> 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".
For what it's worth, I use Firefox for 10+ years now for web development, and in my opinion their tooling is actually superior to Chrome. Small example: if I just want to test visual responsiveness of a page at different breakpoints, Firefox lets me close the bottom toolbar and just play around with the top window. In Chrome I need to keep the bottom toolbar open the whole time, cluttering my screen, because if I close it the whole devtools closes too.
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'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.
> when it was the last time that I felt it to be slow
I only have an issue because I set a big disk cache (because data cap). 8gb is fine IIRC, but 24gb causes slowdowns on startups and new tabs. (Also much more of an issue on my older laptop than my newer desktop.)
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?
Using Chromium-based browsers means you give Google, the surveillance company that works with ICE and the military, more power over the web to do stuff like push Manifest V2.
Everyone has their own ethical standards around this but I think Firefox is clearly seen as the browser to use if you care about the open web. A lot of people therefore feel the need to defend their preference for a Chromium-based browser.
IMO that obfuscates the fact that even non-Chrome Chromium based browsers still affords Google massive influence over the future of the web.
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.
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.
No one in their right mind would use Edge, unless the employer's IT forces them to - and in that case they've given up on the tools the employer gives them already and wouldn't care enough to hate.
Nothing worse then silence quitting.
Your disappointed users quit in silence because of their insatisfaction but they don't care enough or anymore enough to even telling you that they are quitting or why.
In that case you can be satisfied of yourself while your user base and promoters is plummeting.
It is a great thing that you still have a large user base that will still complain of issues they have so you can improve or ever on that if it is your wish.
And nothing as strong in the end that the fidelity of an user that was complaining about an issue and now feel that his voice was heard!
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!
I mean, there are plenty of reasonable takes (some of which are criticism) too. Generally, working at Mozilla doesn't make it much more torturous than before, when I was merely an unpaid open web advocate :)
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.
This exactly what I disagree with and I think I supported my argument quite clearly. The more we say "Chrome is not Chromium" the more stuff like V2 will happen. At some point we need to admit that the dominance of Chromium does in fact give Google power over the web
Google controls Chromium to the extent they can impose changes like manifest v3 and while some forks like Brave will try to circumvent such changes, it will eventually become too costly or incompatible to maintain.
It is kind of the same daydream as the Windows 11 debloaters have that if they just keep doing that, everything will be okay. That is until Microsoft implements features they can no longer fully disable, like recall, or just exercise their control to revert any changes at will.
Maybe librewolf, but Waterfox is a drop-in replacement. Same extension “store”, gets updates quickly, install on every OS I’ve tried (which is usually windows unfortunately) is equally as smooth as Firefox, compatible profiles, etc, etc, etc. You literally just go to a different website to get the installer. It’s harder to install FF developer edition.
They both use Gecko under the hood and can install any Firefox Add-on. If you want something truly different, try a Goanna-based browser like Pale Moon or Basilisk
Tired: Firefox
Wired: Floorp, Midori, Mullvad Browser, SeaMonkey, Waterfox, Zen, GNU Icecat
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.
Then let me pay for Firefox. I don't need a resold Mullvad (which incidentally took forever to come to my country) or an AI chatbot (which seemingly are the options Mozilla provides to give them money), and donations to Mozilla don't go to Firefox. It took them ~20 years to work out that was the solution for Thunderbird, they shouldn't spend another 20 years flailing about for Firefox.
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.
That's their choice, nobody forced them to implement that corporate structure and they can decide to deconstruct it any time.
Google pays Mozilla for default search engine selection in Firefox, no other product. If Mozilla then redirect that money to other non-Firefox ventures then maybe they should explain why.
They specifically implemented that structure to be eligible for search licensing revenue that they might not otherwise have gotten and that's been the lifeline that's kept them able to compete with Google.
The non Firefox ventures are things like lobbying and building a community of support for principles of the open web, which seem pretty defensible to me. It's not like the CEO of WeWork paying himself from his own company's money to turn his private property into a revenue stream. Which I know might disappoint people looking for things to accuse Mozilla of.
That's self-inflicted though; they could just thesaurize that money and live on the interests to fund Firefox forever.
That they decide to burn through it by paying 7 figures salaries for their C-suites, buying luxury offices at the heart of Paris and launching plethoras of feel-good initiatives left-and-right is their own choice.
They already do have an endowment fund and they do get annual revenue from it but it's something on the order of 10% of the cost of developing the browser.
Most of their money is spent on software development, they seem to pay at market rates and CEO spending is something like 1.5% of their overall budget and consistent with industry norms. I don't personally love it, but I also don't think it's a conspiracy or enough to legitimize theory that they're supposedly wasting money. If anything, mozilla stands alone as the most successful pure full stack browser company in the history of the tech industry precisely owing to their intelligent handling of revenue streams and long-term financial planning. Got to go back to the drawing board and find a new accusation.
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.
I'll reinstall now for a fresh opinion vs Kiwi (my current least hated mobile browser; Chrome with Extensions minus tab groups or AI junk)
Prefaced: I respect Mozilla's mission. All of these criticisms ARE overly harsh. At the same time, app UI should be as invisible as possible to the user, and Mozilla's apps are... "loud"
My last installs of Firefox Klar and Developer a year or two ago had the APKs at over 200 MB, no ability to block sound per-site, confusing UI icons (e.g. I couldn't find the forward button after clicking back, abstract shapes for everything), reader mode that doesn't place you at the same place where you were on the original page, annoying gestures that can't be disabled (swiping tabs away UGGGHHHH), Collections which were really quite silly/not my thing, no toolbar customizability like in the desktop app, no WebHID, and data collection on by default.
Today, Firefox is under 100 MB. It has very much bought into Android's overrounded/inproperly-whitespaced/shadow-heavy/unintuitively-animated Material 3 Expressive. Like most Material Design apps, this Firefox is ugly in a way that offers zero usability benefit: Despite the excessive margins nearly everywhere the three dot menu and menu search icon are still too close to the screen edge. I would place extra emphasis on the unused 8 mm above and 6 mm below the URL text, which SHOULD be 2% rather than 9% of my screen real estate.
I have always felt that Mozilla could join Canonical in dumping the Nickelodeon color scheme. (Did the founders of all these plus FedEx go to Clemson or something??) At least respect my device theme (grey) rather than Grimace purple everywhere! It's particularly strange to me that they have 23 different icons to choose from as well as a "Device Theme" setting but no method of deamethysting all the UI elements.
Tab overview and tabs.
Holding a tab selects its checkbox, holding it longer does "something" but it's not clear what, I guess "show full URL" and then eventually "Share"?
The "swipe tab away" gesture is still there.
Closing multiple tabs creates a sequence of "Closed tab (Undo)" toasts, so you aren't actually sure which toast to click that will undo a specific closure. (Coupled with the swipe detail, it becomes annoying accidentally swiping a tab away while deliberately closing others.)
Per-tab disabling of Sound is still missing; this is not the same as Autoplay!
There are prominent features that I'd never use: private mode icon, "grab tabs from any device", "search your tabs", the giant "FIREFOX IS ON GUARD" reminder, a home screen.
New Tab is across the entire screen from the tab overview button, so you either need to enable the New Tab shortcut (which encroaches on URL space) or just live with "tap top-right, tap bottom-right" for every new tab you'll create in your lifetime which is DEFINITELY not nice for one-handed navigation. There was enough space in the tab overview top bar for a "New Tab" button, but then they'd have to ditch the default Jetpack Compose floating action button.
Everything else.
The shortcut to get to Settings is in a different place on each View.
I couldn't find Reader Mode at first. It only shows up on supported pages and is not as customizable as desktop Firefox. Good enough.
Collections still seem dumb as hell. Maybe I need to use them to appreciate them.
I still have to change just about every default setting to match my personal preferences.
WebHID will never be added. There are a lot of passionate opinions on HID/USB in the browser with solid moral stances against its adoption. I get this and generally agree. However. If I want to reprogram a Gen 1 Shure MVX2U with a cellphone---and I often do---my options are writing my own APK or some very quick/dirty Javascript that I can edit/host anywhere. Mozilla takes away the convenient option and leaves only the labor intensive Google-approved technique.
Oh, and I guess there's no about:config unless you re-enable it at chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml which is not-at-all memorable. :( about:config doesn't matter much anyway, since I can't find any flag that will improve any one complaint I've listed.
I liken Firefox to mediocre toilet paper. It gets its job done and is certainly better than nothing but can get irritating to use day after day.
Thank you for taking the time to write all this out. I've never noticed these issues. I also agree, that these are fair criticisms that Mozilla should address.
Also, to be fair to you, I rarely use my phone as a dedicated browsing device so I am probably least representative of someone who relies on their phone as a primary browsing tool.
Not implying that you do btw, I just thought I would color my experience with Firefox. I live largely on Desktop and see my phone as a secondary experience so I excuse a lot of this because I get a Native Add-on experience that isn't addressed by Android's Chrome.
No worries. I'm glad I went down the mobile browser rabbit hole again. I tried half a dozen browser this afternoon and then found Omni Browser (another Gecko-based one) and might stick with it. If that still disappoints, I'm cautiously optimistic for Ladybird.
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.
I just tried it out with this page, and it gets the HN icon for me. I am on Nightly and on Linux, so possibly this is an actual bug you're running into, but no fix in sight might be too pessimistic. But definitely worth reporting otherewise.
Keep in mind that just because it works for me, that doesn't mean that you're not running into a bug that I'm not, so I can't make any promises about it actually being fixed for you :)
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.
> 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.
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
1. Pocket was an external company, which Mozilla bought (and claimed they would open source), which already had a web extension. There was no need for the pre-acquisition integration, or to buy it later on.
2. After buying it, Mozilla did nothing with it, including failing to open source it, and seemingly failed to get enough revenue from that they shut it down last year.
This saga provided no benefit to Firefox users who did not use pocket, and at best for pocket users left them with a dying solution that they would need to migrate from (given the failure to open source it). It's not clear how much Mozilla paid for Pocket, but those funds could have been spent on something more valuable.
> 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.
It's always there because it remains unaddressed. You may be used to people just folding then corporations move forward with enshittification but that's not going to happen with all enthusiasts, which is the only kind of user FF has left.
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
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.
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.
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.
All the existing "forks" that continue past adding/removing that one feature are regularly merging firefox back. That is they are not a fork there are a derivative that never forked. All the forks that remain a fork that I've seen die within a few months.
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."
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.
Even given an unlimited token budget for AI and some form of paycheck to do this I don't think I could maintain a fork of firefox along. There is far too many things that need to be done for one person to pull it off.
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.
Ever screenshot I've seen of ladybird makes me not want to use it. It's too "modern". I need functional software where the text and background aren't the same color.
>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.
> Power users is the only thing Firefox doesn't lack.
Which is exactly why the first thing Mozilla needs to to is to stop driving them away. They are never going to win the popularity contest for the average user without the word of mouth from enthusiasts.
> 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.
And killed its add-on ecosystem. If the choice is between (as it was then) a slower browser missing the add-ons you were used to, and a faster browser missing the add-ons you were used to, then you're going to need some other motivation to stick with (as I did, to be clear) the slower browser.
> 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?
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.
They could basically re-form Firefox as a non-profit where they provide funding, but control the non-profit org enough to sway it from wasting funds, not to mention Mozilla's war chest is insane, its no wonder they have bought up some startups before.
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)
You'd want this browser for free, wouldn't you?
Have you donated to Mozilla Foundation?
So you're bitching because the free product that you don't support finds ways to sustain economically the hordes of developers that are trying to improve it for you.
And no, Chrome never "bought an ad-tech company, collected data on users, and used chrome to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force users to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings". NEVER IN THE WORLD. That's why you use it.
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.
I’m sorry, but this is not my experience at all. The process of installing and using Firefox for a non-technical user is no different from Chrome: both give you immediate access to search, both offer to sign you in for cross-computer sync, and… that’s pretty much it.
I have gotten most of my family and friends to switch to Firefox, and I have never gotten a Firefox-specific complaint or question that I can remember.
> The process of installing and using Firefox for a non-technical user is no different from Chrome
Most non-technical users are exclusively using android devices and chrome is pre-installed. Today you can still install firefox for others and it will probably work fine for them, but it will be exploiting them too. It will collect their personal data and use it to push personalized ads. It will use updates to force anti-features onto them.
Firefox has gone from something I could recommend unreservedly to something I can only suggest while cautioning about it's increasingly user-hostile practices and providing a list of setting changes that should be made and monitored for silent changes after every update.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Mozilla Corporation already has funds totaling about $1 billion today. They're simply choosing not to develop Firefox actively.
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.
>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.
To get pedantic about it, they aren't developing that much code, they are maintaining that much code.
Not that I think LOC is the best metric but here are the figures for 2 of the project I brought up.
Linux kernel is ~40M LOC
FreeBSD kernel 7.8~9M LOC
I would argue that the OS's that run the internet are much more cutthroat than a browser, not just in terms of attack risk but in business terms as well.
>Microsoft aggressively tried to destroy Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s. This era included the internal "Halloween Documents" mapping out strategies to fight open source, former CEO Steve Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer," and Microsoft covertly funding SCO Group's proxy lawsuits against Linux users.
The larger your codebase is, the greater the attack surface. One of the arguments about the way that Firefox is progressing is that they keep adding more stuff into the codebase. If it's getting too complex, maybe they shouldn't be adding those features...
>Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users.
Mozilla received 16.9 million from contributions in 2024.
Wikipedia took in ~170 million in the same time period.
Not sure where you got that Mozilla was bringing in more than Wikipedia through donations?
In going through the Mozilla Financials, I don't see where they have a huge endowment set aside, 73% of their revenue is royalties. I did however see that they spent 31 million to buy Acronym(an ad company) and 21 million to buy Fakespot. So that's neat.
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.
Except Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.
I really want you to stop and think about what you're saying for a second. I just made the point that the strongest online fundraising operation in the world, Wikipedia, gets less than half of what it takes to fund Firefox. Your counterpoint to that is to point to Thunderbird, which raises significantly less money than Wikipedia, which is already not enough to fun Firefox, in order to prove that it's plausible that the full operations of Firefox could be funded.
This would be the point where Logan Roy says you're not serious people.
I would have them fully shed the silicon valley tech corporation mindset and instead act like a charity working for the benefit of the public, as is appropriate for a non-profit foundation. Funding should mean seeking donations and government grants, not trying to fleece users, sell their privacy/attention and/or resell mediocre services - which are not serving the mission of building the best browser possible.
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?
All of those are non profit organizations that receive donations. It seems Firefox is owned by Mozilla Corporation which is the for profit branch of the Mozilla Foundation. So again, how do they fund Firefox as a for profit company?
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.
It's one thing to criticize clearly malicious or incompetent actions Mozilla makes, the majority of the complaints are when Firefox release a new version and people on HN bring up their personal pet peeves every single time instead of anything positive about said release or news.
I'm very sick in general of "the criticism will continue until moral improve" attitude that has become more and more common.
And we are very sick of the enshittification will continue no matter what attitude from Mozilla. Sorry not sorry that you feel bad about people keep telling Mozilla off for the things where they keep being bad actors. Criticism will continue until there is no more reason for it. This frog will not be boiled.
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.
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)...
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.
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 know Chrome's address bar also does searches, but somehow I find it much worse at actually finding what I want. It's perhaps unfair since I use Firefox much more, but I visit some pages regularly in Chrome and I'm 90% sure suddenly it doesn't find these - or they are just ranked way off.
Firefox also find open tabs (so you can jump to the open tab instead of opening a new tab) and allow you to explicitly search for bookmarks, open-tabs etc. The open tab thing is also nicely integrated with Firefox sync (not sure if Chrome has something similar)
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.
Those tabs telling you to restart are because the OS upgraded Firefox in the background and Firefox detected that its files changed under it. It tells you to restart so you don't get buggy broken behavior if anything was incompatible between the two versions. Firefox's built-in update system waits for a natural browser restart so it doesn't do that.
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.
Your English seemed perfectly clear to me, for what it's worth. We just have a tendency to read things in a negative tone for some reason - one of those human bugs :).
I don't think this is helpful if somebody is trying to learn English subtleties. Responding to a person's thought with "You don't understand", and that's it, implies hostility/rudeness.
People tend to read certain things with a negative tone because people tend to write certain things with a negative tone. That kind of pattern recognition is fundamental to language, not a regrettable quirk. Otherwise "You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about" would be equivalent to "I think you might have misunderstood".
I had to double check to make sure I responded to the right person after seeing this pop up in my replies summary :D. One way to perk up during morning coffee!
I'm sorry you feel "you didn't understand" has a similar range of interpretation as something like "you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about". I'm not sure I can help with that, I can only say this is not the interpretation of every native English speaker. If anything, the split in views should hopefully help convey English often cares about context and the audience over a singular meaning for a set of words (though I don't think that's particularly unique to English).
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 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.
I think it would had been better for Andreas Kling to simply stay “our style guidelines use the masculine form when describing an unspecified person, even though the person may be masculine, feminine, or non-binary”. But I also understand his frustration: Someone who prefers using an indefinite male is not someone who, as per the now-dead slanderous parent post, “a white replacement theory type”.
Nor is someone who prefers the indefinite masculine grammatical form someone who, as per another dead post, “is completely blinded by his own privileges as a cisgender white guy”.
This kind of hyperbolic overreaction is something Kasparov, someone whose Chess playing and politics I greatly respect, recently described as “Woke 1”:
> People know that ICE is bad, that law enforcement has a troubled history in this country.
I’m sorry but is he joking? Does he have any idea how much the Republicans/MAGA love ICE? Look at the funding it is getting, look at all the red meat being flung around about immigration. This started well before 2020. Immigration is the burning issue for the GOP. It’s been a cornerstone of Trump’s reign.
And come on, you think the average American is particularly aware of the systemic abuse that law-enforcement uphold here? That is a clearly divisive opinion that falls along political lines.
I have no interest in reading past that. His understanding of the context for these debates is completely inaccurate and warped. He is hand waving away real problems and somehow pretending people are acknowledging them when the entire point is a massive percentage of the country thinks those aren’t actual issues and thus don’t need to be addressed.
These are the same kind of talking points we see when someone goes “we all know Trump is not a great guy.” Unfortunately, no, a huge part of the country not only thinks he isn’t a bad guy, but thinks he is a role model. Someone to aspire to. So that cannot be an assumption we make when discussing Trump.
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.
I share your concern about the effects of white supremacy, but in this case it looks like there is no lesser or greater "evil'. Just a guy who expresses his opinions without delicacy.
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.
Once people start saying things like “his own privileges as a cisgender white guy”, that’s a red flag in my book—someone who writes like that, in my experience, doesn’t have real empathy for others, and uses “privilege” as an excuse to not have empathy or caring towards someone because of their gender or the color of their skin.
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.
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.
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.
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 wonder how true this is now. I believe the functionality in MV3 has increased since it was released.
There's still filters that can't be supported, but it seems like most are.
From "ublock-filters" only 1 filter was unsupported and 90 had unsupported domains dropped out of 10436. From "easylist" 18 out of 56109 filters are unsupported, no unsupported domains.
I'm sticking with uBlock-Origin, but not sure how much of a difference it makes these days.
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.
Yes, you're incorrect. The mentioned Vivaldi has one (and ublock still works). Brave has one. And even with ublock light you get high enough quality that other bad design decisions of Firefox kill the selling point of a better ad blocker
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.
"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.
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?
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.
They crypto payments for ads mechanism isn't enabled by default. Charging money directly is a way to avoid all of this so should be supported by people seeking "ethical" ways to fund development. What is lower quality about Brave's experience? Their built in ad blocker is great, certainly not low quality.
Google pays Mozilla something like $400 million a year. So what browser do you use that you claim is ethical, and what exactly is the ethical method to fund development which you haven't actually defined? Origin, like Kagi, seems the best way to do it imo.
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.
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).
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.
Web3 was used simply as a way to get money for development that gave some control to users about which ads they would see and isn't enabled by default. Origin avoids all of this and charges the user directly for the product, like Kagi seems like great motivation in my mind what issues do you have with it?
Who do you trust to fight the good fight against Google? Mozilla, who get $400 million per year from Google? Makes no sense. Brave has a great built in ad blocker that is configurable with lists and works great. What's the problem?
Oh I don't care about that, I want a well functioning search engine that doesn't have ads and Kagi is that and it works well. You can pay for it with Bitcoin which is nice. Which search engine do you use instead?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Got curious, so I did a very unscientific experiment. Playing 3 1080 music videos in FF pulls about 60W here. In Chrome, about 50W. No videos playing is about 30W.
If it's uBlock or 3.33W, I know which I'm choosing.
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
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.
> 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 have been a few attempts at this already and I have something like this myself for websites I design. Ultimately they fail to gain widespread traction since everyone has very different ideas on what of the various Web standards should be included at each version level. Someone else’s standard will likely not include that one feature you cannot go without so you simply do not follow it.
There’s a reason why this culture doesn’t exist: Internet Explorer 6
As recently as 2012, web developers had to make sure their websites ran on IE6, a browser from 2001, and were very frustrated that had to support this 11-year-old browser instead of being able to implement new features available with Chrome/Firefox/Opera and even newer versions of Internet Explorer.
There was a lot of resentment caused by this situation, resulting in web developers just not wanting to hold back their website so that it will render correctly in some random ancient browser.
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
> 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.
That's true, but you can dive into specific categories to get a more accurate picture and also see which sets of tests are only implemented by Chrome.
FYI I was able to vibe code "enough JavaScript to run the css part of WPT" in about a week. Might not work so well if you don't have a DOM or incremental rendering though, but could be worth looking into.
thanks, i was already looking at this. Most of my skipped tests are reftests with script tag inside, and big part of that script just builds the dom. Thats doable without a real js runtime.
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 think it's the specific pages - some Javascript is much more memory hungry that others.
A few hundred HN or Wikipedia tabs work absolutely fine, I've tested. But there are much heavier sites, and only a few of those can cause the machine to start swapping until OOM, especially when left to work in the background.
(And unlike Chrome, Firefox does not seem to throttle/unload background tabs automatically... or if it does, it does it much less aggressively)
Yeah, that's it probably, I also notice that when I have certain pages open in tabs on the background, my Framework laptop fans start spinning faster, probably because of JS running on those sites. I don't know whether that wouldn't happen with Chrome, but yeah, if that's the case, then Chrome would have to reload / restore those pages and on Firefox they're still in memory. I rather just close those resource heavy pages, fortunately they're usally not the kinds of pages I need to use too often.
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
My hot take: there are two kinds of bookmarks. 1. shortcuts to get to common sites and 2. stuff i need to get back to. And it's a UX mistake to keep #2 separate from open tabs; they are the same thing.
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.
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 also discovered the joy of shift-selecting a big range of tabs and pressing ^W only once. It also feels pretty good, but in a slightly different way...
>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 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.
Yeah similar. When I leave firefox running on the macbook, after a couple of days I get an out of memory, 32GB used type error (8GB macbook). Maybe it's the sites I have open keep requesting stuff? Not sure.
> 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.
This is a very good example what I meant when I said "it's designed for a different person"!
For me, it's pretty clear that a much better idea is not to fix the broken concept, but do what the Chrome does, and show the button on every single page. Then users won't have to report the pages where button is missing, and
Firefox devs won't have to keep updating that functionality all the time as the new types of pages appear.
Yes, this means that sometimes reader mode might miss some relevant text, but that's OK, reader mode does this occasionally already. And Firefox is supposed to be for power users, right?
Also: Substack posts don't seem to show the reader symbol immediately, often only after switching tabs or a page refresh, e.g. posts linked here: https://dynomight.substack.com/
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.
Passing tests and has abysmal performance on basic web features. Not to mention how many security issues are present. Its unserious to suggest it as an alternative at this stage. It make people think they dont have to support firefox because there is alternatives just around the corner.
the acid test is surfing the web. it doesn't matter how many tests it passes if users can't get to the sites they want and use them the way they want because their browser doesn't support some feature properly or because gets rejected by the sites for not being Chrome/Safari/Firefox.
if sites break despite passing all tests then the tests would be incomplete.
as for detecting that the browser is not chrome/safari/firefox, the days where you could trust the user agent value to reliably identify a browser are long gone. ladybird will just have a value that will make it pass any checks.
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.
ladybird is way to early in development to sell itself to anyone except developers who might want to contribute to it. they need to get it working first before they can think about interesting features that might make it attractive. it's not the time for that yet
I treat firefox the same way I treat politics. If I am around people I know understand the importance of firefox and are commited to using it then we can talk about its problems. If I am around anyone else I wont say a bad word about firefox. Why would I say a negative thing about firefox to a google chrome user, any point they make is instantly undermined by their usage of google chrome. To sit there and talk badly about firefox just reinforces their resolve in choosing google chrome.
Plus I genuinely like firefox its a great browser and I dont feel bad telling people that its good.
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".
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.
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.
It's that Firefox occasionally breaks websites because most devs only test and target for Chrome. And that it is now more CPU and RAM-hungry than Chrome.
Also that it is controlled by Mozilla, an org ALLEGEDLY more interested in fringe politics than tech.
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 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.
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.
Perhaps, but is there any modern browser name or brand that inspires the kind of fierce loyalty Firefox did 20 years ago?
It was the alternative to IE6, the first rays of dawn bringing hope to to a desolate, war-torn funereal valley of culpable corporate complacence.
Hatred for IE6 drove people to Firefox more than anything else - IE was horrible. Firefox users crowdfunded a two-page ad in the New York Times, mostly to get people to move off of IE6.
I think software loyalty is stuck at an all time low. Even the OS wars are over. People are stuck with subscription models. Almost everything has a cloud-based or SaaS service that works on everything. Nobody cares enough to fight about what browser they are using unless it is to fiddle around with adblockers.
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.
One feature Firefox is really lacking is shortcuts on Android. I use Firefox on all my devices except my Android tablet. When I have a physical keyboard paird with my Android tablet and want to use keyboard shortcuts to open new tabs, switch tabs, etc. on Firefox for Android -- well, the shortcuts just don't exist. This is the only reason I use Brave instead of Firefox on my tablet. Hella annoying because my bookmarks and browsing history are not synced on the tablet, but I chose that over always having to touch the screen just to open a new browser tab.
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
Technically rc files tend to be a list of commands (usually to set config options) that are executed on startup, not actually configuration files per se.
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.
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 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.
> 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
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.
> but need to independently implement updates going forward.
That's not needed either? But since you've provided no rationale, it's hard to point out where the mistake lies.
What's wrong with using known code updates as long as you remove the anti-user parts?
Because you have no control over the future of the project. If Firefox or Chrome starts going down a route where they deprecate features you need you probably won't have the expertise to keep them going.
Anyway modern browsers are too hard to build profitably I guess without anti-consumer weirdness. Might have to switch to a cli RSS reader...
Line Mode Browser has some features that have not been found anywhere else. (In some cases, old version of Firefox can be hacked to support a few of them, such as that URLs entered by the user are treated as relative to the current document; Lynx doesn't do that. But, there are also such things as the ability to pipe the output to another program, directly invoking HTTP methods, display a numbered list of links in the current document (also should be easy to do in most web browsers by adding an extension), direct cache management, etc.) I would rather avoid many of the features that Firefox and Chrome have, including CSS, JavaScripts (although JavaScript codes entered by the end user can be useful for the purpose of querying JSON data returned by the server, because such a situation is common enough to be worth), favicons, HSTS, etc, but include some features such as TLS 1.3. Some features that would be useful, I don't see anywhere, such as displaying a table of contents menu based on the <h1> etc in the HTML, commands to sort tables, saving form data to the local disk and later recalling it, calling external programs to edit text, etc. However, they just put too much stuff and make it more complicated than it should be, and many of the actual useful features are omitted. I don't want inline pictures, videos, etc either. However, some of the web developer tools can be useful, because e.g. you can display a list of the network requests.
The problem is not any particular "modern" web browser
It is the so-called "modern" web browser itself
For certain users who care about certain things, the concept is fatally flawed
The problem of the so-called "modern" web browser concept is that every computing task ends up "inside the browser" and thus outside the user's control
"Ad blocking" is no exception
Many so-called "modern" browsers now contain their own "ad blockers"
These "ad blockers" are not under the user's control^1. By putting them "inside the browser" the browser vendor has the final control, not the user
These browser vendors are generally seeking to profit from advertising or marketing services
For any user that seeks to avoid internet marketing and advertising, this presents a problem: the user's and the vendor's interests conflict
This is why I could never take Javascript-based "ad blockers" that work "inside the browser" seriously as a long-term solution
I use them, in conjunction with other methods, but I am prepared for them to stop working at any time.^2 I have always relied on programs that are "outside the browser", not under the browser vendor's control
1. In theory, if the browser is "open source", large numbers of users should be able to modify the source code to stop the browser from automatically requesting unwanted ads, tracking and telemetry. In practice, for a variety of reasons, this does not happen. The browser vendors, including Mozilla, make no effort to remove those reasons
2. This includes UBO in Firefox. The question is not if but when
> Meanwhile, the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox every time the subject arises. It makes me wonder if it’s a bot campaign by Google — except, why would they bother?
Not bots. Am here. Not some google bot. People putting Firefox with chrome, Vivaldi and whatever Safari users in one bag is absolutely stupid.
Firefox users and community have invested heavily into Firefox unlike other browser users and the people who move from firefox for flimsy reasons like X. I will use firefox until it's available. But I don't want firefox to go on this road that they are on right now.
We've done install fests and what not as communities to get Firefox installed on computers. I've stuck through firefox even when they ditched development until quantum release. It literally has effected work cos Google meet didn't use to work reliably. So if u think I will shutup about mozilla making intentional stupid decisions... Sorry not going to.
First thing they should do is stop virtue signaling in their marketing stuff. Stick to technicals if they don't want to give a damn about community. That won't stop me. But I'll back off a lil.
Firefox is a product of community collaboration which has also stopped recently. People who don't know that part of Firefox development... Community leaders era and stuff might think we are overreacting. We are toning it down actually since we don't want people to go to chrome.
Their vision and the way it was built is why Firefox was loved even when it was technically bad. They are technically greater than or on par with chrome now. But they have lost the soul which is why there is criticism.
I left Firefox for the first time since... well, I _think_ I used it before it was Firefox. This self-imposed exile only lasted a couple months.
I left looking for low-friction answers to my need to organize tabs and content. I didn't love giving up control to some central organization to process my data, but I had promised myself I'd write one or two extensions to answer my needs "next week" for years.
After doing some research, most of what I wanted already exists. Sidebery, Tab Wrangler and the new Agents window (with some styling to eliminate the default tab list), together with my other old friends like uBlock Origin, Auto Tab Discard (suspend) and a number of container-related extensions, deliver the same functionality I found elsewhere, without taking control from me.
Plus, this is just me, but chromium-based browsers manage to get my m3 pro macbook with 36GB RAM hot pretty consistently with normal use. I noticed the moment I left Firefox. And I noticed the problem gone as soon as I went back to Firefox.
I have often criticized Mozilla, because I care that Firefox remains the best browser, not just an alternative worth keeping.
The frustrating part is that we all know what the problem is (management) but we're powerless to do anything about it since they're holding all the cards. This frustration leads to hate which leads to many people turning away from Firefox.
I'm still sticking with Firefox, at least until Ladybird comes toe-to-toe in terms of features and functionality.
And then there are the web developers who make their site functional only on Chrome. They deserve a special place in Hell.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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
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.
Late to the party but it does not matter what users or Mozilla does. The problem is all the Big Corps and Gov sites now refuse to work with anything but a chromium browser. We can debate Firefox features and Mozilla missteps until the cows come home and it won't make a difference. The clock is ticking.
To save FF, Mozilla needs to enter the DC swamp, hire PR and lobbists to buy politicians to pass a law to force Gov.gov and (if possible) Big Corp sites to support Firefox. Maybe they can ally with EFF or others who understand Google's (don't be evil, lol) deepstate roots.
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.
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.
> My personal rule: anyone who uses any chromuim based browser is a tech illiterate
That's funny, that's exactly how I feel about people who haven't jumped ship from firefox yet.
> 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.
I have 1940 tabs open in my chromium-based browser right now. This machine has 16GB RAM. It's running just fine, thanks. It's been this way for weeks. I opened a new tab to reply to this.
> Plus the proper ad blocking and control over privacy, making it the last bastion of browsers right now.
All that stuff is just built into brave. Which is chromium-based.
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.
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.
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 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.
Honest question: I recently bought a mac for the first time. A long-time Firefox user I quickly realized it is draining my battery like crazy. What do people do? My whole browsing ecosystem is on Firefox Sync and I would like to keep supporting it, but I am not willing to sacrifice battery life for that
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.
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.
Say what you want about Mozilla's propensity to shove useless features into Firefox, but I've been loving some of the recent addition to tabs management. Split-view tabs, vertical tabs, tab groups and tab pinning have made my work so much easier.
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.
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
The usual culprits are government, bank, or google websites. Youtube and Google docs occasionally break in amusing ways. Definitely Google's fault to a large extent, but it is what it is.
A friend recently got into making JS games, the FPS is always unplayable on Firefox. I'm not going to be snotty and ask someone doing this for fun to test stuff on multiple browsers.
SVG rendering occasionally slows down to a crawl. I used to open up bug reports ten or so years ago when I worked on something SVG related, but none of those bugs got looked at from what I can tell.
If I always have to have Chromium installed as a fallback, might as well use it.
Firefox is getting milked for profit by a few individuals. User data collection, personalized ads and such for profit, while the CEO's paycheck exploded in 15 years.
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.
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?
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.
I feel like we are nitpicking here. Would you say that Google actually cares about those 3%?
When you have 97% of the market, you own the market, right? It's actually problematic to own 100% because then it's strictly a monopoly. Whereas with 97% you can pretend it's not a monopoly.
Why do i care about google’s opinion on the 7% desktop users. I just care that I have firefox. I continue to say that having 7% on desktop is an incredible large userbase when you convert it to people and not a percentage. Ive only pushed back on the minimizing all these people to ‘a rounding error’.
> 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".
Not sure if you're trying to offend me or not. But it seems like you agree with me: people don't care. You just somehow wanted to call me a weirdo on the way.
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 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.
Firefox is shit because Mozilla is run by garbage people. I have used Firefox for 10 years; for many years I was on nightly to help testing.
Their ui was bad, they could not get ui locks up issue fixed for many years, and instead of focusing on core browser, they time and spend money on bullshit. Kick out technical people like Eich, pays useless Baker 6M while market where keeping crashing.
I'll still happily recurring donate money to Firefox, but not to Mozilla. Mozilla makes it impossible.
Firefox is a lost cause, overtaken by mentally ill sjws. That's the reason it can not compete with chrome even though firefox always had a soft spot in everyone's heart back in those times. They also failed to capture new generation.
Ladybird is the answer. A true diversity in the world of browsers; focused on making the best software instead of playing politics and paying 6M to useless CEO.
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.
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.
>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.
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".
For what it's worth, I use Firefox for 10+ years now for web development, and in my opinion their tooling is actually superior to Chrome. Small example: if I just want to test visual responsiveness of a page at different breakpoints, Firefox lets me close the bottom toolbar and just play around with the top window. In Chrome I need to keep the bottom toolbar open the whole time, cluttering my screen, because if I close it the whole devtools closes too.
Tree style tabs, can never go back to a browser without them; Firefox only place with them (via extension).
WebHD (WebHID?) - you can flash your devices from a browser. I've installed chromium for the approximately two times I've done it.
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'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.
> when it was the last time that I felt it to be slow
I only have an issue because I set a big disk cache (because data cap). 8gb is fine IIRC, but 24gb causes slowdowns on startups and new tabs. (Also much more of an issue on my older laptop than my newer desktop.)
Doesn't outweigh anything tho.
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?
Using Chromium-based browsers means you give Google, the surveillance company that works with ICE and the military, more power over the web to do stuff like push Manifest V2.
Everyone has their own ethical standards around this but I think Firefox is clearly seen as the browser to use if you care about the open web. A lot of people therefore feel the need to defend their preference for a Chromium-based browser.
IMO that obfuscates the fact that even non-Chrome Chromium based browsers still affords Google massive influence over the future of the web.
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.
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.
True, I hate edge so much. I have to use it in work.
But it just laugh at it because it's so incompetent and mediocre like everything from Microsoft.
Firefox on the other hand I use privately and I deeply care about it. That's what makes me pipe up more.
No one in their right mind would use Edge, unless the employer's IT forces them to - and in that case they've given up on the tools the employer gives them already and wouldn't care enough to hate.
This reflects my whining.
Obviously, I hate edge. I dont mention it because useless garbage is what I expect out of microsoft.
Nothing worse then silence quitting. Your disappointed users quit in silence because of their insatisfaction but they don't care enough or anymore enough to even telling you that they are quitting or why.
In that case you can be satisfied of yourself while your user base and promoters is plummeting.
It is a great thing that you still have a large user base that will still complain of issues they have so you can improve or ever on that if it is your wish.
And nothing as strong in the end that the fidelity of an user that was complaining about an issue and now feel that his voice was heard!
> 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!
[flagged]
Seriously, I’m with the person who says people hating on Firefox are often just trying to justify sticking with Chrome due to the inertia.
I’ve been exclusively using Firefox for many years. I don’t even have a Chromium browser installed! (I just nix-shell it if I need to test anything.)
I love the raft of new features that have been coming through recently! I heavily use tab groups, profiles, split view, and the baked in VPN.
The loud ones are always the complainers, which is a problem for adoption, which is exactly what TFA is getting at.
Are you seriously suggesting that developers isolating themselves into a yes-man bubble ever gets good results?
I'm sure you can think of alternatives.
They are probably nodding in agreement while management lives in its bubble.
I do not hate Firefox but I hate it when Mozilla uses my donation money in not Firefox.
I mean, there are plenty of reasonable takes (some of which are criticism) too. Generally, working at Mozilla doesn't make it much more torturous than before, when I was merely an unpaid open web advocate :)
(Reading every comment is a bit much though.)
> abuse and ignorance
Toxic positivity is what's abusive and ignorant.
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.
> Chrome != Chromium engine
This exactly what I disagree with and I think I supported my argument quite clearly. The more we say "Chrome is not Chromium" the more stuff like V2 will happen. At some point we need to admit that the dominance of Chromium does in fact give Google power over the web
Google controls Chromium to the extent they can impose changes like manifest v3 and while some forks like Brave will try to circumvent such changes, it will eventually become too costly or incompatible to maintain.
It is kind of the same daydream as the Windows 11 debloaters have that if they just keep doing that, everything will be okay. That is until Microsoft implements features they can no longer fully disable, like recall, or just exercise their control to revert any changes at will.
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
Maybe librewolf, but Waterfox is a drop-in replacement. Same extension “store”, gets updates quickly, install on every OS I’ve tried (which is usually windows unfortunately) is equally as smooth as Firefox, compatible profiles, etc, etc, etc. You literally just go to a different website to get the installer. It’s harder to install FF developer edition.
They both use Gecko under the hood and can install any Firefox Add-on. If you want something truly different, try a Goanna-based browser like Pale Moon or Basilisk
Tired: Firefox
Wired: Floorp, Midori, Mullvad Browser, SeaMonkey, Waterfox, Zen, GNU Icecat
Inspired: Basilisk, Pale Moon
Speaking of “I use arch btw”
>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.
By government approved, I meant only to access government websites/applications.
> I reject the idea that Firefox can transgress as much as they want as long as Chrome has gotten worse.
Well, then the good news is nobody is saying that.
There’s room for people to disagree on what constitutes a serious “transgression”, though.
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
Then let me pay for Firefox. I don't need a resold Mullvad (which incidentally took forever to come to my country) or an AI chatbot (which seemingly are the options Mozilla provides to give them money), and donations to Mozilla don't go to Firefox. It took them ~20 years to work out that was the solution for Thunderbird, they shouldn't spend another 20 years flailing about for Firefox.
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.
That's their choice, nobody forced them to implement that corporate structure and they can decide to deconstruct it any time.
Google pays Mozilla for default search engine selection in Firefox, no other product. If Mozilla then redirect that money to other non-Firefox ventures then maybe they should explain why.
They specifically implemented that structure to be eligible for search licensing revenue that they might not otherwise have gotten and that's been the lifeline that's kept them able to compete with Google.
The non Firefox ventures are things like lobbying and building a community of support for principles of the open web, which seem pretty defensible to me. It's not like the CEO of WeWork paying himself from his own company's money to turn his private property into a revenue stream. Which I know might disappoint people looking for things to accuse Mozilla of.
That's self-inflicted though; they could just thesaurize that money and live on the interests to fund Firefox forever.
That they decide to burn through it by paying 7 figures salaries for their C-suites, buying luxury offices at the heart of Paris and launching plethoras of feel-good initiatives left-and-right is their own choice.
They already do have an endowment fund and they do get annual revenue from it but it's something on the order of 10% of the cost of developing the browser.
Most of their money is spent on software development, they seem to pay at market rates and CEO spending is something like 1.5% of their overall budget and consistent with industry norms. I don't personally love it, but I also don't think it's a conspiracy or enough to legitimize theory that they're supposedly wasting money. If anything, mozilla stands alone as the most successful pure full stack browser company in the history of the tech industry precisely owing to their intelligent handling of revenue streams and long-term financial planning. Got to go back to the drawing board and find a new accusation.
This is a gross misunderstanding of the situation surrounding Mozilla revenue and Firefox development expenses.
And it probably costs something like 80% of that to build and maintain a browser and they probably spend less than Google.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money...
Look how they spend money, plenty of articles on it, and it makes me hesitate to donate
They need funds but they don't have to make money in the same way as a for profit corporation.
Linus manages.
Yes, uBlock Origin. How can that not be _the_ killer app for surviving with your sanity when (trying to) view the modern web?
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.
> 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.
I'll reinstall now for a fresh opinion vs Kiwi (my current least hated mobile browser; Chrome with Extensions minus tab groups or AI junk)
Prefaced: I respect Mozilla's mission. All of these criticisms ARE overly harsh. At the same time, app UI should be as invisible as possible to the user, and Mozilla's apps are... "loud"
My last installs of Firefox Klar and Developer a year or two ago had the APKs at over 200 MB, no ability to block sound per-site, confusing UI icons (e.g. I couldn't find the forward button after clicking back, abstract shapes for everything), reader mode that doesn't place you at the same place where you were on the original page, annoying gestures that can't be disabled (swiping tabs away UGGGHHHH), Collections which were really quite silly/not my thing, no toolbar customizability like in the desktop app, no WebHID, and data collection on by default.
Today, Firefox is under 100 MB. It has very much bought into Android's overrounded/inproperly-whitespaced/shadow-heavy/unintuitively-animated Material 3 Expressive. Like most Material Design apps, this Firefox is ugly in a way that offers zero usability benefit: Despite the excessive margins nearly everywhere the three dot menu and menu search icon are still too close to the screen edge. I would place extra emphasis on the unused 8 mm above and 6 mm below the URL text, which SHOULD be 2% rather than 9% of my screen real estate.
I have always felt that Mozilla could join Canonical in dumping the Nickelodeon color scheme. (Did the founders of all these plus FedEx go to Clemson or something??) At least respect my device theme (grey) rather than Grimace purple everywhere! It's particularly strange to me that they have 23 different icons to choose from as well as a "Device Theme" setting but no method of deamethysting all the UI elements.
Tab overview and tabs.
Holding a tab selects its checkbox, holding it longer does "something" but it's not clear what, I guess "show full URL" and then eventually "Share"?
The "swipe tab away" gesture is still there.
Closing multiple tabs creates a sequence of "Closed tab (Undo)" toasts, so you aren't actually sure which toast to click that will undo a specific closure. (Coupled with the swipe detail, it becomes annoying accidentally swiping a tab away while deliberately closing others.)
Per-tab disabling of Sound is still missing; this is not the same as Autoplay!
There are prominent features that I'd never use: private mode icon, "grab tabs from any device", "search your tabs", the giant "FIREFOX IS ON GUARD" reminder, a home screen.
New Tab is across the entire screen from the tab overview button, so you either need to enable the New Tab shortcut (which encroaches on URL space) or just live with "tap top-right, tap bottom-right" for every new tab you'll create in your lifetime which is DEFINITELY not nice for one-handed navigation. There was enough space in the tab overview top bar for a "New Tab" button, but then they'd have to ditch the default Jetpack Compose floating action button.
Everything else.
The shortcut to get to Settings is in a different place on each View.
I couldn't find Reader Mode at first. It only shows up on supported pages and is not as customizable as desktop Firefox. Good enough.
Collections still seem dumb as hell. Maybe I need to use them to appreciate them.
I still have to change just about every default setting to match my personal preferences.
WebHID will never be added. There are a lot of passionate opinions on HID/USB in the browser with solid moral stances against its adoption. I get this and generally agree. However. If I want to reprogram a Gen 1 Shure MVX2U with a cellphone---and I often do---my options are writing my own APK or some very quick/dirty Javascript that I can edit/host anywhere. Mozilla takes away the convenient option and leaves only the labor intensive Google-approved technique.
Oh, and I guess there's no about:config unless you re-enable it at chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml which is not-at-all memorable. :( about:config doesn't matter much anyway, since I can't find any flag that will improve any one complaint I've listed.
I liken Firefox to mediocre toilet paper. It gets its job done and is certainly better than nothing but can get irritating to use day after day.
Thank you for taking the time to write all this out. I've never noticed these issues. I also agree, that these are fair criticisms that Mozilla should address.
Also, to be fair to you, I rarely use my phone as a dedicated browsing device so I am probably least representative of someone who relies on their phone as a primary browsing tool.
Not implying that you do btw, I just thought I would color my experience with Firefox. I live largely on Desktop and see my phone as a secondary experience so I excuse a lot of this because I get a Native Add-on experience that isn't addressed by Android's Chrome.
No worries. I'm glad I went down the mobile browser rabbit hole again. I tried half a dozen browser this afternoon and then found Omni Browser (another Gecko-based one) and might stick with it. If that still disappoints, I'm cautiously optimistic for Ladybird.
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.
I just tried it out with this page, and it gets the HN icon for me. I am on Nightly and on Linux, so possibly this is an actual bug you're running into, but no fix in sight might be too pessimistic. But definitely worth reporting otherewise.
Wonderful to hear this is fixed in Nightly on Linux; thanks for the heads up. I reported this several months ago.
Keep in mind that just because it works for me, that doesn't mean that you're not running into a bug that I'm not, so I can't make any promises about it actually being fixed for you :)
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.
> 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.
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
Pocket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(service) for those who aren't aware of it) is an excellent example:
1. Pocket was an external company, which Mozilla bought (and claimed they would open source), which already had a web extension. There was no need for the pre-acquisition integration, or to buy it later on.
2. After buying it, Mozilla did nothing with it, including failing to open source it, and seemingly failed to get enough revenue from that they shut it down last year.
This saga provided no benefit to Firefox users who did not use pocket, and at best for pocket users left them with a dying solution that they would need to migrate from (given the failure to open source it). It's not clear how much Mozilla paid for Pocket, but those funds could have been spent on something more valuable.
Sync and container tabs aren't on the list of features I recall seeing people complain about.
Everyone complains about something is the point.
> 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.
> 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
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 there because it remains unaddressed. You may be used to people just folding then corporations move forward with enshittification but that's not going to happen with all enthusiasts, which is the only kind of user FF has left.
I don’t disagree but the dog piles are predictable, repetitive, and unproductive.
> 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
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.
I'm pretty sure firefox itself is a direct contradiction to this, but ok...
[dead]
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.
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.
All the existing "forks" that continue past adding/removing that one feature are regularly merging firefox back. That is they are not a fork there are a derivative that never forked. All the forks that remain a fork that I've seen die within a few months.
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."
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.
Even given an unlimited token budget for AI and some form of paycheck to do this I don't think I could maintain a fork of firefox along. There is far too many things that need to be done for one person to pull it off.
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.
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.
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
I expect we'll se at least five more language switches before that happens.
Ever screenshot I've seen of ladybird makes me not want to use it. It's too "modern". I need functional software where the text and background aren't the same color.
"When Ladybird comes out" is starting to sound like "when Star Citizen is released"
>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.
> Power users is the only thing Firefox doesn't lack.
Which is exactly why the first thing Mozilla needs to to is to stop driving them away. They are never going to win the popularity contest for the average user without the word of mouth from enthusiasts.
> 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.
And killed its add-on ecosystem. If the choice is between (as it was then) a slower browser missing the add-ons you were used to, and a faster browser missing the add-ons you were used to, then you're going to need some other motivation to stick with (as I did, to be clear) the slower browser.
Screw average user.
> 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.
Nothing Firefox has done is remotely comparable to chrome.
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.
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.
They could basically re-form Firefox as a non-profit where they provide funding, but control the non-profit org enough to sway it from wasting funds, not to mention Mozilla's war chest is insane, its no wonder they have bought up some startups before.
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.
Yes Mozilla keeps trying to make it a glossy mainstream product, a userbase which they've long and irrevocably lost.
And I hate them trying to push the ethical ads angle. For my there is zero ethics in advertising anymore.
You'd want this browser for free, wouldn't you? Have you donated to Mozilla Foundation? So you're bitching because the free product that you don't support finds ways to sustain economically the hordes of developers that are trying to improve it for you.
And no, Chrome never "bought an ad-tech company, collected data on users, and used chrome to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force users to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings". NEVER IN THE WORLD. That's why you use it.
Donating to the Mozilla Foundation does NOT pay for Firefox development.
Mozilla Corporation does not get to do whatever they want to get funds for something that should be a project run for the public benefit.
Google/Chrome being worse is irrelevant to criticism of Mozilla/Firefox.
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.
I’m sorry, but this is not my experience at all. The process of installing and using Firefox for a non-technical user is no different from Chrome: both give you immediate access to search, both offer to sign you in for cross-computer sync, and… that’s pretty much it.
I have gotten most of my family and friends to switch to Firefox, and I have never gotten a Firefox-specific complaint or question that I can remember.
> The process of installing and using Firefox for a non-technical user is no different from Chrome
Most non-technical users are exclusively using android devices and chrome is pre-installed. Today you can still install firefox for others and it will probably work fine for them, but it will be exploiting them too. It will collect their personal data and use it to push personalized ads. It will use updates to force anti-features onto them.
Firefox has gone from something I could recommend unreservedly to something I can only suggest while cautioning about it's increasingly user-hostile practices and providing a list of setting changes that should be made and monitored for silent changes after every update.
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> 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.
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.
> 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.
Mozilla Corporation already has funds totaling about $1 billion today. They're simply choosing not to develop Firefox actively.
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.
> They're developing 40 million lines of code
Isn't half a billion dollars per year enough to maintain that? Over $10 per LoC annually?
>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.
To get pedantic about it, they aren't developing that much code, they are maintaining that much code.
Not that I think LOC is the best metric but here are the figures for 2 of the project I brought up. Linux kernel is ~40M LOC FreeBSD kernel 7.8~9M LOC
I would argue that the OS's that run the internet are much more cutthroat than a browser, not just in terms of attack risk but in business terms as well.
>Microsoft aggressively tried to destroy Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s. This era included the internal "Halloween Documents" mapping out strategies to fight open source, former CEO Steve Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer," and Microsoft covertly funding SCO Group's proxy lawsuits against Linux users.
The larger your codebase is, the greater the attack surface. One of the arguments about the way that Firefox is progressing is that they keep adding more stuff into the codebase. If it's getting too complex, maybe they shouldn't be adding those features...
>Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users.
Mozilla received 16.9 million from contributions in 2024.
Wikipedia took in ~170 million in the same time period.
Not sure where you got that Mozilla was bringing in more than Wikipedia through donations?
In going through the Mozilla Financials, I don't see where they have a huge endowment set aside, 73% of their revenue is royalties. I did however see that they spent 31 million to buy Acronym(an ad company) and 21 million to buy Fakespot. So that's neat.
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
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.
Except Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.
I really want you to stop and think about what you're saying for a second. I just made the point that the strongest online fundraising operation in the world, Wikipedia, gets less than half of what it takes to fund Firefox. Your counterpoint to that is to point to Thunderbird, which raises significantly less money than Wikipedia, which is already not enough to fun Firefox, in order to prove that it's plausible that the full operations of Firefox could be funded.
This would be the point where Logan Roy says you're not serious people.
Wikipedia gets way more than they actually need to run the site, and this is even with tons of self-inflicted drama of their own.
No, that is not what I said, and you repeatedly misreading what people write is noticeable.
I would have them fully shed the silicon valley tech corporation mindset and instead act like a charity working for the benefit of the public, as is appropriate for a non-profit foundation. Funding should mean seeking donations and government grants, not trying to fleece users, sell their privacy/attention and/or resell mediocre services - which are not serving the mission of building the best browser possible.
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?
How does Doctors Without Borders generate revenue?? How does the EFF??? How is the FSF able to fund GCC development?????
All of those are non profit organizations that receive donations. It seems Firefox is owned by Mozilla Corporation which is the for profit branch of the Mozilla Foundation. So again, how do they fund Firefox as a for profit company?
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.
If other users are happy with Windows then theirs not the culture I want Linux to ever adopt.
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.
It's one thing to criticize clearly malicious or incompetent actions Mozilla makes, the majority of the complaints are when Firefox release a new version and people on HN bring up their personal pet peeves every single time instead of anything positive about said release or news.
I'm very sick in general of "the criticism will continue until moral improve" attitude that has become more and more common.
And we are very sick of the enshittification will continue no matter what attitude from Mozilla. Sorry not sorry that you feel bad about people keep telling Mozilla off for the things where they keep being bad actors. Criticism will continue until there is no more reason for it. This frog will not be boiled.
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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.
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)...
Worth knowing: you can also use @tabs, @history, @bookmarks, etc. now. Way easier to remember :)
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.
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 know Chrome's address bar also does searches, but somehow I find it much worse at actually finding what I want. It's perhaps unfair since I use Firefox much more, but I visit some pages regularly in Chrome and I'm 90% sure suddenly it doesn't find these - or they are just ranked way off.
Firefox also find open tabs (so you can jump to the open tab instead of opening a new tab) and allow you to explicitly search for bookmarks, open-tabs etc. The open tab thing is also nicely integrated with Firefox sync (not sure if Chrome has something similar)
Firefox doesn't report every keystroke put into the Awesome bar back to Mozilla, AFAIK.
It does (to the search engine you use) unless you turn off "Show search suggestions in address bar results".
I don't think you can turn that off in Chrome
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 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.
Those tabs telling you to restart are because the OS upgraded Firefox in the background and Firefox detected that its files changed under it. It tells you to restart so you don't get buggy broken behavior if anything was incompatible between the two versions. Firefox's built-in update system waits for a natural browser restart so it doesn't do that.
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.
Your English seemed perfectly clear to me, for what it's worth. We just have a tendency to read things in a negative tone for some reason - one of those human bugs :).
I don't think this is helpful if somebody is trying to learn English subtleties. Responding to a person's thought with "You don't understand", and that's it, implies hostility/rudeness.
People tend to read certain things with a negative tone because people tend to write certain things with a negative tone. That kind of pattern recognition is fundamental to language, not a regrettable quirk. Otherwise "You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about" would be equivalent to "I think you might have misunderstood".
I had to double check to make sure I responded to the right person after seeing this pop up in my replies summary :D. One way to perk up during morning coffee!
I'm sorry you feel "you didn't understand" has a similar range of interpretation as something like "you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about". I'm not sure I can help with that, I can only say this is not the interpretation of every native English speaker. If anything, the split in views should hopefully help convey English often cares about context and the audience over a singular meaning for a set of words (though I don't think that's particularly unique to English).
You're wrong!
[I'm sure you won't have any desire for me to explain my position and will regard this interaction positively.]
Right, I see what you mean. It's not entirely Microsoft's fault - I'm just taking a shot at them.
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.
Ladybird is steadily progressing: https://ladybird.org/
I will believe it when I see it. Still no public release.
the source is public, you can just compile it
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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.
I think it would had been better for Andreas Kling to simply stay “our style guidelines use the masculine form when describing an unspecified person, even though the person may be masculine, feminine, or non-binary”. But I also understand his frustration: Someone who prefers using an indefinite male is not someone who, as per the now-dead slanderous parent post, “a white replacement theory type”.
Nor is someone who prefers the indefinite masculine grammatical form someone who, as per another dead post, “is completely blinded by his own privileges as a cisgender white guy”.
This kind of hyperbolic overreaction is something Kasparov, someone whose Chess playing and politics I greatly respect, recently described as “Woke 1”:
https://www.thenextmove.org/p/2020-accountability-is-mia - https://archive.ph/20260827172149/https://www.thenextmove.or...
> People know that ICE is bad, that law enforcement has a troubled history in this country.
I’m sorry but is he joking? Does he have any idea how much the Republicans/MAGA love ICE? Look at the funding it is getting, look at all the red meat being flung around about immigration. This started well before 2020. Immigration is the burning issue for the GOP. It’s been a cornerstone of Trump’s reign.
And come on, you think the average American is particularly aware of the systemic abuse that law-enforcement uphold here? That is a clearly divisive opinion that falls along political lines.
I have no interest in reading past that. His understanding of the context for these debates is completely inaccurate and warped. He is hand waving away real problems and somehow pretending people are acknowledging them when the entire point is a massive percentage of the country thinks those aren’t actual issues and thus don’t need to be addressed.
These are the same kind of talking points we see when someone goes “we all know Trump is not a great guy.” Unfortunately, no, a huge part of the country not only thinks he isn’t a bad guy, but thinks he is a role model. Someone to aspire to. So that cannot be an assumption we make when discussing Trump.
Kasparov has no fingers on the pulse here.
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.
Then you’d be a bad steward.
There is absolutely nothing constructive about removing "gendered language". He was absolutely right to shut that nonsense down.
You’re literally doing what I described. You’re not even attempting to understand the issue,
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.
I share your concern about the effects of white supremacy, but in this case it looks like there is no lesser or greater "evil'. Just a guy who expresses his opinions without delicacy.
Meritocracy looks good on paper but the real world implementation fails abysmally. - see Pete Hegseth
If it's all imperfect failures, I personally prefer the failure that doesn't result in raising up white supremacists.
Probably "is flawed" is closer to reality than "fails abysmally", in contrast to most modern implementations of DEI.
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.
Once people start saying things like “his own privileges as a cisgender white guy”, that’s a red flag in my book—someone who writes like that, in my experience, doesn’t have real empathy for others, and uses “privilege” as an excuse to not have empathy or caring towards someone because of their gender or the color of their skin.
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.
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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.
Microsoft didn't fail, they made a business decisions to reduce costs.
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!)
I like that they both have vertical tabs now.
firefox container tabs are great for multiple accounts with the same webpage
Brave is nowhere near as snappy as Chrome and Firefox with all its bloat.
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.
I’m happy with Brave’s ad blocker. That said, I use Firefox on my desktop machines. It’s a great browser.
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
Brave's adblocker is pretty good, but their means of syncing browsers has kept me away.
I wonder how true this is now. I believe the functionality in MV3 has increased since it was released. There's still filters that can't be supported, but it seems like most are.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/blob/main/chromium...
From "ublock-filters" only 1 filter was unsupported and 90 had unsupported domains dropped out of 10436. From "easylist" 18 out of 56109 filters are unsupported, no unsupported domains.
I'm sticking with uBlock-Origin, but not sure how much of a difference it makes these days.
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.
Yes, you're incorrect. The mentioned Vivaldi has one (and ublock still works). Brave has one. And even with ublock light you get high enough quality that other bad design decisions of Firefox kill the selling point of a better ad blocker
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?
For me I just enabled the built-in privacy feature and uBlock Origin. Haven't see any ads so far.
Only downside is I keep getting Google Recaptcha so I have to switch to DDG.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
They crypto payments for ads mechanism isn't enabled by default. Charging money directly is a way to avoid all of this so should be supported by people seeking "ethical" ways to fund development. What is lower quality about Brave's experience? Their built in ad blocker is great, certainly not low quality.
Google pays Mozilla something like $400 million a year. So what browser do you use that you claim is ethical, and what exactly is the ethical method to fund development which you haven't actually defined? Origin, like Kagi, seems the best way to do it imo.
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.
Right, so when exactly paying a LICENSE for SOFTWARE had become EXPLOITATIVE?
[dead]
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).
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.
Web3 was used simply as a way to get money for development that gave some control to users about which ads they would see and isn't enabled by default. Origin avoids all of this and charges the user directly for the product, like Kagi seems like great motivation in my mind what issues do you have with it?
Who do you trust to fight the good fight against Google? Mozilla, who get $400 million per year from Google? Makes no sense. Brave has a great built in ad blocker that is configurable with lists and works great. What's the problem?
i think kagi isn't open source, we should stay away from closed source software as much as possible.
Oh I don't care about that, I want a well functioning search engine that doesn't have ads and Kagi is that and it works well. You can pay for it with Bitcoin which is nice. Which search engine do you use instead?
Web3 slop? WTF?!
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?
This is arguably a sales pitch
How so?
NoScript works well enough just wholesale blocking js.
I've heard good things about Orion (WebKit)
It's still unusable on Linux, but I like where it's going.
Qutebrowser's ad blocking got much better than it used to be. It's not as good as ubo though.
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
Safari and 1Blocker works fine for me.
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.
I was going to say the same - I haven't noticed any deterioration switching to lite.
The user interface is a bit different which took getting used to but I think I now prefer the one in lite.
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.
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?
1. Laziness.
2. My employer requires Chrome or Edge to access all resources.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Got curious, so I did a very unscientific experiment. Playing 3 1080 music videos in FF pulls about 60W here. In Chrome, about 50W. No videos playing is about 30W.
If it's uBlock or 3.33W, I know which I'm choosing.
It's more about "abdicating to the Chromium monopoly" than "uBlock" in my case, in which case that 3.33W isn't so bad for me. YMMV I guess.
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
When you first install Firefox, there's an option to import all your data from Chrome.
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.
> 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 have been a few attempts at this already and I have something like this myself for websites I design. Ultimately they fail to gain widespread traction since everyone has very different ideas on what of the various Web standards should be included at each version level. Someone else’s standard will likely not include that one feature you cannot go without so you simply do not follow it.
There’s a reason why this culture doesn’t exist: Internet Explorer 6
As recently as 2012, web developers had to make sure their websites ran on IE6, a browser from 2001, and were very frustrated that had to support this 11-year-old browser instead of being able to implement new features available with Chrome/Firefox/Opera and even newer versions of Internet Explorer.
There was a lot of resentment caused by this situation, resulting in web developers just not wanting to hold back their website so that it will render correctly in some random ancient browser.
>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...
> 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.
That's true, but you can dive into specific categories to get a more accurate picture and also see which sets of tests are only implemented by Chrome.
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
FYI I was able to vibe code "enough JavaScript to run the css part of WPT" in about a week. Might not work so well if you don't have a DOM or incremental rendering though, but could be worth looking into.
thanks, i was already looking at this. Most of my skipped tests are reftests with script tag inside, and big part of that script just builds the dom. Thats doable without a real js runtime.
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.
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.
Firefox have forks like Zen which allow you to have the best of both worlds.
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?
Maybe, yeah. It did seem a bit slower around the 400 mark, though -- there are definitely limitations.
I think it's the specific pages - some Javascript is much more memory hungry that others.
A few hundred HN or Wikipedia tabs work absolutely fine, I've tested. But there are much heavier sites, and only a few of those can cause the machine to start swapping until OOM, especially when left to work in the background.
(And unlike Chrome, Firefox does not seem to throttle/unload background tabs automatically... or if it does, it does it much less aggressively)
Yeah, that's it probably, I also notice that when I have certain pages open in tabs on the background, my Framework laptop fans start spinning faster, probably because of JS running on those sites. I don't know whether that wouldn't happen with Chrome, but yeah, if that's the case, then Chrome would have to reload / restore those pages and on Firefox they're still in memory. I rather just close those resource heavy pages, fortunately they're usally not the kinds of pages I need to use too often.
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.
My hot take: there are two kinds of bookmarks. 1. shortcuts to get to common sites and 2. stuff i need to get back to. And it's a UX mistake to keep #2 separate from open tabs; they are the same thing.
Broadly I agree. Unfortunately the major browser devs haven't moved bookmark UX forward since the late 90s.
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.
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
Nothing makes me happier than holding down ^W at the end of the day.
I also discovered the joy of shift-selecting a big range of tabs and pressing ^W only once. It also feels pretty good, but in a slightly different way...
>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.
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.
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.
Yeah similar. When I leave firefox running on the macbook, after a couple of days I get an out of memory, 32GB used type error (8GB macbook). Maybe it's the sites I have open keep requesting stuff? Not sure.
> 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/
We should find a clear example of a webpage with an article-like content where the reader is unavailable and file a bug.
This is a very good example what I meant when I said "it's designed for a different person"!
For me, it's pretty clear that a much better idea is not to fix the broken concept, but do what the Chrome does, and show the button on every single page. Then users won't have to report the pages where button is missing, and Firefox devs won't have to keep updating that functionality all the time as the new types of pages appear.
Yes, this means that sometimes reader mode might miss some relevant text, but that's OK, reader mode does this occasionally already. And Firefox is supposed to be for power users, right?
Found one: Blog of Scott Aaronson. E.g. this post https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10046
Also: Substack posts don't seem to show the reader symbol immediately, often only after switching tabs or a page refresh, e.g. posts linked here: https://dynomight.substack.com/
Too much RAM use is rare for me, but when it happens I just open the tab unloading page and unload all the tabs. Usually it’s Jira’s fault.
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/
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.
Passing tests and has abysmal performance on basic web features. Not to mention how many security issues are present. Its unserious to suggest it as an alternative at this stage. It make people think they dont have to support firefox because there is alternatives just around the corner.
nobody is suggesting that it is a viable alternative, i am just arguing that it is not imaginary science fiction either
the acid test is surfing the web. it doesn't matter how many tests it passes if users can't get to the sites they want and use them the way they want because their browser doesn't support some feature properly or because gets rejected by the sites for not being Chrome/Safari/Firefox.
if sites break despite passing all tests then the tests would be incomplete.
as for detecting that the browser is not chrome/safari/firefox, the days where you could trust the user agent value to reliably identify a browser are long gone. ladybird will just have a value that will make it pass any checks.
How much does Firefox pass? 99.99%?
Right. I think the "last mile" compliance is where it gets most challenging.
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.
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.
ladybird is way to early in development to sell itself to anyone except developers who might want to contribute to it. they need to get it working first before they can think about interesting features that might make it attractive. it's not the time for that yet
I treat firefox the same way I treat politics. If I am around people I know understand the importance of firefox and are commited to using it then we can talk about its problems. If I am around anyone else I wont say a bad word about firefox. Why would I say a negative thing about firefox to a google chrome user, any point they make is instantly undermined by their usage of google chrome. To sit there and talk badly about firefox just reinforces their resolve in choosing google chrome.
Plus I genuinely like firefox its a great browser and I dont feel bad telling people that its good.
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?
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.
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.
It's that Firefox occasionally breaks websites because most devs only test and target for Chrome. And that it is now more CPU and RAM-hungry than Chrome.
Also that it is controlled by Mozilla, an org ALLEGEDLY more interested in fringe politics than tech.
I literally only have Firefox installed and cannot remember the last time I encountered a broke web page.
+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.
+1 for Zen
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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 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.
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.
Perhaps, but is there any modern browser name or brand that inspires the kind of fierce loyalty Firefox did 20 years ago?
It was the alternative to IE6, the first rays of dawn bringing hope to to a desolate, war-torn funereal valley of culpable corporate complacence.
Hatred for IE6 drove people to Firefox more than anything else - IE was horrible. Firefox users crowdfunded a two-page ad in the New York Times, mostly to get people to move off of IE6.
I think software loyalty is stuck at an all time low. Even the OS wars are over. People are stuck with subscription models. Almost everything has a cloud-based or SaaS service that works on everything. Nobody cares enough to fight about what browser they are using unless it is to fiddle around with adblockers.
Part of it is the psychology of owning vs renting. No one loves a rented house, but the landlord still wins.
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.
One feature Firefox is really lacking is shortcuts on Android. I use Firefox on all my devices except my Android tablet. When I have a physical keyboard paird with my Android tablet and want to use keyboard shortcuts to open new tabs, switch tabs, etc. on Firefox for Android -- well, the shortcuts just don't exist. This is the only reason I use Brave instead of Firefox on my tablet. Hella annoying because my bookmarks and browsing history are not synced on the tablet, but I chose that over always having to touch the screen just to open a new browser tab.
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
An rc file is a configuration file. Vim has .vimrc and bash has .bashrc
For example, some distros add an alias for rm to bashrc to make it ask for confirmation (the -i switch iirc).
I didnt know Firefox has one. I can't find any documentation on it either...
Technically rc files tend to be a list of commands (usually to set config options) that are executed on startup, not actually configuration files per se.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RUNCOM
</pedantry>
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.
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 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.
> 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.
> 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
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
> Not a fork,
I guess you know you're wrong because why else would you need this bizarre requirement?
Because otherwise you can git clone Firefox , change it's name and call it a new browser.
I guess if we really get technical we could say you can fork, but need to independently implement updates going forward.
> you can fork
Progress!
> but need to independently implement updates going forward.
That's not needed either? But since you've provided no rationale, it's hard to point out where the mistake lies. What's wrong with using known code updates as long as you remove the anti-user parts?
Because you have no control over the future of the project. If Firefox or Chrome starts going down a route where they deprecate features you need you probably won't have the expertise to keep them going.
Anyway modern browsers are too hard to build profitably I guess without anti-consumer weirdness. Might have to switch to a cli RSS reader...
> 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?
Line Mode Browser has some features that have not been found anywhere else. (In some cases, old version of Firefox can be hacked to support a few of them, such as that URLs entered by the user are treated as relative to the current document; Lynx doesn't do that. But, there are also such things as the ability to pipe the output to another program, directly invoking HTTP methods, display a numbered list of links in the current document (also should be easy to do in most web browsers by adding an extension), direct cache management, etc.) I would rather avoid many of the features that Firefox and Chrome have, including CSS, JavaScripts (although JavaScript codes entered by the end user can be useful for the purpose of querying JSON data returned by the server, because such a situation is common enough to be worth), favicons, HSTS, etc, but include some features such as TLS 1.3. Some features that would be useful, I don't see anywhere, such as displaying a table of contents menu based on the <h1> etc in the HTML, commands to sort tables, saving form data to the local disk and later recalling it, calling external programs to edit text, etc. However, they just put too much stuff and make it more complicated than it should be, and many of the actual useful features are omitted. I don't want inline pictures, videos, etc either. However, some of the web developer tools can be useful, because e.g. you can display a list of the network requests.
The problem is not any particular "modern" web browser
It is the so-called "modern" web browser itself
For certain users who care about certain things, the concept is fatally flawed
The problem of the so-called "modern" web browser concept is that every computing task ends up "inside the browser" and thus outside the user's control
"Ad blocking" is no exception
Many so-called "modern" browsers now contain their own "ad blockers"
These "ad blockers" are not under the user's control^1. By putting them "inside the browser" the browser vendor has the final control, not the user
These browser vendors are generally seeking to profit from advertising or marketing services
For any user that seeks to avoid internet marketing and advertising, this presents a problem: the user's and the vendor's interests conflict
This is why I could never take Javascript-based "ad blockers" that work "inside the browser" seriously as a long-term solution
I use them, in conjunction with other methods, but I am prepared for them to stop working at any time.^2 I have always relied on programs that are "outside the browser", not under the browser vendor's control
1. In theory, if the browser is "open source", large numbers of users should be able to modify the source code to stop the browser from automatically requesting unwanted ads, tracking and telemetry. In practice, for a variety of reasons, this does not happen. The browser vendors, including Mozilla, make no effort to remove those reasons
2. This includes UBO in Firefox. The question is not if but when
> Meanwhile, the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox every time the subject arises. It makes me wonder if it’s a bot campaign by Google — except, why would they bother?
Not bots. Am here. Not some google bot. People putting Firefox with chrome, Vivaldi and whatever Safari users in one bag is absolutely stupid.
Firefox users and community have invested heavily into Firefox unlike other browser users and the people who move from firefox for flimsy reasons like X. I will use firefox until it's available. But I don't want firefox to go on this road that they are on right now.
We've done install fests and what not as communities to get Firefox installed on computers. I've stuck through firefox even when they ditched development until quantum release. It literally has effected work cos Google meet didn't use to work reliably. So if u think I will shutup about mozilla making intentional stupid decisions... Sorry not going to.
First thing they should do is stop virtue signaling in their marketing stuff. Stick to technicals if they don't want to give a damn about community. That won't stop me. But I'll back off a lil.
Firefox is a product of community collaboration which has also stopped recently. People who don't know that part of Firefox development... Community leaders era and stuff might think we are overreacting. We are toning it down actually since we don't want people to go to chrome.
Their vision and the way it was built is why Firefox was loved even when it was technically bad. They are technically greater than or on par with chrome now. But they have lost the soul which is why there is criticism.
- Not a bot.
I left Firefox for the first time since... well, I _think_ I used it before it was Firefox. This self-imposed exile only lasted a couple months.
I left looking for low-friction answers to my need to organize tabs and content. I didn't love giving up control to some central organization to process my data, but I had promised myself I'd write one or two extensions to answer my needs "next week" for years.
After doing some research, most of what I wanted already exists. Sidebery, Tab Wrangler and the new Agents window (with some styling to eliminate the default tab list), together with my other old friends like uBlock Origin, Auto Tab Discard (suspend) and a number of container-related extensions, deliver the same functionality I found elsewhere, without taking control from me.
Plus, this is just me, but chromium-based browsers manage to get my m3 pro macbook with 36GB RAM hot pretty consistently with normal use. I noticed the moment I left Firefox. And I noticed the problem gone as soon as I went back to Firefox.
I have often criticized Mozilla, because I care that Firefox remains the best browser, not just an alternative worth keeping.
The frustrating part is that we all know what the problem is (management) but we're powerless to do anything about it since they're holding all the cards. This frustration leads to hate which leads to many people turning away from Firefox.
I'm still sticking with Firefox, at least until Ladybird comes toe-to-toe in terms of features and functionality.
And then there are the web developers who make their site functional only on Chrome. They deserve a special place in Hell.
Totally right.
On Earth, nothing is perfect, and nothing satisfies everyone.
Yeah, you can feel uncomfortable or disappointed, but Firefox is still the best option we have.
We should hold the line for Firefox.
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.
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’d recommend using a dedicated PDF reader in any case.
I use SumatraPDF for reading, but it doesn't do editing. The Firefox PDF editor works perfectly fine.
In latest pre-release it does editing too (annotations, filling out forms, extracting pages, deleting pages etc.)
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.
For Linux users, SELinux's sandbox command works well. (The manual isn't event two printed pages.)
I think flatpacks also have some sandboxing.
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/sandbox.8.html
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.
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.
I use Firefox because it's a user agent. Chrome is a vendor agent.
The problem is Mozilla, not Firefox.
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.
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 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
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.
>When Google implement an anti-user feature, Mozilla have to begrudgingly implement it
Why would ladybird be any different? The developer is not anti corporate and is closer ideologically to Google than Mozilla.
Late to the party but it does not matter what users or Mozilla does. The problem is all the Big Corps and Gov sites now refuse to work with anything but a chromium browser. We can debate Firefox features and Mozilla missteps until the cows come home and it won't make a difference. The clock is ticking.
To save FF, Mozilla needs to enter the DC swamp, hire PR and lobbists to buy politicians to pass a law to force Gov.gov and (if possible) Big Corp sites to support Firefox. Maybe they can ally with EFF or others who understand Google's (don't be evil, lol) deepstate roots.
Firefox has been my main browser for at least 10 years now.
Occasionally something doesn't work right and I use Chrome for that one thing.
It's nice to slightly reduce the totally overbearing presence of Google in my life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Honest question: I recently bought a mac for the first time. A long-time Firefox user I quickly realized it is draining my battery like crazy. What do people do? My whole browsing ecosystem is on Firefox Sync and I would like to keep supporting it, but I am not willing to sacrifice battery life for that
Take a look at about:performance page, maybe some background tab is too active?
Try some tab suspend extension like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
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.
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 love firefox. I did the swap 20 years ago to Chrome, and then swapped again 10 years ago. Firefox is the goat.
Say what you want about Mozilla's propensity to shove useless features into Firefox, but I've been loving some of the recent addition to tabs management. Split-view tabs, vertical tabs, tab groups and tab pinning have made my work so much easier.
Firefox is worse today than it was in ~2012.
That is all.
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.
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
The usual culprits are government, bank, or google websites. Youtube and Google docs occasionally break in amusing ways. Definitely Google's fault to a large extent, but it is what it is.
A friend recently got into making JS games, the FPS is always unplayable on Firefox. I'm not going to be snotty and ask someone doing this for fun to test stuff on multiple browsers.
SVG rendering occasionally slows down to a crawl. I used to open up bug reports ten or so years ago when I worked on something SVG related, but none of those bugs got looked at from what I can tell.
If I always have to have Chromium installed as a fallback, might as well use it.
99% of the time I just change my UA to Chrome and the incompatible site works fine.
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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?
> Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition.
What is the appropriate non-convoluted feeling towards the company that's been killing this hope for many years?
Firefox is getting milked for profit by a few individuals. User data collection, personalized ads and such for profit, while the CEO's paycheck exploded in 15 years.
I'm good with my Safari, but thanks.
(Though, I do use FF on Windows).
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.
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.
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.
Will Chrome go the way of Internet Explorer 6?
Microsoft killed off all competition. Then the only improvements were Microsoft proprietary.
Firefox is my first browser, and I've been using it for over 10 years. I like its cross-platform sync and addons.
The only real threat to firefox is ladybird, that's it, Brave and other chromium browsers are not it.
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?
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.
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.
> The userbase of Firefox existing is obvious signs of caring.
And that's pretty much a rounding error, getting smaller every year, right?
Or would you say that "most people don't care" does not apply when it's only 99% of people that don't care?
Well I would say that the firefox userbase is 3%+ across all platforms (over 7% on desktop) and that is larger than a rounding error.
I feel like we are nitpicking here. Would you say that Google actually cares about those 3%?
When you have 97% of the market, you own the market, right? It's actually problematic to own 100% because then it's strictly a monopoly. Whereas with 97% you can pretend it's not a monopoly.
Why do i care about google’s opinion on the 7% desktop users. I just care that I have firefox. I continue to say that having 7% on desktop is an incredible large userbase when you convert it to people and not a percentage. Ive only pushed back on the minimizing all these people to ‘a rounding error’.
Right. So I say "people don't care", and you say "they do: look at the 3% of people who use Firefox!".
Can we agree on "the vast majority of people don't care", then? Does 97% or even 93% qualify for me to say "the vast majority"?
> 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".
Not sure if you're trying to offend me or not. But it seems like you agree with me: people don't care. You just somehow wanted to call me a weirdo on the way.
I stopped using Firefox when they forced out Eich over his personal views.
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?
Mozilla will eventually run firefox into the ground due to Mozilla degeneracy, reliance on Google, etc.
Firefox forks however are still the ones with light in their eyes. LibreWolf, Waterfox, Ironfox, keep those going.
He seems to completely ignore Ladybird project for some reason.
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...
Firefox is shit because Mozilla is run by garbage people. I have used Firefox for 10 years; for many years I was on nightly to help testing.
Their ui was bad, they could not get ui locks up issue fixed for many years, and instead of focusing on core browser, they time and spend money on bullshit. Kick out technical people like Eich, pays useless Baker 6M while market where keeping crashing.
I'll still happily recurring donate money to Firefox, but not to Mozilla. Mozilla makes it impossible.
Firefox is a lost cause, overtaken by mentally ill sjws. That's the reason it can not compete with chrome even though firefox always had a soft spot in everyone's heart back in those times. They also failed to capture new generation.
Ladybird is the answer. A true diversity in the world of browsers; focused on making the best software instead of playing politics and paying 6M to useless CEO.
It is still not ready but that's fine.
I don't love FireFox. I love my uBlock Origin.
Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing.
What's the significance of being on X?
The guy that bought twitter is a Nazi.
To the inevitable down voters, I'm not calling musk a Nazi because I dont like him, I call him a Nazi because he did a friggin' heil Hitler salute.
Interesting. I thought he was about free speech and reducing government spending. (Musk, I mean, not Hitler, in case there was any confusion!)
If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk's_Salute_at_Don...
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.
No offence, it feels more "here's vivaldi if you haven't heard" than "let's save firefox together" to me.
palemoon is the only independent browser
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.
Uh, Pale Moon? Libre Wolf? There have been browsers for a long time that just browsed...
bro I am wanted to be firefox evangelist but alas. it not even have proper datetime picket
Conservatives like Firefox too.
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.
There’s a big difference between going to the same six sites every day and “browsing“ the web
i like noscript
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>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.
> 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 ...