours before purchasing. If I still need it, I buy it. Probably cut the crap I buy down by 75%. Steam? It goes on the wishlist (personally capped at ~50) until I can commit to playing and finishing it right then and there.
From my experience it's inconsistent and that's incredibly frustrating. Overall the whole mobile interface needs to be overhauled imo. These guys need to simply copy Safari and call it a day. I still have never used a mobile browser that's as thoughtfully designed as Safari, and I've used basically all the major ones.
>Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.
I'm using Fennec from F-Droid, but I have a little document symbol on the URL bar I tap for reader mode. I guess the issue is it doesn't show on all sites then?
> Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.
This is false. I am seeing that button right now in Firefox, on the right side of the address bar.
Firefox's button is flaky - it seems to disappear depending on the page. For example it appears on HN comment page, but disappears on HN's top-level page. There is clearly some sort of heuristic which maybe tries to determine if there is "main content", but it fails on many blog-like pages, like current #5 [0].
It seems that any time I find a website with a horrible design and start looking for that "reader" button, that button is disabled in Firefox. Sometimes I tolerate the design, sometimes I switch to Chrome - because reader mode works on all sites there.
Related: There's also Ladybird that is developing quickly and is aiming for an alpha release this year. It's a truly independent browser engine built from scratch.
This is mentioned under every Firefox discussion despite being possibly years away from being generally useful if the will ever progress to that point.
If the goal is browser diversity, is the answer really Firefox? Or is it one of the active in development projects from people who are motivated to do something new?
What exactly is Firefox going to do differently to grow its market share? Or just "more of whatever the last fifteen years have been"? Unless they have a plan to do better it seems foolish to trust that they'll steer the project miraculously towards success.
> If the goal is browser diversity, is the answer really Firefox? Or is it one of the active in development projects from people who are motivated to do something new?
The former. Ladybird is currently not practically usable, it is unclear whether it will ever catch up to the main engines, and even if it does, it is unclear whether it will ever reach the market share that Firefox has. It is a nice project but science fiction at this point.
What’s the real selling point? Yeah non profit but is it gonna be faster and better than WebKit? The reason I switched to chrome a long time ago was tab isolation, how much faster it was than Firefox, and built it better developer tools. What’s ladybug got going for it?
Most people don't care about that though. My wife doesn't care about browser independence. If Ladybird wants to more than just a pet project for some tech companies it needs a sell. Something that makes it better than Chrome.
Of my cohorts, I am probably the most loyal firefox fan. That said, I've broken up with it twice, and am currently in the second breakup b/c at work we're mandated to use the Island browser due to security reasons, and my work machine absolutely cannot handle two browsers running while I also have all of the work dependencies and IDEs and slack running.
I know much of this is subjective, but the chrome experience just feels better / faster. This is what precipitated the first breakup, and when I think about the situation now, it feels like this dynamic is probably long lasting. It does make me sad though. I'll come back to firefox later, perhaps when I get a laptop refresh and can be a little more cavalier with RAM.
It seems like the Browser Wars are going to converge on a singular point:
"Do I need to access Big Tech services?"
As long as the business world is going to continue centrallizing on the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, any existing or future alternative browsers will either have to kowtow on the alter of compatibility or make the deliberate decision not to support "advanced features" that enable the next generation of proprietary webmail, social media, banking webpages, etc - tending towards a total revocation of privacy in exchange for KYC via a glut of metadata.
This will get even crappier as mechanisms used to filter out "suspicious" traffic (read: competing products) become standard. I imagine using Firefox in 2030 will be akin to using Tor in 2019 - web requests will be blocked, denied, or deemed "insecure".
I'm an avid Firefox user, but it seems that Firefox keeps getting worse. Pages forever load, when the issue does not happen in Chrome. History gets corrupted. Claude wouldn't load consistently if I had more than one tab of claude opened internal tools that used to work fine and we haven't updated struggle. I don't know if it's me but it's certainly maddening, especially when I go to Chrome on the same laptop and it just loads.
> Pages forever load, when the issue does not happen in Chrome.
A bit tangential, but that's not a meaningful analysis (depending on how you tested):
FF CHR
Site 1 n Y
Site 2 Y n
Imagine a Firefox user: They try site 1, see Firefox fail, and so they try Chrome and it succeeds. Then they try site 2, see Firefox succeed, and stop there. They never see Chrome's problem.
It's like what I've seen some DuckDuckGo users say about search engines: 'Google is better because when I can't find something on DDG I do find it on Google'. (I think there's also some confirmation bias with Chrome and Google.)
It's like the old sales technique of comparing your product's features with the other product:
MyProduct YourProduct
Feature A X X
Feature B X
Feature C X X
Feature D X X
Feature E X
Feature F X
Feature G X X
Feature H X X
It doesn't show:
Feature I X
Feature J X
Feature K X
Feature L X
Feature M X
Feature N X
Feature O
I use Zen (firefox under the hood) and I just don't understand all of the bitching people do about Firefox. Once I learned all about manifest v2 deprecation it was such an easy decision to move away from Chromium based browsers. The transition was one of the most painless things I've ever done in the software world.
Abject fear. They are afraid that the best option will go away. They're afraid that their perfectionism and critiques have driven it to a point of failure. They're afraid that a project is big as a browser can't really be open source. They're probably also angry at the squandering of resources at Mozilla particularly on executive salaries.
I’ve always been a Firefox fan, and I used it exclusively for quite some time. However, I had to switch back to Brave after they blocked clipboard managers from seeing what you copy in private windows, and there was no way to turn it off. I know about profiles and containers, but this is something I need for my workflow. Now that Brave has proper containers, I’m running out of reasons to miss Firefox other than my ideals.
Aren't most of the complicated and useful parts of Chrome in Chromium?
Isn't that sufficiently divorced from most of what makes Chrome unpalatable to people who appreciate Firefox as an alternative?
Why then aren't there more forks of Chromium? I would think with the progression of SOTA LLMs it should not be long now before everyone can simply ride their own custom flavor of Chromium.
> The only holdout would be Apple Safari, hanging in there only because it’s the enforced default on iPhones.
This is one of the big reasons I'm against the EU trying to force Apple to open up the iPhone and allow other rendering engines. The market share of the iPhone is the only reason Google doesn't have 90+% marketshare, at which point no one will even bother testing in other browsers or worrying if features are Chrome-only. It will be Internet Explorer all over again.
I know some devs want this, because it will make their life easier, but you're assuming Google will keep doing what you want and like even after all the competition is gone. That's a bad bet.
this is a very stange reason to take a stance against (forcibly) opening up ios?
it's not like the types of webapps that are broken on firefox dont also force you to install an app if you're on a phone.
i do wish govts. with spines had real power over big tech besides threatening userbase numbers, since basically everyone in the space is due for a breakup
I use Firefox, but Mozilla is increasingly eroding user trust and being primarily funded by Google to avoid a monopoly does not give me confidence either. When Google implement an anti-user feature, Mozilla have to begrudgingly implement it, and that is not a healthy ecosystem. There's a good chance that I'll move from Firefox when Ladybird reaches feature-parity, but they'll likely fall into the non-standard standards (Chrome-pushed features) trap all the same to avoid having sites break.
I don't know how we solve this, other than to hold Google accountable, but that in turn hurts Firefox. At least in that case we'll hopefully have Ladybird as a truly independent browser.
The issue is building a browser is not profitable by itself.
You’d need to sell an annual subscription of 150$ to like 10 million people to get a browser that’s actually developed for users and not in some bizarre exploitive fashion.
I am hanging on! At home I only use Firefox. At work, unfortunately, I need Chrome for a few things that do not work well with Firefox (most Google products), but for everything else I use Firefox.
IMHO, that Firefox can only really stay free if it is supported by donations (i.e. people like us who use it). Anything else will lead to various things that either push people away or make less free - probably both.
Could be. Pity there is no way to donate to Firefox. You can only donate to Mozilla for 'mission to keep the Web open and free', with an unknown fraction going to Firefox development. People have been deliberately disenfranchised from voting with their wallets for decades.
Firefox used to be amazing, but they squandered their market share with bad decisions and stagnation. Maybe one day they'll see the light, but not likely, given their recent ai additions...
They were competing with the biggest advertiser in the world who put an ad about their own browser on the front page of the biggest search engine in the world.
Not sure it was entirely their own doing.
That turned off a fraction of a fraction of users. And I believe i was largely misunderstood. There are also Firefox forks of somehow that was a bridge too far. I don’t understand how the answer would be to jump to chrome as if they have a better ToS.
It's not "us" that matters, assuming that means very on-the-pulse power user types. We're a tiny fraction of users. Over 99% of users have probably never even spared a thought for the ToS.
Both can be true. Progressing without innovation only works when your product is Coca-Cola or Bic lighters. FireFox as a name or brand is nowhere near it's former v1.0-3.0 glory days.
somehow this little content made me to set default browser to Firefox on mac. I am so easy get convinced. I dont know what problems Firefox has, why firefox not improving developer experience, focusing on building new products, making it light weight and performant. But I am going to try again after 2 years. Its going to be amazing.
I'm holding on.. in a way. I've switched to Zen about a year ago after ~2 decades of Firefox. It's a fork of Firefox so I'm counting it as supporting Firefox anyway.
However, on my iPhone and iPad I've stuck with Safari. Because it's "good enough", I'm not a heavy phone user, and really any browser on iOS is just a reskin of Safari given they don't allow different web browser engines.
I switched to Firefox when chrome announced manifest v3, and I'm still happy with it. Not only I get a browser with a real adblock, now that I got used to multi-account containers, I can't go back to chrome since it has no good equivalent.
And I'm also using it on mobile since it's one of the few mobile browsers with extensions too.
I've been using LibreWolf (FF based) for years now and I love this thing. There are many issues coming with anti-tracking, sometimes a pain in the ... but, whenever I ask myself "what if I had to switch to Brave or other" I always end up with the same firm "Nah, I'm good".
If LibreWolf would disappear, it would still be FF for me, with carefully selected and regularly reviewed privacy settings.
If you hate on Firefox because they're on X for outreach and marketing — like every other browser — you are certifiable. Your opinion is extreme and summarily discarded as noise.
FWIW, if you're reading this article your opinion is extreme and summarily discarded as noise by pretty much everyone else too.
I don't say that because I personally mind if they are on X one way or the other, I've just given up on the idea anyone but an extreme few, usually tech nerds, seem to give a damn about this topic as a whole.
Honest ask, no shaming, how many who read this comment either:
A) Don't know what an rc file is
B) Haven't manually configured one in the last few years
I'm sure there are plenty on HN who are eager to say how much they love rc files, I mean to point out how many, even here, really have no attachment to these kinds of things. Of course it's very possible they don't care enough to read this far or respond either... but it's worth a shot :D
Picture Firefox as a fence inside of a walled garden. One side is painted a dull corporate grey colour; on the other your favorite colour of happiness. The happiness sits beyond the horizon of the graveyard. The dead of digital and open-source.
Instead of jumping over using another browser of the 'fox family; you have to dig under by removing all the unnecessary junk. Telemetry, Pocket, VPN et cetera; only then do you get to trek. I see why they named it fox. Each release that grey side of the fence gets a fresh coat of paint and the holes filled.
Rumours from the graves are that Cloudflare are going to introduce turnstiles to your own hole if you decide to dig.
I gave Firefox a chance as my PDF reader as it has a pretty efficient engine. But that didn't work out as I don't need to read PDFs often so every time it launched, it ran an update that added 10s to reading the PDF... :/
My current main browser across desktop and mobile is Brave. Pretty happy with it. Overall more efficient and with a better UI than FF. I've used FF for many years, but I feel it's simply not as good as competitors anymore.
Generally speaking most dedicated PDF readers haven't implemented the nastier parts of the PDF spec that need a sandbox. Except adobe. They support everything because they wrote it. But they keep making it worse so I can't recommend them.
If you're going to use a Chromium based browser, why pick one that's filled with crypto ads? I use Firefox on mobile because it supports extensions. One of the main benefits of the web is that, unlike proprietary native apps, I get to experience it the way I want. The web is nearly intolerable without extensions.
I still use firefox when I'm on a proper unix desktop, like *BSD or Linux running x11. This is just force of habit from when I started using those in the '90s, with the old closed source Netscape 4.7 binaries, and eventually mozilla suite, and Firefox when that started out.
When I'm using windows or mac I use chrome. I've used chrome on x11 before. But somehow it never hooked me.
> Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition.
This isn't really true, and hasn't been for some time. It's just the only other browser engine with meaningful production users. Servo and Ladybird are both making great strides.
I want to be able to recommend firefox to everybody, but after 15 years of chrome and going back to firefox, it still feels jank.
Web apps like twitter youtube discord that is left open for a few hours take up >2gb ram and is jittery. I have to shift+esc and close them to make them run smoothly again. Why hasn't stuff like this been fixed yet?
Why do I need to open about:profiles just to launch a new profile?
The only community they have any penetration in is the developer one (in its prime non-technical people would tell me they used Firefox since IE was insecure. Their techy friends would tell them to use it and the message carried some actual weight back then).
Today they are a large organization that needs to make money to sustain itself, while facing declining usage, and less favorable terms for search engine integrations.
And our community (developers) is the least likely to take kindly to the increasing monetization slop (promoted articles, pestering about pocket and their VPN offering, continually requiring accepting new ToS, reminders to use new features, etc).
I mostly use FF, because I think we'll lose something if it disappears (for example, DRM will become intolerable, web inspectors will become more opaque, and generally future web standards may be much more controlled by a small set of large orgs with their own interests).
But I use FF with less enthusiasm every passing day
Firefox still works fine for me. Sometimes it gets greedy with some activities. I smack it around and it seems to respond. I worry that Mozilla is starving it compared to other activities.
What websites? I've been using Firefox exclusively forever and the only times I've had to switch browsers was doing my passport application and I had to find a windows desktop to get that to work
Firefox is great, and I use and recommend it as daily driver, but the actions of Mozilla leadership are really hard to differentiate from deliberately managed decline. It will be interesting to see what happens as Ladybird matures.
I hate to change the subject to something so trivial -- because I have been an exclusive Firefox user for many, many years -- but the awful moving background of this website is literally nauseating.
I'm no designer, but I can't understand why someone would make a graphical choice like this. It absolutely detracts from the content, and in my case, will prevent me from reading it.
This article seems directly target me. I was a Firefox fanboy and switch to Vivaldi for daily driver work browser. I still keeps Firefox for personal browsing. If Firefox could address the performance issue when opening many tabs, I definitely go back to Firefox.
My personal rule: anyone who uses any chromuim based browser is a tech illiterate. Firefox has been my browser since I ever remember touching a computer, netescape before too. It’s even the best performing browser too, I have had more than 1500 tabs in one machine a couple weeks ago on a laptop of 16gib ram, running 1% of those on chromium based and it will crash. Plus the proper ad blocking and control over privacy, making it the last bastion of browsers right now.
The big problem for Firefox/Mozilla is that the browser is currently primarily sponsored by Google, but due to an extremely stupid antitrust ruling, Google will no longer be allowed to do this after 2026. Then Mozilla could run out of money, which would imply layoffs and Firefox likely shelving its rendering engine, with the browser becoming just another Chrome reskin. The situation is quite dire I fear.
And it was all the fault of a judge seeing an alleged Google search monopoly despite the fact that countless users were already using ChatGPT rather than Google.
With killing off one of the last remaining web rendering engines, the ruling would instead create a Blink/Webkit (Chrome/Safari) duopoly.
firefox is the only mainstream browser with an rcfile, that alone gives you incredible powers. I hope one day it also grows something like chrome's CDP. What is everyone so upset about?
> They are happy with monopolies and surveillance capitalism.
Actually I believe for most normal people it is a feature of other platforms that they don't have to appear to be associated with weirdos who use terms like "surveillance capitalism".
Does it matter to the average person that the society is marching further and further down the road of digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism? My impression certainly is that the percentage of people who care about this is so small that it might as well be a rounding error, while on the other side I see tremendous momentum, effort, and cunning.
The userbase of Firefox existing is obvious signs of caring. You really got to go out of your way to not use chromium. The userbase grows when people help others understand these issues, or ideally just install firefox for their non techie friends and set them up with ubo. be the change you want to see.
>Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition
And this is a good thing why? It just makes web developer's lives harder and wastes engine developer's time building multiple engines when they could be contributing to a single foundation making that better.
nobody is (well i guess some people are) clamoring for alternative virtual machines for Perl. I guess there are some different implementations of Java. The web browsers today are virtual machines + operating systems. I don't particularly trust or care which implementation I use. Maybe i should, but i realize having multiple implementations of the same thing isnt all that profitable.
I think there's immense value+profit for our society in having multiple choices for what browser and browser engine you use. If you have many options, then Chrome killing adblockers with Manifest v3 is a much smaller issue.
Getting mad that something is on Twitter will never not be funny to me.
Cutting off your nose to spite your face kind of thing.
Anyway, I’ll stick with FF for the adblocking but these Mozilla guys need to piss off with the constant popups for new features I don’t give a shit about (like a VPN). 1Password has been doing the same thing lately, too. Both my browser and my password manager fall into the category of software that should absolutely never bother or distract me from whatever I’m trying to do.
Re-read the top comment in the link you posted as well as the Mozilla blog post. It says you give Mozilla a license, not ownership of your content.
Dont get me wrong, I object to anything and everything they'd be doing that requires a license to my private data. Fuck that and fuck Mozilla. I just think it's important to be accurate when calling out scummy techbros on their bullshit.
Can barely keep my eyes socketed from all this involuntary rolling that's overtaken them ...
I'm personally here for the non-bullshit stuff that isn't about getting clicks with hot ledes grounded on warmed over, barely modified well worn takes on well-understood stats so miss me with _that_ shit ...
> Meanwhile, the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox every time the subject arises...Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition.
It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings in about:config and make edits to userChrome.css
It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into. Users who are seriously concerned about what Mozilla is prioritizing, and who are genuinely worried about what is at stake.
I hope people here never stop bitching about Firefox. Refusing to talk about Firefox's problems wont help make them go away. Keep discussing what you'd like to see in Firefox and what things you hope they'll focus on and prioritize. There are Firefox devs and mozilla employees around here. If we're lucky, a few of them might see and listen to some of what we say. It's the most tech savvy users who disable all the telemetry and data collection, so our feedback isn't really going to be seen any other way.
> It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings in about:config and make edits to userChrome.css
On the one hand, you're totally right. Pushback should exist.
On the other hand, I have seen some seriously lazy and wild justifications for sticking in the chrome universe because tech users aren't immune to justifying a bad product through inertia (and, honestly, are probably champions at it).
I have seen and heard plenty of firefox "can't handle all the sites they need" and I have always been curious as to what these people are doing because I've been on FF for decades and the ONLY time I switch to a chrome browser is for VIA (and that's a whole google did a standard no one else wants to do situation).
To be fair, I suspect some of that has to do with major web dev stuff that I don't have to do, so it is very possible I'm actually just missing the mark here and the tooling/use case is really that much better in chrome (although I know that's its own issue since that's kinda the problem), and there are those who've found some major feature on a chrome spinoff that they just love and FF doesn't do well.
Still accounting from those, I'd safely bet money a lot of people who claim firefox just cannot work for them haven't really bothered to try to adopt. It's functionally identical to me outside of the whole "better adblock" and "arguably better bookmarks i forget to use".
I will go further and say that people hate on Firefox because they care.
We don't see many people here hating on Edge for instance, they may hate the fact that it always wants to force itself in, but not the browser itself. And that's simply because they don't use it, they don't even bother trying, they don't know what to hate about it and they don't care. Occasionally, some people say it is actually good, they get ignored.
Compared to this, hate is a good thing.
I'm not sure about that. I think there's plenty of people who shit on Firefox to justify to their own ethical standards their preference for some Chromium-based browser.
I'm failing to parse the "own ethical standards" as it relates to chromium-based browsers and this conversation about firefox..can you maybe explain, does removing the ability for users to block adds seem more ethical than not?
Is this being done for the benefit of the users? The question applies to many decisions in Chrome. It's the ethical side of the maker.
Is letting Firefox slip into irrelevance (by not using it) in the interest of the users, writ large? What developments should we expect if this happens? This is the ethical side of the user.
People often will tell lies to themselves and other to support their personal ideology. Product A is bad and so is product B. So why should I move from A to B? They are try to rationalize their belief system versus looking at realty.
Reality is that non-tech people to know what surfing the web is like with Ad-Block vs non-Ad-Block browsing. Once you teach some one it becomes night and day.
Without teaching someone very few people will step out of their comfort-zone to self educate.
I've seen people complain about Firefox in terms of performance and compatibility to justify using Chrome, but there aren't many chromium-based browsers appealing to those with ethical standards to choose from. Ecosia maybe? Ultimately is seems to come down to choosing your moral compromises more than anything.
Firefox performances have been good for so many years that I can't remember when it was the last time that I felt it to be slow. I only remember that Chrome used to be faster than FF (mainly the JS engine) and then it wasn't. Maybe it loses every single benchmark, I didn't check, but it is fast enough to be my primary browser, the one I use when I work as web developer and also when I'm not working. I run FF on a 2014 Debian laptop. Windows and Mac, who knows.
About compatibility, there are some odd sites that use a Chrome only API or something that FF didn't implement. They are really rare but people that must use one of them to do their job don't have a choice.
Then I intentionally break every single site by using privacy add-ons like uBO, uMatrix, PrivacyBadger etc so sometimes I have to play with them and find a configuration that lets me use a site. In the case of uMatrix it usually means finding the minimum set of scripts that enables enough functionality leaving out all the 3rd party tracking and then saving it. When it's too complicated and I will not use that site again but I must use it, I either disable every add-on on that site or I run Chrome.
Finally, I run integration tests with a headless Chrome, but I develop with FF. If it works with FF it works with Chrome and Safari too.
BTW, I use FF on Android as my primary browser too.
> hate is a good thing.
Hate more if you care.
The more you hate, the more you care.
Support hate.
Relax people it's a joke, if I have to say it it's not funny anymore.
I worked at Mozilla for quite a long time. I can tell you that MANY employees will be reading every comment in this thread. Hello mozillians! Don't forget to do something good for the web tomorrow!
> MANY employees will be reading every comment in this thread
That's interesting - why? Why torture yourself with abuse and ignorance?
It's somewhat like athletes who are told not to read social media. I'm sure many do, but what is the point? The people commenting know nothing of value about what you do - you're a professional working with professionals.
At least athletes are in entertainment so some aspects of public reaction are significant (not their advice on how to shoot the ball).
That said, if they're reading - hello! You guys do some of the best, most important work. The world without Mozilla and Firefox would be much less.
I love Firefox. It just doesn't always feel like it loves me back.
Not like Chrome, Chrome feels like it LOVES hanging out with me, looking over my shoulder, telling all it's friends about what I'm working on, what I buy, and how much money I make.
Sure, but Firefox doesn’t have to be Chrome to be unacceptable, and Chrome isn’t the only alternative. I reject the idea that Firefox can transgress as much as they want as long as Chrome has gotten worse.
And fuck then for buying and killing fakespot.
Chrome is the only alternative unless you have access to Safari. Brave, Opera, Edge, etc are all Chromium and will all deprecate Manifest V2 eventually. The V2 mess is just one example of how Google can continue to stangle the web even if you're not using Chrome itself.
Chrome != Chromium engine
Most of the Chromium-based browsers remove Google's telemetry and integrations, so if someone has a problem with Chrome "looking over my shoulder", then they have many more alternatives.
And sure, Manifest V2 will disappear in all those forks, but many browsers have built-in adblocker instead, for example both Opera and Brave claim to. And other than adblockers, what else is lost in Manifest V2?
Mind you, I am still using Firefox, but saying "the only alternatives are Chrome and Firefox" is completely incorrect.
Epiphany on Linux is a pretty straightforward Webkit browser. Konqueror still exists. Ladybird is up and coming. Servo is still making progress.
I use Waterfox or Librewolf
The "I use arch btw" of browsers.
Jk but tbh I think group them in with Firefox
>Chrome is the only alternative
The future looks pretty clear to me. We will have to use two browsers. One government approved, google (or some other thing) vetted browser for all the official and banking stuff. One other for all the other causal stuff.
This would be bundled as a single package, with something like firefox containers automatically switching to the "approved" browser based on domain loaded in the tab.
Once a browser is "Government Approved" all the other are 'Unapproved' ipso facto. There's nothing clear about that future, imo.
I use Firefox and I like it (especially being able to use uBlock Origin), but I really dislike what Mozilla has become over the last ten years or so. I think that's the key distinction, I can mostly manage Mozilla's crap by turning off a bunch of stuff in my Firefox settings, but I think it's really important for the web to not use a Chromium based browser.
But they have to make money. Else they go away. I don't understand how people think Mozilla can just exist and be permanently solvent forever
Mozilla's not exactly short on funds. They take in at least $500,000,000 every year.
AFAIK, from reading the annual reports years ago, this nice sum of money belongs to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works on making a better web. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity that makes Firefox, doesn’t seem to have as much as it needs. Hence MDN Plus, Mozilla VPN, and other services.
And it probably costs something like 80% of that to build and maintain a browser and they probably spend less than Google.
Linus manages.
Look how they spend money, plenty of articles on it, and it makes me hesitate to donate
Same. I want to love Firefox, but it does not have the polish on Android compared to Chrome-based browsers.
On Android I use Firefox despite the rough edges simply because the usability gain of the mobile web with ublock Origin is insane. Also it's nice sending tabs between desktop and mobile.
But how could it possibly? For work, sure, this kind of minor efficiency means something, so I'll stick with Chromium-base. But for my own phone? This is like the exact type of thing that proves the monopolistic dark patterning. Personally, the modicum of convenience feels super short-sighted compared to the ethical/privacy hangover, not to mention the risk to future availability of a viable competitor.
> polish on Android
Would you care to expand?
I've been using Firefox on Android for years and haven't noticed a lack of polish. However, I am genuinely curious what I am missing out on.
Same, especially with the recent redesign I think it's actually super polished.
Hate that they recently implemented PWAs, but didn't bother making sure the icon for the site worked, so all PWAs have the genetic Firefox icon. The most valuable feature of PWAs is to identify a tab as a standalone app and there's no fix for this in sight.
> I hope people here never stop bitching about Firefox.
Its getting harder and harder, at some point they'll deprecate their last sane ESR, and we'll all get stuck with all their junk.
There are forks which will keep the sanity alive, but I worry about how long Firefox will survive if everyone moves to them, and I have doubts about how well those forks will be maintained after Firefox is gone.
On the bright side, there will finally be a compelling reason to move to an alternative protocol like Gemini.
If 99.9999% is on WWW, nobody will move to Gemini. There is no business to build on Gemini, no publicly accessible, culturally broad community exists on it and none will exist. You'll only find programmers on Gemini. No authors, philosophers, non-IT engineers/makers with their projects. WWW has organically grown. Gemini has to be equally or more capable and more user and business friendly to have a significant contributor base.
Sounds peaceful.
But seriously, web is asymptotically approaching zero usefulness precisely because of all those "capabilities". In those circumstances, can't you see a million nerds muttering "we'll build our own interweb! with blackjack and hookers!" And one of them might even get lucky, and get a tipping point. Gemini's just an example.
I don't think web's ever going away for corporate stuff, but I can imagine the cultural party moving next door, to a less capable protocol.
It's like Reddit and Lemmy. The majority of users did not switch to Lemmy but the ones that did seem to engage more and share cooler stuff. They are there on purpose, not because it's the default platform.
This is the most insane cope. The old web was good because a naive user could find the coolest thing imaginable. The naive user isn't digging into a forum, finding a reference to a niche forum from the other forum, figuring out how to install or access it, and then actively engaging in it. People don't know passwords can have spaces now.
This is exactly and precisely why open source exists, for both the "never upgrade frozen version" case, and the extension into "fork it and make your own" case
Something like Firefox is so complex that I could not fork it and make my own. I mean, I could, but the amount of changes I could put in would be trivial unless I'm getting paid full time. Even if I was paid full time, realistically, one person paid full time, no matter how good, just can't make an impact in the browser today.
I'm not paid full time to work on a web browser. As a volunteer, I can't find the time to dedicate to that. I could do a few lines here and there if I really got dedicated, but like most people, I have a life. I have kids and such. My retirement account won't fund my midlife crisis to quit my job and work on a web browser, so I depend on something to build a good browser. And that is assuming I even would work on a web browser if I could afford to do whatever I want full time. There are a ton of other activities in my community that need volunteer help, some of which I'm helping a little bit, but I could do more for.
I, like many here, have wished that we could donate a small amount to Firefox every month to fun development, however it turns out that the Mozilla Foundation does not fund development of Firefox and so any money would go not to Firefox but to other causes of which I may or may not support but are not a web browser which is what I want to support.
Finally someone talking sense. I understand forking if it's, say, a simple android app to view images, because the owner sold out and ads got put into a bunch of things that used to be a foss code base (coughSimpleMobileToolscough), but the actual task of forking and maintaining 30-40 million lines of code and weekly security updates is unrealistic. That intensive process effectively became Google's moat.
I actually think this is an interesting case for AI not being evil, because I think it's at least plausible that it could close the gaps between big dogs and little guys, though in the long run it might just prove to be another form of acceleration.
Other people do fork Firefox though, like Zen browser
https://zen-browser.app/
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop
A lot of existing forks are just Firefox with a couple features added or removed. It's very different from a fork that continues being independently developed as a separate project.
There are a lot of good community forks of Chromium also.
And no, a fork of Chromium isn’t “the same as Chrome”.
Chromium forks are not the same as Chrome but it does help Alphabet keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology. And eithr way, monocultures are bad, a surprise vulnerability could nuke 70% of users overnight, which could be partiularly bad with features like WebSerial and WebUSB.
What does "keep a strangle hold on the render engine ecology" even meant?
Does "make Firefox compatible with more web site" make chrome stronger?
A thought experiment: if Firefox can use all chrome extension, does this make chrome stronger? I guess yes, right? What makes a website different from extension?
[ I am trying to show the "chrome ecology" argument is ridiculous, not saying we show stop supporting website ]
It's like IE6 was - whatever Google/Chrome wants to do effectively becomes mandatory because nearly everyone is using it.
Firefox has to follow along because of all the web developers who only test things in Chrome and expect all browsers to work exactly like Chrome does. If anything about your browser is different, a website doesn't work, and if you complain the response will be "We don't support Firefox, you should use Chrome or Edge instead."
For a browser, that's not really possible without a significant team of over-the-average and paid developers. There are a lot of complexities in a browser. It has to have its own GPU driver, JIT compiler, optimized scheduler to pull page components, another scheduler to run JS, a cross-platform rendering abstraction, hacks for 30+ years of WWW. All of that should be fast. Because everything else is extremely slow and wasteful on Web.
People who can handle this complexity are extremely mobile in the industry. They can always find employment in a much better paying place than Mozilla. And a competitive browser has to have such developers on generous payroll.
One of the issues with Firefox is its codebase. Some parts of it are slowly rotting and it has its own fair share of 20-year-old bugs. Mozilla is slowly failing to keep up with the ever changing landscape and dealing with the age of their codebase. There is a reason why Electron could be developed with Chromium but not Firefox. Mozilla really tried this as well, it just didn't work.
If you're forking, Chromium or Safari are a better start point than Firefox.
You don’t want a “never upgrade frozen version” for a web browser that is terrifying.
Also without Mozilla (and Google’s funding), “just fork it and make your own” isn’t reasonable either.
If Mozilla/Firefox goes away, so do all those ragequit forks maintained by a group of people I can count on one hand.
It would be up to companies like Redhat, Suse and/or Canonical (preferably AND) to step in but realistically I don’t see that happening either.
The moment it comes to that level of complexity is well past the moment it matters for browser diversity anymore. There is no shortage of open source browser codebases or random forks using them, there is a shortage of development paid in some form other than selling out the users.
There's still seamonkey, lynx, and I think emacs has a browser built in somewhere.
Konqueror could be an option.
Eventually we'll have ladybird too
"When Ladybird comes out" is starting to sound like "when Star Citizen is released"
How does Mozilla fund Firefox right now? I'm genuinely curious for a free product, how can they generate revenue without doing shady ad and data collection stuff?
At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests, they just give everyone a decent free browser, bring back the oxidation effort and overhaul Firefox to be all our Rust as Quantum was aiming towards.
Someone needs to take Firefox from Mozilla itself and provide it better funding under the understanding no more shennanigans.
> At this point I will gladly take an announcement where CloudFlare buys them out and frees the Fox from annoying corporate interests
I don't see how cloudflare buying firefox would keep it from being a victim of corporate interests. That'd just make them subject to the corporate interests of cloudflare instead.
Unless they mean Cloudflare is actually a political entity, as it was created, but that doesn't make their claim any better.
Cloudflare is corporate interests. What makes you think they or any other big corp is above messing with products they acquired? Remember when google used to be the good guys?
It is also very bad if the company that gets to decide which user agents get to see a webpage owns a browser. I could easily see some kind of fingerprinting mechanisms built into the browser if cloudflare is in charge. For your safety, of course.
Cloudflare is a vile company, who has destroyed large parts of the web and is almost certainly involved with intelligence agencies. Buying Firefox would push away what users they have left (many of which are due to Torbrowser)
> CloudFlare buys them out
That's even worse.
Scumsuckers at cloudflare buying Firefox would be the final nail for me. Cloudflare is every bit as evil as google or Microsoft.
> Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads
oh ok I'll change to Chrome then surely they would never do stuff like this
i missed the part where op you're replying to said switching to chrome was the alternative to pursue over holding firefoxes nuts to the fire.
I mean people do sincerely argue that (edit: they're literally doing it in this same tree of replies as yours), and I think they do it precisely because it hasn't occurred to them to think in comparative terms.
So I think if you're going to be ambiguous on a point where ambiguity is inexcusable you deserve to get nailed for it every time.
Firefox has indeed done things that are worse than anything Chrome has done, such as abusing a privileged update channel to push content advertising a TV show to user’s browsers without their knowledge or consent.
That was nowhere near what chrome does. This is why I have trouble taking Firefox haters seriously. A 1 time thing that they the haven't done again. Installed an add on that was never enabled or did anything at all unless you went through the trouble of enabling it. Needed you to have the Firefox studies checkbox enabled which all of us who would even care turn off first thing.
Chrome: no blocking ads on websites whatsoever. The comparison isn't even close.
Have you ever used stock Android TV? They push out updates daily about TV shows and even snack food ads.
Chrome and Google have not done worse than a nearly-10-year-old incident that was walked back 3 days later and hasn't resurfaced since? That's truly your position?
I'm sorry but I don't take you seriously.
i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain. my opinion doesn't matter more then the next guys. but when you see where this is headed because you've seen it countless times, there is always the "it works fine for me" guy and that is the most infuriating thing ever. a great example is microsoft teams, which is by every metric the shittiest application on my computer and there is always a "i don't have a problem with it" guy somewhere.
the frustration i have with that is the "i don't have a problem with it" crowd is the poster child for lower standards and shittier software experiences. there seems to be no meaningful way to convey "hey, you should care about this".
firefox fumbled super hard earlier this year trying to push their on-by-default AI. it took entirely too long to get them to backtrack a little. you could feel the insulation between customer feedback and their teams working it, they already have the operating models in place to try and force an enshittified offering and you can tell their new MO means they are hungry to do it and i expect more bullshit from firefox up ahead. hopefully we have other options locked and loaded before we get there because they're playing with fire considering how much user share they don't have. mozilla has completely shifted its priorities and structure, i do not expect them to move independently in a direction that benefits us anymore. no one should be surprised if/when they resume shipping some real bullshit up ahead
> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain.
It could be a generational thing, but I've always associated "power user" with the DOS/Windows crowd and it isn't so much about knowing more as, well, treating a computer like a computer. That is to say that the person who uses scripting in Excel is as much of a power user as the gamer who tweaks power profiles or overclocks their processor. On the flip side, someone who uses the basics of Excel or the gamer who buys the fastest GPU is a consumer of products, rather than a power user.
Funny thing is, I never hear that term being used on the macOS or *ix side of the fence -- even though there are certainly people who who would qualify.
As for the AI thing: AI is something that nobody wants but "everybody" expects. I don't blame them for pursuing it, even if it's a type of integration that I really don't want.
> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain.
That's fair. In this case though, the divide is pretty massive and also important. A lot of people couldn't tell you what a browser is. They just know what button to hit to make Facebook appear on their screen. A few would know what a browser is, but couldn't tell you what engine it used or why that would even matter. Many of the folks around here know about browsers in a way that goes far beyond what is typical. We've sought out and experimented with several. We've written websites, extensions, and applications for them. We understand how browsers work, and the standards and protocols involved in what they do.
The result is that we tend to hold stronger opinions about web browsers than many others would. Our knowledge matters especially to Mozilla because the user who couldn't tell you what a browser is isn't going to bother going to their app store and searching for a new one. We are the ones who go to our friends and family and tell them about Firefox. We encourage them to install a new program on their devices and to learn to recognize and use an unfamiliar icon whenever they want to search "The Google". The more users like that Firefox pushes away, the more they'll miss out on the benefits of that kind of evangelism.
It used to be a whole lot easier to recommend Firefox. I could tell a moderately skilled person to download it and install it. If someone weren't comfortable with downloading and installing software I could install it for them plus an extension or two in just a few minutes. I knew firefox would work for them, and not try to exploit them. That's no longer the case.
Now firefox provides an enshittified product out of the box, and every update threatens more harm. While I might be willing and able to keep an eye on whatever new bullshit Mozilla pushes and make a bunch of config changes and customizations to work around it, I can't expect my less technical or passionate friends and family to do that.
>It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into
The problem isn't that they're frustrated it's that they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about.
They don't just complain for themselves, they think this is the causal explanation for Firefox declining market share. Which it isn't because what they complain about 99% of people have never heard of. Nobody out there cares about who the CEO of Mozilla is or what detail of their Term of Service for telemetry they've changed. Power users is the only thing Firefox doesn't lack.
> they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about.
The average user doesn't really understand what a browser is, or how it works, and will never bother to look for an alternative to whatever default browser shipped with their OS. If Firefox plans on surviving by appealing to that audience they're doomed to fail.
Firefox got what success it's had by appealing to the people who care about browsers. They installed Firefox and then convinced the other people in their lives who couldn't care less about what a web browser is to install and use Firefox. It was easy for power users to recommend Firefox because it was a good product that offered clear advantages and didn't exploit its userbase. Alienating the people who know and care about browsers by enshittifying is probably not going to work out for Mozilla, and that means we all lose.
This is complete revisionist history. Mozilla actually did the dang thing with project Quantum which was a massive overhaul of performance and stability when the browser was arguably at its lowest point in terms of a performance gap with Google Chrome
They completely revitalized the browser and... kept losing market share. Because it's 99% about distribution and Chrome was distributed by the world's most visited website and the pre installed default on over a billion devices.
In fact, we have a perfect natural experiment for what it looks like to execute on features perfectly, listen to core user concerns, getting first to market on mobile devices, and outcompeting on customizability and features as well as experiment with every imaginable fundraising model you could imagine. Opera was that company, and to this day I maintain that nobody has a better browser engine than Presto at its peak, I still think even now, in terms of features, innovation, customizability. Opera was the best browser company that ever existed. If being a perfect browser company was rewarded with market share we would all be using Presto right now. But browser economics just don't work that way.
Also, there's a history of curbing browser monopoly dominance by giving users choice (antitrust case against Microsoft in the '90s), and Mozilla's market share issues would be solved overnight if Android users had to choose from a list of browsers. The narrative that market share change has anything to do with feature development is a hallucination born in the backwaters of internet comment sections and completely ignores the actual drivers, which are the flexing of monopoly power and pre-installed defaults.
> when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company
What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow.
Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.
It's not an either/or situation. For many years now people have been begging Mozilla to allow them to give money to help fund firefox (and only firefox) but Mozilla has refused. I can't promise that allowing it would provide all the funds they need, but certainly every little bit helps. People could continue to contribute code to the project, but that requires a lot more time, effort, and no small amount of skill compared to the time it takes to enter your credit card number and submit and an online form. Contributing code to Firefox is still a good thing, but it's a process (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...) that won't be for everyone.
There is no precedent for donations on the scale of what Mozilla gets from search licensing. The best online fundraising drive on the planet is Wikipedia with orders of magnitude more users and they don't raise half of what Mozilla spends on keeping up with Google.
It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.
How is it that we can have a plethora of different Linux distributions, the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the OpenBSD kernel, GIMP, LibreOffice and several other large projects that are run and maintained by donations and volunteers.
Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at least that was the argument for some of what they were doing.
At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.
We've got a live one. Most of their expenses are developing the core browser, the side bets (with a few exceptions, notably FirefoxOS, which I think was a GOOD side bet and worth the effort) were not that expensive. They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat.
>At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.
They already do that, they have a huge endowment set aside. It's obvious that people don't actually care about it because they don't know, and they only mention the possibility to make the accusation, never to give them credit once they discover Mozilla already does this and has been doing it for about 2 decades.
>And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.
Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users. And that's the best pure online fundraising program on planet Earth. Again, people only think this through to the point of being able to make the accusation not to the point of figuring out if it would actually work or not.
Normally I'd agree but at this point it's basically "Firefox is mismanaged, updoots to the left my 1337zors" behavior. It's basically a meme. It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted. Yes they make mistakes. Yes they can be frustrating. But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.
People whine about the features every time. Guess what? I like sync. I like having a dedicated container for the rare times I must log in to google. I like some of these "useless" things they "tack on." Not every change must be met with "nobody asked for it." I actually don't want a super basic, boring browser - that's what I have mullvad browser for! FF is my daily driver, sometimes they roll out stuff I legitimately want and expect.
Who complains about sync thought? What tilts me is Pocket, AI features, integrated ads, and a plethora of other random acquisitions and side projects that constitute outsized expenses yet do zilch to drive adoption.
I also used to be a Thunderbird lover, but I was forced to ditch it due to crippling freezes, crashes, and slowdown when you have a lot of emails. Mozilla just feels like an awful steward of their projects at times.
EDIT: I also subscribed to Mozilla VPN for almost two years and was forced to ditch that too, due to... solvable technical issues, again. Mullvad was just a greatly superior product for the same price. I still use Firefox for all my browsing on desktop and Android at least.
Totally agree they lose focus and spend a lot of time on things that are questionable. But again, they do release things that are super useful. There are probably people out there who like pocket. As for AI, as much as I was raising my eyebrow, I watched a whole threat of people the other day raving about Kagi’s AI implementation. Maybe Mozilla will make something useful shrug
> But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.
As much as Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of Good, the existence of Worse shouldn't make anyone stop demanding Better.
Generally, while I know it can take time away from working on other things, I don't mind if firefox adds optional features like Sync, FlyWeb, Pocket, or Hello as long as they can be easily and permanently disabled.
Ideally they wouldn't be installed by default and users would be informed about what the features are, told what the risks of installing/using them are, and given an option to enable them or not first.
There are half a dozen quality Firefox forks that can (not) do that for you. That’s the beauty of Firefox if you ask me. Just use a stripped down version like Mullvad. Thank god Firefox exists so we can have it.
> But it is still so much better than using a chromium browser, and that must be acknowledged.
Often it goes unacknowledged, leaving the reader to read the criticism as a tacit endorsement of switching off of Firefox to something else.
For real. Honestly all I need is some token acknowledgment that it is still the best option for browsing right now, even if we demand it be better
Sync and container tabs aren't on the list of features I recall seeing people complain about.
I’m fine with Firefox and run it as my main browser on all my devices. But their corporate behavior means I’ll never give them my money again.
I don't have any issues with the extra features they try to tack on. I just disable them.
I just wish they would fix the memory leaks and stuttering.
> It's always at the top of every single firefox thread no matter what is being posted.
That’s because this mismanagement has been going on for nearly 10 years now, nothing is being done to address it, and if anything, it seems to be getting progressively worse.
This rant reminds me why Linux has limited penetration. Its user base is made up of opinionated users who view compromise along the way to something larger as a moral failure.
People saw what happened when you compromise with the ad companies. Remember when Google was good?
Some things are absolutely worth refusing to compromise on.
Can we donate a portion of our Claude subscription to open source yet?
Just fork it and have the agents maintain security patches moving forward.
There’s an old mantra from organizing: “no permanent enemies, no permanent allies.” You will never align with another group or person 100% on all things; the secret to making change is to build a coalition of those with whom you agree on an issue without holding it against them that you disagree on a different one.
I disagree with Mozilla about many things, but I agree with this article - I use Firefox because it’s the only browser out there that isn’t Chrome or WebKit, and that’s worth enough to me that I’m willing to disagree with them on other issues.
It's also better that the other browser in many ways. The "Awesome Bar" among them.
What's different about the Awesome Bar from Chrome? IIRC Chrome had the unified search/URL bar before Firefox did, and I don't remember it being very different from Firefox's implementation. If anything, I remember it being easier to add search engines in Chrome (unless it's gotten worse in the past few years since I switched to Firefox).
Am I missing out on cool features of the URL bar in Firefox?
Edit: made my question more specific
Among other things, it's less about searching the web, and more about reliably surfacing your history and bookmarks and already open tabs.
This is what bugs me every time I have to use Chrome. I know why Chrome does it, it has every incentive to put people through search at every opportunity. There is no way to put results from the history on top.
But you can do that in Firefox.
You can start typing words that were in either the title or the URL of some thing you vaguely remember visiting last month, or last year, and the Awesome Bar will reliably surface it for you. I hardly even use bookmarks; I just count on the Awesome Bar finding everything for me. If I had to choose between it and uBlock Origin, I wouldn't even have to think twice. Ads I can deal with, if I have to. I've been outsourcing my memory for the web to the Awesome Bar for decades. It's part of my brain.
Not sure if chrome has an equivalent but FF bar allows limiting results, e.g. adding a single % in the bar will search tabs, ^ history, * bookmarks, (+ searchs tagged bookmarks? there's no shiny icon)...
Firefox doesn't report every keystroke put into the Awesome bar back to Mozilla, AFAIK.
firefox still support ublock origins
I was very narrowly asking about the "Awesome Bar", the example the GP comment mentioned as being better than Chrome.
I'm sure it varies from person to person, but I find it very frustrating to use Chrome's equivalent of the "Awesome Bar" when I'm forced to (eg work computer); Firefox just seems to do a much better job of surfacing open tabs (yes, I'm a tab hoarder), bookmarks, history, etc while Chrome seems like it'll surface some dubiously relevant options and try to railroad you into search. Even when I know I have a tab open and I know the domain name or a substantial chunk of the title it is legitimately rare for Chrome to offer to switch me to that tab, and often times it will surface one or two tabs that seem utterly unrelated. Bafflingly bad performance from what used to be a search company.
I might be the odd one out but I hate the awesome bar. What I do like about Firefox is I can make the awesome bar just a boring address bar and have a separate search bar.
middle mouse click auto-scrolling too!
I like this, and I also think it will help this Canadian deal with the current position of the USA
It's absolutely critical, and worth mentioning, that even after substantial reductions, there are a lot of Canadians still working on and contributing to Firefox!
I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a selling point for everyone to switch to it?
Agree, and not just that, it allows to escape the hijack of your right click (something google does not tolerate), but they also degraded a lot the experience the last year or two. Number of modal dialog boxes every time it updates (and of course repeat for how many machines you use), also every time there is a pending update, the performance seems to degrade until you close and update, and those updates are very frequent. I don't know if it is my machine but it seems to be struggling when there is more than 2 or 3 video streams on different tabs (increasingly common now that every news websites seems compelled to live stream video on their front page whether you want it or not).
You may restrict updates in policies.json[1][2]:
Syntax should be slightly different for Windows.File should be located in $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR/distribution/
$FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR is the installation directory for firefox, which (for default setup) probably will be printed by this:
When you decide to update you may temporarily replace policy for permissive one, or you may just install new version in a separate $FIREFOX_DISTRIBUTION_DIR.[1] https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/guides/policies-confi...
[2] https://firefox-admin-docs.mozilla.org/reference/policies/
Even better, I switched to the esr release. It gets updates every week or two, but only for security issues. Otherwise the browser has a stable feature set and no new features.
I got very annoyed by the pending update pop-ups and the "Restart to keep using Firefox" messages when I opened new tabs, so I switched over to Librewolf and now I get no distracting modals at all and can update it precisely when I feel like it.
This remains true: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Yeah, and when you think about the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine, we are very unlikely to see a new browser engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if a browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
"even Microsoft" is an oxymoron. Microsoft is exactly the entity I would expect to fail at implementing complex standards.
You didn´t understand
Why the insult with no explanation?
I did not insult
Oh, sorry, in English your wording appears insulting. What don't I understand?
I think OP didn´t mean the "real" web standars (W3C) but what Google rules that is the actual standars in practice. Edge had to move from his own rendering engine to blink (crhomium) because of that. So "even" Microsoft could not fight that trend. Sorry for my english.
Right, I see what you mean. It's not entirely Microsoft's fault - I'm just taking a shot at them.
Ladybird is steadily progressing: https://ladybird.org/
too bad the project leader is a white replacement theory type
that’s a bold statement, and my googling has not returned results that verify this claim. can you provide any context?
Here's a fun example https://archive.is/ZtQpj
Another funny moment from this guy https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814#issuecommen...
These both look within the realm of reason. Not that you must agree with them, only that they are not some kind of hideous evil.
The dismissal of gendered language as politics is arguably “defensible” in a “I wrote this in a way that allows me to hide behind it” sort of way. It was wrong and needlessly dismissive in a way that clearly communicates he disagrees to anyone who understands typical internet discourse tactics.
If he really did not want “political drama” or whatever there are far more effective ways to handle it that don't allow you to also signal your disapproval/disagreement with the content.
TL;DR: he handled it in a way that expressed his disagreement while staying plausibly deniable.
I completely agree that he was unnecessarily prickly/political in his response. I only disagree that it validates xgulfie's implication that he is in the "so bad we should disparage whatever he does" category.
Thank you
If I was dealing with the same type of "person" that's only "contribution" to every github repo is to just go and ask for language policing I would intentionally be as prickly as possibly to them while telling them no.
There is absolutely nothing constructive about removing "gendered language". He was absolutely right to shut that nonsense down.
All of this seems about right.
what is wrong about it? I have issue with diversity that it allows someone to game the whole system. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion looks very good on paper, but in real world implementation it fails abysmally. I can tell because some of my friend who don't know anything got into companies by the same diversity and highly talented friend were rejected.
Not talking about you. But a white supremacist would be ok with only white people formally employed because whoever is not white wouldn't get a job without gaming the system. Pick the lesser evil.
That fun example does not provide evidence of what you accused the developer of. Not even close. I think if you’re going to accuse someone of what amounts to racist paranoia, you’d better have clear evidence of it. The fragment you linked to simply shows Kling being uncomfortable with racial discrimination in hiring, which is a mainstream, probably majority, attitude.
no, the fragment shows kling is completely blinded by his own privileges as a cisgender white guy and completely missing the point of diversity by instead making it all about himself and other cisgender white dudes
its unfortunately very common for privileged people to not realize how good they have it compared to people with less privileges. you have to live it to really know what its like
diversity efforts being seen as "discrimination against [privileged group]" is exactly how we don't fix the problem
In the 2020's, this is just another genre of petty hatred. As time goes on, one "type" of person's historical privilege becomes less and less valid as a reason to reduce them in any way, as compared to anybody else (giving the benefit of the doubt that it ever was "valid"). Similarly, "diversity efforts" are laudable in theory, but in practice they are frequently just discrimination in the opposite direction of what is typical.
None of this has anything to do with "white replacement", or being "blind to privilege". You're stretching a totally reasonable viewpoint into "evil racism" because you don't agree with his point of view.
So you try to slander and discredit anyone who thinks differently than you. Same playbook every time, so boring.
You might think differently, but I think hiring someone based on their race to meet arbitrary racial quotas is insulting.
Sorry everyone on "hacker" "news" I cannot provably see into a strangers heart of hearts in a way that would satisfy you
I don't follow, especially since this is a reply to your own post. Can you clarify?
It’s an expression of frustration at being expected to supply evidence after accusing someone of racism.
Here at HN, we regularly expect evidence of lesser known claims. It’s actually a pretty cool way to form understanding based on reality. My original post was openminded, and stated that I tried to learn more about what your post on my own to not waste your time. When I could bot find discourse or articles about your statement, I asked for a source. That is a natural and valid thing to have happen. If there is basically no validation of your strong statements, maybe think about what you post and what it’s adding to the discourse.
You are not responding to the same commenter.
It would be nice to have a browser with excellent ad blocking capabities that doesn't use the money of donations to fund "whites not welcome" initiatives, so people would be able to choose browsers based on their skin color
The last time I checked the source code, it was filled with horrible unsafe C++. They also re-implement everything whether it is needed or not.
> It was filled with horrible unsafe C++
Are you saying their code was horrible and unsafe, or just that its a byproduct of using C++. They've been rewriting parts in rust: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/8f0a1b19114....
> They also re-implement everything whether it is needed or not.
No they don't. SerenityOS did, and that was the goal of the project. But Ladybird has plenty of third party libraries.
> Are you saying their code was horrible and unsafe, or just that its a byproduct of using C++.
Yes.
It's both terrible because it's C++, and it's terrible because they're not following the modern C++ safe coding practices.
> They've been rewriting parts in rust: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/8f0a1b19114....
And it's not going to amount to anything major. Rewriting in Rust properly requires architecting things from the beginning.
> No they don't.
For a long time, their policy had been "no third-party code". Eventually it became untenable, so they started using third-party libraries. But they still ended up reinventing the wheel at least several times.
Aren’t Chrome and Firefox also filled with “horrible unsafe C++”?
Yup. But they had thousands of engineers working on them for a decade.
Doesnt that makes it even less consistent ?
Why? C++ is horrible, but when you have thousands of developers, you can make it work.
Servo exists, and it's making steady progress: https://servo.org/
How old is Servo? 14? I just opened waspdev.com and the UI was quite broken. It can't even render a basic blog normally.
Works for me? I clicked on a few games even.
The only brokenness is misalignment of text on the tag cloud. I took a glance, and it has the content marked as scrollable with the min-height of 0, height of 20 and line-height of 24. I have no idea what _is_ the correct behavior in this case.
The html lists in the articles were not ok, the top bar search input as well. Chrome and FF were rendering fine.
Brave's adblocker does a good job. As far as I know Firefox started using some of the Rust written components of that engine.
Interestingly on fingerprinting test websites, Brave also did significantly better than Firefox + PrivacyBadger + ublock Origin + one or two more which I forgot. When I ran some tests a couple months back.
Brave is nowhere near as snappy as Chrome and Firefox with all its bloat.
Firefox was slow on my computer (old Thinkpad). I tried using Degoogled Chromium but it kept crashing. So the closest thing for me (Chrome minus Google) was Brave.
Vivaldi is cool (I loved Opera 20 years ago) but very laggy on my machine. (They did the UI in JavaScript or something.)
I use both now (Brave and Firefox), when I want to use a second account. And Firefox scrolls PDFs more smoothly. (But Chrome-based browsers have sharper text rendering in PDFs! Can't win 'em all!)
I like that they both have vertical tabs now.
To me helium the best browser right now.
Firefox probably has the best support of the best ad blocker (uBO), which is really nice in a lot of ways, but whether or not that means it can be the only "quality" one is completely subjective. Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker, let alone debate the differences between the top implementations.
> Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker
I hate that you are right about this :-)
It really hit home for me today. My project manager was sharing her screen so we could see the free planning poker webapp our team uses. I had it open locally on my machine. She had ads, I did not.
She's not a programmer, but she _is_ technical. She's worked adjacent to programmers for many years, and she's very adapt at writing SQL to query our DB. But she didn't think to install an ad blocker.
I guess I really do live in a bubble where I think _most_ people run ad blockers.
> I hate that you are right about this :-)
I love this. Many ADs are blockable because they don't care adblocker.
If everybody use an Adblocker, they will come up with something even harder to block. This is engineering time arm race.
I’ve never been enough of a uBO power user to say conclusively - but I am extremely satisfied with Brave - in particular its ad blocking on YouTube. I also think Brave is by far the best ad block available on iOS.
People say this, but seeing ads is very rare for me with AdGuard on Safari. I’ve no doubt that it’s technically less comprehensive than the best Firefox ad blockers, but in practice it feels more than “good enough” for me.
I imagine others feel the same?
I’m happy with Brave’s ad blocker. That said, I use Firefox on my desktop machines. It’s a great browser.
Brave is even better since the ad engine is actually built in (lower level) and written in Rust if memory serves me well. And before anyone says anything about crypto: pay a small fee for Brave Origin or use it for free on Linux.
Thanks! I had no idea they added a paid option.
This is a brilliant browser for iOS/Linux usage, and now its UI is minimal, and its settings are filled only with stuff for my benefit. It feels like the early 2000s again! This should be much more ballyhooed.
$60 ain't exactly teensy.
It's a lifetime license.
'lifetime'
The last lifetime license I bought expired when the developer was bought, stopped releasing updates, and the software stopped working the next major OS upgrade. It is on a clock, and you don't know when it runs out so you can't value it.
Yes.
60 USD for a lifetime license for software is a lot in 2026? For a browser that's arguably the fastest, most lightweight, privacy oriented and with best AdBlock available?
> pay a small fee for Brave Origin
"Hey, we recognize that normal Brave is exploitative and user-hostile by default. We'll fix it if you pay us $59.99 in mutual acknowledgement that you're a chump who can't install UBO."
I'm glad (and unsurprised) that Brave's vision for the web never hit the big leagues.
Right, so when exactly paying a LICENSE for SOFTWARE had become EXPLOITATIVE?
Maintaining browser takes a lot of effort. And, fighting with google implementation takes it to whole new level. $60 is very reasonable amount as it is a lifetime license.
I don't trust Brave to fight the good fight against Google. Brave wants to sell their own ads and push Web3 slop, making them an ethical tarpit with questionable motivations.
It's not their "vision for the web" it's just an attempt at funding development of the browser given they aren't an ad-network behemoth like Google. Like Kagi charging for their search engine, a company charging money directly for the product is a good idea all things considered. How do you expect them to pay their developers?
I don't use brave, and I'm mostly going by this comment thread, but if the free brave is user hostile by default in an attempt to steer people over to the paid brave, that's a very legitimate thing to complain about. you can't compare it to kagi.
No one is steering towards paid version. Every for profit feature can be disabled in free version. Whoever said hostile absolutely abused that phrase to make their point. And be the judge of it yourself: try it.
> How do you expect them to pay their developers?
Ethically, for one. I'll be fucked if you expect me to "donate" to a browser that thinks my friends and family deserve a lower-quality browser experience.
How is it hostile? Serving you an ad when you don’t have a tab open? Literally open a tab my guy it’s free
Many opponents of Brave online are thoroughly convinced that Brave Rewards (which gives you their Ethereum coin in exchange for showing ads as OS notification) is on by default, when it isn't. They also claim that this replaces blocked ads on webpages (this may have been true very early, I didn't use Brave back then).
Brave's adblocker is pretty good, but their means of syncing browsers has kept me away.
uBlock Origin (non-lite) only works on Firefox as far as I know. Brave purportedly has a built-in ad blocker that uses the same lists, but I can't vouch for it personally.
Brave maintains its own fork of uBlock Origin for Chromium and hosts it on its own servers but they themselves have admitted they're unsure how long this state of affairs can go on for.
Their built-in adblock is quite good but still not nearly as sophisticated as uBO which intelligently intercepts and modifies requests from advertisers to stop tracking. uBO is much more than an adblock tbh
I use it in Opera without issues
From my POV, an adblocker's perceived quality is primarily weighted on whether it can block visible ads without impacting performance. While uBO on firefox is a more capable blocker, I honestly don't browse enough sites to know one where uBOL provides a worse experience in this metric than uBO.
I prefer vivaldi's UX to firefox enough that i am willing to settle for technically-worse adblocking. If I notice this becoming practically-worse, I will consider switching.
I'm using Safari w/ AdGuard and it seems to work OK.
Qutebrowser's ad blocking got much better than it used to be. It's not as good as ubo though.
uBlock lite is enough for me. I switched from normal to lite and did not notice a difference.
With this attitude you can expect uBlock Ultra-Lite and then uBlock Nothing in future. Mozilla is the only remaining obstacle to stop big tech from deciding everything about how the web is rendered. If we don't support Firefox we will get what we deserve.
Might be, but I can't take on every battle. I switched from chrome to vivaldi in the hopes of they would keep the v2 api alive. They could not. Currently I can't be asked to switch browser again. Maybe at some point.
But OP asked if "is this not enough of a selling point" and I wanted to answer that honestly.
If that's enough for you, then by all means use Chrome.
Yeah, it's what I do. I use Vivaldi.
the difference is you are being tracked but not seeing the ads. that’s what you lost when they sunset mv2 for mv3.
Just wait until Manifest V4 then Manifest V5.
NoScript works well enough just wholesale blocking js.
Some people seem to enjoy ads, maybe they feel like they'll be first to know about the next hot thing.
Just look at how many people pump positive comments into influencer's posts that are nothing more then ads (sorry, collaborations). While some are bots, plenty seem real.
Or the new local takeaway that's just opened and all the reviews saying "I keep seeing this place appear so I had to check it out"
Few month after I started using bare Chromium instead of Brave, and consequently started to see ads, they often felt like a cool joke. I even had an occasional urge to share it with colleagues, like "Look, what they are showing me, haha" But novelty faded, and they became nuisance again.
Occasionally see someone go to yt without ad blocking and I'm blown away, feels like I'm from the 1800's sitting with someone in rush hour traffic - what is going on?
Brave has a quality ad blocker without mv2 but they also support uBlock origin
I've heard good things about Orion (WebKit)
It's still unusable on Linux, but I like where it's going.
Safari and 1Blocker works fine for me.
Only? No. Best? Yes, it's not even close.
I got the Chrome extension that adds the "Open in Firefox" option to the hyperlink right-click menu. That's how I view all YouTube videos.
I'd switch completely to Firefox except for all my data being on Google. It's clear that eventually I will switch to Firefox completely.
Google is pure evil.
I don't understand, all my data sits on Google too but I never use Chrome for anything? What issues are you having?
My data is google too and I own a pixel phone, but I only use Firefox and my google data is perfectly accessible using it.
1. Laziness.
2. My employer requires Chrome or Edge to access all resources.
When you first install Firefox, there's an option to import all your data from Chrome.
Why not migrate your data off? As far as browser stuff goes, it's not that hard of a switch.
Laziness.
Also I swear YouTube runs much worse on FF. But that's secondary.
YouTube runs worse on FF if you have uBO. They do it on purpose. But if you were to use a clean Firefox install it's pretty comparable. Ofc YT is optimized for Chromium which is another factor
That second part was indeed pretty self evident years ago, but I regularly watch 4k content on YouTube on low powered machine these days and can't say I see the difference anymore.
I'm not saying it's FF's fault, but it undeniably runs worse on my machine.
You might still in a power usage graph.
Eh, maybe, maybe not. I watch YouTube content, not power usage graphs, perceived performance is good enough for what I do with it. If I'm on battery I'm probably not watching in 4k anyway, at which point the difference in power use should be pretty negligible.
I switched my family off Google after almost 20 years on our own domain. In hindsight it was ridiculously easy, although there are still some weird Google account required links that ultimately have me just moving on. Yt does run worse on FF but that's because of unlock (I believe) they tend to stall out intentionally instead of showing you ads and attempt to get you to switch.
Yeah, I believe the stall-out issue is sabotage, but it also visibly takes longer to just render the page. On FF, a YT page jumps around for almost two whole seconds while it renders for me (not to play the video - to render the page). This may also be sabotage by Google, I don't know.
Part of the blame for what's wrong with the web right now is on web developers:
- We "need" firefox or else everything's just chrome
- Forks of chrome don't count as different browsers because they all use the same engine
- Using the same engine makes you basically just chrome because you can't diverge from upstream
- You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
- You need to keep merging with upstream because upstream is implementing new web platform features
- You need those web platform features because if you don't add them then websites will stop working in your fork
- Websites will stop working in your fork because web developers don't support older browser versions
- Web developers don't support older browser versions because... they don't care?
If web developers had a culture of supporting, say, 10 years of previous browser versions, then chromium would lose a lot of the power it has to drag the forks (and firefox) behind it. I don't really see this happening without some sort of major culture shift, though. Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.
There are more layers, if you'd like to look into it.
- Web developers don't support older browsers because they lack the skill and economic motivation for it.
- The managers of web developers will not support them, because there is no money to be made in supporting older browsers. Nor are there career benefits in maintenance projects. No developer or manager will get promotions for it.
- The actual management of the companies will not promote or compensate engineering managers or developers for maintenance projects since it doesn't contribute to "line goes up"-economics.
>You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
Blink is very modular. Merging your changes is easier than you think. Exponentially easier than creating a whole other browser engine.
For those interested in how the alternative browsers are doing, I just put up an alternative to https://wpt.fyi (displays the WPT test results of each browser) which is IMO easier to navigate, and shows Servo / Ladybird by default:
https://blitz.is/wpt
The headline results are:
- Chrome 94.7% (1053647/1112582)
- Firefox 90.6% (1008073/1112582)
- Safari TP 88.7% ( 987377/1112582)
- Ladybird 84.2% ( 937019/1112582)
- Servo 74.4% ( 827216/1112582)
So Ladybird is catching up with the other pretty fast! Although it's worth noting that it still has a bunch of extra work to do with regard to performance.
(my engine Blitz whose website this is on scores 42.2% for specifically the `css` subset, compared to 50.3% for Servo and 72.3% Ladybird)
(the results above exclude the `encoding` suite, because that's 1 million test ~50% of the whole suite, that doesn't really measure rendering capability).
I love WPT (I even have a bookmark comparing all of these browsers as well as Flow[0] that I check regularly).
But this is absolutely NOT how this site is meant to be used. For example, Ladybird jumped from about 30% to over 70% when it added a bunch of unicode logic. Secondly, these tests aren't all even officially agreed upon standards. Some are specific to Chrome features that are still in the draft stages for W3C. Many tests are written by the developers of the engines themselves. Chrome, having a larger team, will naturally contribute many more tests relevant to whatever feature they're prioritizing
[0] https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&product=chrome&product...
nice to see someone else fighting with the same suite. i run css part of WPT on pdf engine (paged output, no js) and hit most of the same problems.
https://reflowpdf.com/conformance
Firefox is the best of a bunch of bad options, but isn't above critique. It does suck when they do anticonsumer stuff and shove weird stuff like pocket in, but you can't leave which makes it similar to the democratic party where you can't really do anything, but they keep making really poor decisions.
The similarity goes deeper since they're funded by the very thing they claim to oppose.
Firefox have forks like Zen which allow you to have the best of both worlds.
Pocket was awesome. I am sad it’s gone and even though I found replacements I just don’t use them as much as pocket.
I've found Raindrop to be a better stand in, but I jumped ship from Pocket a long time ago.
I am using firefox, but it is pretty hard to keep using it. I don't want the whole world to converge on one browser engine, but I also want things to work, and Firefox does not make it easy.
Firefox on my laptop has a propensity for eating lots of RAM, and constant CPU usage, even if nothing is going on. Task manager is useless. Profiler just shows "GC collecting".
Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not. And don't even get me started on the "new tab" [age - it gives me 6 choices and all of them are "AI" ones which never show what I want. The only way to show a manually curated link list is "collections" and those do not get synced, and occasionally disappear for no reason.
I don't know why but I have a different experience. My daily driver is a 13 year old Thinkpad with 16Gb memory, I use Firefox all the time, I routinely have 50+ tabs open, I really have no complaints.
I also use Firefox on Android, I have less experience of using other browsers on mobile but what I've got is fine for me.
I'm not questioning your experience but I would like others, who might be considering using Firefox, to know that different people have different experiences.
> I routinely have 50+ tabs open
For what it's worth, I've been known to have 300+ tabs open all in separate windows (I just forget about them and they tend to accumulate), and for the most part it handled it just fine (it did use quite a lot of RAM, of course.) That was on an i7 7700k with 32GB of RAM.
I remember being quite impressed indeed.
Genuine thought: maybe it's the separate windows?
I don’t know you, but most people I work with for some reason keep so many tabs open, the tab bar is squeezed so you can barely see a favicon
Probably due to my age, I religiously close every tab after I read it. If that gets more than a dozen, I literally quit the browser and declare bankruptcy because it’s not worth it to sort through the mess of tabs I clearly am not using.
Firefox is old too. I’m sure it could manage memory better, but couldn’t we all? If you have tabs in GC and using CPU when you aren’t using them, kill them maybe? What else is that tab doing all day when you aren’t looking?
I’ve never understood why people keep so many tabs open and why they’ll literally switch to an entirely different browser platform rather than change a bad habit
I'm around middle age and keep tons of tabs open simply because I have a number of projects/tasks or soon-to-be projects/tasks going at any given point and managing associated websites is easier with tabs than it is with bookmarks. In other words, bookmark management UI/UX is inadequate and tab hoarding is the band-aid.
There's also a higher chance that things will slip through the cracks and be forgotten if I bookmark them, whereas with tabs they're staring me in the face any time I'm using my computer.
tab groups, a very recent feature, help a lot at keeping tabs organized. you can even archive whole groups if you no longer need them but don't want to throw them away
Exactly this. I used to be a tab minimalist, but vertical tabs + tab groups made having lots of tabs open viable for me.
I have maintained Tab Wrangler for both Chrome and for Firefox for years: it auto-closes tabs based on a configurable timeout and when they were last active. I'm not sure how people keep dozens or hundreds of tabs open either. It's FOSS, no ads, no tracking, no monetization:
https://github.com/tabwrangler/tabwrangler
I wish I had that level of executive functioning. I open tabs at a high branching rate, and faster than I have the impulse control to (for lack of a better word) run a garbage-collection pass over what I'd just done.
When it balloons into the low thousands and starts hurting performance, I dump Firefox's open-tabs store (file called recovery.jsonlz4) into a different file and start over. At some point I'll point an LLM at that junk pile and see if I missed anything important. (Probably not).
You could probably just use an extension that unloads inactive tabs from RAM, and maybe another that closes tabs that haven't been touched in over a week. Between those and an extension that closes duplicate tabs, it's pretty easy to get down to a sane number, no LLM required.
If a tab is important, you'll be using it more often than once a week. I have a similar rule with impulse purchases: anything I want needs to sit in the cart for 24-48 hours before purchasing. If I still need it, I buy it. Probably cut the crap I buy down by 75%. Steam? It goes on the wishlist (personally capped at ~50) until I can commit to playing and finishing it right then and there.
>You could probably just use an extension that unloads inactive tabs from RAM
Doesn't Firefox already do this? (Or at least have an option for it?)
Some of it, yes, but you get finer control with extensions.
Nothing makes me happier than holding down ^W at the end of the day.
From my experience it's inconsistent and that's incredibly frustrating. Overall the whole mobile interface needs to be overhauled imo. These guys need to simply copy Safari and call it a day. I still have never used a mobile browser that's as thoughtfully designed as Safari, and I've used basically all the major ones.
>Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.
I'm using Fennec from F-Droid, but I have a little document symbol on the URL bar I tap for reader mode. I guess the issue is it doesn't show on all sites then?
From my experience it's inconsistent and incredibly frustrating, but that's my experience with Firefox mobile overall.
I have exactly the same problem. Firefox uses far too much RAM. I ended up going back to Chrome over it, even though I prefer Firefox otherwise.
> Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.
This is false. I am seeing that button right now in Firefox, on the right side of the address bar.
Firefox's button is flaky - it seems to disappear depending on the page. For example it appears on HN comment page, but disappears on HN's top-level page. There is clearly some sort of heuristic which maybe tries to determine if there is "main content", but it fails on many blog-like pages, like current #5 [0].
It seems that any time I find a website with a horrible design and start looking for that "reader" button, that button is disabled in Firefox. Sometimes I tolerate the design, sometimes I switch to Chrome - because reader mode works on all sites there.
[0] https://masteranza.github.io/weedout/
This ^^^
Related: There's also Ladybird that is developing quickly and is aiming for an alpha release this year. It's a truly independent browser engine built from scratch.
https://ladybird.org/
I just wish Ladybird can do what Electron currently does, but with much better resources. Especially in today's age where memory is so expensive.
This is mentioned under every Firefox discussion despite being possibly years away from being generally useful if the will ever progress to that point.
It’s not really a feasible alternative.
If the goal is browser diversity, is the answer really Firefox? Or is it one of the active in development projects from people who are motivated to do something new?
What exactly is Firefox going to do differently to grow its market share? Or just "more of whatever the last fifteen years have been"? Unless they have a plan to do better it seems foolish to trust that they'll steer the project miraculously towards success.
> If the goal is browser diversity, is the answer really Firefox? Or is it one of the active in development projects from people who are motivated to do something new?
The former. Ladybird is currently not practically usable, it is unclear whether it will ever catch up to the main engines, and even if it does, it is unclear whether it will ever reach the market share that Firefox has. It is a nice project but science fiction at this point.
ladybird is passing more than 90% of the browser test suite. that's not science fiction.
How much does Firefox pass? 99.99%?
Right. I think the "last mile" compliance is where it gets most challenging.
What’s the real selling point? Yeah non profit but is it gonna be faster and better than WebKit? The reason I switched to chrome a long time ago was tab isolation, how much faster it was than Firefox, and built it better developer tools. What’s ladybug got going for it?
completely independent development. not based on any existing browser. we need more browser variety.
Most people don't care about that though. My wife doesn't care about browser independence. If Ladybird wants to more than just a pet project for some tech companies it needs a sell. Something that makes it better than Chrome.
Of my cohorts, I am probably the most loyal firefox fan. That said, I've broken up with it twice, and am currently in the second breakup b/c at work we're mandated to use the Island browser due to security reasons, and my work machine absolutely cannot handle two browsers running while I also have all of the work dependencies and IDEs and slack running.
I know much of this is subjective, but the chrome experience just feels better / faster. This is what precipitated the first breakup, and when I think about the situation now, it feels like this dynamic is probably long lasting. It does make me sad though. I'll come back to firefox later, perhaps when I get a laptop refresh and can be a little more cavalier with RAM.
It seems like the Browser Wars are going to converge on a singular point: "Do I need to access Big Tech services?"
As long as the business world is going to continue centrallizing on the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, any existing or future alternative browsers will either have to kowtow on the alter of compatibility or make the deliberate decision not to support "advanced features" that enable the next generation of proprietary webmail, social media, banking webpages, etc - tending towards a total revocation of privacy in exchange for KYC via a glut of metadata.
This will get even crappier as mechanisms used to filter out "suspicious" traffic (read: competing products) become standard. I imagine using Firefox in 2030 will be akin to using Tor in 2019 - web requests will be blocked, denied, or deemed "insecure".
Lynx revolution when?
I'm an avid Firefox user, but it seems that Firefox keeps getting worse. Pages forever load, when the issue does not happen in Chrome. History gets corrupted. Claude wouldn't load consistently if I had more than one tab of claude opened internal tools that used to work fine and we haven't updated struggle. I don't know if it's me but it's certainly maddening, especially when I go to Chrome on the same laptop and it just loads.
> Pages forever load, when the issue does not happen in Chrome.
A bit tangential, but that's not a meaningful analysis (depending on how you tested):
Imagine a Firefox user: They try site 1, see Firefox fail, and so they try Chrome and it succeeds. Then they try site 2, see Firefox succeed, and stop there. They never see Chrome's problem.It's like what I've seen some DuckDuckGo users say about search engines: 'Google is better because when I can't find something on DDG I do find it on Google'. (I think there's also some confirmation bias with Chrome and Google.)
It's like the old sales technique of comparing your product's features with the other product:
It doesn't show:I use Claude all day long with Firefox - haven't seen your problem. Are you sure the issue isn't somewhere else?
I use Zen (firefox under the hood) and I just don't understand all of the bitching people do about Firefox. Once I learned all about manifest v2 deprecation it was such an easy decision to move away from Chromium based browsers. The transition was one of the most painless things I've ever done in the software world.
Literally what is the issue?
Abject fear. They are afraid that the best option will go away. They're afraid that their perfectionism and critiques have driven it to a point of failure. They're afraid that a project is big as a browser can't really be open source. They're probably also angry at the squandering of resources at Mozilla particularly on executive salaries.
But yeah it's ultimately fear.
+1 for Zen, it's a great browser. I've been using it for 1.5 years now and I'm loving the UI/UX.
I’ve always been a Firefox fan, and I used it exclusively for quite some time. However, I had to switch back to Brave after they blocked clipboard managers from seeing what you copy in private windows, and there was no way to turn it off. I know about profiles and containers, but this is something I need for my workflow. Now that Brave has proper containers, I’m running out of reasons to miss Firefox other than my ideals.
Aren't most of the complicated and useful parts of Chrome in Chromium?
Isn't that sufficiently divorced from most of what makes Chrome unpalatable to people who appreciate Firefox as an alternative?
Why then aren't there more forks of Chromium? I would think with the progression of SOTA LLMs it should not be long now before everyone can simply ride their own custom flavor of Chromium.
> The only holdout would be Apple Safari, hanging in there only because it’s the enforced default on iPhones.
This is one of the big reasons I'm against the EU trying to force Apple to open up the iPhone and allow other rendering engines. The market share of the iPhone is the only reason Google doesn't have 90+% marketshare, at which point no one will even bother testing in other browsers or worrying if features are Chrome-only. It will be Internet Explorer all over again.
I know some devs want this, because it will make their life easier, but you're assuming Google will keep doing what you want and like even after all the competition is gone. That's a bad bet.
this is a very stange reason to take a stance against (forcibly) opening up ios?
it's not like the types of webapps that are broken on firefox dont also force you to install an app if you're on a phone.
i do wish govts. with spines had real power over big tech besides threatening userbase numbers, since basically everyone in the space is due for a breakup
I am definitely hanging on my Firefox!
Personally I have the same view to things like Github, Google, and many companies/products that offer public services (largely) for free for mass.
Granted they have their own monetization scheme behind it, I don't feel I am entitled to used them, I feel grateful regardless.
I use Firefox, but Mozilla is increasingly eroding user trust and being primarily funded by Google to avoid a monopoly does not give me confidence either. When Google implement an anti-user feature, Mozilla have to begrudgingly implement it, and that is not a healthy ecosystem. There's a good chance that I'll move from Firefox when Ladybird reaches feature-parity, but they'll likely fall into the non-standard standards (Chrome-pushed features) trap all the same to avoid having sites break.
I don't know how we solve this, other than to hold Google accountable, but that in turn hurts Firefox. At least in that case we'll hopefully have Ladybird as a truly independent browser.
The issue is building a browser is not profitable by itself.
You’d need to sell an annual subscription of 150$ to like 10 million people to get a browser that’s actually developed for users and not in some bizarre exploitive fashion.
The current spend on Firefox development is only about $290 million per year, not the $1.5bn you're talking about...
But at the end of the day, it's not the amount of money that matters, it's the goals of the people running it.
If you sell it on Steam or the Mac App Store we’re talking about a minimum of 30% gone off top.
Marketing costs money. Taxes, etc. Not everyone is going to pay the full 150$. Various discount programs would probably exist.
Anyway, even if my numbers are off not enough people will pay for a browser for this to be a viable business.
If you disagree you can start today and I’ll gladly subscribe. Not a fork, no build a new browser from scratch with feature parity to chrome
> it's not the amount of money that matters
I think that matters quite a bit. Otherwise, if you've got a spare $1,000, build us a browser. Maybe vibe code it?
I am hanging on! At home I only use Firefox. At work, unfortunately, I need Chrome for a few things that do not work well with Firefox (most Google products), but for everything else I use Firefox.
IMHO, that Firefox can only really stay free if it is supported by donations (i.e. people like us who use it). Anything else will lead to various things that either push people away or make less free - probably both.
Could be. Pity there is no way to donate to Firefox. You can only donate to Mozilla for 'mission to keep the Web open and free', with an unknown fraction going to Firefox development. People have been deliberately disenfranchised from voting with their wallets for decades.
Firefox used to be amazing, but they squandered their market share with bad decisions and stagnation. Maybe one day they'll see the light, but not likely, given their recent ai additions...
They were competing with the biggest advertiser in the world who put an ad about their own browser on the front page of the biggest search engine in the world. Not sure it was entirely their own doing.
Wasn't something in their new ToS that turned many of us against them? I don't think advertisement was the issue
That turned off a fraction of a fraction of users. And I believe i was largely misunderstood. There are also Firefox forks of somehow that was a bridge too far. I don’t understand how the answer would be to jump to chrome as if they have a better ToS.
It's not "us" that matters, assuming that means very on-the-pulse power user types. We're a tiny fraction of users. Over 99% of users have probably never even spared a thought for the ToS.
Rumors of Firefox's death have been circling for at least 15 years now... somehow it's kept going despite odd incentives and bad corporate decisions.
Both can be true. Progressing without innovation only works when your product is Coca-Cola or Bic lighters. FireFox as a name or brand is nowhere near it's former v1.0-3.0 glory days.
somehow this little content made me to set default browser to Firefox on mac. I am so easy get convinced. I dont know what problems Firefox has, why firefox not improving developer experience, focusing on building new products, making it light weight and performant. But I am going to try again after 2 years. Its going to be amazing.
I'm holding on.. in a way. I've switched to Zen about a year ago after ~2 decades of Firefox. It's a fork of Firefox so I'm counting it as supporting Firefox anyway.
However, on my iPhone and iPad I've stuck with Safari. Because it's "good enough", I'm not a heavy phone user, and really any browser on iOS is just a reskin of Safari given they don't allow different web browser engines.
I switched to Firefox when chrome announced manifest v3, and I'm still happy with it. Not only I get a browser with a real adblock, now that I got used to multi-account containers, I can't go back to chrome since it has no good equivalent. And I'm also using it on mobile since it's one of the few mobile browsers with extensions too.
I've been using LibreWolf (FF based) for years now and I love this thing. There are many issues coming with anti-tracking, sometimes a pain in the ... but, whenever I ask myself "what if I had to switch to Brave or other" I always end up with the same firm "Nah, I'm good".
If LibreWolf would disappear, it would still be FF for me, with carefully selected and regularly reviewed privacy settings.
If you hate on Firefox because they're on X for outreach and marketing — like every other browser — you are certifiable. Your opinion is extreme and summarily discarded as noise.
FWIW, if you're reading this article your opinion is extreme and summarily discarded as noise by pretty much everyone else too.
I don't say that because I personally mind if they are on X one way or the other, I've just given up on the idea anyone but an extreme few, usually tech nerds, seem to give a damn about this topic as a whole.
I use Firefox because it's a user agent. Chrome is a vendor agent.
Wait, is this a thing?
Why do people hate firefox? It's the only mainstream browser with an rcfile?
Honest ask, no shaming, how many who read this comment either:
A) Don't know what an rc file is
B) Haven't manually configured one in the last few years
I'm sure there are plenty on HN who are eager to say how much they love rc files, I mean to point out how many, even here, really have no attachment to these kinds of things. Of course it's very possible they don't care enough to read this far or respond either... but it's worth a shot :D
Picture Firefox as a fence inside of a walled garden. One side is painted a dull corporate grey colour; on the other your favorite colour of happiness. The happiness sits beyond the horizon of the graveyard. The dead of digital and open-source.
Instead of jumping over using another browser of the 'fox family; you have to dig under by removing all the unnecessary junk. Telemetry, Pocket, VPN et cetera; only then do you get to trek. I see why they named it fox. Each release that grey side of the fence gets a fresh coat of paint and the holes filled.
Rumours from the graves are that Cloudflare are going to introduce turnstiles to your own hole if you decide to dig.
I gave Firefox a chance as my PDF reader as it has a pretty efficient engine. But that didn't work out as I don't need to read PDFs often so every time it launched, it ran an update that added 10s to reading the PDF... :/
My current main browser across desktop and mobile is Brave. Pretty happy with it. Overall more efficient and with a better UI than FF. I've used FF for many years, but I feel it's simply not as good as competitors anymore.
Enable background updates when Firefox is not running[1]. This way it will be ready to launch anytime.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-background-updat...
You will not beat SumatraPDF for speed of opening & reading PDF's.
I’d recommend using a dedicated PDF reader in any case.
One advantage of Firefox's PDF reader is that it is sandboxed which a dedicated PDF reader typically isn't AFAIK.
Generally speaking most dedicated PDF readers haven't implemented the nastier parts of the PDF spec that need a sandbox. Except adobe. They support everything because they wrote it. But they keep making it worse so I can't recommend them.
I use SumatraPDF for reading, but it doesn't do editing. The Firefox PDF editor works perfectly fine.
If you're going to use a Chromium based browser, why pick one that's filled with crypto ads? I use Firefox on mobile because it supports extensions. One of the main benefits of the web is that, unlike proprietary native apps, I get to experience it the way I want. The web is nearly intolerable without extensions.
The problem is Mozilla, not Firefox.
I still use firefox when I'm on a proper unix desktop, like *BSD or Linux running x11. This is just force of habit from when I started using those in the '90s, with the old closed source Netscape 4.7 binaries, and eventually mozilla suite, and Firefox when that started out.
When I'm using windows or mac I use chrome. I've used chrome on x11 before. But somehow it never hooked me.
> Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition.
This isn't really true, and hasn't been for some time. It's just the only other browser engine with meaningful production users. Servo and Ladybird are both making great strides.
It’s true up until those other browsers are released and stable.
Firefox forever! On all the things! You can take it from my cold dead hands. Thank you Mozilla, for making the web a better place for humans.
Why isn't Firefox funded from the state as a utility and is instead left to rot in the hands of the "free" market?
If ff needs to turn a profit to survive how can it not follow the directives of the market?
I love firefox. I did the swap 20 years ago to Chrome, and then swapped again 10 years ago. Firefox is the goat.
What do people hate Chromium so much? I genuinely don't understand. AFAICS, it's one of the most decent C++ codebase.
I'm sure it's mostly Chrome and not Chromium that people hate.
I’ve been using nightly and it’s f’n awesome. The future of Firefox feels great.
Even switched the telemetry and reporting on to help them out.
He seems to completely ignore Ladybird project for some reason.
I want to be able to recommend firefox to everybody, but after 15 years of chrome and going back to firefox, it still feels jank.
Web apps like twitter youtube discord that is left open for a few hours take up >2gb ram and is jittery. I have to shift+esc and close them to make them run smoothly again. Why hasn't stuff like this been fixed yet?
Why do I need to open about:profiles just to launch a new profile?
The only real threat to firefox is ladybird, that's it, Brave and other chromium browsers are not it.
I don't love FireFox. I love my uBlock Origin.
I'm good with my Safari, but thanks.
(Though, I do use FF on Windows).
What's the significance of being on X?
I think FF is in a difficult place.
The only community they have any penetration in is the developer one (in its prime non-technical people would tell me they used Firefox since IE was insecure. Their techy friends would tell them to use it and the message carried some actual weight back then).
Today they are a large organization that needs to make money to sustain itself, while facing declining usage, and less favorable terms for search engine integrations.
And our community (developers) is the least likely to take kindly to the increasing monetization slop (promoted articles, pestering about pocket and their VPN offering, continually requiring accepting new ToS, reminders to use new features, etc).
I mostly use FF, because I think we'll lose something if it disappears (for example, DRM will become intolerable, web inspectors will become more opaque, and generally future web standards may be much more controlled by a small set of large orgs with their own interests).
But I use FF with less enthusiasm every passing day
Firefox is my first browser, and I've been using it for over 10 years. I like its cross-platform sync and addons.
Firefox still works fine for me. Sometimes it gets greedy with some activities. I smack it around and it seems to respond. I worry that Mozilla is starving it compared to other activities.
No sorry, I give Firefox a try about once a year and every time so far I have switched back because some random websites were unusable.
Maybe it works if you are de-googling your life at the same time and consciously choose to use apps over websites whenever possible.
What websites? I've been using Firefox exclusively forever and the only times I've had to switch browsers was doing my passport application and I had to find a windows desktop to get that to work
99% of the time I just change my UA to Chrome and the incompatible site works fine.
Firefox is great, and I use and recommend it as daily driver, but the actions of Mozilla leadership are really hard to differentiate from deliberately managed decline. It will be interesting to see what happens as Ladybird matures.
Will Chrome go the way of Internet Explorer 6?
Microsoft killed off all competition. Then the only improvements were Microsoft proprietary.
I hate to change the subject to something so trivial -- because I have been an exclusive Firefox user for many, many years -- but the awful moving background of this website is literally nauseating.
I'm no designer, but I can't understand why someone would make a graphical choice like this. It absolutely detracts from the content, and in my case, will prevent me from reading it.
Plenty of users use the reduced motion option for accessibility reasons. The developer of this page is just an ass for ignoring it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
This article seems directly target me. I was a Firefox fanboy and switch to Vivaldi for daily driver work browser. I still keeps Firefox for personal browsing. If Firefox could address the performance issue when opening many tabs, I definitely go back to Firefox.
My personal rule: anyone who uses any chromuim based browser is a tech illiterate. Firefox has been my browser since I ever remember touching a computer, netescape before too. It’s even the best performing browser too, I have had more than 1500 tabs in one machine a couple weeks ago on a laptop of 16gib ram, running 1% of those on chromium based and it will crash. Plus the proper ad blocking and control over privacy, making it the last bastion of browsers right now.
The big problem for Firefox/Mozilla is that the browser is currently primarily sponsored by Google, but due to an extremely stupid antitrust ruling, Google will no longer be allowed to do this after 2026. Then Mozilla could run out of money, which would imply layoffs and Firefox likely shelving its rendering engine, with the browser becoming just another Chrome reskin. The situation is quite dire I fear.
And it was all the fault of a judge seeing an alleged Google search monopoly despite the fact that countless users were already using ChatGPT rather than Google.
With killing off one of the last remaining web rendering engines, the ruling would instead create a Blink/Webkit (Chrome/Safari) duopoly.
wait, is this a thing?
firefox is the only mainstream browser with an rcfile, that alone gives you incredible powers. I hope one day it also grows something like chrome's CDP. What is everyone so upset about?
I stopped using Firefox when they forced out Eich over his personal views.
People just don't care. They are happy with monopolies and surveillance capitalism.
Once in a while someone talks about digital sovereignty, but much like climate change, nothing will be done (successfully) about it.
That's how it is, I've come to terms with it.
Agreed. All the more reason to do what we can to make things better than they otherwise would be. Outcomes are never black and white.
> They are happy with monopolies and surveillance capitalism.
Actually I believe for most normal people it is a feature of other platforms that they don't have to appear to be associated with weirdos who use terms like "surveillance capitalism".
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted.
Do people care? What signs of this are there?
Does it matter to the average person that the society is marching further and further down the road of digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism? My impression certainly is that the percentage of people who care about this is so small that it might as well be a rounding error, while on the other side I see tremendous momentum, effort, and cunning.
The userbase of Firefox existing is obvious signs of caring. You really got to go out of your way to not use chromium. The userbase grows when people help others understand these issues, or ideally just install firefox for their non techie friends and set them up with ubo. be the change you want to see.
>Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition
And this is a good thing why? It just makes web developer's lives harder and wastes engine developer's time building multiple engines when they could be contributing to a single foundation making that better.
palemoon is the only independent browser
Uh, Pale Moon? Libre Wolf? There have been browsers for a long time that just browsed...
Conservatives like Firefox too.
Criticism is not "throwing out with the bathwater"
Criticism is criticism.
Its daft to think something should be exempt from criticism because it is good or necessary.
nobody is (well i guess some people are) clamoring for alternative virtual machines for Perl. I guess there are some different implementations of Java. The web browsers today are virtual machines + operating systems. I don't particularly trust or care which implementation I use. Maybe i should, but i realize having multiple implementations of the same thing isnt all that profitable.
Profitable for who?
I think there's immense value+profit for our society in having multiple choices for what browser and browser engine you use. If you have many options, then Chrome killing adblockers with Manifest v3 is a much smaller issue.
Am I the only one that doesn't really care about browsers anymore because I stopped browsing the web?
You are in the web right now.
i like noscript
Getting mad that something is on Twitter will never not be funny to me.
Cutting off your nose to spite your face kind of thing.
Anyway, I’ll stick with FF for the adblocking but these Mozilla guys need to piss off with the constant popups for new features I don’t give a shit about (like a VPN). 1Password has been doing the same thing lately, too. Both my browser and my password manager fall into the category of software that should absolutely never bother or distract me from whatever I’m trying to do.
Didn't firefox have a TOS changed where they own all your content? Update: To whoever downvoted this, go read: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1iyuvjf/introducin...
Re-read the top comment in the link you posted as well as the Mozilla blog post. It says you give Mozilla a license, not ownership of your content.
Dont get me wrong, I object to anything and everything they'd be doing that requires a license to my private data. Fuck that and fuck Mozilla. I just think it's important to be accurate when calling out scummy techbros on their bullshit.
> The over thinkers on Hacker News
Can barely keep my eyes socketed from all this involuntary rolling that's overtaken them ...
I'm personally here for the non-bullshit stuff that isn't about getting clicks with hot ledes grounded on warmed over, barely modified well worn takes on well-understood stats so miss me with _that_ shit ...