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And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep th

And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it we will be worse for it.

tapoxi 3mo ago
Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%. Saying "you can use uBlock Origin instead of uBlock Origin Lite!" won't change this.
- Marsymars 3mo ago
  What does it matter for users if it's at 2% if it works better than the alternatives? Lots of products and services have small market share and are better than the market leaders.
- OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
  As long as Firefox keeps up with the standards treadmill, I could be the only person using it, and it really wouldn't affect me any. As of right now, there are vanishingly few sites that earnestly work differently on Firefox than on Chrome. Significantly more sites arbitrarily block non-Chrome User Agents, but that's trivially avoided by just serving a Chrome UA on Firefox. Which makes it trivial to switch. There's really no justification for sticking with Chrome. Switching to Firefox takes about a minute, you can import all your saved logins and bookmarks, and then maybe spend a whole whopping 30 seconds adding Ublock Origin. Complaints about Chrome amount to "I am too inconceivably lazy to spend 90s switching to a browser that doesn't hate me".
  - barnabee 3mo ago
    Agree. I only keep a Chromium based browser around because of Mozilla's asinine decision not to support Web Bluetooth and Web USB that are needed to interact with devices, microcontrollers, etc.
    - BadBadJellyBean 3mo ago
      They recently added web serial so here's hoping they might also do BT and USB.
  - Avicebron 3mo ago
    I'll be right there with you. Even with the stupid addition of widgets which immediately get disabled and never used. All that I care about is that I do not see a single ad in or on anything while I browse. It's a fight but firefox makes it doable.
  - scoofy 3mo ago
    You won't be the only person using it. I'll be right there with you.
- glenstein 3mo ago
  I think there was a huge missed opportunity with the recent Google monopoly case, which could have been used to give users a dialog box to select a browser from a list instead of starting with Chrome as the pre-installed default. It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company. It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.
- epihelix 3mo ago
  The great thing about FOSS is that nobody can stop me using it, and nobody can force you to use it. We can all be happy. The great thing about Firefox "losing" the "war" is that Chrome users' ad viewing essentially pays for my internet, and with only 2% market share, nobody will pay any attention to those of us still blocking ads. Sometimes you lose the war, but still end up winning the battle :)
- throw0101a 3mo ago
  > Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%. Firefox, originally "Phoenix" when it was first released, originally had 0% and made it up to 30%. There's no technical reason why it can go higher from 2%. If the folks that started Phoenix/Firefox thought the same way you did, when IE was the top dog, we wouldn't have it in the first place because they would have things were "lost". They decided things were not lost and to make an effort. We can again choose to consider things "lost", or we can try to turn things around.
  - dwaite 3mo ago
    That was with a lot of technical innovation against a static competitor. Firefox isn't in nearly as good of a position when it comes to either technology or resources now. It would be possible for a surge in contributors to bring it back up to a double digit percentage, but I don't think manifest v3 is going to be the catalyst for that.
- troyvit 3mo ago
  Apple market share (whether by hardware or operating system) was that low for awhile there and by some estimates OSX even dipped down to 2.29%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/ https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/ And that doesn't even count the dark years of OS9 in the '90s. Have they lost the operating system wars?
  - frollogaston 3mo ago
    Apple did lose the desktop OS war. But that became less important on the desktop itself because of the browser ;) and also mobile, which is btw where the largest competitor to Chromium exists. It was still important though. Windows is huge leverage in all sorts of B2B areas like Azure.
- kjkjadksj 3mo ago
  I don’t care about its market share. Most people are tech illiterate. This comes as no surprise.
- layer8 3mo ago
  It depends a bit on the market. Firefox still has 15% desktop market share in Germany, only at second place after Chrome.
- frollogaston 3mo ago
  How much does it actually matter that Firefox uses a different engine from Chromium? I would imagine you can just use a fork of Chromium that supports uBO or whatever else Google dislikes, and there are already browsers like that. Maybe cause Google could move Chrome to closed-source so the others gradually get outdated?
InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
The nice thing about using Firefox is that Zen is by far the best browser I have ever used. So you get all the pros of Firefox in an amazing package.
metalliqaz 3mo ago
Hear, hear! Mozilla seems to have a string of bad leadership but when compared to Alphabet, I don't see how there can be any choice. Use Firefox or one of the niche privacy focused forks. My uBlock Origin works perfectly well.
basch 3mo ago
white hat firefox, black hat brave?
- subscribed 3mo ago
  Why brave black hat?
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
vovavili 3mo ago
>I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else Brave and Vivaldi strike me as being at least not worse.
- throwaway27448 3mo ago
  I thought that brave was caught injecting affiliate links. That alone makes it worse than anything mozilla has done. Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1ebbeas/why_is_brave_inserting_additional_text_affiliate/ https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1ebbeas/why_...
  - basch 3mo ago
    ill be in the strong minority here, and it should be opt-in, but if theres no affiliate link, i would be ok with my tiny marketshare browser capturing the extra. less ethical for them to be replacing other peoples affiliate links, but they are also blocking ads ... so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway.
    - Sohcahtoa82 3mo ago
      What I don't understand is how inserting affiliate links doesn't violate affiliate ToS.
    - throwaway27448 3mo ago
      I would much rather just pay the browser maker directly rather than it subtly doing strange things without letting me know. > so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway. Ads are hardly an example of an ethical product to begin with, hah.
      - basch 3mo ago
        two wrongs?
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
mijowi 3mo ago
I prefer ungoogled-chromium: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
- nicce 3mo ago
  How does it helps with this issue? It becomes a much bigger fork if they keep the manifest support.
  - mijowi 3mo ago
    It was less related to the manifest issue specifically and more that I don’t think Mozilla is some great bastion of internet freedom, and chromium works better on many sites because developers design for it because it’s the most popular browser.
- nickthegreek 3mo ago
  that doesnt get your ublock orign after this.
  - mijowi 3mo ago
    If that’s true it may be what finally pushes me back to Firefox.
gdulli 3mo ago
And there's LibreWolf, for people who want to use Firefox without Mozilla.
worldsavior 3mo ago
[flagged]
- netdevphoenix 3mo ago
  How so?
  - capitainenemo 3mo ago
    Yeah. Take Firefox choosing to create PDF.js to have a clean minimalist sandboxed PDF parser. Chrome instead used an existing one that has been the source of dozens of vulnerabilities. Or Firefox pulling in a ton of anti-fingerprinting measures from the Tor team. Not even worth talking about anti-fingerprinting as a serious consideration in Chrome. Rust - a mozilla effort that resulted in code from servo being pulled into Firefox - chrome is headed that way too. Even WASM was definitely a security improvement over NaCL, and Mozilla also led the way on Flash replacements in the day, making one of the first JS flash players (in the end, the solution was no more flash, but hey, at least they tried). Font sanitisation - originally a mozilla security effort... I feel I could go on and on.
    - maxloh 3mo ago
      Did you know that Mozilla spends so much of their budget on their CEO's compensation that they actually had to lay off the entire Servo team?
      - capitainenemo 3mo ago
        Cite? I think the timeline has issues there. That predates the CEO controversies AFAIK. They did ditch a lot of R&D as their userbase kept shrinking due to chrome growth. 'course this sort of thing keeps coming up - yeah, I do think their CEO is overpaid ... and? Solution is what. Kill firefox off completely, hand internet over to chrome? Basically, where is this point going?
        3mo ago
Noaidi 3mo ago
I prefer an ad (and porn, gambling, social media) blocking host file myself.
- WesolyKubeczek 3mo ago
  Necessary, but not sufficient. Sometimes you want to block certain URLs and not whole domains.
  - pseudalopex 3mo ago
    Or certain elements.
- lightedman 3mo ago
  Many browsers and programs now days ignore HOSTs.
- drdexebtjl 3mo ago
  A lot of sites serve their ads from the same domains as their actual content nowadays. So if you really don't want to ever see ads again, you need something at the application layer.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
    "A lot of sites serve their ads from the same domains as their actual content nowadays." What are some examples I observe the contrary among the sites submitted to HN Without access to other subdomains and other domains plus a Javascript interpreter, the ads and tracking don't work
    - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
      Google's sponsored results, ads from streaming services. Usually when the website is not part of an ad network, but instead runs their own ads.
      - 3mo ago
frizlab 3mo ago
I use Safari, and it’s good.
- MrDrMcCoy 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - gf263 3mo ago
    Software you can’t run on your machine is useless? Okay.
    - Tade0 3mo ago
      There's a qualifier there and I think it's important.
- kjkjadksj 3mo ago
  No ublock origin so it is less good.
  - QuiEgo 3mo ago
    Agreed, however Wipr seems about as good in practice.
  - frizlab 3mo ago
    I use 1blocker (desktop+mobile) with Little Snitch (desktop only). I’m OK.
maxloh 3mo ago
Because Mozilla allocates far too much of their budget to executive compensation, which has led to the layoff of many Firefox maintainers, including the entire Servo team. A self-respecting hacker would choose a piece of tech that is well-maintained, not one that only recently added profile support after all these years, or one that still offers an ancient bookmark and history UI.
- SadErn 3mo ago
  [dead]
- glenstein 3mo ago
  This is confidently repeated but extremely misleading claim that seems to pop up ad nauseam in the comment sections. They spend more now on development than they ever have in their history, and the CEO spending is something like 1.6% of the budget, which I don't love, but which is not enough to sustain the narrative of all the money being siphoned into executives. They also break down spending into a pie chart of different types and development gets more than anything. If you look at their actual budget or the published changes to new releases it tells a different story than vibes based internet comment sections. But you have be approaching conversations in an open-to-new-information kind of way.
  - hyperbovine 3mo ago
    1.6% is insane though. That would be like Google, Apple, or MSFT paying their CEO $4-6 billion a year.
    - glenstein 3mo ago
      Which is why it's not normal or standard to represent pay that way. The whole reason for it in this context is to address claims that people keep making over and over that they ran out of money to develop the browser because they gave it all to the CEO.
    - mschuster91 3mo ago
      The problem is, the market price for executive leadership doesn't care about that, there is always a floor at the bottom that will make leadership compensation consume much more % of the budget of a smaller org than something the size of Google. Besides... the real compensation for big-tech executives or for early startup employees isn't a fixed dollar amount, it's the stock options. Let these vest and cool down for 10 years or so, and when you look at them again, they can easily be worth a billion a year. That's how a bunch of "angel investors" in SV got their money, they profited massively off of a good exit event in the past and now invest a chunk of that profit.
water-data-dude 3mo ago
I'm a big fan of WaterFox! I switched when Firefox decided to add a ton of AI crap without providing a "turn this crap off" button (you could force it, but I don't want to fight my tools). Really good experience, been recommending it to all my friends. Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut the mold off the tasty cheese that is Firefox
- lom888 3mo ago
  I've been using Waterfox on deskop for years and adore it. Firefox for mobile does great. I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly aside from just inertia.
  - daveshistory 3mo ago
    Most computer users have very few real demands to make and it suffices.
  - majorchord 3mo ago
    > I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly The overwhelmingly vast majority of the world population uses Google Chrome with no adblocker, on Windows, and have no desire to change anything. Even if you actively try to persuade them towards other browsers or operating systems. Why is that difficult to understand? Most people are not technical and do not have the same concerns or gripes as we do... their current software stack is familiar and does what they need it to, and that's all they care about.
- shiandow 3mo ago
  For what it is worth they have now added a global kill switch for AI features. Though I appreciate the local translation feature so I'm inclined to keep it on just for that.
- SwamyM 3mo ago
  If you don't mind me asking, do Waterfox and Librewolf add significant benefits that you wouldn't get by customizing base Firefox?
m_a_g 3mo ago
There is a reason Mozilla is getting ripped to shreds. I’m using Brave and I’d rather people support a degoogled fork of chromium that supports ublock origin, than keeping Mozilla on life support. And if you don’t like Brave just fork it again.
- Ygg2 3mo ago
  There's a reason Brave sucks too. From dabbling into cryptocurrency to charging $60 for Brave origins, it's also a dubious proposal. Edit: Someone on Reddit compiled a list of various fuckups. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_brave_browser_controversies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_b...
  - jorvi 3mo ago
    Of the no-hassle browsers (read: widely support, no snags) it is still the most private browser you can run. It blows Firefox out of the water on adblocking and its adblocking itself doesn't rely on Manifest so it isn't hit by Google's changes.
    - jrm4 3mo ago
      This is an unadvisable forest-v-trees calculation. At any given time, Firefox is rarely the "best" at any snapshot metric. It's nonetheless the thing you can overwhelmingly trust the most in the long run.
- thenewnewguy 3mo ago
  You mean the same Brave that's only going to offer "limited MV2 support" for five hand chosen extensions because they aren't able of truly keeping it alive? https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/#which-mv2-extensions-will-work-in-brave https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/#which-mv2-... Anything Chromium based is tainted. They will not be able to keep out all of Google's shitty decisions because they are not building a browser, they are building a skin on top of somebody else's browser.
- 3mo ago
Insanity 3mo ago
I'm going to advocate for Zen here. https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/ I've been using it for the past year or so and love using it so far. There's some bugs here and there but nothing that occurs often or breaks my workflow. And it's based on Firefox :)
- janalsncm 3mo ago
  I really want to like zen but every so often it eats all my RAM. Many have reported similar issues. https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/8932 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/8932
  - Insanity 3mo ago
    Thanks for sharing! Fortunately have not ran into this yet but obviously YMMV.
- skarz 3mo ago
  Why does their website seem like a clone of Anthropic's?
- rubslopes 3mo ago
  I've been using Zen since almost the beginning of the project. I'm pretty happy with it! Great QOL features, and being Firefox, I have perfect ad block and syncs nicely with Firefox for Android.
dualvariable 3mo ago
Well, you see Firefox isn't entirely perfect, so I'll just continue using the worst web browser out there until someone finally makes the perfect one...
- classified 3mo ago
  The worst one being Chrome or its Microslop copycat?
  - frollogaston 3mo ago
    Internet Explorer 6
joe_mamba 3mo ago
>Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, Funny how people always blame Mozilla's good faith critics, but they never engage into hearing them out on why so many people rip mozilla to shreds in the first place. With a "stop being mean to my favorite billion dollar corporation" attitude. Gee, maybe there's valid reasons on why so many people dunk on Mozilla. Hear them out before you snarkily dish on them. And it's Mozilla who should hear them out the most, if they actually cared about FF's market share, but they don't because those Google cheques keep clearing. >That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars And where has the EU been all these years on this topic? Where is it now? They could just easily have blocked google from pushing MV3 on anti consumer and anti competitive grounds alone. End of story. But they didn't.
bayesianbot 3mo ago
Once again I have to let people know about glide[0], fork of Firefox. I know a lot of people here like keyboard-driven and scriptable software, and glide shines at both. Keyboard control in it is so so much better than the extensions for Chrome or Firefox, and I'm quite happy how easily the API allows me do my own customizations. (as an example when I open HN in new tab with my bind ,sn , if I already have HN front page open it will refresh it, focus it and move it to the tab index where new tab would otherwise have opened. Really simple stuff in glide, not so much in others) [0[ https://github.com/glide-browser/glide https://github.com/glide-browser/glide
- sujaldev 3mo ago
  This seems like a nice project, I tried it out. Scroll is so much smoother than vimium. Sadly, it doesn't seem ready for daily use yet: 1. Hint detection seems much more fragile than vimimium. For example, some links don't get a hint when pressing f on their own :tutor page. 2. The ctrl+, shortcut to focus doesn't work always, requiring a mouse click to start working again. 3. Pressing tab doesn't autocomplete in command mode. And some other minor quirks.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
"Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive." That "keep the web open" nonsense is a myth, spread by Mozilla press releases People who use Firefox, not all of them, "keep open internet [read: www] alive" If Firefox exists and does the job for them, then they'll use it. These users write the add-ons to do "ad blocking", not Mozilla If Mozilla closes the door on "ad blockers" then these users will move to another solution, maybe a Firefox fork, maybe a non-browser method, who knows Mozilla gets ripped because ultimately they are "in it for the money", not Firefox users, and the money, they believe, is in online ad services. Mozilla advocates for having all www content supported by ads. Effectively they advocate for companies like Google By pure coincidence I'm sure, Mozilla relies on dollars from Google to line their own (management's) pockets. Without an ad services company like Google to partner with, Mozilla's business, sending search queries and possibly other data about Firefox users to Google, cannot survive But Mozilla communications reframes this operation as something like "we take money from advertising services companies like Google to keep the web open" Except they will not mention the money from Google part Then they will lead off press releases with some bizarre assumption like "a healthy online ads ecosystem is essential for the www to exist" This might make sense to Mozilla but it makes no sense for www users who don't like ads
- halJordan 3mo ago
  I'll never understand the "I hate FF for taking google money. That's why I use chrome." When something is so egregious incongruous then it should be a red flag.
  - greyface- 3mo ago
    You're hallucinating the second part. The comment you replied to doesn't advocate for the use of Chrome.
- manithree 3mo ago
  That's a lot of words to leave me completely unconvinced that Chrome is better than Firefox for an open www.
- 3mo ago
pseudalopex 3mo ago
> Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Firefox is more divisive than AI?
insane_dreamer 3mo ago
Safari on Mac, Firefox on Linux. (Windows: no thanks)
casefields 3mo ago
You mean the organization that advocated for deplatforming and more: https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need...

tapoxi 3mo ago

Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%. Saying "you can use uBlock Origin instead of uBlock Origin Lite!" won't change this.

Marsymars 3mo ago
What does it matter for users if it's at 2% if it works better than the alternatives? Lots of products and services have small market share and are better than the market leaders.
OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
As long as Firefox keeps up with the standards treadmill, I could be the only person using it, and it really wouldn't affect me any. As of right now, there are vanishingly few sites that earnestly work differently on Firefox than on Chrome. Significantly more sites arbitrarily block non-Chrome User Agents, but that's trivially avoided by just serving a Chrome UA on Firefox. Which makes it trivial to switch. There's really no justification for sticking with Chrome. Switching to Firefox takes about a minute, you can import all your saved logins and bookmarks, and then maybe spend a whole whopping 30 seconds adding Ublock Origin. Complaints about Chrome amount to "I am too inconceivably lazy to spend 90s switching to a browser that doesn't hate me".
- barnabee 3mo ago
  Agree. I only keep a Chromium based browser around because of Mozilla's asinine decision not to support Web Bluetooth and Web USB that are needed to interact with devices, microcontrollers, etc.
  - BadBadJellyBean 3mo ago
    They recently added web serial so here's hoping they might also do BT and USB.
- Avicebron 3mo ago
  I'll be right there with you. Even with the stupid addition of widgets which immediately get disabled and never used. All that I care about is that I do not see a single ad in or on anything while I browse. It's a fight but firefox makes it doable.
- scoofy 3mo ago
  You won't be the only person using it. I'll be right there with you.
glenstein 3mo ago
I think there was a huge missed opportunity with the recent Google monopoly case, which could have been used to give users a dialog box to select a browser from a list instead of starting with Chrome as the pre-installed default. It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company. It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.
epihelix 3mo ago
The great thing about FOSS is that nobody can stop me using it, and nobody can force you to use it. We can all be happy. The great thing about Firefox "losing" the "war" is that Chrome users' ad viewing essentially pays for my internet, and with only 2% market share, nobody will pay any attention to those of us still blocking ads. Sometimes you lose the war, but still end up winning the battle :)
throw0101a 3mo ago
> Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%. Firefox, originally "Phoenix" when it was first released, originally had 0% and made it up to 30%. There's no technical reason why it can go higher from 2%. If the folks that started Phoenix/Firefox thought the same way you did, when IE was the top dog, we wouldn't have it in the first place because they would have things were "lost". They decided things were not lost and to make an effort. We can again choose to consider things "lost", or we can try to turn things around.
- dwaite 3mo ago
  That was with a lot of technical innovation against a static competitor. Firefox isn't in nearly as good of a position when it comes to either technology or resources now. It would be possible for a surge in contributors to bring it back up to a double digit percentage, but I don't think manifest v3 is going to be the catalyst for that.
troyvit 3mo ago
Apple market share (whether by hardware or operating system) was that low for awhile there and by some estimates OSX even dipped down to 2.29%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/ https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/ And that doesn't even count the dark years of OS9 in the '90s. Have they lost the operating system wars?
- frollogaston 3mo ago
  Apple did lose the desktop OS war. But that became less important on the desktop itself because of the browser ;) and also mobile, which is btw where the largest competitor to Chromium exists. It was still important though. Windows is huge leverage in all sorts of B2B areas like Azure.
kjkjadksj 3mo ago
I don’t care about its market share. Most people are tech illiterate. This comes as no surprise.
layer8 3mo ago
It depends a bit on the market. Firefox still has 15% desktop market share in Germany, only at second place after Chrome.
frollogaston 3mo ago
How much does it actually matter that Firefox uses a different engine from Chromium? I would imagine you can just use a fork of Chromium that supports uBO or whatever else Google dislikes, and there are already browsers like that. Maybe cause Google could move Chrome to closed-source so the others gradually get outdated?

InsideOutSanta 3mo ago

The nice thing about using Firefox is that Zen is by far the best browser I have ever used. So you get all the pros of Firefox in an amazing package.

metalliqaz 3mo ago

Hear, hear! Mozilla seems to have a string of bad leadership but when compared to Alphabet, I don't see how there can be any choice. Use Firefox or one of the niche privacy focused forks. My uBlock Origin works perfectly well.

basch 3mo ago

white hat firefox, black hat brave?

subscribed 3mo ago
Why brave black hat?

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

vovavili 3mo ago

>I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else Brave and Vivaldi strike me as being at least not worse.

throwaway27448 3mo ago
I thought that brave was caught injecting affiliate links. That alone makes it worse than anything mozilla has done. Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1ebbeas/why_is_brave_inserting_additional_text_affiliate/ https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1ebbeas/why_...
- basch 3mo ago
  ill be in the strong minority here, and it should be opt-in, but if theres no affiliate link, i would be ok with my tiny marketshare browser capturing the extra. less ethical for them to be replacing other peoples affiliate links, but they are also blocking ads ... so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway.
  - Sohcahtoa82 3mo ago
    What I don't understand is how inserting affiliate links doesn't violate affiliate ToS.
  - throwaway27448 3mo ago
    I would much rather just pay the browser maker directly rather than it subtly doing strange things without letting me know. > so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway. Ads are hardly an example of an ethical product to begin with, hah.
    - basch 3mo ago
      two wrongs?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago

mijowi 3mo ago

I prefer ungoogled-chromium: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

nicce 3mo ago
How does it helps with this issue? It becomes a much bigger fork if they keep the manifest support.
- mijowi 3mo ago
  It was less related to the manifest issue specifically and more that I don’t think Mozilla is some great bastion of internet freedom, and chromium works better on many sites because developers design for it because it’s the most popular browser.
nickthegreek 3mo ago
that doesnt get your ublock orign after this.
- mijowi 3mo ago
  If that’s true it may be what finally pushes me back to Firefox.

gdulli 3mo ago

And there's LibreWolf, for people who want to use Firefox without Mozilla.

worldsavior 3mo ago

[flagged]

netdevphoenix 3mo ago
How so?
- capitainenemo 3mo ago
  Yeah. Take Firefox choosing to create PDF.js to have a clean minimalist sandboxed PDF parser. Chrome instead used an existing one that has been the source of dozens of vulnerabilities. Or Firefox pulling in a ton of anti-fingerprinting measures from the Tor team. Not even worth talking about anti-fingerprinting as a serious consideration in Chrome. Rust - a mozilla effort that resulted in code from servo being pulled into Firefox - chrome is headed that way too. Even WASM was definitely a security improvement over NaCL, and Mozilla also led the way on Flash replacements in the day, making one of the first JS flash players (in the end, the solution was no more flash, but hey, at least they tried). Font sanitisation - originally a mozilla security effort... I feel I could go on and on.
  - maxloh 3mo ago
    Did you know that Mozilla spends so much of their budget on their CEO's compensation that they actually had to lay off the entire Servo team?
    - capitainenemo 3mo ago
      Cite? I think the timeline has issues there. That predates the CEO controversies AFAIK. They did ditch a lot of R&D as their userbase kept shrinking due to chrome growth. 'course this sort of thing keeps coming up - yeah, I do think their CEO is overpaid ... and? Solution is what. Kill firefox off completely, hand internet over to chrome? Basically, where is this point going?
      - 3mo ago

Noaidi 3mo ago

I prefer an ad (and porn, gambling, social media) blocking host file myself.

WesolyKubeczek 3mo ago
Necessary, but not sufficient. Sometimes you want to block certain URLs and not whole domains.
- pseudalopex 3mo ago
  Or certain elements.
lightedman 3mo ago
Many browsers and programs now days ignore HOSTs.
drdexebtjl 3mo ago
A lot of sites serve their ads from the same domains as their actual content nowadays. So if you really don't want to ever see ads again, you need something at the application layer.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
  "A lot of sites serve their ads from the same domains as their actual content nowadays." What are some examples I observe the contrary among the sites submitted to HN Without access to other subdomains and other domains plus a Javascript interpreter, the ads and tracking don't work
  - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
    Google's sponsored results, ads from streaming services. Usually when the website is not part of an ad network, but instead runs their own ads.
    - 3mo ago

frizlab 3mo ago

I use Safari, and it’s good.

MrDrMcCoy 3mo ago
[flagged]
- gf263 3mo ago
  Software you can’t run on your machine is useless? Okay.
  - Tade0 3mo ago
    There's a qualifier there and I think it's important.
kjkjadksj 3mo ago
No ublock origin so it is less good.
- QuiEgo 3mo ago
  Agreed, however Wipr seems about as good in practice.
- frizlab 3mo ago
  I use 1blocker (desktop+mobile) with Little Snitch (desktop only). I’m OK.

maxloh 3mo ago

Because Mozilla allocates far too much of their budget to executive compensation, which has led to the layoff of many Firefox maintainers, including the entire Servo team. A self-respecting hacker would choose a piece of tech that is well-maintained, not one that only recently added profile support after all these years, or one that still offers an ancient bookmark and history UI.

SadErn 3mo ago
[dead]
glenstein 3mo ago
This is confidently repeated but extremely misleading claim that seems to pop up ad nauseam in the comment sections. They spend more now on development than they ever have in their history, and the CEO spending is something like 1.6% of the budget, which I don't love, but which is not enough to sustain the narrative of all the money being siphoned into executives. They also break down spending into a pie chart of different types and development gets more than anything. If you look at their actual budget or the published changes to new releases it tells a different story than vibes based internet comment sections. But you have be approaching conversations in an open-to-new-information kind of way.
- hyperbovine 3mo ago
  1.6% is insane though. That would be like Google, Apple, or MSFT paying their CEO $4-6 billion a year.
  - glenstein 3mo ago
    Which is why it's not normal or standard to represent pay that way. The whole reason for it in this context is to address claims that people keep making over and over that they ran out of money to develop the browser because they gave it all to the CEO.
  - mschuster91 3mo ago
    The problem is, the market price for executive leadership doesn't care about that, there is always a floor at the bottom that will make leadership compensation consume much more % of the budget of a smaller org than something the size of Google. Besides... the real compensation for big-tech executives or for early startup employees isn't a fixed dollar amount, it's the stock options. Let these vest and cool down for 10 years or so, and when you look at them again, they can easily be worth a billion a year. That's how a bunch of "angel investors" in SV got their money, they profited massively off of a good exit event in the past and now invest a chunk of that profit.

water-data-dude 3mo ago

I'm a big fan of WaterFox! I switched when Firefox decided to add a ton of AI crap without providing a "turn this crap off" button (you could force it, but I don't want to fight my tools). Really good experience, been recommending it to all my friends. Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut the mold off the tasty cheese that is Firefox

lom888 3mo ago
I've been using Waterfox on deskop for years and adore it. Firefox for mobile does great. I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly aside from just inertia.
- daveshistory 3mo ago
  Most computer users have very few real demands to make and it suffices.
- majorchord 3mo ago
  > I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly The overwhelmingly vast majority of the world population uses Google Chrome with no adblocker, on Windows, and have no desire to change anything. Even if you actively try to persuade them towards other browsers or operating systems. Why is that difficult to understand? Most people are not technical and do not have the same concerns or gripes as we do... their current software stack is familiar and does what they need it to, and that's all they care about.
shiandow 3mo ago
For what it is worth they have now added a global kill switch for AI features. Though I appreciate the local translation feature so I'm inclined to keep it on just for that.
SwamyM 3mo ago
If you don't mind me asking, do Waterfox and Librewolf add significant benefits that you wouldn't get by customizing base Firefox?

m_a_g 3mo ago

There is a reason Mozilla is getting ripped to shreds. I’m using Brave and I’d rather people support a degoogled fork of chromium that supports ublock origin, than keeping Mozilla on life support. And if you don’t like Brave just fork it again.

Ygg2 3mo ago
There's a reason Brave sucks too. From dabbling into cryptocurrency to charging $60 for Brave origins, it's also a dubious proposal. Edit: Someone on Reddit compiled a list of various fuckups. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_brave_browser_controversies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_b...
- jorvi 3mo ago
  Of the no-hassle browsers (read: widely support, no snags) it is still the most private browser you can run. It blows Firefox out of the water on adblocking and its adblocking itself doesn't rely on Manifest so it isn't hit by Google's changes.
  - jrm4 3mo ago
    This is an unadvisable forest-v-trees calculation. At any given time, Firefox is rarely the "best" at any snapshot metric. It's nonetheless the thing you can overwhelmingly trust the most in the long run.
thenewnewguy 3mo ago
You mean the same Brave that's only going to offer "limited MV2 support" for five hand chosen extensions because they aren't able of truly keeping it alive? https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/#which-mv2-extensions-will-work-in-brave https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/#which-mv2-... Anything Chromium based is tainted. They will not be able to keep out all of Google's shitty decisions because they are not building a browser, they are building a skin on top of somebody else's browser.
3mo ago

Insanity 3mo ago

I'm going to advocate for Zen here. https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/ I've been using it for the past year or so and love using it so far. There's some bugs here and there but nothing that occurs often or breaks my workflow. And it's based on Firefox :)

janalsncm 3mo ago
I really want to like zen but every so often it eats all my RAM. Many have reported similar issues. https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/8932 https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/8932
- Insanity 3mo ago
  Thanks for sharing! Fortunately have not ran into this yet but obviously YMMV.
skarz 3mo ago
Why does their website seem like a clone of Anthropic's?
rubslopes 3mo ago
I've been using Zen since almost the beginning of the project. I'm pretty happy with it! Great QOL features, and being Firefox, I have perfect ad block and syncs nicely with Firefox for Android.

dualvariable 3mo ago

Well, you see Firefox isn't entirely perfect, so I'll just continue using the worst web browser out there until someone finally makes the perfect one...

classified 3mo ago
The worst one being Chrome or its Microslop copycat?
- frollogaston 3mo ago
  Internet Explorer 6

joe_mamba 3mo ago

>Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, Funny how people always blame Mozilla's good faith critics, but they never engage into hearing them out on why so many people rip mozilla to shreds in the first place. With a "stop being mean to my favorite billion dollar corporation" attitude. Gee, maybe there's valid reasons on why so many people dunk on Mozilla. Hear them out before you snarkily dish on them. And it's Mozilla who should hear them out the most, if they actually cared about FF's market share, but they don't because those Google cheques keep clearing. >That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars And where has the EU been all these years on this topic? Where is it now? They could just easily have blocked google from pushing MV3 on anti consumer and anti competitive grounds alone. End of story. But they didn't.

bayesianbot 3mo ago

Once again I have to let people know about glide[0], fork of Firefox. I know a lot of people here like keyboard-driven and scriptable software, and glide shines at both. Keyboard control in it is so so much better than the extensions for Chrome or Firefox, and I'm quite happy how easily the API allows me do my own customizations. (as an example when I open HN in new tab with my bind ,sn , if I already have HN front page open it will refresh it, focus it and move it to the tab index where new tab would otherwise have opened. Really simple stuff in glide, not so much in others) [0[ https://github.com/glide-browser/glide https://github.com/glide-browser/glide

sujaldev 3mo ago
This seems like a nice project, I tried it out. Scroll is so much smoother than vimium. Sadly, it doesn't seem ready for daily use yet: 1. Hint detection seems much more fragile than vimimium. For example, some links don't get a hint when pressing f on their own :tutor page. 2. The ctrl+, shortcut to focus doesn't work always, requiring a mouse click to start working again. 3. Pressing tab doesn't autocomplete in command mode. And some other minor quirks.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago

"Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive." That "keep the web open" nonsense is a myth, spread by Mozilla press releases People who use Firefox, not all of them, "keep open internet [read: www] alive" If Firefox exists and does the job for them, then they'll use it. These users write the add-ons to do "ad blocking", not Mozilla If Mozilla closes the door on "ad blockers" then these users will move to another solution, maybe a Firefox fork, maybe a non-browser method, who knows Mozilla gets ripped because ultimately they are "in it for the money", not Firefox users, and the money, they believe, is in online ad services. Mozilla advocates for having all www content supported by ads. Effectively they advocate for companies like Google By pure coincidence I'm sure, Mozilla relies on dollars from Google to line their own (management's) pockets. Without an ad services company like Google to partner with, Mozilla's business, sending search queries and possibly other data about Firefox users to Google, cannot survive But Mozilla communications reframes this operation as something like "we take money from advertising services companies like Google to keep the web open" Except they will not mention the money from Google part Then they will lead off press releases with some bizarre assumption like "a healthy online ads ecosystem is essential for the www to exist" This might make sense to Mozilla but it makes no sense for www users who don't like ads

halJordan 3mo ago
I'll never understand the "I hate FF for taking google money. That's why I use chrome." When something is so egregious incongruous then it should be a red flag.
- greyface- 3mo ago
  You're hallucinating the second part. The comment you replied to doesn't advocate for the use of Chrome.
manithree 3mo ago
That's a lot of words to leave me completely unconvinced that Chrome is better than Firefox for an open www.
3mo ago

pseudalopex 3mo ago

> Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Firefox is more divisive than AI?

insane_dreamer 3mo ago

Safari on Mac, Firefox on Linux. (Windows: no thanks)

casefields 3mo ago

You mean the organization that advocated for deplatforming and more: https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need...