This is the right answer, and more people (especially technical people like frequent HN) should be pointing this out.
"What ads? Oh you must be running Chrome" needs to be the common refrain.
Really hope this ends up being a surprising tide shift. Firefox has dipped really hard in marketshare, but there's no reason it can't start to gain again/grow steadily.
It's really too bad the Firefox tent wasn't big enough for all the alternative browsers that exist (though of course they're not scratching the surface of real usage either). I skipped the whole Arc wave and I'm glad I did -- it's a distraction from Firefox.
its got stronger privacy out of the box than stock firefox, modern design, big fan of vertical tabs myself and it now has basic tab folders if enabled by flags. ubo/bpc both work nicely.
And they're really good. I'm so glad I've discovered this paradigm.
I use a vertical task bar on KDE and a vertical task bar on Windows at work. It's such a huge productivity boost. First, I can see WAY more window previews at one time than before. And second, I can use text to tell the windows apart. 5 Excel workbooks open? No problem, they each have a name. No more clicking on one icon and then squinting at window previews to see which one you need.
They really should be a LOT clearer about it on their homepage, 99.99% of "original" browsers tend to be a wrapper around Chromium.
And as someone who actually lived through the "IE is the standard, deal with it" - age, I refuse to use any Chromium based browser out of principle. We need more actually viable engines in use or Google will just keep dictating what's allowed on the internet by the fact that Chrome has something like 90% market share on desktop browsers.
I left Firefox a few months ago because there was a bug in their shader cache, so a lot of stuff was laggy. I was willing to put up with until I got a 360 camera and videos were playing at like 2 fps. This was about six months ago, it’s possible that it’s been fixed, I haven’t checked.
I am using Brave right now, which seems fine. I have no idea if it actually respects privacy but they at least claim it does.
That doesn't solve the issue of ManifestV2 being removed though, Brave will have it removed at the same time as Chrome, when it's pulled from the code base
nar001 is right. Once it is pulled from Chromium, Brave can no longer support it. Although, Brave's adblocking is just as good out if the box IMO, and it is implemented without the need for Manifest V2, so it will continue to function
They absolutely can continue to support it, that is the entire point of open source. What Chrome or Chromium does by default may make it more difficult, but doesn’t mean it is something that “can no longer” be supported.
I'm not sure that that's realistic. A browser in 2025 is arguably more complicated than an operating system, and requires fairly large and expensive teams of engineers to maintain and grow.
Google has billions and billions of dollars to throw at Chromium; I doubt Brave has anywhere near that kind of money. The longer it stays fully forked from core Chromium, the harder it's going to be to pull in updates, and the more expensive it will be to maintain.
I really am curious if that will hold up once bigger refactorings make the necessary internal APIs for ManifestV2 unavailable. Then Brave needs to maintain those APIs themselves, and every time downporting changes from the open source base becomes harder and thus more expensive in time and money.
I agree fully. We need to keep the idea of fully branching off from an open source project alive. But I also suspect that Google has incentives to make it extra complicated and difficult to maintain a fork of their codebase with adblocking implemented on top of it, over time. Resources are often very limited in open source and often comes down to one or a few people.
Sure, but there is a limit to bullshit I'm willing to put up with. When that bullshit level is past its threshold I don't think you can blame someone for jumping ship.
These days the term "woke" has lost almost all meaning. It used to mean being "awake" i.e. aware of socio-economic factors in society. Today, as far as I can tell, it simply refers to whatever the big corporations/alt-right doesn't like. Just like how they refer to anything left of oligarchy as "communism". To me them calling themselves "very woke" reads as "we are against anti-human behavior", which is a good thing.
> Just like how they refer to anything left of oligarchy as "communism"
To the left of oligarchy? I thought it was anything to the left of getting hit repeatedly in the head with a hammer that they labelled as communism? There must have been a massive leftward shift in society since I last checked the news!
I never had firefox pop up and tell me to attend a drag show or that I need to surf more diverse websites than my usual sports and news sites. how is it woke? I don't care what mozilla the org does. They jsut took a big revenue hit because of the decision against google, they won't have much money for any political endeavors other than maybe privacy and free speech on the web very soon
The woke reference is to LibreWolf, not Mozilla. The dev labelled themselves "very woke" and declared the project will not be apolitical. They banned someone from their chatroom for their identity/political affiliation outside the chat, and so on.
Regardless of one's political applications, I do agree who you are elsewhere shouldn't matter unless you actually start spewing that in an inappropriate context.
It crashes every few days for me and has since the last several major releases... enough that I can't rely on it anymore. (UG) Chromium has never crashed on me once.
But Firefox is so dependent on google (money, code) that it's absolutely impossible they won't also remove manifest v2. It will just take a little while, for appearances...
About a year ago FF said they had no current plans to remove V2 support, and if they did, they'd give at least 12 month notice. Which to me is basically language saying they absolutely will remove it at some point, otherwise they'd just say "no we'll never remove it, fuck google".
Did you look at the FAQ page they created afterwards?
'do not sell user data' is too broad legally. It's a challenge in some jurisdictions. So they removed that. But it's not because they sell the data. They do have partnerships (like they did Pocket for example). In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
> In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
Correction, they said personal data, which if you go by the EU's definition means "any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual".
Which wouldn't be "anonymous stats", and can you give an example of a jurisdiction where sharing "anonymous stats" would go under selling personal data?
And is "doesn't sell your data to advertisers" also too broad? Because they removed that part too.
There are many cases where "anonymous" data can be de-anonymized, mostly if the stats contain outliers or multiple small groups that can be combined to uniquely identify an individual. "Any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual" (emphasis mine) implies that if there exists a way to de-anonymize any individual in the dataset then the dataset is PII.
> It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Specifically,
> Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love.
If you consider GDPR, even the suggestions on the new tab could send data to third parties and wouldn't be okay with this.
Any request done to a third party server, would send them your IP which is PII under GDPR.
> Why go by EU's definition when it's used globally? If it was a single location, or a single law like GDPR, that'd be easy to reword.
I tried to look up Mozilla's definition for "personal data" first but could only find "personal information":
> For us, "personal information" means information which either directly identifies you (like your name, email address, or billing information) or can be reasonably linked or combined to identify you (like an account identification number or IP address).
And again, what's a jurisdiction where sharing anonymous stats would conflict with "we don't sell your personal data"?
They mentioned CCPA as an example but they define a sale as the "selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration"
But they define "personal information" as "personal information includes any data that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked to you or your household, directly or indirectly" so "anonymous stats" wouldn't conflict with that, would it?
This is the right answer, and more people (especially technical people like frequent HN) should be pointing this out.
"What ads? Oh you must be running Chrome" needs to be the common refrain.
Really hope this ends up being a surprising tide shift. Firefox has dipped really hard in marketshare, but there's no reason it can't start to gain again/grow steadily.
It's really too bad the Firefox tent wasn't big enough for all the alternative browsers that exist (though of course they're not scratching the surface of real usage either). I skipped the whole Arc wave and I'm glad I did -- it's a distraction from Firefox.
Sadly more than just ads. my ublock/pihole rules is mostly tracking ( +80% ) and very little ad rules.
Highly recommend Zen Browser: https://github.com/zen-browser
What do you like about it?
its got stronger privacy out of the box than stock firefox, modern design, big fan of vertical tabs myself and it now has basic tab folders if enabled by flags. ubo/bpc both work nicely.
Vertical tabs and tab groups (I suspect it can't be that different from folders but I could be wrong) are available in Firefox.
And they're really good. I'm so glad I've discovered this paradigm.
I use a vertical task bar on KDE and a vertical task bar on Windows at work. It's such a huge productivity boost. First, I can see WAY more window previews at one time than before. And second, I can use text to tell the windows apart. 5 Excel workbooks open? No problem, they each have a name. No more clicking on one icon and then squinting at window previews to see which one you need.
…yet another Chromium browser though - supporting the Google browser monopoly.
It is based on Firefox…
They really should be a LOT clearer about it on their homepage, 99.99% of "original" browsers tend to be a wrapper around Chromium.
And as someone who actually lived through the "IE is the standard, deal with it" - age, I refuse to use any Chromium based browser out of principle. We need more actually viable engines in use or Google will just keep dictating what's allowed on the internet by the fact that Chrome has something like 90% market share on desktop browsers.
I left Firefox a few months ago because there was a bug in their shader cache, so a lot of stuff was laggy. I was willing to put up with until I got a 360 camera and videos were playing at like 2 fps. This was about six months ago, it’s possible that it’s been fixed, I haven’t checked.
I am using Brave right now, which seems fine. I have no idea if it actually respects privacy but they at least claim it does.
That doesn't solve the issue of ManifestV2 being removed though, Brave will have it removed at the same time as Chrome, when it's pulled from the code base
Brave have not promised to continue to support uBlock Origin ?
nar001 is right. Once it is pulled from Chromium, Brave can no longer support it. Although, Brave's adblocking is just as good out if the box IMO, and it is implemented without the need for Manifest V2, so it will continue to function
They absolutely can continue to support it, that is the entire point of open source. What Chrome or Chromium does by default may make it more difficult, but doesn’t mean it is something that “can no longer” be supported.
I'm not sure that that's realistic. A browser in 2025 is arguably more complicated than an operating system, and requires fairly large and expensive teams of engineers to maintain and grow.
Google has billions and billions of dollars to throw at Chromium; I doubt Brave has anywhere near that kind of money. The longer it stays fully forked from core Chromium, the harder it's going to be to pull in updates, and the more expensive it will be to maintain.
I really am curious if that will hold up once bigger refactorings make the necessary internal APIs for ManifestV2 unavailable. Then Brave needs to maintain those APIs themselves, and every time downporting changes from the open source base becomes harder and thus more expensive in time and money.
I agree fully. We need to keep the idea of fully branching off from an open source project alive. But I also suspect that Google has incentives to make it extra complicated and difficult to maintain a fork of their codebase with adblocking implemented on top of it, over time. Resources are often very limited in open source and often comes down to one or a few people.
Brave has a built in ad blocker.
I know, but for some reason I am adding uBlock Origin as well.
Every browser has occasional big issues. If you haven't seen one yet in (insert browser name here) then you just haven't been around long enough.
Sure, but there is a limit to bullshit I'm willing to put up with. When that bullshit level is past its threshold I don't think you can blame someone for jumping ship.
This is a good reason to stick with LTS vesions of firefox
Would it be possible to just look at the videos in a different browser?
Of course I could but I don’t really want to do that.
Go with Pale Moon, if you want a privacy-respecting fork of Firefox.
I like librewolf, but it has made similar choices as a fork
I wish Firefox would at least implement a basic adblocker on iOS.
Without it, browsing is unbearable. I wonder if they're not allowed to do so because of their contract with Google?
I agree; i use Firefox on all my Desktop devices. But on iOS it’s the worst. I never use it, except to quickly check for a (synced) bookmark.
Ditto!
NextDNS [0] has proven very useful for me on iOS. Firefox is 99% ad-free. Only for YouTube do I switch to Brave Browser.
I use Firefox on other devices and use the sync functionality so prefer to use it where possible.
My home router (Draytek) is also configured to force any connected devices to use NextDNS too.
Definitely worth the €20 annual subscription.
[0] https://nextdns.io
Firefox Focus can be used as an ad-blocker.
Apparently no one remembers when Firefox changed their terms of service literally this year to become adversarial toward their own users.
Librewolf is the way to go now.
The binaries aren't signed… :’(
Also, it seems quite vague to me exactly who/what company/entity is behind it.
What does the binaries not being signed mean?
It seems waterfox (?) has a legal entity behind it for your exact reason!
No thanks. Their own devs have gladly called the project "very woke", and a "certainly quite political project".
Wow, a political free software project? Who could imagine such a thing.
Anyway sounds like you're trying to convince me to use it
You’ll find that has absolutely nothing to do with the way you choose to use the free software they produce for your benefit.
These days the term "woke" has lost almost all meaning. It used to mean being "awake" i.e. aware of socio-economic factors in society. Today, as far as I can tell, it simply refers to whatever the big corporations/alt-right doesn't like. Just like how they refer to anything left of oligarchy as "communism". To me them calling themselves "very woke" reads as "we are against anti-human behavior", which is a good thing.
> Just like how they refer to anything left of oligarchy as "communism"
To the left of oligarchy? I thought it was anything to the left of getting hit repeatedly in the head with a hammer that they labelled as communism? There must have been a massive leftward shift in society since I last checked the news!
I never had firefox pop up and tell me to attend a drag show or that I need to surf more diverse websites than my usual sports and news sites. how is it woke? I don't care what mozilla the org does. They jsut took a big revenue hit because of the decision against google, they won't have much money for any political endeavors other than maybe privacy and free speech on the web very soon
The woke reference is to LibreWolf, not Mozilla. The dev labelled themselves "very woke" and declared the project will not be apolitical. They banned someone from their chatroom for their identity/political affiliation outside the chat, and so on.
Regardless of one's political applications, I do agree who you are elsewhere shouldn't matter unless you actually start spewing that in an inappropriate context.
so? is the browser any good?
It’s just secured Firefox. I use it and like it
It crashes every few days for me and has since the last several major releases... enough that I can't rely on it anymore. (UG) Chromium has never crashed on me once.
Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration? I've heard some graphics drivers can be crashy when apps push the boundaries.
I have had crashes with Firefox in a long time.
^have not
But Firefox is so dependent on google (money, code) that it's absolutely impossible they won't also remove manifest v2. It will just take a little while, for appearances...
It seems disingenuous to penalize a company for something that hasn't happened and is based on an assumption of interest.
In the same way we should chastise the platforms that choose to enshitify, we should praise those that hold out.
About a year ago FF said they had no current plans to remove V2 support, and if they did, they'd give at least 12 month notice. Which to me is basically language saying they absolutely will remove it at some point, otherwise they'd just say "no we'll never remove it, fuck google".
I've moved to LibreWolf personally
Errrr....https://winaero.com/mozilla-has-removed-the-do-not-sell-user...
Did you look at the FAQ page they created afterwards?
'do not sell user data' is too broad legally. It's a challenge in some jurisdictions. So they removed that. But it's not because they sell the data. They do have partnerships (like they did Pocket for example). In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
> In this case, they have anonymous stats that they share with others and that, in some jurisdictions, could fall under 'selling user data'
Correction, they said personal data, which if you go by the EU's definition means "any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual".
Which wouldn't be "anonymous stats", and can you give an example of a jurisdiction where sharing "anonymous stats" would go under selling personal data?
And is "doesn't sell your data to advertisers" also too broad? Because they removed that part too.
There are many cases where "anonymous" data can be de-anonymized, mostly if the stats contain outliers or multiple small groups that can be combined to uniquely identify an individual. "Any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual" (emphasis mine) implies that if there exists a way to de-anonymize any individual in the dataset then the dataset is PII.
> which if you go by the EU's definition
Why go by EU's definition when it's used globally? If it was a single location, or a single law like GDPR, that'd be easy to reword.
From the page they launched, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/
> It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Specifically,
> Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love.
If you consider GDPR, even the suggestions on the new tab could send data to third parties and wouldn't be okay with this.
Any request done to a third party server, would send them your IP which is PII under GDPR.
> Why go by EU's definition when it's used globally? If it was a single location, or a single law like GDPR, that'd be easy to reword.
I tried to look up Mozilla's definition for "personal data" first but could only find "personal information":
> For us, "personal information" means information which either directly identifies you (like your name, email address, or billing information) or can be reasonably linked or combined to identify you (like an account identification number or IP address).
And again, what's a jurisdiction where sharing anonymous stats would conflict with "we don't sell your personal data"?
They mentioned CCPA as an example but they define a sale as the "selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration"
But they define "personal information" as "personal information includes any data that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked to you or your household, directly or indirectly" so "anonymous stats" wouldn't conflict with that, would it?
If I’m not mistaken they own an advertisement company which they use the data for.