And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it we will be worse for it.
Well, you see Firefox isn't entirely perfect, so I'll just continue using the worst web browser out there until someone finally makes the perfect one...
I'm going to advocate for Zen here. https://zen-browser.app/ I've been using it for the past year or so and love using it so far. There's some bugs here and there but nothing that occurs often or breaks my workflow. And it's based on Firefox :)
I really want to like zen but every so often it eats all my RAM. Many have reported similar issues.
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/issues/8932
Thanks for sharing! Fortunately have not ran into this yet but obviously YMMV.
Why does their website seem like a clone of Anthropic's?
I'm a big fan of WaterFox! I switched when Firefox decided to add a ton of AI crap without providing a "turn this crap off" button (you could force it, but I don't want to fight my tools). Really good experience, been recommending it to all my friends.
Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut the mold off the tasty cheese that is Firefox
For what it is worth they have now added a global kill switch for AI features. Though I appreciate the local translation feature so I'm inclined to keep it on just for that.
I've been using Waterfox on deskop for years and adore it. Firefox for mobile does great. I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly aside from just inertia.
Most computer users have very few real demands to make and it suffices.
"Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive."
That "keep the web open" nonsense is a myth, spread by Mozilla press releases
People who use Firefox, not all of them, "keep open internet [read: www] alive"
If Firefox exists and does the job for them, then they'll use it. These users write the add-ons to do "ad blocking", not Mozilla
If Mozilla closes the door on "ad blockers" then these users will move to another solution, maybe a Firefox fork, maybe a non-browser method, who knows
Mozilla gets ripped because ultimately they are "in it for the money", not Firefox users, and the money, they believe, is in online ad services. Mozilla advocates for having all www content supported by ads. Effectively they advocate for companies like Google
By pure coincidence I'm sure, Mozilla relies on dollars from Google to line their own (management's) pockets. Without an ad services company like Google to partner with, Mozilla's business, sending search queries and possibly other data about Firefox users to Google, cannot survive
But Mozilla communications reframes this operation as something like "we take money from advertising services companies like Google to keep the web open"
Except they will not mention the money from Google part
Then they will lead off press releases with some bizarre assumption like "a healthy online ads ecosystem is essential for the www to exist"
This might make sense to Mozilla but it makes no sense for www users who don't like ads
That's a lot of words to leave me completely unconvinced that Chrome is better than Firefox for an open www.
I'll never understand the "I hate FF for taking google money. That's why I use chrome." When something is so egregious incongruous then it should be a red flag.
You're hallucinating the second part. The comment you replied to doesn't advocate for the use of Chrome.
With few exceptions, I do not use a browser to make HTTP requests, I use small programs to (a) make TCP connections, (b) output HTTP and (c) filter response bodies. I often consume HTML from the www as SQL or plain text
I use a text-only browser to read HTML files offline
HN replies trying to interpret a comment from me as promoting use of Chrome are delusional or perhaps made in bad faith. Quite amusing nonetheless. The comment is about the myth that Mozilla spreads, not about browser choice^1
Mozilla is pro-advertising, it supports online advertising and is supported by online advertising
Google bought Doubleclick. Mozilla bought Anonym, an adtech company started by former Meta employees
Chrome was written by former Firefox developers
Mozilla does not "keep the open internet alive". It just likes to say that. Meanwhile it's supporting the "closed internet" by sending search queries to Google
Internet users write "ad blockers", not Mozilla
1. Yesterday a former Mozilla employee's blog was on the HN front page. He just quit. The blog suggested users should look at the Vivaldi browser. It has a built-in ad blocker
I'm not a fan of "modern" web browsers. I minimise usage of them. They are a necessary evil and the source of countless problems. Online advertising depends on them and probably the income of certain HN commenters, too
Safari on Mac, Firefox on Linux. (Windows: no thanks)
The nice thing about using Firefox is that Zen is by far the best browser I have ever used. So you get all the pros of Firefox in an amazing package.
> Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website.
Firefox is more divisive than AI?
Once again I have to let people know about glide[0], fork of Firefox. I know a lot of people here like keyboard-driven and scriptable software, and glide shines at both. Keyboard control in it is so so much better than the extensions for Chrome or Firefox, and I'm quite happy how easily the API allows me do my own customizations. (as an example when I open HN in new tab with my bind ,sn , if I already have HN front page open it will refresh it, focus it and move it to the tab index where new tab would otherwise have opened. Really simple stuff in glide, not so much in others)
[0[ https://github.com/glide-browser/glide
Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%. Saying "you can use uBlock Origin instead of uBlock Origin Lite!" won't change this.
As long as Firefox keeps up with the standards treadmill, I could be the only person using it, and it really wouldn't affect me any. As of right now, there are vanishingly few sites that earnestly work differently on Firefox than on Chrome. Significantly more sites arbitrarily block non-Chrome User Agents, but that's trivially avoided by just serving a Chrome UA on Firefox.
Which makes it trivial to switch. There's really no justification for sticking with Chrome. Switching to Firefox takes about a minute, you can import all your saved logins and bookmarks, and then maybe spend a whole whopping 30 seconds adding Ublock Origin. Complaints about Chrome amount to "I am too inconceivably lazy to spend 90s switching to a browser that doesn't hate me".
I'll be right there with you. Even with the stupid addition of widgets which immediately get disabled and never used.
All that I care about is that I do not see a single ad in or on anything while I browse. It's a fight but firefox makes it doable.
You won't be the only person using it. I'll be right there with you.
Agree.
I only keep a Chromium based browser around because of Mozilla's asinine decision not to support Web Bluetooth and Web USB that are needed to interact with devices, microcontrollers, etc.
They recently added web serial so here's hoping they might also do BT and USB.
> Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%.
Firefox, originally "Phoenix" when it was first released, originally had 0% and made it up to 30%. There's no technical reason why it can go higher from 2%.
If the folks that started Phoenix/Firefox thought the same way you did, when IE was the top dog, we wouldn't have it in the first place because they would have things were "lost". They decided things were not lost and to make an effort.
We can again choose to consider things "lost", or we can try to turn things around.
That was with a lot of technical innovation against a static competitor. Firefox isn't in nearly as good of a position when it comes to either technology or resources now.
It would be possible for a surge in contributors to bring it back up to a double digit percentage, but I don't think manifest v3 is going to be the catalyst for that.
Apple market share (whether by hardware or operating system) was that low for awhile there and by some estimates OSX even dipped down to 2.29%:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/
And that doesn't even count the dark years of OS9 in the '90s. Have they lost the operating system wars?
The great thing about FOSS is that nobody can stop me using it, and nobody can force you to use it. We can all be happy.
The great thing about Firefox "losing" the "war" is that Chrome users' ad viewing essentially pays for my internet, and with only 2% market share, nobody will pay any attention to those of us still blocking ads. Sometimes you lose the war, but still end up winning the battle :)
I think there was a huge missed opportunity with the recent Google monopoly case, which could have been used to give users a dialog box to select a browser from a list instead of starting with Chrome as the pre-installed default.
It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company.
It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.
It depends a bit on the market. Firefox still has 15% desktop market share in Germany, only at second place after Chrome.
What does it matter for users if it's at 2% if it works better than the alternatives?
Lots of products and services have small market share and are better than the market leaders.
I don’t care about its market share. Most people are tech illiterate. This comes as no surprise.
I use Safari, and it’s good.
No ublock origin so it is less good.
I use 1blocker (desktop+mobile) with Little Snitch (desktop only). I’m OK.
Agreed, however Wipr seems about as good in practice.
[flagged]
Software you can’t run on your machine is useless? Okay.
There's a qualifier there and I think it's important.
And there's LibreWolf, for people who want to use Firefox without Mozilla.
Hear, hear!
Mozilla seems to have a string of bad leadership but when compared to Alphabet, I don't see how there can be any choice. Use Firefox or one of the niche privacy focused forks.
My uBlock Origin works perfectly well.
I prefer ungoogled-chromium: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
How does it helps with this issue? It becomes a much bigger fork if they keep the manifest support.
that doesnt get your ublock orign after this.
>Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed,
Funny how people always blame Mozilla's good faith critics, but they never engage into hearing them out on why so many people rip mozilla to shreds in the first place. With a "stop being mean to my favorite billion dollar corporation" attitude.
Gee, maybe there's valid reasons on why so many people dunk on Mozilla. Hear them out before you snarkily dish on them. And it's Mozilla who should hear them out the most, if they actually cared about FF's market share, but they don't because those Google cheques keep clearing.
>That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars
And where has the EU been all these years on this topic? Where is it now?
They could just easily have blocked google from pushing MV3 on anti consumer and anti competitive grounds alone. End of story. But they didn't.
white hat firefox, black hat brave?
I prefer an ad (and porn, gambling, social media) blocking host file myself.
A lot of sites serve their ads from the same domains as their actual content nowadays.
So if you really don't want to ever see ads again, you need something at the application layer.
Many browsers and programs now days ignore HOSTs.
Necessary, but not sufficient. Sometimes you want to block certain URLs and not whole domains.
Or certain elements.
[flagged]
How so?
Yeah. Take Firefox choosing to create PDF.js to have a clean minimalist sandboxed PDF parser. Chrome instead used an existing one that has been the source of dozens of vulnerabilities.
Or Firefox pulling in a ton of anti-fingerprinting measures from the Tor team. Not even worth talking about anti-fingerprinting as a serious consideration in Chrome.
Rust - a mozilla effort that resulted in code from servo being pulled into Firefox - chrome is headed that way too.
Even WASM was definitely a security improvement over NaCL, and Mozilla also led the way on Flash replacements in the day, making one of the first JS flash players (in the end, the solution was no more flash, but hey, at least they tried).
Font sanitisation - originally a mozilla security effort...
I feel I could go on and on.
Everything you said don't really matter when there is basically no site sandboxing on Android and desktop.
[edit] correction - I looked this up - I thought they used the chrome version, but they wrote their own sandboxing layer from scratch. On top of that they go beyond Chrome's measures with containers that isolate pretty much everything tracking-related if you use them. https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/05/18/introducing-sit...
That's on the desktop. I don't know about the situation on Android, but my impression was the codebases are pretty similar these days.
Where did you get the idea there was no sandboxing?
Did you know that Mozilla spends so much of their budget on their CEO's compensation that they actually had to lay off the entire Servo team?
Cite? I think the timeline has issues there. That predates the CEO controversies AFAIK. They did ditch a lot of R&D as their userbase kept shrinking due to chrome growth. 'course this sort of thing keeps coming up - yeah, I do think their CEO is overpaid ... and? Solution is what. Kill firefox off completely, hand internet over to chrome? Basically, where is this point going?
In 2018, Baker received $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla. In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5.5 million, and again to over $6.9 million in 2022. In August 2020, the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues after laying off roughly 70 employees in January 2020. Baker stated this was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundat...
Yes, the (significant) salary increases happened well after the servo team was cut. In 2020 when that happened she was at 3 million at a revenue of 466 million or 0.6% of revenue.
They laid off 320 people that year. If she had taken a salary of $0 they could have paid them each <$10k with that salary.
I don't think the salary was appropriate, but like a lot of these CEO compensation things, it's not going to make a huge difference to the final problem. Which was people switching to Chrome which google was pushing aggressively everywhere. ... and I guess purists here abandoning them for... Chrome? Again, no idea what the point is here. Mozilla has flaws, so screw 'em?
https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
Surprised I'm so much downvoted.
Just an FYI there are many efforts already available to clean and or provide a clean Firefox.
>I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else
Brave and Vivaldi strike me as being at least not worse.
They're built on Chromium, they still reinforce the Chromium monoculture and expand Google's influence.
I thought that brave was caught injecting affiliate links. That alone makes it worse than anything mozilla has done.
Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1ebbeas/why_...
ill be in the strong minority here, and it should be opt-in, but if theres no affiliate link, i would be ok with my tiny marketshare browser capturing the extra. less ethical for them to be replacing other peoples affiliate links, but they are also blocking ads ... so, not exactly the most purely ethical product in the world anyway.
Those 2 browsers used a rendering engine developed by Google. It would not be wrong to consider them partial chromium reskins with all the technical dependency it entails.
There is a reason Mozilla is getting ripped to shreds.
I’m using Brave and I’d rather people support a degoogled fork of chromium that supports ublock origin, than keeping Mozilla on life support.
And if you don’t like Brave just fork it again.
You mean the same Brave that's only going to offer "limited MV2 support" for five hand chosen extensions because they aren't able of truly keeping it alive? https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/#which-mv2-...
Anything Chromium based is tainted. They will not be able to keep out all of Google's shitty decisions because they are not building a browser, they are building a skin on top of somebody else's browser.
There's a reason Brave sucks too. From dabbling into cryptocurrency to charging $60 for Brave origins, it's also a dubious proposal.
Edit: Someone on Reddit compiled a list of various fuckups. https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_b...
Of the no-hassle browsers (read: widely support, no snags) it is still the most private browser you can run. It blows Firefox out of the water on adblocking and its adblocking itself doesn't rely on Manifest so it isn't hit by Google's changes.
This is an unadvisable forest-v-trees calculation. At any given time, Firefox is rarely the "best" at any snapshot metric.
It's nonetheless the thing you can overwhelmingly trust the most in the long run.
Brave seems silly theoretically for two reasons:
1) I think it's well established (or perhaps not well established enough) that "non-profit" is the only way to go for base level computing things like this. Profit motive (as distinguishable from "keep the lights on money," e.g. with Wikipedia) makes you do unnecessary and often harmful experimentation.
2) It's a fork of the thing you're trying to beat. Now, that may not be a deal-killer, but given Chrome's dominance, getting outside of that entirely seems smarter.
Because Mozilla allocates far too much of their budget to executive compensation, which has led to the layoff of many Firefox maintainers, including the entire Servo team.
A self-respecting hacker would choose a piece of tech that is well-maintained, not one that only recently added profile support after all these years, or one that still offers an ancient bookmark and history UI.
This is confidently repeated but extremely misleading claim that seems to pop up ad nauseam in the comment sections. They spend more now on development than they ever have in their history, and the CEO spending is something like 1.6% of the budget, which I don't love, but which is not enough to sustain the narrative of all the money being siphoned into executives.
They also break down spending into a pie chart of different types and development gets more than anything. If you look at their actual budget or the published changes to new releases it tells a different story than vibes based internet comment sections. But you have be approaching conversations in an open-to-new-information kind of way.
1.6% is insane though. That would be like Google, Apple, or MSFT paying their CEO $4-6 billion a year.
Which is why it's not normal or standard to represent pay that way. The whole reason for it in this context is to address claims that people keep making over and over that they ran out of money to develop the browser because they gave it all to the CEO.
The problem is, the market price for executive leadership doesn't care about that, there is always a floor at the bottom that will make leadership compensation consume much more % of the budget of a smaller org than something the size of Google.
Besides... the real compensation for big-tech executives or for early startup employees isn't a fixed dollar amount, it's the stock options. Let these vest and cool down for 10 years or so, and when you look at them again, they can easily be worth a billion a year. That's how a bunch of "angel investors" in SV got their money, they profited massively off of a good exit event in the past and now invest a chunk of that profit.
Well, I'm certainly glad that Google has never given their executives a lot of compensation or done layoffs of their workers.
[dead]