When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech.
When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet, with entire forums filled with people vowing to leave Firefox forever and switching to something like Waterfor or Ilp/Zorp/Floop instead.
As a result, searching for experiences other people had with Firefox makes it sound like hell on earth, while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
> When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet
i.e. when firefox does it, people wonder why they aren't using chrome. That's the entire point. The only thing that makes firefox attractive is if they don't do what google does, and they do almost everything google does.
Even if it results in extended campaigns of complaints and hostility from their most devoted users, and the loss of 95% of their installs. As far as I can tell the only thing they backed down on was destroying ublock, and that's because they recognized that it was an existential threat to firefox. The 3% market share that they have now would have become 0.3%, no matter what google did to prop them up.
I certainly don't recommend firefox any more. The amount of effort I have to go through to get the standard 2010 experience quality is absurd and I can't expect anyone else to think it's worth it. It's not worth it to dodge any of this bad behavior anymore, it's industry standard. Going through the effort of dodging it makes you stand out more, and makes you more trackable and targetable. For me it's just compulsive, and my values don't change when the values of the crowd changes. But I can't expect anyone else to download and maintain a git repo that allows you to have basic control over your UI, or to fill out captchas after every pageload.
If you're going to use plain firefox, you might as well use plain chrome. Both of them have the same degree of respect for you, and both of them are owned by the same company. Using plain firefox for freedom is like using an Android phone for freedom. It's amusing that google gets to play the "bad guy" in one of those stories (browser wars) and gets to play the "good guy" in the other (mobile wars.) It's all keyfabe. None of these companies are competing with each other.
> while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
I, being a Firefox user with practically zero Chromium use, would air my grievances when the Mozilla does something I disagree with more than I would when Google does. And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.
You wouldn’t throw the same fit if [insert dictator you don’t have high expectations of here] shot a hundred random civilians compared to if your government did, no?
> would air my grievances when the Mozilla does something I disagree with more than I would when Google does.
Mozilla doesn't care about your grievances. It collects lots of telemetry about you by default, and has recently officially removed the obligation not to sell your personal data to third parties etc. It also plans to "introduce AI" into its browser.
> And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.
On the contrary. Those people have moved on, or are in the process of moving on, from Firefox itself to more privacy-minded forks. Like Palemoon, LibreWolf and maybe Mullvard.
Offering something like a local Gemma 4 (though apparently not what we get here) to web apps via a browser API could change UX quite drastically. Possibly for the better. We had a project where it could have been nice.
Having rock-solid security for quietly transferring all of your deeply personal and private data to Google feels like a win for the pedants, but a loss for everyone else.
This is a significant point. To many people security includes privacy, which is a fair assumption: in a non-evil timeline user privacy will be one of the first-class components high on the priority list for being secured. Unfortunately companies and the people high up running them only care about their own privacy¹, everyone else is expected to be grateful that we are being stalked so we can be targetted for sales purposes.
--------
[1] Follow one of them around the way they track us online, or let out a bit of information about, for example, their tax affairs, and see how fast lawyers or law enforcement arrive on your doorstep…
Google has invested massively into security. On various platforms (non-Chromium Linux excluded), Google Chrome uses advanced defence-in-depth that make Chrome much more secure than Firefox on the same machine. Their origin-based process separation make Chrome a memory hog but protect tab processes from each other in a way Firefox doesn't bother with just yet.
Chrome may be a privacy nightmare, but in terms of security it beats Mozilla.
Not supporting real ad blockers makes it strictly less secure for any threat model that matters for normal people - most importantly less secure against predatory corporations like Google.
Same could be said about Windows vs Linux back in the day, but as another person already pointed out it doesn't make sense when the owner is one of the ones you are trying to protect yourself against.
Also, as it turned out, Windows wasn't much more secure than Linux, and I guess we'll find this with Chrome as well. In fact I wonder if this isn't obvious already now that uBlock Origin doesn't work on Chrome any longer?
Besides, isn't Chrome approaching 20 years now and I still cannot have tree style tabs on it so it is still a toy browser meant for causual browsing, not work ;-)
The more time goes on the more I feel like I live on a different planet. Even things like "shouldn't you be able to decide what software you run on the stuff you own?" gets blank stares.
I still remember "oh my friend's iphone has a nice camera, how can I send myself that picture he took with bluetooth?" and being... a bit surprised that it wasn't really possible.
I’ve been using Firefox for 20+ years and continue to do so, but let’s not pretend that Firefox hasn’t been an embarrassing shit show for most of the past 15.
I’ve been a Safari user for over 20 years. Every year or so I go on a journey to switch to something else. I’ve use Firefox (LibreWolf, IceWeasle, etc), Chrome (Edge, Arc, etc), Camino, OmniWeb, Orion, Opera (I was primarily an Opera user before Safari), and more. At work I use Edge for weird corporate reasons that I’m not thrilled about.
I always end up coming back to Safari for personal use. It seems to do the best job getting out of my way. I am annoyed by how Safari now handles browser extensions. I’d like them to take a page out of Orion’s book and support both Firefox and Chrome extensions. However, I generally have very few extensions, as they tend to slow things down, so this has been a relatively minor issue. The main things I’ve wanted extensions for in other browsers (like word lookup) have come out of the box in Safari (or Apple platforms as a whole) for quite a long time.
You can likely run Firefox Portable from PortableApps.com on your corporate Windows machine. Just make sure you're not running afoul of IT policies. Disclosure: I make it
Safari is better than Chrome and FF in enough ways I'd argue it can be considered the best of the three, even to people in tech. The dev tools are just way behind.
i really feel like trying this out as a quasi-firefox user, but i've really started to love and appreciate Zen for its UI :( wonder if there's a Waterfox X Zen alternative.
EDIT: whoops, should've scrolled down a bit on the website, looks like Waterfox has vertical tabs as well. damn, probably going to try to migrate to it sometime soon...
EDIT2: of course supports firefox extensions as well, perfect.
People keep saying this like it's just conventional wisdom we all supposedly agree with. I think it's a string of tech articles and spiraling comment sections searching for drama that's kind of been a self-perpetuating phenomenon over the past 3 or 4 years the majority of which I think has been extremely unfair and mostly just based on vibes. If you actually scroll through HN and read the criticisms, they tend to trail off into vague phrases like "all the stuff they've been doing".
If people read the release notes instead of the comment sections, not only would they have a lot more specific knowledge of the work going into the browser but they wouldn't be locked in this cycle of outrage and escalation that normally you only see in YouTube comment sections.
If Mozilla fired its CEO for a private political donation from 10 years earlier, it will not hesitate to do much worse to its users. Mozilla isn’t on the good side here.
At that time, it was 10 years ago, which is what I was responding to.
Is bigotry always a permanent condition?
Yes, people famously change more as they get older. Eich was already a man in his 40s at that point in time. He also doubled-down instead of acknowledging any wrongdoing.
I wouldn't want to use anything that earn them money, if I could avoid it. That it was half the population doesn't change my view.
I understand that it is difficult for me to shun (which is basically what I'm talking about) so many people, or to even know if they should be shunned, but it would definitely be my preference.
Your perspective only confirms that it’s popular within the Mozilla audience to ban people for their political opinion when it’s slightly out of currently-approved opinions. TODAY. Not 18 years ago. Today.
Making Mozilla a politically-extremist organization intolerant to other opinions than theirs, and thus incompatible with being a steward of the global web.
I mean ... frankly, and I say this as a guy who's used solely Firefox since before it was Firefox all the way until 2025 when I finally got sick & tired of their shit... (now on WaterFox because I refuse to submit to the Google browser monopoly)
... Mozilla absolutely did this to themselves. Come think of it, they really remind me of what Microsift's been doing with Windows.
I still don't understand what problem you guys have with Firefox. I really don't, and comments like yours are always very vague and seem to assume that it's obvious.
For me Firefox is (slightly) better than is used to be, not by a wide margin but it's not gotten worse either.
I've been running it since it was Phoenix so I think my experience is at least somewhat valid, which is why I'm so confused by these comments.
I apologize; my comment is vague because I wrote it on my phone, and didn't feel like writing super-long text there. I hate typing on a phone.
Anyway, for a browser that keeps touting how it's privacy-centered, they sure as hell love doing horrible things.
Cliqz is a great example; here's a direct quote from Mozilla (emphasis mine):
> "Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit."
This was not opt-in. It was automatically enabled for a percentage of users in (I believe) Germany. Not only is it a blatant breach of the privacy promise, it's such a massive breach it's almost on the cartoon villainy level.
But for me personally, the final straw was the yet-another-pointless-UI-change at or around v103 (or thereabouts, I don't recall the exact version). When they removed icons from a bunch of menus and went with the rounded style. That version's UI redesign worsened accessibility in so many ways, and complaints by visually-impaired users were simply ignored. All for the sake of a UI redesign yet again.
I consider myself an advanced user, and even I get annoyed by the changes. Now imagine someone not tech savvy, e.g. my mother, trying to use Firefox, when the UI suddenly changes between versions. I can adapt to changes far more easily than them (not that I want to, but Mozilla keeps wanting to force it), but for some, it's going to be a struggle. For that reason alone, I can no longer recommend Firefox to non-tech-savvy people (and I used to!).
Meanwhile, Chrome, although I dislike its UI, has kept it relatively stable throughout. People get used to it, and it stays that way. They don't have to learn new things or change their habits. Now, there are a myriad of issues with Chrome, but constant UI rug-pulls aren't one of them.
That's why I'm comparing Mozilla to Microsoft. They ignore users, and shove changes nobody asked for down their throats --- even if it makes things worse for everyone. The UI change, for example, is kind of like the new context menu in Windows Explorer. On top of that, they tout being privacy-focused everywhere in the marketing, but then their actions show the exact opposite.
Are you referring to technical implementation or the poor anti-privacy decisions they keep making when you say 'slightly better'? I have not given up, but I am profoundly disappointed and for somebody who says they have used FF for so long, it feels like I am being gaslit when you say they are peachy.
People have problems with what they choose to program, not the quality of their code. I too have used FF since the beginning, but switched to Waterfox last year (it took me about two years to make that decision - I didn't make it lightly). I chose WF in large part because its profile remains compatible with FF so I can switch back if they calm the F down and start acting normal again for long enough to rebuild some trust.
What browsers would you recommend? I use Brave but it's still Chromium under the hood. It's the only one that I never had trouble with adblock though. Also lets me play youtube on mobile when my screen is locked.
I will never use Brave after the debacle where they injected content into sites downloaded over HTTPS to pretend people were promoting their crypto token and adding a "donate" button on the page.
It helps if you're doing mundane things and want to help people who need to mix their sensitive traffic with it.
More people "legitimately" using Tor makes it less likely to have its exit nodes outright blocked, as well, and assuming all traffic from them is malicious.
In my recent experience: definitely yes, though not significantly worse. Unless you have [many] hundreds of tabs open (which I do as I have neither executive function nor organisational skills), or have a machine with very limited RAM, I don't think you'll notice a difference.
This is anecdata, of course, take with a pinch of your preferred flavouring powder.
Chrome on Windows is running with thousands of tabs "open" over dozens of windows, but it does practically max out on a certain number of tabs per window (not just the GUI, but something in the memory architecture), and it does stack fat cache which will crash the whole thing if it digs deeper than your available space.
Windows even runs (semi-playably) 2020's shooters in this condition, though you need to kill any windows close to the tab limit that are full of recently opened tabs.
> Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.
Thats good to know, but I am a "out of the box" person. I never want to have to manually install extensions as thats just more stuff to remember when setting up a new machine. Yea thats a me problem, but still.
It used to support it out-of-the-box as well, but it's technically against YouTube's ToS to allow this without paying for a premium, so now you need this as an extra hoop.
Agreed, this sounds strange indeed. Much more likely is that Google found a reliable way to detect the screen status using a standard feature and Mozilla just implements the standard neutrally
Wouldn't know, as I have never been in charge of one, but I imagine Google having the power to make your browser completely irrelevant would be a pretty strong incentive.
Nah I want general media playback in the background. Doesn't matter if its Youtube or any other platform. I dont want giga corpos to monetize my attention. Youtube does well enough from ads anyway ;)
Even youtube's app itself doesn't allow that unless you pay. I suspect they've nobbled most browsers into not allowing it, either by technical measures or (more likely) the strong-arm tactic of saying “if you don't block this we'll find a way to make the entire of youtube practically unusable on your browser”.
I've been using Grayjay recently which does allow that, amongst a number of other useful features (integrating other media sources, lack of adverts every few minutes in some content). Might be worth considering as an option.
I suspect that if youtube's metric show that enough people are doing that (without paid accounts) it'll stop by default for the same reasons it stopped in FF.
I used ublock origin for a while, but I kept having issues with it on Youtube due to Youtubes anti adblock measurements. Brave for some reason always had a fix for it pretty quickly, so I never experienced these issues with it. Maybe I could try a different browser again on my next machine.
In iOS kinda yes; you have to request desktop version, and once you activate the lock screen for the first time you have to press “play”. Then it just plays and auto plays in the background.
Don’t know about android, but there is also an extension there that blocks the visibility page api for YouTube.
Vivaldi - built in ad blocker, the creator is a nice guy, transparent business model. It might be rough around the edges, but it's much better from every alternative imho.
Arc is still great on macOS (not so much the Windows build, essentially an abandoned beta) even if it's not getting active development anymore.
I'm defaulting to Firefox ever since I moved my desktop to CachyOS, but I need to either reacquaint myself with its add-on situation after a long arc of using "chrome alternatives", or migrate to something else niche. Vivaldi was what I was sold on before Arc caught my attention through its wonderful UX/UI.
I heard Arc was abandoned and not getting any more work because they were moving to their new AI browser. So, Zen has replaced it for me, and it is based on Firefox which is nice to avoid the chromium
Google's "don't be evil" motto already felt ironic over a decade ago, long before they even replaced it with "do the right thing [for shareholder value?]".
You have to understand it to work like in many RPG games - you get to murder and pillage from time to time as long as you donate some of your ill gotten gains to move your alignment back to "neutral".
> Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?
There are only three major browser rendering engines. One is Gecko, by Mozilla. One is Webkit, currently tended to by Apple. And one is Blink, which is Google/Microsoft. Of those, Blink is the most featureful. That's why.
You could use Chromium just for Google Meet. That's what I do. I have Chromium relatively up to date that I basically solely use when I need to. It can be Google Meet, or Teams, or whatever was purposely botched in order NOT to work with Firefox, basically sabotage, but it can also be very rare cases like Lego Spike or GrapheneOS Web installer which require WebUSB.
99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.
That's exactly what I do with Chrome, use it for Google Meet and some websites that work best in Chrome (heavy apps like Figma or whatever). 99% it's Firefox.
What mess? I only ever used Chrome as my main browser for a short while when Firefox had become rather bloaty and had slow JS, and Chrome was small and nimble. But that was something like fifteen years ago. Firefox works, is plenty fast these days, and only eats most of my RAM compared to Chrome which takes all of it, and serves me a web devoid of almost all ads and most trackers.
They push millions of lines of code every quarter including thousands of patches, constant security updates and performance improvements and deepened support for web platform standards. As open source projects go, it's probably one of the most active and thriving ones there is. As eager as some people are to dance on Mozilla's grave, that day isn't coming anytime soon.
If you wanted to point to the year where they've been the best financed they've ever been and where they've had the most resources invested into browser development they ever have, that year would be 2026. Only to be exceeded by 2027 and then 2028, 2029 and beyond.
At a bare minimum, their endowment gives them probably a two to three year firewall in the event that their funding is cut off, which it hasn't been. I also thought the accusation was supposed to be the other way around, namely that we all knew they were going to get funded into perpetuity as controlled opposition.
This isn't particularly relevant to whether you should use it right now though. If there's a restaurant I like but it might go out of business in a year I don't stop eating there today.
Firefox has a complete UBo unlike the Chrom* corporateware turd which is just Microsoft 2.0 from Google. Chrome instead of IE, and propietary JS code for Google services such as Youtube -deliberately made slower in Firefox- as the new Active X shoved down your throat in order to keep a monopoly.
With Librewolf I can get proper WebGL, full UBo -with the AI blocklist too to avoid all the slop- and Bypass Paywall Clean from Giflic or whatever was called. Yeah, eh, y local newspaper won't mainly get adverts' money but the rest of local company ads show up well even with UBo/BPC, so they get some money after all.
On RAM usage, Librewolf it's far lighter on the long term and it doesn't ping back as Firefox, and many times less than Chrom* based browsers where, I repeat, Chrome based browsers don't allow UBo any more even if installed from their Github repo enforcing some about:flags variables related to legacy extension support.
The web today without UBo it's unmanageable. Popus, more than the ones from 2003, malware disguised as ads even on mainstream, safe sites, and all of these running zillions of cookies and trackers converting your -otherwise perfectly usable- old amd64 Celeron machine with 2GB of RAM into some crawling Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. With LibreWolf and UBo I could even test Yandex Maps with Prypiat and the like and InstantStreetView too. No slowdowns, no OpenGL >= 3.3/Vulkan video card required, and no need to own a 8GB machine.
HN developers there without UBo if they depend on the web for documentation they are bit screwed if they use Chrom* based browsers, sorry. Half of the resources for their machines coudn't be used, you know for IDE's, compilers, virtual machines/containers and whatnot.
And, yes, I know about ZRAM under GNU/Linux, and just imagine how many tasks would anyone accomplish with a ZRAM compressed chunk (~1/3 of the physical RAM), a light desktop environment as Lumina/LXQT and a non-Chrom* browser blocking all pests. Up to 3X more tasks in the same machine. No need to waste money on upgrades, and compilng cycles are cut down for the good.
Yeah that's mostly why I use it. When I try Firefox I get out of memory messages for some reason. Also the Google Lens tool is very handy and gets used often.
What are the alternatives? Only a massively moneyed corp has the resources to fight vulns at acceptable rates. Firefox doesn’t count because they’re being funded by Google.
I don't understand this perspective. How can one accept the objectively more user hostile option because the less hostile one gets money from the other. If one objects to using products funded by google, why is there not also an objection to using products from google?
For as long as the funding for Firefox continues, it remains a viable option. And despite all their bad decisions of late, they still give users the ability to configure or disable user hostile components.
Their funding model is a risk, but I've been using Firefox and librewolf forever and I'd argue it's a much better option than chrome or edge, especially with a handful of plugins. A risk is still better than the actual realization of the risk.
In the short term, Helium (if, like me, you can’t live without Chrome’s bookmarks). In the medium term, perhaps Ladybird. In the long term, we’re all dead.
I think they were looking for browsers that aren't based on Chromium or Gecko, which, for something still regularly updated and works with most websites, I think webkit is the only real alternative.
I have no idea but when I mention Firefox my colleagues under 35 or so literally think I'm joking.
When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech.
When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet, with entire forums filled with people vowing to leave Firefox forever and switching to something like Waterfor or Ilp/Zorp/Floop instead.
As a result, searching for experiences other people had with Firefox makes it sound like hell on earth, while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
I hope you're not implying that that reaction to Mozilla going against the only reason anyone has to use Firefox is unwarranted.
> When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet
i.e. when firefox does it, people wonder why they aren't using chrome. That's the entire point. The only thing that makes firefox attractive is if they don't do what google does, and they do almost everything google does.
Even if it results in extended campaigns of complaints and hostility from their most devoted users, and the loss of 95% of their installs. As far as I can tell the only thing they backed down on was destroying ublock, and that's because they recognized that it was an existential threat to firefox. The 3% market share that they have now would have become 0.3%, no matter what google did to prop them up.
I certainly don't recommend firefox any more. The amount of effort I have to go through to get the standard 2010 experience quality is absurd and I can't expect anyone else to think it's worth it. It's not worth it to dodge any of this bad behavior anymore, it's industry standard. Going through the effort of dodging it makes you stand out more, and makes you more trackable and targetable. For me it's just compulsive, and my values don't change when the values of the crowd changes. But I can't expect anyone else to download and maintain a git repo that allows you to have basic control over your UI, or to fill out captchas after every pageload.
If you're going to use plain firefox, you might as well use plain chrome. Both of them have the same degree of respect for you, and both of them are owned by the same company. Using plain firefox for freedom is like using an Android phone for freedom. It's amusing that google gets to play the "bad guy" in one of those stories (browser wars) and gets to play the "good guy" in the other (mobile wars.) It's all keyfabe. None of these companies are competing with each other.
> while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
Wise words.
I, being a Firefox user with practically zero Chromium use, would air my grievances when the Mozilla does something I disagree with more than I would when Google does. And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.
You wouldn’t throw the same fit if [insert dictator you don’t have high expectations of here] shot a hundred random civilians compared to if your government did, no?
> would air my grievances when the Mozilla does something I disagree with more than I would when Google does.
Mozilla doesn't care about your grievances. It collects lots of telemetry about you by default, and has recently officially removed the obligation not to sell your personal data to third parties etc. It also plans to "introduce AI" into its browser.
> And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.
On the contrary. Those people have moved on, or are in the process of moving on, from Firefox itself to more privacy-minded forks. Like Palemoon, LibreWolf and maybe Mullvard.
Mozilla is nice enough to let you opt out.
I'm in my 40s I have no desire for this new technology unless we get the kind of AI from Japanese anime.
Offering something like a local Gemma 4 (though apparently not what we get here) to web apps via a browser API could change UX quite drastically. Possibly for the better. We had a project where it could have been nice.
> "RMS style curl works for me unless I can have Hatsune Miku"
> When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech.
Because this is something expected from Google. Google has never committed to security, but Mozilla did.
EDIT: I meant privacy, not security.
Google has invested significantly in security. I believe you are referring to privacy?
Having rock-solid security for quietly transferring all of your deeply personal and private data to Google feels like a win for the pedants, but a loss for everyone else.
Correct, Google has invested significantly in securing themselves from their users.
This is a significant point. To many people security includes privacy, which is a fair assumption: in a non-evil timeline user privacy will be one of the first-class components high on the priority list for being secured. Unfortunately companies and the people high up running them only care about their own privacy¹, everyone else is expected to be grateful that we are being stalked so we can be targetted for sales purposes.
--------
[1] Follow one of them around the way they track us online, or let out a bit of information about, for example, their tax affairs, and see how fast lawyers or law enforcement arrive on your doorstep…
Oh, you right, thanks for pointing this out. Indeed, I referred to privacy.
Google has invested massively into security. On various platforms (non-Chromium Linux excluded), Google Chrome uses advanced defence-in-depth that make Chrome much more secure than Firefox on the same machine. Their origin-based process separation make Chrome a memory hog but protect tab processes from each other in a way Firefox doesn't bother with just yet.
Chrome may be a privacy nightmare, but in terms of security it beats Mozilla.
Not supporting real ad blockers makes it strictly less secure for any threat model that matters for normal people - most importantly less secure against predatory corporations like Google.
Same could be said about Windows vs Linux back in the day, but as another person already pointed out it doesn't make sense when the owner is one of the ones you are trying to protect yourself against.
Also, as it turned out, Windows wasn't much more secure than Linux, and I guess we'll find this with Chrome as well. In fact I wonder if this isn't obvious already now that uBlock Origin doesn't work on Chrome any longer?
Besides, isn't Chrome approaching 20 years now and I still cannot have tree style tabs on it so it is still a toy browser meant for causual browsing, not work ;-)
Defense is not very meaningful if your browser is provided by one of the parties you need to defend yourself yourself _against_.
They've been consuming 15+ years of anti-Mozilla rants anytime it or Firefox are mentioned online.
It's how you get things like "Browser monocultures are an issue, so don't use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!" said in earnest.
Then maybe Mozilla should stop doing things that upset the users that actually care to use Firefox in a vain attempt to chase the average Chrome user.
at least we can use ublock and turn off ai
Or simply they haven't heard much about it at all, don't care, and chalk it up to OP being some sort of an odd hipster.
Man, so many things could be better if people cared.
The more time goes on the more I feel like I live on a different planet. Even things like "shouldn't you be able to decide what software you run on the stuff you own?" gets blank stares.
Hello fellow extraterrestrial
Old heads checking in... Back in my day, we had an exposed file hierarchy and we liked it!
I still remember "oh my friend's iphone has a nice camera, how can I send myself that picture he took with bluetooth?" and being... a bit surprised that it wasn't really possible.
Is anyone disagreeing with that statement?
Yeah, among other things when I'm supportive of sideloading and disappointed that it's being greatly restricted on Android.
I’ve been using Firefox for 20+ years and continue to do so, but let’s not pretend that Firefox hasn’t been an embarrassing shit show for most of the past 15.
10x better than safari and it won’t consume all my RAM like google, so not sure it you’re just repeating what you heard or if you mean what you said
I’ve been a Safari user for over 20 years. Every year or so I go on a journey to switch to something else. I’ve use Firefox (LibreWolf, IceWeasle, etc), Chrome (Edge, Arc, etc), Camino, OmniWeb, Orion, Opera (I was primarily an Opera user before Safari), and more. At work I use Edge for weird corporate reasons that I’m not thrilled about.
I always end up coming back to Safari for personal use. It seems to do the best job getting out of my way. I am annoyed by how Safari now handles browser extensions. I’d like them to take a page out of Orion’s book and support both Firefox and Chrome extensions. However, I generally have very few extensions, as they tend to slow things down, so this has been a relatively minor issue. The main things I’ve wanted extensions for in other browsers (like word lookup) have come out of the box in Safari (or Apple platforms as a whole) for quite a long time.
You can likely run Firefox Portable from PortableApps.com on your corporate Windows machine. Just make sure you're not running afoul of IT policies. Disclosure: I make it
I’m on a Mac these days at work. I used to use and recommend PortableApps a lot back when I was on Windows, thanks for making it.
Safari is better than Chrome and FF in enough ways I'd argue it can be considered the best of the three, even to people in tech. The dev tools are just way behind.
> 10x better than safari and it won’t consume all my RAM like google
Using the 3 regularly, no, Firefox is not "10 times better than Safari". Though, yes, Chrome(ium) is a ressource hog.
I'd recommend checking out WaterFox. It's what I switched to when I finally got sick & tired of Mozilla's shit.
i really feel like trying this out as a quasi-firefox user, but i've really started to love and appreciate Zen for its UI :( wonder if there's a Waterfox X Zen alternative.
EDIT: whoops, should've scrolled down a bit on the website, looks like Waterfox has vertical tabs as well. damn, probably going to try to migrate to it sometime soon...
EDIT2: of course supports firefox extensions as well, perfect.
Firefox has vertical tabs as well, and it is a lot less bloated that the extension one I was using.
People keep saying this like it's just conventional wisdom we all supposedly agree with. I think it's a string of tech articles and spiraling comment sections searching for drama that's kind of been a self-perpetuating phenomenon over the past 3 or 4 years the majority of which I think has been extremely unfair and mostly just based on vibes. If you actually scroll through HN and read the criticisms, they tend to trail off into vague phrases like "all the stuff they've been doing".
If people read the release notes instead of the comment sections, not only would they have a lot more specific knowledge of the work going into the browser but they wouldn't be locked in this cycle of outrage and escalation that normally you only see in YouTube comment sections.
Ok, then. What shitshow? Does it not pale in comparison to Chrome and Edge?
If Mozilla fired its CEO for a private political donation from 10 years earlier, it will not hesitate to do much worse to its users. Mozilla isn’t on the good side here.
He’s the founder of Brave, by the way.
This just makes me support Firefox more
It makes you intolerant, as you are unable to comprehend the opinion of other normal people in your society.
The action of performing real-life drastic sanctions against people you don’t tolerate is an extremism.
And it is the general opinion of most Mozilla idealists. Mozilla is a political project, and is dangerous to our democracy.
Brave also got caught hijacking links and swapping in their own affiliate codes
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...
16-18 years ago. Is bigotry always a permanent condition?
At that time, it was 10 years ago, which is what I was responding to.
Yes, people famously change more as they get older. Eich was already a man in his 40s at that point in time. He also doubled-down instead of acknowledging any wrongdoing.Has he apologized?
As if apologizing to the cancel mob ever worked out of anyone. All that does is affirm the mob.
You know, you're condemning most of California. The measure he supported won the vote. Would you like to drive all of them out of their jobs?
I wouldn't want to use anything that earn them money, if I could avoid it. That it was half the population doesn't change my view.
I understand that it is difficult for me to shun (which is basically what I'm talking about) so many people, or to even know if they should be shunned, but it would definitely be my preference.
My man, we do live in a society.
Your perspective only confirms that it’s popular within the Mozilla audience to ban people for their political opinion when it’s slightly out of currently-approved opinions. TODAY. Not 18 years ago. Today.
Making Mozilla a politically-extremist organization intolerant to other opinions than theirs, and thus incompatible with being a steward of the global web.
I mean ... frankly, and I say this as a guy who's used solely Firefox since before it was Firefox all the way until 2025 when I finally got sick & tired of their shit... (now on WaterFox because I refuse to submit to the Google browser monopoly)
... Mozilla absolutely did this to themselves. Come think of it, they really remind me of what Microsift's been doing with Windows.
I still don't understand what problem you guys have with Firefox. I really don't, and comments like yours are always very vague and seem to assume that it's obvious.
For me Firefox is (slightly) better than is used to be, not by a wide margin but it's not gotten worse either.
I've been running it since it was Phoenix so I think my experience is at least somewhat valid, which is why I'm so confused by these comments.
I apologize; my comment is vague because I wrote it on my phone, and didn't feel like writing super-long text there. I hate typing on a phone.
Anyway, for a browser that keeps touting how it's privacy-centered, they sure as hell love doing horrible things.
Cliqz is a great example; here's a direct quote from Mozilla (emphasis mine):
> "Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit."
This was not opt-in. It was automatically enabled for a percentage of users in (I believe) Germany. Not only is it a blatant breach of the privacy promise, it's such a massive breach it's almost on the cartoon villainy level.
But for me personally, the final straw was the yet-another-pointless-UI-change at or around v103 (or thereabouts, I don't recall the exact version). When they removed icons from a bunch of menus and went with the rounded style. That version's UI redesign worsened accessibility in so many ways, and complaints by visually-impaired users were simply ignored. All for the sake of a UI redesign yet again.
I consider myself an advanced user, and even I get annoyed by the changes. Now imagine someone not tech savvy, e.g. my mother, trying to use Firefox, when the UI suddenly changes between versions. I can adapt to changes far more easily than them (not that I want to, but Mozilla keeps wanting to force it), but for some, it's going to be a struggle. For that reason alone, I can no longer recommend Firefox to non-tech-savvy people (and I used to!).
Meanwhile, Chrome, although I dislike its UI, has kept it relatively stable throughout. People get used to it, and it stays that way. They don't have to learn new things or change their habits. Now, there are a myriad of issues with Chrome, but constant UI rug-pulls aren't one of them.
That's why I'm comparing Mozilla to Microsoft. They ignore users, and shove changes nobody asked for down their throats --- even if it makes things worse for everyone. The UI change, for example, is kind of like the new context menu in Windows Explorer. On top of that, they tout being privacy-focused everywhere in the marketing, but then their actions show the exact opposite.
The main problem is consent. Mozilla doesn't understand it. Lots of other problems flow from that.
Are you referring to technical implementation or the poor anti-privacy decisions they keep making when you say 'slightly better'? I have not given up, but I am profoundly disappointed and for somebody who says they have used FF for so long, it feels like I am being gaslit when you say they are peachy.
People have problems with what they choose to program, not the quality of their code. I too have used FF since the beginning, but switched to Waterfox last year (it took me about two years to make that decision - I didn't make it lightly). I chose WF in large part because its profile remains compatible with FF so I can switch back if they calm the F down and start acting normal again for long enough to rebuild some trust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mozilla_Corporati... - start at the end for most recent.
Also go to the website of any one of the FF forks and read their reasons for existing. For example:
https://www.waterfox.com/#why-waterfox
> Are you referring to technical implementation or the poor anti-privacy decisions they keep making when you say 'slightly better'?
Which ones are you talking about? I'm talking about Firefox, not the Mozilla Corp to be clear.
They are obvious in the links, no time for silly games.
You’re not alone. Been a user for years and I still don’t get the hate.
Having said that, I keep a copy of Ungoogled Chromium for those websites that refuse to test against FF.
FWIW: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48020960
Plus there's the Wikipedia link another user posted.
Could you list some of the major grievances you have with Firefox? I haven't been following the news very closely
To avoid repeating myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48020960
its almost like Google, a marketing company with a serious requirement for data mining, could be talking shit about Mozilla...
Why would Google talk shit about their subsidiary's product.
Is Vivaldi any good?
I've switched to it some months ago and I like it. It's based on Chromium, so switching from Chrome is almost seamless
Even if it is, you can look at it like Chrome on launch. It was good then, but has become belligerent because they can.
What browsers would you recommend? I use Brave but it's still Chromium under the hood. It's the only one that I never had trouble with adblock though. Also lets me play youtube on mobile when my screen is locked.
Brave origin on linux looks pretty solid now. Now I'm using that and Librewolf.
I will never use Brave after the debacle where they injected content into sites downloaded over HTTPS to pretend people were promoting their crypto token and adding a "donate" button on the page.
That made me avoid it for a long time but there hasn't been more concerning behavior since, so some point, we can move on.
Did they ever address it? It's still the same company with presumably the same ideals. I was using it daily at the time, maybe it's better now.
Brave is a series scam company. Always has been, always will be.
I just checked it out, but it removes Tor access? It would pretty much downgrade the regular browser
I think using tor in brave just makes you stand out more - stock tor browser is probably a better setup. Whonix even better.
It helps if you're doing mundane things and want to help people who need to mix their sensitive traffic with it.
More people "legitimately" using Tor makes it less likely to have its exit nodes outright blocked, as well, and assuming all traffic from them is malicious.
That's charitable, but even then you probably want to avoid fingerprinting...
Brave it's spyware, keep going with Librewolf. You can disable some fingerprinting support for WebGL -but- you need UBo for sure (and JShelter).
Firefox.
is it as greedy as chrome for the ram?
In my recent experience: definitely yes, though not significantly worse. Unless you have [many] hundreds of tabs open (which I do as I have neither executive function nor organisational skills), or have a machine with very limited RAM, I don't think you'll notice a difference.
This is anecdata, of course, take with a pinch of your preferred flavouring powder.
Chrome on Windows is running with thousands of tabs "open" over dozens of windows, but it does practically max out on a certain number of tabs per window (not just the GUI, but something in the memory architecture), and it does stack fat cache which will crash the whole thing if it digs deeper than your available space.
Windows even runs (semi-playably) 2020's shooters in this condition, though you need to kill any windows close to the tab limit that are full of recently opened tabs.
[Yes, I know, the horror]
Yes: https://www.phoronix.com/review/firefox-chrome-2026/4
> Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.
[flagged]
Yes, actually!
Well, it does require you to install an extension[0], but it can be done.
[0]: <https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play>
Thats good to know, but I am a "out of the box" person. I never want to have to manually install extensions as thats just more stuff to remember when setting up a new machine. Yea thats a me problem, but still.
It used to support it out-of-the-box as well, but it's technically against YouTube's ToS to allow this without paying for a premium, so now you need this as an extra hoop.
Why should a browser be policing YouTube’s ToS for them?
Agreed, this sounds strange indeed. Much more likely is that Google found a reliable way to detect the screen status using a standard feature and Mozilla just implements the standard neutrally
Wouldn't know, as I have never been in charge of one, but I imagine Google having the power to make your browser completely irrelevant would be a pretty strong incentive.
You want to have your cake and eat it too, I think the best solution in your case is paying for youtube
Or I just keep using brave and not pay for the biggest media corpo that just passed Disney in revenue.
Was Brave pre-installed on your computer or did you remember to install it?
You don't install software on your machines that didn't come pre-installed/configured?
They're literally asking for a paid YouTube feature to be free "out of the box". Lol wild.
Nah I want general media playback in the background. Doesn't matter if its Youtube or any other platform. I dont want giga corpos to monetize my attention. Youtube does well enough from ads anyway ;)
Even youtube's app itself doesn't allow that unless you pay. I suspect they've nobbled most browsers into not allowing it, either by technical measures or (more likely) the strong-arm tactic of saying “if you don't block this we'll find a way to make the entire of youtube practically unusable on your browser”.
I've been using Grayjay recently which does allow that, amongst a number of other useful features (integrating other media sources, lack of adverts every few minutes in some content). Might be worth considering as an option.
Kagi’s Orion browser on iOS is able to play YT vids in the background.
I suspect that if youtube's metric show that enough people are doing that (without paid accounts) it'll stop by default for the same reasons it stopped in FF.
It allows you to play youtube without ads with ublock origin.
I used ublock origin for a while, but I kept having issues with it on Youtube due to Youtubes anti adblock measurements. Brave for some reason always had a fix for it pretty quickly, so I never experienced these issues with it. Maybe I could try a different browser again on my next machine.
In iOS kinda yes; you have to request desktop version, and once you activate the lock screen for the first time you have to press “play”. Then it just plays and auto plays in the background.
Don’t know about android, but there is also an extension there that blocks the visibility page api for YouTube.
Why not simply use NewPipe [0]?
You also get ad filtering and you can download Audio/Video streams from within the app.
[0] https://newpipe.net/
You can play yt video in firefox with locked screen but you need to use desktop mode
Yes. That's the primary reason I use it, but you have to install an extension called "Video Background Play Fix".
Tubular app does, and it blocks ads
Vivaldi - built in ad blocker, the creator is a nice guy, transparent business model. It might be rough around the edges, but it's much better from every alternative imho.
…and Chromium under the hood.
Arc is still great on macOS (not so much the Windows build, essentially an abandoned beta) even if it's not getting active development anymore.
I'm defaulting to Firefox ever since I moved my desktop to CachyOS, but I need to either reacquaint myself with its add-on situation after a long arc of using "chrome alternatives", or migrate to something else niche. Vivaldi was what I was sold on before Arc caught my attention through its wonderful UX/UI.
I heard Arc was abandoned and not getting any more work because they were moving to their new AI browser. So, Zen has replaced it for me, and it is based on Firefox which is nice to avoid the chromium
I still use Firefox. It does all I need with no ads. That's nice.
Konform Browser
Mullvad Browser
Tor Browser for those occasions
Currently using Helium.
This one looks neat, is it also based on Chromium?
Yes.
Safari
I agree. This is Google doing underhanded Google-things. Why the hell would anyone trust them in the first place?
Google's "don't be evil" motto already felt ironic over a decade ago, long before they even replaced it with "do the right thing [for shareholder value?]".
You have to understand it to work like in many RPG games - you get to murder and pillage from time to time as long as you donate some of your ill gotten gains to move your alignment back to "neutral".
> Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?
There are only three major browser rendering engines. One is Gecko, by Mozilla. One is Webkit, currently tended to by Apple. And one is Blink, which is Google/Microsoft. Of those, Blink is the most featureful. That's why.
> Blink is the most featureful
It’s not a waste of bandwidth and disk space, it’s a feature!
Exactly my thoughts. There are so many good alternatives already, it's insane to me that people still use this garbage. LibreWolf is a godsend
Why in the world do people keep shipping Chrome with their pseudo native applications?
Easy. You work for a company that has only whitelisted chrome or edge.
Nothing says you have to use the same browser at work and outside of work? I use Edge for work, Firefox everywhere else.
I use Chrome because at Google Meet it renders a nice separate window with mute/unmute controls as you switch to another tab and screen share.
Curious if Google plans to allow other browsers doing that too.
You could use Chromium just for Google Meet. That's what I do. I have Chromium relatively up to date that I basically solely use when I need to. It can be Google Meet, or Teams, or whatever was purposely botched in order NOT to work with Firefox, basically sabotage, but it can also be very rare cases like Lego Spike or GrapheneOS Web installer which require WebUSB.
99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.
That's exactly what I do with Chrome, use it for Google Meet and some websites that work best in Chrome (heavy apps like Figma or whatever). 99% it's Firefox.
i use chrome enterprise for my personal use, which is managed via the google workspace admin.
you would think google is not stupid enough to mess with gcp account holders
Because ladybird isn’t alpha yet, and Firefox is a mess.
What mess? I only ever used Chrome as my main browser for a short while when Firefox had become rather bloaty and had slow JS, and Chrome was small and nimble. But that was something like fifteen years ago. Firefox works, is plenty fast these days, and only eats most of my RAM compared to Chrome which takes all of it, and serves me a web devoid of almost all ads and most trackers.
From a funding standpoint there’s no future to Firefox. They will get brought Mozilla foundation is an investment fund now. Firefox it dead weight.
They push millions of lines of code every quarter including thousands of patches, constant security updates and performance improvements and deepened support for web platform standards. As open source projects go, it's probably one of the most active and thriving ones there is. As eager as some people are to dance on Mozilla's grave, that day isn't coming anytime soon.
If you wanted to point to the year where they've been the best financed they've ever been and where they've had the most resources invested into browser development they ever have, that year would be 2026. Only to be exceeded by 2027 and then 2028, 2029 and beyond.
At a bare minimum, their endowment gives them probably a two to three year firewall in the event that their funding is cut off, which it hasn't been. I also thought the accusation was supposed to be the other way around, namely that we all knew they were going to get funded into perpetuity as controlled opposition.
This isn't particularly relevant to whether you should use it right now though. If there's a restaurant I like but it might go out of business in a year I don't stop eating there today.
Firefox is open source :)
Firefox has a complete UBo unlike the Chrom* corporateware turd which is just Microsoft 2.0 from Google. Chrome instead of IE, and propietary JS code for Google services such as Youtube -deliberately made slower in Firefox- as the new Active X shoved down your throat in order to keep a monopoly.
With Librewolf I can get proper WebGL, full UBo -with the AI blocklist too to avoid all the slop- and Bypass Paywall Clean from Giflic or whatever was called. Yeah, eh, y local newspaper won't mainly get adverts' money but the rest of local company ads show up well even with UBo/BPC, so they get some money after all.
On RAM usage, Librewolf it's far lighter on the long term and it doesn't ping back as Firefox, and many times less than Chrom* based browsers where, I repeat, Chrome based browsers don't allow UBo any more even if installed from their Github repo enforcing some about:flags variables related to legacy extension support.
The web today without UBo it's unmanageable. Popus, more than the ones from 2003, malware disguised as ads even on mainstream, safe sites, and all of these running zillions of cookies and trackers converting your -otherwise perfectly usable- old amd64 Celeron machine with 2GB of RAM into some crawling Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. With LibreWolf and UBo I could even test Yandex Maps with Prypiat and the like and InstantStreetView too. No slowdowns, no OpenGL >= 3.3/Vulkan video card required, and no need to own a 8GB machine.
HN developers there without UBo if they depend on the web for documentation they are bit screwed if they use Chrom* based browsers, sorry. Half of the resources for their machines coudn't be used, you know for IDE's, compilers, virtual machines/containers and whatnot. And, yes, I know about ZRAM under GNU/Linux, and just imagine how many tasks would anyone accomplish with a ZRAM compressed chunk (~1/3 of the physical RAM), a light desktop environment as Lumina/LXQT and a non-Chrom* browser blocking all pests. Up to 3X more tasks in the same machine. No need to waste money on upgrades, and compilng cycles are cut down for the good.
Ublock origin works perfectly fine on Edge. With Firefox I've also had ram usage that was multiples of what I get with Edge, on both Linux and Windows
It's the browser that annoys me the least. Almost everything just works.
Yeah that's mostly why I use it. When I try Firefox I get out of memory messages for some reason. Also the Google Lens tool is very handy and gets used often.
What are the alternatives? Only a massively moneyed corp has the resources to fight vulns at acceptable rates. Firefox doesn’t count because they’re being funded by Google.
I don't understand this perspective. How can one accept the objectively more user hostile option because the less hostile one gets money from the other. If one objects to using products funded by google, why is there not also an objection to using products from google?
For as long as the funding for Firefox continues, it remains a viable option. And despite all their bad decisions of late, they still give users the ability to configure or disable user hostile components.
Their funding model is a risk, but I've been using Firefox and librewolf forever and I'd argue it's a much better option than chrome or edge, especially with a handful of plugins. A risk is still better than the actual realization of the risk.
> Firefox doesn’t count because they’re being funded by Google.
Even if that were true, it's still a better option _today_.
In the short term, Helium (if, like me, you can’t live without Chrome’s bookmarks). In the medium term, perhaps Ladybird. In the long term, we’re all dead.
I think they were looking for browsers that aren't based on Chromium or Gecko, which, for something still regularly updated and works with most websites, I think webkit is the only real alternative.
Anything webkit-based and open source like Epiphany or Konqueror/Rekonq, it matches your "moneyed corp" requirement (Apple).
because it's really well developed and Just Works
Thank you. Exactly this question. Full stop.