Tell HN: Firefox has madea lotof progress. Let the browser wars continue
Like many others around here, i switch over to chrome around the v8 days when it was a superior runtime and haven't looked back. Due to the recent youtube shanangins with adblock and adding a Thread.Sleep(5 seconds) call to every webpage load, i decided to try out firefox again. I had alot of extensions (ublock, bitwarden etc) so i was concerned this was gonna be a whole thing.
I downloaded firefox, it imported the chrome history and all the plugins i had and i was pretty much continuing where i left off without any issues or "noticing the change".
I'm no longer concerned about manifest v3, youtube adblock warfare etc and it's nice to have a complete drop in replacement for chrome so we don't end up like the intel days where it had no competition and suffered with 4 core cpus for a decade.
Let the browser wars continue.
49 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadI don’t know if people are overestimating but it sure as shit does surprise me each and every day.
also re adblock users being the minority, i think if we were, google a 1T company won't bother with this. It has to be a large chunk of their viewers.
uBlock origin has 10,000,000+ users on the web store. Adblock has 10,000,000+ users. Adblock Plus has 10,000,000+ users.
I believe that 10,000,000+ means "any number above 10m" and not something like "between 10m and 100m", which means that 10m could potentially be a vast underestimation.
But either way, that's 30m devices, minimum, running adblock. That's 10% of the US population. Just for 3 adblockers I picked at random. And I would not be surprised to find that the number was 10x, even 50x higher than that.
I know I've downloaded uBlock Origin probably about 20 times over the years.
"users", which I assume means "devices".
Instead of just buying a monitor and plugging your laptop in to stream... which seems far cheaper and better.
So I think a lot of people actually don't really mind ads that much tbh.
Others just do not know how to setup a media experience and just take what their Roku, or other media device gives them.
As younger people age up, these stats will change significantly.
It is that future fueling ad block wars, IMHO
Whenever I would alt-tab back to FF, it would hang for a half second, just long enough be annoying. Chrome is instant.
Only thing I miss is middle click mouse drag feature.
or for that matter set default settings? like use of doh or proxies?
for any browser actually.
For example, it's much easier in FF to not use tabs, which is important to me.
Also I want to support them because I think Google is getting to strong overall and a monoculture is no good.
I wish more Devs/IT people would use ff and lead the way for their non techie friend and family
I've had exactly zero performance issues. I watch YouTube, Netflix, AppleTV+, HBO. I access many SPAS. I use Google Meet for conference calls at work. I use websites that have a custom video player to watch their stuff.
CPU and memory usage are always low. No freezing. Nada.
I'm not questioning you or anything, I'm genuinely curious why some people seem to have these issues.
https://mango.pdf.zone/stealing-chrome-cookies-without-a-pas...
Maybe something that would be valuable is encryption with the password manager's master password. That way you would have to enter the password at browser startup.
Now all this is pointless due to Chrome allowing remote debugging, but Firefox could come along and do it right and it would actually be an increase in security. A random unsandboxed binary trying to access the key would be blocked by the kernel.
This might not be completely feasible under the current form of webextensions, however I wonder what would it take to work around Google's bad faith behaviour, and make firefox truly first-class.
And of course, on Android, they messed it up big time when they switched to Quantum, and stopped supporting most extensions for years. (That was when I switched to Samsung browser, and realized that it is pretty much the best one on Android - after Firefox 68, which got pretty old after a while).
Of course I'm still a Firefox user on Desktop (and I also support them with code actually in the embedded space), but I consider them a wasted OSS opportunity.
Plus it doesn't offer me as much configurability as Vivaldi, at least in these areas I care for.
I'd love to hear that FF has 50% usage ratę again, but I will stick to chromium based browser.
This is one of the things I love about Firefox. So many options available, even if not "fully supported" tend to work well. Although they appear to be moving away from this approach with the move to only We extensions.
and
> with a CSS rule or two in userChrome.css.
Are firmly at odds. Over 99% of users will not have the ability or the desire to do this. Heck, I know exactly what you mean and how to do it, and I would never do it as it's a pain in the butt. I don't use a browser to mess around with its "conf" files. Either it does what I want or I can change it without leaving the app. Everything else is onerous.
One of the features that's exclusive to Firefox, and I love, are the "Multi account containers". These let me have colored tabs with different contexts, so I can log in to a service with multiple users in one browser! Mighty useful for web development, for example. Even colleagues look at my setup with awe, but it's just Firefox and the official container addon.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Sorry for ignorance, some moves from Mozilla like unblockable ads on page about VPN, constant redesign of GUI without clear aim, removing/dropping support of settings that I use forced me to change browser from Firefox to Vivaldi.