It nerfs adblockers so the current net convenience of using Chromium vs Firefox becomes a net inconvenience. Manifest v2 disablement day might as well be Firefox Switching Day.
Happy to chime in regarding LibreWolf and Waterfox, as it comes up alot in our support forums[1]:
This question comes up every now and then, I'll base my currently updated reply starting with my previous response[2]:
> Now, ignoring feature differences between all the forks out there, I'd like to present a different perspective and consideration that I think gets overlooked when comparing forks like Waterfox to other forks (if I am incorrect regarding Librewolf, someone please correct me).
> Waterfox provides signed binaries for download. Librewolf (and most of the rest) do not. Checksum's are all well and good, but IMO, not enough. Code signing provides trust.
> Librewolf does not provide auto-updates. There are 3rd party tools out there, but IMHO that brings in its own set of problems, and breaks the chain-of-trust.
> The most important one that I believe, maybe apart from Pale Moon, only Waterfox does, is offers _accountability_. There is (and has been since 2012) a legal entity behind Waterfox. That used to be Waterfox Limited, then it was System1 and now BrowserWorks (the entity I control). Laws must be abided and the end user actually has an entity to hold accountable. GDPR, CCPA, the rest are things that _actually_ need to be followed. The other projects, who are you _really_ going to hold accountable if things go wrong? To me this is super important because a browser is used for sensitive information. It's just not worth the risk otherwise. This also goes hand in hand with the code signing.
> Above all else, Waterfox has been around for 12 years
> Don't get me wrong, things like EV code signing certs are a bit of a racket, and yeah you can jump in and code audit all those other forks too. But really, push comes to shove, they can just disappear into the aether.
Separately, I'd say the end goals of each browser are different. Librewolf seems to aim for privacy on a rolling release. Tor and Mull will both target ESR (extended support releases, which is where Mozilla aim for my enterprise friendly releases of features being set and instead security/bug patches applied only). All of them will sacrifice compatibility for privacy/security. From my above comment, I'd go with Tor if you're willing to sacrifice speed, Mull if you want better speed but broken websites. After all a web browser probably accesses the most _sensitive_ data it can, I'd put my faith in a piece of a software run by a legal entity so you can have some legal recourse on matters.
Waterfox's goal in terms of privacy is a usable web that still leans heavily to privacy but doesn't want to sacrifice the web experience for that to work.
Waterfox has done a lot to reach that, from careful curation of preferences to supplemental infrastructure such as DNS over Oblivious HTTP (DoOH). These aren't just features that "might" help; there's real benefit to it. For example, users have reported being able to access censored websites when using Waterfox. In my opinion, I've reached Waterfox's goal perfectly here: privacy and web compatibility.
Then, there's all the other "sugar" on top:
- Customization
- Reverting features removed by Mozilla but are genuinely useful/should've remained in Firefox.
- Adding features when Mozilla is slow to do so (better JPEG-XL support for one).
- The only fork that AFAIK that supports DRM content, for watching Netflix, Prime Video etc. Considering how difficult this was to achieve I doubt any will get support any time soon either.
I use Firefox because it's the least bad option remaining, certainly not because I believe it's the last remaining ethical web browser. I have no confidence in Mozilla's ethics or mission, and no longer contribute directly or financially for that reason.
I agree with the implicit point. From the ethics standpoint, regardless of what happens at the top, Mozilla's waywardness isn't reflected in the browser, unlike Google's web and user hostility with Chrome (manifest v3 etc).
86% of revenue of Mozilla corp are royalties, which encompasses any search engine that shares revenue with Firefox, not just Google. But the remaining 14% is not only revenue generated by Firefox, but also by e.g. Pocket. So from their financial statement, it's pretty hard to say what percentage of Firefox's revenue is derived from Google.
I believe Mozilla falls into a difficult non-profit grey area. Having another browser on the market isn’t as critical to humanity as providing anti-malarial medicine to millions of Africans, yet I think we can all agree that a world without any browser competition would suck for people rich enough to use a browser in the first place. It would be hard for Mozilla to attract $400M/yr of relatively strings-free cash from anyone other than Google.
Google’s search dominance won’t be cured by Mozilla ending its partnership. It will only be cured by innovative competitors who discover an even better way of organizing the internet’s information (perhaps OpenAI or LLMs generally?), or by government regulation. In the meantime, I like to think of Mozilla’s siphoning of cash from Google as a good thing while we all wait for a proper long term solution that may never arrive.
A similar philosophical question ought to confront us every day about many things we use without thinking, both on the internet and off.
I switched back to firefox last year and haven't looked back. I still use chrome on another laptop sometimes, the performance difference from my human perspective is literally zero.
These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.
The only site I've found behaves terribly in Firefox is LinkedIn. Weird pauses on page load that lock the whole browser (not just the tab) for like 5-10 seconds. No idea what they're doing to make this happen, but it's odd.
Which is, well, fine, because LinkedIn is mostly a dumpster anyways.
Any site that is on the edge of performance (often due to bad engineering, which you can blame on time constraints) will perform vastly better in Chromium.
I don't much care, TBH. Having worked in the Chromium codebase before, I know what an absolutely mammoth amount of engineering hours goes into that.
V8 on its own is a technological miracle.
But all funded by a firehose of crazy privacy invading ad revenue.
So. I'll live with the odd pause and a bit of battery drain. I gave Google 10 years of my life as an employee in exchange for $$, I'm not interested in giving them the rest of my life for free.
It's funny because I worked in that repository for a few years, and routinely built a custom "shell" (what Chromecast is) and when this guy suggested Brave my thought was... eh, yeah, sure, but I could also just roll my own or just run stock chromium :-)
I personally like that Firefox isn't based on webkit/blink.
Okay, well, they're using React and most React engineers aren't very good so it ends up being a clusterfuck that most people don't even notice given how well Chromium is optimized.
This prompted me to check LinkedIn after months of having it parked in a tab and it worked with no problems.
When I have problems with a site it's usually because I'm blocking most JavaScript with uMatrix and I have to find the correct combination of scripts to make the site work for me without having to give away my soul to the gods of tracking.
As a software developer, it's been years since a customer told me that the sites I develop on Firefox don't work on Chrome or Safari. I don't even bother to check anymore. I couldn't check with Safari anyway and they are OK with that. The point is that if it works in Firefox it works everywhere. Of course we're not using any Chrome-only API but we never had to use one of them as far as I can remember.
Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites. However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with "Multi-Account Containers", "Temporary Containers", "uBlock Origin", and a few more. These are amazing for privacy and productivity, but will occasionally cause broken websites.
Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.
Nah, there's plenty of examples of sites breaking on Firefox. For example, the recent degraded performance on Youtube linked to Firefox User Agent strings.
Yeah but that's not on Mozilla in any way. That's just Google's anti-competitive practices. Firefox refuses to jump on Google's attempts to ban adblockers with Manifest V3 so Google wants to punish them
What matters for the end user is the experience. If using FF will lead to a poor experience on certain websites, then why recommend it?
Do people honestly believe that if they keep recommending FF, people will magically switch to FF and Google will be forced to stop its anti-competitive practices?
Yea - because Google is just outright acting evil in a number of ways. A good example is the fact that background blur isn't supported in google meet in FF and that audio translation is similarly blocked in FF. These are just arbitrary ways that Google is degrading the FF experience because of their commanding market share.
> What matters for the end user is the experience. If using FF will lead to a poor experience on certain websites, then why recommend it?
Because holding that against Firefox is exactly what Google is counting on. And the more you recommend it the harder it is for Google to continue its anti-competitive practices.
The more you fall a fool for Google's (or Microsoft a decade ago) practices, the worse the experience for everyone is in the future.
Anyways, there's simple extensions that will sidestep Chrome's bs. In addition, you'll soon to be able to get an adblocked experience that you can only get on Firefox. That means less network traffic, faster loading websites, and better user privacy
Speaking of adblock experience with Firefox (and uBlock origin), Google has managed to slip ads into my Youtube experience. So far I can skip them after watching the first 5 seconds so it's not too bad.
Before that they had a popup that would timeout after 15s (?). At that point I tried disabling uBlock on Youtube but found the ads stacked up to much longer, so the 15s delay was more acceptable.
As expected, this will probably continue to be a cat and mouse game.
Well, there's also the fact that Google is currently being prosecuted for antitrust violations on both sides of the Atlantic...
Do you honestly believe that it's OK for Google to just keep being anti-competitive? Or that this is a completely inevitable and unfixable state of affairs?
We can, should, and will hold Google accountable for its monopolistic conduct, and this is absolutely part of that.
If you want an experience that includes privacy violations, knock yourself out. Personally, as an end user, that is exactly what I don’t want, which is why I use Firefox
What good does not recommending it achieve? Maintaining the status quo which as well discussed elsewhere in these threads is hardly generally desirable?
My move back to FF has been slow (as mentioned already too) but I've been recommending it to others, who don't have my self-inflicted blocker, for some time. Maybe some will stop listening if I keep mentioning it, but people online I'll never meet in person are hardly a great loss in my life. The sort of people who are going to take such issue in RealLife™ are likely those just paying me attention in exchange largely for free tech support (the matter isn't likely to come up in other contexts) and they can do one anyway too.
It doesn't ban a blockers outright but does severely hamper them. It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin, and also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves and forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store.
Both of those will seriously hamper a more advanced adblock like UBlock Origin
>It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin
The limits are 30,000 static rules and 30,000 dynamic rules. Running tens of thousands of regexs for each request can lead to a performance impact. Allowing for even higher limits may result in people having a worse experience from the browser becoming slower. The API was designed such that these limits can be increased in the future as available computation and user needs change over time. Getting extension developers to design their extensions in a way where they have to think about not slowing down the browser too much I think is a good thing and I would not call these current limits severe.
>also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves
declarativeNetRequest lets rules be added and removed dynamically by the extension.
>forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store
The Chrome team has said that configuration can be updated outside of a store update. What the Chrome web store does not want are extensions that download and run code. This policy does not related to mv3.
It bans the ability for them to block or reroute network requests. Some adblockers might still work on some sites, but it'd mostly be an aesthetic feature. Your browser is still receiving the data, your network is still clogged, and websites are still slower.
I feel like it doesn't matter how many examples of Firefox not working properly you are faced with, you will simply respond "well that's not Mozilla's fault, that on the website developer" for each and every one. At the end of the day it's the Firefox user who is faced with the problem.
I do feel that there’s a difference in kind between: “a website was built with Chrome in mind, and has problems rendering in Firefox”, and “a website was built specifically to degrade in Firefox”.
If no engineering time was spent on Firefox, and it’s broken in Firefox, that’s a Firefox problem.
If active engineering time was spent on _deliberately breaking_ Firefox, then yes, I don’t think that’s a Firefox problem. I think it’s a website problem at that point.
which means other than a small handful of power users most people will continue using chrome, and websites will continue prefering to put it first, continuing the cycle
im curious to see what effect ublock not working as well on chrome as it will on firefox will have to the demographics, if there's no shift then that's a hurdle that has to be overcome by either firefox by some sort of engineering, google, or via legislation
Nowadays there's very few websites that work on Chrome but not Firefox. Hell I'd even throw modern Safari in that. Interop 2021-2023 has made a huge difference
Besides specific Google products, most everything works across all 3 major engines.
In addition, Mozilla adds specific code to Firefox to counteract anti-competitive practices on specific websites
Firefox doesn't. But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does. I keep Chrome up for VirusTotal to scan PortableApps.com releases. In Firefox, it'll throw broken ReCaptcha prompts over and over and over after a certain number of scans per day (pick the thing, next, pick the thing, next x10, etc). And that's with all extensions disabled. Possibly related: VirusTotal and ReCaptcha are owned by Google.
It's not patronage if you don't pay. Google would rather not have you as a user if it costs them any amount of time to support you. The relationship here is adversarial on both sides and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
if firefox users keep flooding their support line with problems then that means firefox users are costing them money. eventually it will be cheaper to build software that actually works.
> But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does.
Honestly, we should take the same stand against them. Those who are hostile towards Firefox should be publicly named and shamed for sheer incompetence and/or malice.
I have chrome installed. In the rare occasion that Firefox does not do a good job I just switch to chrome for that website and then go back.
This is usually the case if there might be forms or something like that. It's minor enough that it doesn't bother me.
Now, on the other hand, tab management is so much better with chrome and I've considered using Chrome for that reason alone. At work I do use chrome because I usually have 10-15 websites open at a time (for example I like to keep one tab group per ticket and every related item to it there).
I do use simple tab groups on Firefox but it's not good enough at least to replace my workflow at work.
Hey! So I finally felt inspire and made a demo of my Firefox userchrome.css and Tree Style Tabs customization and CSS on my Github here [1]. It makes it so that the Tree style tabs expand and contract over the page, showing just the favicon and number of sub-tabs when contracted, along with a few other things, like reducing border sizes and adding better indication for sound in a tab. It's pretty nifty I think; I hope someone finds it to their liking. :)
I wish tab groups to be implemented natively. Or that extensions can manage the tab bar instead of using a sidebar. That’s the best experience we can get so far, but it does not feel right to me.
"Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites" .. for you.
I regulary ran across something that does not work or has a broken style. And I know how to turn UO off.
And why should that be a surprise? FF has way less manpower than Chrome. (And even fired lots of engineers, to raise the CEO bonus)
Chrome leads the way and probably the vast majority developes for chrome and with chrome dev tools. So most of the time FF works, but not always. And performance is just worse, but not noticable on a desktop and on mobile it is offset by the working adblock. Meaning perceived performance is usually better, because ads are blocked, unlike in chrome mobile.
Not the worst idea to avoid a website for breaking in FF (or take a chance to touch grass), but unfortunately when you can't pay your credit card bill or need something for your work and it only works in Chromium it can't be avoided.
And sadly it can be worse, with my quite complex app, that I absolutely did not tailor for chrome, but gone out of my way to also support FF - the result is that chrome is just 3x faster.
> Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites.
There are definitely websites that don't work with Firefox out of the box. Just one example that annoys me is https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com. "Firefox users: Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection may interfere with Sign In. Temporarily disable it in Firefox Privacy Settings to load the sign in screen."
Alternatively read as: “We are actively hostile to user-chosen browser privacy settings such that we develop our application to coach our users to turn these settings off as a necessary means of accessing their account”. I guess that’s what they call a death spiral given that the behavior discourages me from attending any would-have-been-DCI events.
I use Firefox with uBlock Origin. I don't use containers but I do use profiles.
Yes some sites are "broken" with uBlock Origin. I don't find it to be many, however. I run into paywalls much more often than I do problems with my browser settings.
There's some more you should do to increase privacy: Disable Firefox sending each keystroke into the address bar to all the numerous search engines (includes google). Best to just enable the separate bar for search and disable search suggestions entirely.
> Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.
I have good luck just using a private window, since that has no extensions by default. Bonus: It's really fast; ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-c enter
I have had sites that are definitely broken in Firefox even after a stock install with every last toggle/extension/script blocker turned off. It's fairly rare, but there are a slowly growing list of sites that don't behave properly under Firefox but work in Chromium.
I use a home video appliance called camect which is accessed through a web interface which explicitly only works in chromium browsers. Oddly, I often find that the bbc news page doesn't load images on the first attempt in Firefox, but always does in Chrome.
Yeah im still a bit surprised that Github doesnt work in firefox for me. It wont load a repository page, its just blank with nothing but the navigation on the page. This happens after turning off all plugins. dont know if github has made it so only chrome works but thats a pretty major site for firefox to not work with.
I have two profiles for firefox dorkily called "hax0r mode" and "normie mode", each with different theming so I can tell the diff.
I try to do as much as I can in hax0r mode, which has uBlock O, NoScript, auto cookie delete and a few other privacy settings like no 3rd party cookies. Sites usually start pretty broken before I tweak NoScript for them, which I'm OK with.
Occasionally, sites are obstinate and I need to use Normie mode (e.g. for Maps)
Normie mode just has uBlock O, containers. I really have zero problems with sites breaking here.
Multi-account-containers doesn't really break websites in my opinion. It's just like running a separate browser (in fact it's simply a firefox profile under the hood).
What can go wrong is if you've set a certain site to always open in a certain container and another site redirects you to this site. This can happen with Identity Providers like Okta, ADFS etc. They will then open in a different container (the assigned one) and lose context. Especially microsoft services have an annoying habit of redirecting through 25 different URLs on every sign-in. But if configured correctly it's a godsend, you can use this tool to sign into multiple MS tenants at the same time, something with chrome and not even Edge can do right now (switching teams between multiple tenants is a nightmare).
But I don't think it's the multi accounts containers at fault here, it's the user. Just don't do that :P
I also had problems recently with an online notary service... they forced me to use Chrome...
Not the same problem, but I wonder when faxes will disappear... For example, Progressive Insurance wanted me fax, mail pictures or bring them in person... email didn't work... Of course they didn't have a safe way to transfer them digitally but I would not care if everyone in the world saw those emails.
The useless requirements that they set just proves that they don't understand technology.
Zero broken websites here, and I use those and more extensions. I also use FF on Android and iPadOS (although that's a Safari reskin, it provides some niceties on top like send tab to device).
If GP is anything like me, they used Firefox before Chrome was released. The Mozilla/Netscape suite that spawned Firefox is older than Google itself.
For a time, Firefox performed worse than a rabid dog. Chrome ate their lunch and gained market share fast. I and many of my colleagues switched around that time.
In my case: Because Opera stopped using Presto and switched to Chromium. That does says a bit about when I switched.
I used Firefox pretty extensively, then switch to Chrome when Firefox fell behind on speed, but the developer tools absolutely sucks in Chrome, so I tried Opera which had a great feature set, speed and wonderful developer tools. It was a pretty sad day when Opera dropped Presto, and more so when they where bought by some Chinese company.
I've been using FireFox for about 4.5 years now, but I have to have Chrome installed for a few reasons unfortunately.
- Some websites still will just not work in FireFox. It's not super common anymore, but if I sense something is fishy, I pop open the console and see some strange error and swap over to Chrome. Things will just work then. All extensions disabled even. I even ran into this on Vanguard's website, albeit for some obscure forms.
- When I worked at a company that had a larger web app presence, I would have to test in Chrome. That's a given, but my Chrome counterparts did not do the same with FireFox. I would fairly regularly (few times a quarter) find things that were completely broked on FireFox.
All that said, I don't really care about my choice in browser very much, but I'd rather support Mozilla over Google still. Especially since they're the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company. I'd like to help support a more open web, even if it's just a little bit.
> Some websites still will just not work in FireFox
I run into this as well, but I just use Safari as my backup browser and that usually is good enough. The only thing I still need to use Chrome for is my Nest thermostat.
> Especially since they're the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company.
You know, it's not necessarily a bad thing that another enormous company is competing with Chrome. It might be less than ideal than Firefox having Safari's share, but it still eats at Google's monopoly more effectively.
I unfortunately switched back to Chrome last week after having used Firefox for years due to not being able to use sites I frequent. I constantly ran into issues with Heroku, GCP (go figure), and a few financial sites I'd log into regularly.
I tried FF for a long time but finally switched to Brave. Yes, I'll be downvoted for saying this but it's objectively one of my top 3 favorite browsers rn.
1. Brave
2. Edge
3. Safari
I like each of them for different reasons. Brave (after disabling annoying features such as crypto and VPN) is awesome and its iOS app is the only one which can play videos in the background, has dark mode, and syncs really well with the desktop app.
Edge is so tempting esp. with recent Microsoft Copilot which makes it so useful (I can summarize pages right in the browser, organize my tabs by telling so to the Copilot, etc.)
Safari is not a good browser per se and lacks many features and plugins, but it's minimal and doesn't drain the battery like Brave and FF.
I really wanted to like FF but it's just not cutting it anymore.
Brave is really good and always surprising me with features while largely staying lean and out of my way.
They recently added a chatbot that runs locally they call Leo based on llama2. It's pretty impressive that you can perform LLM tasks on the current page without the use of any 3rd party service. And of course you can pay them for the souped up version. https://brave.com/leo-release/
Feels like I am alone in thinking the crypto features of Brave are cool. And not because I think that industry generally isn't full of slime. But micropayments for content has been a good, latent idea for a generation, and here they've simply built it as a default feature.
I still use FF and Brave equally because of my experience with the first browser wars and my mistrust of Chrome, having become the new IE.
This also where I landed with Brave as it seems to be working great for all of devices. Runs smoothly and I don’t really have a problem full with many sites on aggressive mode. I’ve had the sync’ing feature go flaky a few times, but over all good experience.
My big gripe with FF honestly is the lack for PWA ( progressive web apps) If they resurrect that effort I’d give it a shot. I’m not really interested in running another browser for that feature.
Also the brave privacy settings are remarkably better “by default” across all my devices. I’m sure Firefox can be configured to be hardened I just have other ways I’d like to spend my time. Heck I’d even pay for better option for all my devices.
It'll all render the same using Chrome/Blink, but forks might take out tracking by Google (and potentially add other tracking), add adblock outside of plugins, or re-add support for Manifest V2 to name a few. Chromium forks can actually be pretty different.
Chromium is over 20 million lines of code. No Chromium fork is meaningfully different. Come back with that BS when Blink has 25% of its contributions coming from one of these Chrome skins.
That is true, but the Chrome/Chromium ecosystem is largely driven by Google. And Google makes use of this power position to push through web standards that benefit them, but not the users. Therefore I choose to use Firefox, to support a more open browser ecosystem.
I use FF on my desktop and Brave on mobile. I tried FF on mobile and it has too many issues, unlike its desktop counterpart. And there are no good maintained de-googled chromium alternatives on Android other than Brave.
Same, but other way around. Don’t even have Chrome installed. I don’t know what websites people are using, but I’m glad to not need them. The idea that a site could fail to render on any reasonably common browser seems pretty absurd.
I'm a FF-first user but I definitely have had to keep Chrome around for a few things— my investment banking doesn't load in FF nor do some parts of Office 365.
I'm fully switching to FF at home now. I'd half done it but had a large collection of tabs open in Chrome which kept pulling me back as I couldn't be bothered with reassessing them all (a fair I should have closed) and recording the ones I still wanted to keep elsewhere. Chrome gave me the final push the other day by completely forgetting most of those open items during an update.
I'd not encountered anything broken in Chrome that was fixed by FF though.
I'll still be primarily Chrome in DayJob though, as most of our clients' users are (with some on Edge, a few using FF, and a couple of idiots still not off IE though we don't officially support that) so that makes sense even though I very rarely touch anything front-end these days.
SuperTabs is Chrom{e|ium} only which doesn't help as I'm moving to FF. OneTab looks partly useful, but often where I came from is important as well as the current tab location, if I've travelled through links “normally” rather than opening in a new tab every time, and I wouldn't expect it to keep that history.
Really, I need to get away from using tabs for long-term state rather than finding a better way to use tabs for that. It would make switching UA easier when I want to, and switching machine too for that matter.
Also, I've been burned by tab and/or session management extensions going stalky (TheGreatSuspender & friends), or stagnating and failing after a time.
I want to move as much state beyond active interactive use away from the browser. I've never kept passwords there or gone in for built-in sync options, but feel the need to take this further. The older I get, the more I see tight integration as a lock-in rather than a benefit.
I've been using Firefox for regular browsing for years now, but I use Chrome for streaming videos (Firefox streaming quality is noticably worse) and LibreWolf for YouTube (blocks ads). It's annoying to have 3 browsers open basically all of the time.
I'm slowly migrating a lot of my browsing out of Safari and into LibreWolf, and using the opportunity to document accounts/passwords that i want to keep.
If i were willing to get an iPhone, then i'd be quite happy with Safari (i don't have Chrome installed on my Mac), but I want the ability to have my bookmarks available on multiple phones & computers... so firefox profiles (in LibreWolf) is the mechanism i've decided to use for that (for now)
What would be really cool is a Firefox plugin that allowed you to replace the entire browser tab with a Chromium renderer on a specific website if you so wish, and remember that setting. That way there would really be no need to install Chrome for a few one-off websites.
Considering both Firefox and Chromium are open-source it should be entirely possible.
> Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data
This is true for Google, etc, but definitely not for Apple. Not saying Apple is perfect in every way, but they actually have a track record for privacy protection.
Brave runs on Chrome and has some of the highest privacy protections.
I love Firefox, but just questioning if there aren’t good solutions available on Chrome.
And while Apple may
not have a business model as focused on selling data, they still have a growing ad business + weaker protections against fingerprinting and ad blocking
It's worth noting that PrivacyTests tests default configurations. If a browser has a good suite of privacy features but doesn't have them on by default, they'll score low on the benchmark.
Firefox, for example, can be hardened very well with options and extensions, but has many bad defaults (like Google default search with search suggestions on).
The site is all baseline, not potential. Not peak potential, not press a couple buttons potential.
Apple definitely makes a lot of money from advertising...probably more than they make from selling Macs (based on 2022 results).
Also I think this quote might be technically right, but Mozilla's revenue is almost entirely paid from advertising companies who pay royalties to have their search engines by default in Firefox. So they are very much coupled to the dynamics of the ads industry.
Not doubting you, but do you have a source for that? Best I could find was their last quarterly earnings report which does have “Services” ahead of everything but iPhone, but I would imagine includes some big money makers like AppleCare.
Just a small correction. Large parts of revenue are obtained though sharing ad revenue between Mozilla and a search engine, not for being the default search engine.
If you keep feeding the Google monster you soon won't be able to browse the internet without a 3rd party attesting that your computer is worth browsing that site.
And after that's normalized, then Google will enhance your user experience by bringing "Android Webview security" to Chrome on android, you know, it makes you really secure, it's really to help you keep safe.
A few years down the road, a surprising amount of companies insist you can only use their product on those secure smartphone browsers because of it's enhanced security, so Google helps you out by adding a special "Android Secure Mode" to desktop Chrome.
Web sites want you to visit them, they have no reason to barrier you. Some sites I use still have http and if a site wanted you to visit it in a specific way they'd use an app. If the model is to make web sites less accessible for profit it would need a compelling reason to visit it in spite of the barriers. It will never happen.
Nothing unreasonable or unsubstantiated. This is exactly what happened with app geolocking, privacy sandbox/topics, SafetyNet/Play Integrity API, etc. All of these are supposed to improve security and privacy and yet none of them are under the control of the user. Clearly implying that the user is the biggest security/privacy threat to them.
Which sites require those? How would that allow them to make more profit?
I literally said if they want people to visit anywhere they use a site and if not they lock down the experience with an app, and you said they lock down apps as 'proof' that they'd lock down web sites because somehow they are equal. Apps have never been about freedom. Starbucks doesn't want user choice and privacy when they ask you to download their app.
And I'm yet to see what business model it would work for. I'm going with 'none'.
> Which sites require those? How would that allow them to make more profit?
Practically every banking site (or more importantly banking apps). And a lot of weird cases like bus/train timings app, mobile operator apps, etc. You don't see that a lot with websites yet because the web isn't so severely constrained as mobile apps are. But the moment they appear, it will go the other way. One good example of this is AMP - which thankfully fizzled out for other reasons.
> And I'm yet to see what business model it would work for. I'm going with 'none'.
You can go with whatever you feel like. But the real world experience corroborates what the other commenter said. And one good reason for this is the corporate security culture. 'Our app isn't secure if it doesn't use the PIntegrity' type of argument. They'll all fall for it even if it's detrimental to their users.
Making a website less accessible doesn't make any sense. You've given an example of apps like before and you've yet to substantiate any points you made, maybe bank logins have a reason to be secure but that forum you go to doesn't, and wouldn't do this.
If they wanted to make it less accessible they could easily do that by forcing you to use newer browser versions which some boilerplate sites with frameworks do, from lack of expertise. No "safety" required. I'm not going off feeling, I'm going off facts. It will NEVER happen.
Publishers, already pushing back against ad blockers and now suing because their sites were scraped and incorporated into LLM weights, would love to have clients "attest" to the "humanity" of the user and "integrity" (read: no ad blockers) of the browser. It's not hard to imagine that, if given access to the feature, they'd jump on it as soon as it ways feasible and make the user experience for non-attesting browsers progressively worse to force the change.
Your point is that struggling publishers will stay relevant, gain subscribers and afloat/make more money by implementing ad blockers, worst user experience and safety checks to make their sites less accessible. I'm sure it'll happen any day now.
Absolutely, yes. They will be empowered by tools they don't yet have to make it feasible to slowly "boil the frog". Remote attestation is just such a tool.
The frogs already moved onto 4chan, twitter, TikTok, reddit, or YouTube for news. Even here at HN everyone uses archive. Publishers are dead. Nobody checks fox/cnn for the latest breaking news or needs to hear some anchor/journalist tell them what their handlers told them to say.
In Europe traditional media still enjoys relatively high public trust and high circulation. Weekly reach of traditional news media is at 80% to 90% of adult population in the Nordic countries compared to 50-70% of all social media combined, depending on the country.
After all the intense backlash they faced, they made it a 'limited' webview feature rather that dropping it entirely. Now that it's away from a standardization body, what's to prevent it from being developed unimpeded by public opposition? What's to stop them from expanding it to browsers once the 'feature' is ready? After all, this is exactly the pattern we saw with FLoC, 'privacy' sandbox and the Topics API.
It will come back again and again, and each time there will be less public outcry. It'll end up being normalized and eventually accepted. General purpose computers give the unwashed masses too much power.
"Users often depend on websites trusting the client environment they run in. This trust may assume that the client environment is honest about certain aspects of itself, keeps user data and intellectual property secure, and is transparent about whether or not a human is using it."
This reads like someone hopelessly out of touch with actual users.
Most users don't give a shit if their client is "honest", or if it's respects intellectual property. These are concerns of web admins and media companies. Users just want something to load websites.
No no, it's not the users that care if their client is honest, it's the websites. But users want to use those websites, and therefore whatever is in the website's interest is in the user's interest.
There's a lot you can justify with a creative thought process.
I think it depends. When I use an ATM, I want to make sure it's the official bank ATM and won't steal my information. Also, spam is a tax that websites must pay and we as users are indirectly paying for this tax regardless of whether we intend to or not.
> When I use an ATM, I want to make sure it's the official bank ATM and won't steal my information.
sure, but in that situation, the "client" is you, and the "server" is the ATM. as the client, its not your job to worry or care if you are being "honest" with the "server". your concern is only getting the money. its the banks job to secure the ATM from bad actors, not yours.
I've been using Firefox for about as long as I can remember, and really don't notice sites not working. I do notice, however, that using any browser without UBO makes my eyes bleed in an unending agony of capitalist garbage. It's like using a browser and then putting sand in your eyeballs.
That is quite literally Firefox + UBO. Like it's literally a fork of the tor browser (which is downstream firefox) with a custom config and preconfigured addons.
I don't mean this as a dig or anything but it's literally what they described.
Yes for the GP but UBO on firefox isn't defaults either. The bulk of the benefits you get from mullvad browser past what you get with default firefox + the same extensions are easy config changes. Things you can accomplish by just scrolling through the settings and flipping on a few settings with "more secure more better" worded descriptions.
For the average user there's not really a particularly good reason to jump for a downstream browser unless you are specifically using their main features (tor or VPN). It's easy enough to get 95% of the way there with 30 seconds of config tweaks off stock upstream.
The mullvad browser defaults would get it chucked in the bin very quickly by the average web user.
The extreme bent towards privacy and not retaining any identifiable or fingerprint-able behaviors is exactly what its target audience wants, of course. But it leads to a markedly more inconvenient experience than Chrome or default Firefox or Safari.
"better" is completely subjective. From my point of view dev tools are way better in Blink-based browsers, so Chrome is my default dev browser. The browsing experience is really good in Safari, I love the compact tabs and minimalist UI, so that's my default on macOS. Edge has a really nice productivity feature that lets you split a window to see two different pages at the same time, so that's my default on Windows. Other than being open source I don't see what would compel me to go back to Firefox in 2024, the competition improved a lot. Also I personally lost faith in the Mozilla Foundation.
Yeah, I actually switched from Firefox to Safari this month. I didn't know Safari had tab groups, the feature I missed from Chrome when using Firefox. No speed differences and Safari has less of a battery impact so far.
Hard to complain about a browser that still cares about privacy, but with tighter OS integration.
My deshittification suite is NextDNS (Pi-hole as a service), 1Blocker (ad blocker, bought pre-subscription model), Rekt (block bags, redirect AMP), and Vinegar (replaces YouTube player).
I use UBO on Chrome and find the above experience comparable.
I’m not the person you asked, but I’ve been happy with 1Blocker. As a bonus it can also block ads and trackers outside the browser (that part only works on iOS).
I recently switched to Wipr [0]. It’s dead simple to use, and will auto update its filter lists in the background. It’s a one time purchase, not a subscription.
Adguard [1] is a decent free option.
I also use a Pi-hole [2] on my network. That blocks ads in apps (not in the browser) like Letterboxd for example.
Talking about complaining: On iOS I find it an absolute no-go not to have the choice of which browser I use because technically it is Safari anyway. So yes, you can't complain that Safari is worse than Firefox because Firefox is no real Firefox on iOS.
This is true, though the current dominance of Chrome is evidence that a lot of people will switch. Chrome isn't the default browser on any desktop, after all, and yet a majority of non-technical users have deliberately switched to it...
If battery life is all you care about, I'd argue you are not "core market" for FF. You're core-market for OS vendors, who will always be able to give you a better battery life by leveraging all the tips and (typically undocumented) tricks that a cross-platform project cannot touch.
Google's got a major conflict of interest with adsense and I'm sure they'll eventually ramp up the war on adblockers to a degree that will make manifest v3 look like a joke.
If Firefox decides to not implement blocking restrictions they will then have the chance to be the only browser people will still be able to normally use the internet with. That's the only chance they have for any kind of resurgence from their currently laughable 3% market share.
Small gimmicks like privacy, battery life, customizability, stability, etc. are frankly what 99.9% of people don't give a half a shit about. They will only make the switch from default once they're genuinely annoyed to the point where they can no longer use Chrome/ium. For Firefox users that moment unfortunately happens every time a government website doesn't work.
> Using Firefox because it has a particular technological feature is a political choice. That political stance would lead users to turn to other browsers as fast as tech is added or removed.
> I use Firefox for political reasons and for what it stands.
> Which means that when Firefox gets worse I still use it and support what it stands for.
> It's very Stallmanesque and let it be clear I am not saying the choice to favour superior tech over ethic concerns is wrong. It's just a different choice.
> That's what I tell people when talking about Signal and messenger, Chrome and Firefox.
> Also, I don't think Mozilla is a white knight and in my opinion they fucked up some good things over the years (tech or ethic). But the good still largely surpasses the bad.
Let's say Firefox was the open platform it is today but with the exception of, hmmm, tabs ? No tabs. Well, using Chrome because FF has not tabs if fine of course but you are trading convenience for a Google controlled Internet viewer. At some point Microsoft tried the EEE tactics with web browsers (jscript and box models and the whole DHTML hell, etc.) and the argument was the same: "do we want a web that is controlled by MS, a web where MS is the only gateway to how content should be displayed/accessed and where MS totally control the evolution of the tech ?"
Instead of trying to figure out exactly what features would accomplish that, I wish they would focus on making it embeddable. Personally, I like the UX of Arc. Arc uses Chrome under the hood. And if anyone else wants to make a browser specifically for some small subset of users, they're going to pick Chrome.
Why not make it easer for developers to embed Firefox and let a thousand small, weird browsers bloom? Some will be terrible, but a few might be brilliant.
If they don't do this, I'm holding out hope for Servo.
A new browser engine is an incredibly hard thing to program and historically they have always been financed by multi-millions (now billions) companies. Even Firefox via Google.
If you want another engine that is not WebKit or Gecko and you want it open source, you are asking for something that the free software community failed to deliver for the last 30 years and that is harder to deliver everyday.
If Firefox happens to die, we are basically stuck with a Webkit-only internet. We may have open source browsers but nobody is going to pay for the Gecko development (which is not just maintenance but keeping it up to date with the web specs) and nobody is going to pay for a new engine.
Just fork it. I don't have a problem with the tech I have a problem with the corp that governs it. Because in their last Annual Report they see the future of Mozilla in AI services...and that's not what's going to get usershare back.
You can fork it but Google will still be the main maintainer but also the promoter of new APIs so your fork will be forced to either implement those new APIs or to accept their upstream changes.
With multiple engines that have a big enough user base, you force the actors to negotiate standards.
What will you do with your fork when Google will start to implement a replacement for HTML like they tried to do with Dart or AMP ? With enough competitors, Google is forced to make those unilateral evolutions backward compatible with what works everywhere.
With only one engine they can force their new tech in the engine and bet on the fact that it will be integrated in the forks because it’s mostly one pull request away on GitHub.
Maybe that would work if the fork somehow managed to evolve as fast as Google on Blink. But this literally means that you need Google’s kind of money amounts.
These fear-mongers that make everyone hate needs to stop. Multi-millionaires that give their own agenda and anything else is anti-this or stupid needs to stop.
You also probably say you hate "Cancel Culture" while cancelling things including coke.
Daily: Firefox with probably too many blockers, tampermonkey, umatrix, Stylus. I aggressively block any and every element on sites I visit regularly. You get no stats from me.
Also daily: Firefox Developer Ed for frequently visited sites where I need to login and every site is in a container tab.
Brave - my daily puzzle fix for Wordle, Wordiply, Travle, Tradle (no logins, clears data on exit).
Edge, in Private mode, if and only if I cannot get a site to otherwise work.
Also nextdns.io to block as much as I can including all Google, all facebook, all Automattic properties and more.
While I'm sure some data is being collected I am very happy with how my internet looks.
I have to temp-trust some elements in NoScript, then look in uMatris for the specific items I'll set to green. That probably sounds like a hassle and I get that. But I've been doing it for so long it's the norm.
If I need to unblock trackers in NS, I close the tab and go on my way.
And every once in a while I'll factory reset both NS and uM.
This probably sounds very tinfoil territory but as I've said I'm happy with my internet experience.
Doesn't many of those extensions due the exact same thing? Like why have Ghostery, DDG Privacy Essentials, Privacy Badger and to some extend uBlock Origin and Decentraleyes (maybe uMatrix as well), either one would do.
heads up, I think Decentraleyes has been superseded by a "LocalCDN", it's more frequently updated and I thing Decentraleyes has bee abandoned by the devs.
For extensions, I recommend people follow the recommendations[1] in the arkenfox repo and either harden their firefox or use librewolf. Umatrix is unmaintained since 2019.
While i wholeheartedly agree, these aren't really reasons. Playing devil's advocate reveals nothing useful.
"Its happened before"
That's not an argument, in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt. On top of that, the internet was very different back then.
"Its actually good"
I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser? I'm very comfortable in my opera/edge/chrome browser and I'd have to change my workflow.
It's a subheading to "2. Browser engine monopoly". The subsection's purpose is describing how bad things were during the IE monopoly to reinforce that it's something to be avoided.
> in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt
That would be agreeing with the article, unless I misunderstand what you mean.
> On top of that, the internet was very different back then.
In a way that now makes it harder for truly new competing engines to pop up due to increased complexity of the web.
> I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser?
The points made in the article are:
* Increased privacy, opposed to willingly giving your data to an ad-tech company
* Helps avoid a browser engine monopoly which would effectively let Google dictate web standards
Eh, I tried unfortunately and it's not the same. Especially with video processing, my older Macbook Pro heats up very quickly when using Firefox vs Chrome.
An accusation like this would benefit from some evidence.
By not offering any evidence, you get all the benefits of sowing doubt without having put in any of the work necessary to have an actual discussion about it.
Firefox by default also sends marketing campaign data to Adjust, our analytics vendor, which has its own privacy policy. Campaign data includes a Google advertising ID or Android ID, IP address, timestamp, country, language/locale, operating system, and app version.
Smells like a sale, but by not using the word sell, they get all the benefits of sowing doubt without having put in any of the work necessary to have an actual problem about selling it.
I use to be a supporter and I am a customer of Mozilla Relay, but I refuse to use their browser while they are financed by Google. It makes them nothing but controlled opposition.
The name "Google" appears multiple times, sometimes within the phrase "data to Google".
There are also currently references to "third-party ad platform" and "a third-party referral platform", along with other companies/organizations.
Some people will claim that it doesn't matter because some of this Firefox functionality that involves data collection and/or third-parties can be disabled, or that it's fine because it has been disclosed, or it's somehow acceptable because Firefox maybe doesn't send as much info as some of its competitors do, and so on.
I don't buy into those arguments. If Firefox was truly privacy-respecting, it would never collect nor send any data beyond that necessary to provide its core web browsing functionality.
Any functionality that might compromise a user's privacy should not be bundled by default, and would have to be explicitly opted into by manually installing an extension that provides such functionality. This would include Firefox's/Mozilla's own "telemetry".
I am not going back to Firefox anytime soon after they kicked out Brendan Eich for his personal views. Whether we agree or not with his personal views, open source should not be influenced by political agenda, neither by wokeness
at the time he made the donation, it was the majority opinion in California. He even said that he had changed his mind/opinion had evolved. But it wasn't enough
They have customers all over the world. It was a bad business decision, regardless of the local liability. They could have just swept it under the rug like they do at almost every other company.
It was more than a personal view. He paid a lobbying campaign for a policy that is diametrically opposed to Mozilla's organisational views on diversity.
A CEO should stand for the values their organisation represents.
I switched to Firefox earlier this year, having used Chrome since 2008/2009, previously having used Firefox. Mostly out of laziness.
Can't believe how good Firefox is now, and how great it is on Android (addons, config).
Being able to control anything on the browser is fantastic. Want to increase a certain UI elements font size just a tad? Sure! Want to tweak every aspect of the UI? sure! Want a myriad of config options, sure go ahead! Love the concept of Nightly, has worked great for me.
One UI feature that I love that Firefox lets you change is the scrollbars. I forget the precise settings, but I set them up so that they are always present and always big enough for me to see how far down a page I am (yes, like I'm using Windows 95!). That might only be something that matters to a few people, but the fact that it is customizable to that level is one of Firefox's greatest strengths.
You raise a good point. Fortunately, I'm not a web developer but I will keep your point in mind in case I do any web development later.
From a web development standpoint, the scrollbars do seem to be an ignored feature for a lot of web pages. Adding scrollbars actually fixes a lot of issues with some sites. For example, some sites often have a frame inside of another frame, and this reveals the scrollbars for both frames. If I were to use my mouse wheel, I might scroll down inner frame or the outer frame, and I wouldn't know which one would be activated until I try, but with the scrollbars on, I always know which one is which. This was a surprise benefit to this change.
Web developers should be in the habit of checking against many different configurations anyway. I've lost track of the number of times that I've stumbled on a scrollable area that wasn't meant to be scrollable, which would have been caught if the developer had opened the site in the browser with always on scroll bars.
Unless you're on mobile, in which case you'd find it to confusing, so they removed the option, unless you're on nightly, with all the issues that entails.
At the risk of losing credibility in this community, I'm going to voice an opinion which I think belongs to the silent majority: I do not want to customize anything. I want to read the news and check my bank account with as little drama as possible. More customizable settings always means more things that can break. If the best feature of Firefox is that it has lots of things to configure, that's a negative for me.
But this is coming from somebody who really would like to embrace better privacy...sigh...
Holding out hope for the DuckDuckGo browser on Windows. The current beta is decent, but extensions are yet to come, which means no ad blocking at the moment. That makes it essentially unusable with today's internet
Doesn't. Brave's adblockers are not an extension, they're integrated directly into the browser so they don't care what happens with extension APIs. Same reason they can do CNAME unmasking, which uBO can't on Chromium but can do on Firefox.
The easiest way to get the easy of use of Safari's password manager in a different browser would be to use a different password manager that works in other browsers. Common recommendations are 1Password (my personal favorite), BitWarden, etc.
This might not fulfill your needs though, since it sounds like you'd like to use the Safari password manager in a different browser, which is not possible outside of the Chrome extension [0] that Apple provides. This means that it wouldn't work on Firefox.
Apple has an extension for Chrome ("iCloud Passwords") that lets you use the keychain passwords there, but nothing for Firefox. It's less-restrictive than it used to be, since the extension used to only support Chrome on Windows, but they gave in back in July of this year and made it easier to use Chrome on Mac.
Apparently, Firefox removed a bunch of password-related APIs back in Firefox 57 that broke some existing keychain extensions[1], so it might not be Apple's fault that they've not provided a Firefox extension. There's no progress on Firefox bugs related to making such an extension possible again, that I could see.[2]
I'll switch to Firefox when they get proper vertical tabs like Edge's. I know Microsoft Edge has a really bad reputation, but damn it I can't live without its vertical tabs, and I can disable most of the idiotic AI crap. I know there are plugins, but they all feel quite hacky and are simply not as good.
I finally got sick of a lot of the crap that was getting added to edge (like the stupid button on the right that opens the right toolbar), plus I didn’t like MS stealing my data.
Not a day goes by that I don’t strongly miss vertical tabs though.
Firefox is the web browser equivalent a dying language. It will be a tragic loss for the culture of the web for Firefox to fade away. But, there are powerful macro forces pushing us to that outcome. "Switch, please," calls to action are a noble but insufficient countermeasure.
You'll have to ask them. I left Chrome in an exasperated huff several years ago.
The browser ecosystem as we know it is in a tenuous state. It is unhealthy for the web that Chromium has become so dominant. It is a symptom of this imbalance that users line up to defend Apple's choice to lock out other browser engines from iOS. This kind of popular user sentiment would have been unthinkable to me in the era when Firefox first rose up to fight back against the IE singularity. Yet, here we are.
Maybe not dying (yet) but it is technologically behind with a lot of things by now. This is annoying if you want to try out new web platform features. Sometimes, there isn't even a signal from Mozilla while Google marks a feature as stable.
Average people probably don't care about the latest features but Google pushes Chrome very aggressively, so they end up using it anyway.
What annoys me the most, however, is that several things simply don't work in Firefox and the associated report is over a decade old, so with close to zero chances of ever getting addressed. Copying the content of a canvas element as an image to the clipboard is one of these things. In Chrome, this takes a right and a left click. Firefox didn't have such a basic feature last time I checked. There used to be a workaround, opening a blob URL in a new tab and then copy that, but this got broken later, I believe by a stricter security policy.
Firefox is essentially the browser equivalent of Fairphone. It's the most ethical option but it inconveniences you left, right, and center.
I can't comment on the Fairphone 5 specifically but some of the issues reported by the community sound similar to the two predecessors. My personal experience with two Fairphone 4 phones running Android 13 isn't great. Apps sporadically stop reacting to taps and auto-rotate in combination with standby somehow locks up the phone, usually with a black screen. The picture quality isn't good, the stock camera app misses half of the button presses and there's a 2-4 second delay until it actually takes a picture.
How are the Firefox dev tools these days? I feel like every time I try to switch, the dev tooling has felt subpar compared to Chrome, and I don't like using one browser for regular use and one for development. It's been a couple years since I tried though.
I use PWAs extensively and Firefox decided they won't bother to implement them, so that's going to be a no from me.
Rather than wanting the web platform to be first class, they really want it to languish as a second-class citizen. Really sad, seeing as they also fired devs, and invested in "AI" instead.
> Firefox and Safari do not support installing PWAs on any desktop operating systems... Chrome and Edge support installing PWAs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks. [1]
Any idea what Mozilla's motivation is here? (Apple's at least is easy to understand, even if you disagree.)
> Firefox and Safari do not support installing PWAs on any desktop operating systems... Chrome and Edge support installing PWAs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks.
I have tried to switch out of curiosity, but the lack of PWA support in addition to missing features like WebUSB really limits how useful the browser is to me.
I like to see Firefox the browser as something that will have a life independent of Mozilla the (crappily managed) corporation. When they finally go down in flames, the open source community will continue to work on it in some fashion. It started as a skunkworks project, and I expect it will continue to have a life after Mozilla.
That, or something else will fill the void (maybe something built off Servo, I dunno), but that seems less likely.
we really need a wealthy tech founder type (especially one who made their millions or billions on the web) to start a new foundation that will actually care about Firefox rather than see it as a liability. Mozilla has completely lost my trust and support
They just seem like another way to attempt to shift users from the 'proper web' into a place where blocking ads is more difficult.
Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of 'apps' from the world, they shouldn't be apps in the first place, most have no need to run native code, they should be links to websites, sites that can work on more-or-less any device in any browser.
> They just seem like another way to attempt to shift users from the 'proper web' into a place where blocking ads is more difficult.
Extensions still run in PWAs on Chromium-based browsers, so I'm not sure that's the intent behind implementing them.
> Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of 'apps' from the world
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the distinction between an app and a website? PWAs are largely just websites with an OS shortcut, and in some cases more integration via platform APIs. I'm sure you're familiar with the term "web app", which perfectly highlights how muddied the line is with modern tooling.
I used to be the maintainer for Nativefier (which made web apps into native apps via Electron). It was very popular because many people don’t want certain sites to be one of X tabs in one app, especially when those sites act like they’re own apps. So we gave users the ability to treat these web “apps” like any other apps.
We actually shut down the project because a good PWA implementation does this better than we ever could. PWAs can have extensions like ad blockers (very difficult to impossible in Electron). PWAs get automatic browser updates (very difficult with Electron).
PWAs are great, and FF’s implementation of them is not.
On Windows the Twitter, Instagram, TikTok apps are PWAs. I like to use them because I can pin them to the start menu, have them start on a separate window by default and remember the window position.
Having apps that works as well as native ones, while using the same codebase and open technologies, and that is naturally as decentralized, safe and accessible as the web.
Also not needing to be politically correct, approved by Google and Apple or share large percent of revenue and marketing data with them.
It could be happening if Firefox took it more seriously and Apple didn't prevent it from happening.
I use Elk Mastodon client - being able to install it as a PWA is great - I get a nice icon on my mobile screen same as any other app, and it runs full screen without an address bar. I can switch between it and other apps, I don't see the downside really
Getting a full screen view without having to go through the insane hassle of Ionic and the Play store every time you make a one line change? Really useful for various offline control web apps, though I admit it's a rounding error use case that most browsers are more hostile to every year with arbitrary restrictions around HTTP connections (did you know Safari's ATS policy now blocks fetch over unsecure connections, lmao). Web games come to mind as well I guess?
I'm still baffled that mobile browsers don't have the desktop equivalent of F11. Or a console for that matter, the ADB is good and all but it's not always an option.
I personally hate PWAs even the ones I use on mobile (with firefox). Not being able to open a link in a second tab for example. I much rather just open the web app in a normal browser. PWAs just seem to reduce functionality over a normal web page.
Curious, can you give some examples of PWAs you use, and why? I've rarely seen any benefit of actually installing a PWA vs just bookmarking the site.
On mobile, I could see privacy reasons for wanting to use a PWA vs a native app, but every time I've seen a site that supports a PWA, they also support a native app and the PWA is usually a sad substitute in comparison.
Along those lines, does macOS 14's Safari's support for "Add to Dock" count as installing a PWA? I have a couple frequently used websites in my dock, acting more or less like regular Mac apps (or at least like Electron apps). What would a "proper" PWA add to that?
(Not a leading question. I'm genuinely asking people who like and use PWAs: is there something cool I'm missing out on?)
You're correct. I'm actually not sure what installing a PWA does that visiting the website in your browser doesn't, but it's essentially opening the website in a headless browser. So very much like electron except instead of having to bundle the browser in the executable it uses your machine's browser.
I use PWAs for YouTube Music, Slack, and Readwise Reader.
Sometimes there is a standalone app available, like with Slack, but often the PWA has the same features and doesn't duplicate the entire Web Platform stack (Electron), which saves some battery.
Any online IDE is a much nicer experience as an installed PWA compared to as a browser tab. VS code server for instance, since you don't get a the address bar at top like https://code.visualstudio.com/assets/docs/remote/vscode-serv... (without having to go Full screen on browser), and you get a standalone icon in task bar, and standalone window so you can Alt-Tab between it and other apps like web browser of choice quickly.
Photopea, it's a web based photo editor that is really really great. If you install it as a PWA, it works offline. Similarly, excalidraw, monkeytype, google calendar all work offline if you install it as a PWA.
Apart from that, I have youtube music, slack, discord, whatsapp web just for convenience of having it in alt+tab rather than cycle through a thousand tabs (admittedly, this usecase is nullified by tab search)
I didn't follow this PWA stuff very closely, but from what I understand, Mozilla didn't want to implement the PWA protocol proposed by Google because it contained things that weren't compatible with the open web view focused on the benefit of the users which Firefox has. I'm happy there is a browser that takes this stance.
And then ctrl+click links on the site, it opens the new tab and shows the auth part in the tab title as long as the link loads. It seems the "current url" in Firefox code is stored with the auth part, and it passes that part on to local links.
These issues make it insecure to use auth urls because as soon as someone looks over your shoulder (or there is a camera like in many cafes), you are p0wned.
I wish we had a better way to log into a website from the command line, like ssh keys. But for now, we are stuck with what we have. And Firefox makes it insecure to use it. So for now, I continue to use Chromium.
Yes. The auth part should not be displayed when you hover over a bookmark. Chromium does not display it.
In the end, every security mechanism is "plain text". Even ssh keys. When someone gains access to your ssh key, which is just an ascii string, they can log in as you.
My SSH keys are protected with a password, on top of that I have a biometric lock (MacBook fingerprint reader) on my SSH keys. So they would only grant access to someone that 1. has access to my computer, 2. knows the password (which only I know) and 3. has my finger. Definitely more than just plain text!
I strongly suggest looking into multi-factor authentication, or other modern authorization/security mechanisms if you want to see examples of security systems that are not just plain text.
> Chromium does not display it.
Security by obscurity is not ideal, although I can understand that the lack of this feature in Firefox hinders your usecase.
Same here. You can't just access my auth data over the internet.
You would also have to get hold of my machine and get past it's security mechanisms.
You can put as many layers on top of what you call "obscurity". But at the bottom it's still just a simple string that holds the power to authenticate you.
And "multi-factor authentication" does not help with the situation "User is allowed to use this script, so they are also allowed to use that website. Let's open it for them.".
You're literally putting the password in plain-text into the (unencrypted) browser bookmarks (and also into your terminal where it's likely logged to your ~/.bash_history).
That is the bigger security issue you have, not how Firefox is handling the display of the URL.
If anything, Firefox is highlighting your insecure security practice.
I have a hard time believing you even do what you're claiming. The number of sites that support logging in that way is basically (pun intended) 0. In fact, firefox is the only browser that warned me that someone is probably trying to scam me with a url like that, the other browsers just dropped the auth part and went to the site without logging in.
The article has good points but for the love of god please stop with the passive-aggressive "here's why you've been eating apples wrong all your life" headlines
Maybe I should write a blog post titled "You're writing passive-aggressive articles wrong, read this to do better in 2024"
849 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 372 ms ] threadWhat does everyone think about LibreWolf vs mainline FF? It reminds me of Waterfox: https://librewolf.net
Protest before if even happens by switching now, maybe?
This question comes up every now and then, I'll base my currently updated reply starting with my previous response[2]:
> Now, ignoring feature differences between all the forks out there, I'd like to present a different perspective and consideration that I think gets overlooked when comparing forks like Waterfox to other forks (if I am incorrect regarding Librewolf, someone please correct me).
> Waterfox provides signed binaries for download. Librewolf (and most of the rest) do not. Checksum's are all well and good, but IMO, not enough. Code signing provides trust.
> Librewolf does not provide auto-updates. There are 3rd party tools out there, but IMHO that brings in its own set of problems, and breaks the chain-of-trust.
> The most important one that I believe, maybe apart from Pale Moon, only Waterfox does, is offers _accountability_. There is (and has been since 2012) a legal entity behind Waterfox. That used to be Waterfox Limited, then it was System1 and now BrowserWorks (the entity I control). Laws must be abided and the end user actually has an entity to hold accountable. GDPR, CCPA, the rest are things that _actually_ need to be followed. The other projects, who are you _really_ going to hold accountable if things go wrong? To me this is super important because a browser is used for sensitive information. It's just not worth the risk otherwise. This also goes hand in hand with the code signing.
> Above all else, Waterfox has been around for 12 years
> Don't get me wrong, things like EV code signing certs are a bit of a racket, and yeah you can jump in and code audit all those other forks too. But really, push comes to shove, they can just disappear into the aether.
Separately, I'd say the end goals of each browser are different. Librewolf seems to aim for privacy on a rolling release. Tor and Mull will both target ESR (extended support releases, which is where Mozilla aim for my enterprise friendly releases of features being set and instead security/bug patches applied only). All of them will sacrifice compatibility for privacy/security. From my above comment, I'd go with Tor if you're willing to sacrifice speed, Mull if you want better speed but broken websites. After all a web browser probably accesses the most _sensitive_ data it can, I'd put my faith in a piece of a software run by a legal entity so you can have some legal recourse on matters.
Waterfox's goal in terms of privacy is a usable web that still leans heavily to privacy but doesn't want to sacrifice the web experience for that to work.
Waterfox has done a lot to reach that, from careful curation of preferences to supplemental infrastructure such as DNS over Oblivious HTTP (DoOH). These aren't just features that "might" help; there's real benefit to it. For example, users have reported being able to access censored websites when using Waterfox. In my opinion, I've reached Waterfox's goal perfectly here: privacy and web compatibility.
Then, there's all the other "sugar" on top:
- Customization
- Reverting features removed by Mozilla but are genuinely useful/should've remained in Firefox.
- Adding features when Mozilla is slow to do so (better JPEG-XL support for one).
- The only fork that AFAIK that supports DRM content, for watching Netflix, Prime Video etc. Considering how difficult this was to achieve I doubt any will get support any time soon either.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/18g8tez/comment/k...
[2] https://www.reddi...
Why are FOSS names always so bad...
What’s the ethical of switching if Mozilla is just the non-profit arm of Google?
86% of revenue of Mozilla corp are royalties, which encompasses any search engine that shares revenue with Firefox, not just Google. But the remaining 14% is not only revenue generated by Firefox, but also by e.g. Pocket. So from their financial statement, it's pretty hard to say what percentage of Firefox's revenue is derived from Google.
Google’s search dominance won’t be cured by Mozilla ending its partnership. It will only be cured by innovative competitors who discover an even better way of organizing the internet’s information (perhaps OpenAI or LLMs generally?), or by government regulation. In the meantime, I like to think of Mozilla’s siphoning of cash from Google as a good thing while we all wait for a proper long term solution that may never arrive.
A similar philosophical question ought to confront us every day about many things we use without thinking, both on the internet and off.
These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.
Which is, well, fine, because LinkedIn is mostly a dumpster anyways.
V8 on its own is a technological miracle.
But all funded by a firehose of crazy privacy invading ad revenue.
So. I'll live with the odd pause and a bit of battery drain. I gave Google 10 years of my life as an employee in exchange for $$, I'm not interested in giving them the rest of my life for free.
What if you could take the benefits of the spending and jettison the side-effects?
It's called Brave, they have their own ad blocker in the source code written in C, so it can't be hamstrung.
Perhaps you haven't heard of Chromium. If so, that may be because Chromium doesn't spend as much on marketing as Brave.
https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium/
I personally like that Firefox isn't based on webkit/blink.
(I absolutely agree - especially when it's google turning off features when you're using FF... it feels blatantly anticompetitive).
When I have problems with a site it's usually because I'm blocking most JavaScript with uMatrix and I have to find the correct combination of scripts to make the site work for me without having to give away my soul to the gods of tracking.
As a software developer, it's been years since a customer told me that the sites I develop on Firefox don't work on Chrome or Safari. I don't even bother to check anymore. I couldn't check with Safari anyway and they are OK with that. The point is that if it works in Firefox it works everywhere. Of course we're not using any Chrome-only API but we never had to use one of them as far as I can remember.
Long weird pause.
Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.
Do people honestly believe that if they keep recommending FF, people will magically switch to FF and Google will be forced to stop its anti-competitive practices?
Because holding that against Firefox is exactly what Google is counting on. And the more you recommend it the harder it is for Google to continue its anti-competitive practices.
The more you fall a fool for Google's (or Microsoft a decade ago) practices, the worse the experience for everyone is in the future.
Anyways, there's simple extensions that will sidestep Chrome's bs. In addition, you'll soon to be able to get an adblocked experience that you can only get on Firefox. That means less network traffic, faster loading websites, and better user privacy
Before that they had a popup that would timeout after 15s (?). At that point I tried disabling uBlock on Youtube but found the ads stacked up to much longer, so the 15s delay was more acceptable.
As expected, this will probably continue to be a cat and mouse game.
Do you honestly believe that it's OK for Google to just keep being anti-competitive? Or that this is a completely inevitable and unfixable state of affairs?
We can, should, and will hold Google accountable for its monopolistic conduct, and this is absolutely part of that.
My move back to FF has been slow (as mentioned already too) but I've been recommending it to others, who don't have my self-inflicted blocker, for some time. Maybe some will stop listening if I keep mentioning it, but people online I'll never meet in person are hardly a great loss in my life. The sort of people who are going to take such issue in RealLife™ are likely those just paying me attention in exchange largely for free tech support (the matter isn't likely to come up in other contexts) and they can do one anyway too.
Both of those will seriously hamper a more advanced adblock like UBlock Origin
The limits are 30,000 static rules and 30,000 dynamic rules. Running tens of thousands of regexs for each request can lead to a performance impact. Allowing for even higher limits may result in people having a worse experience from the browser becoming slower. The API was designed such that these limits can be increased in the future as available computation and user needs change over time. Getting extension developers to design their extensions in a way where they have to think about not slowing down the browser too much I think is a good thing and I would not call these current limits severe.
>also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves
declarativeNetRequest lets rules be added and removed dynamically by the extension.
>forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store
The Chrome team has said that configuration can be updated outside of a store update. What the Chrome web store does not want are extensions that download and run code. This policy does not related to mv3.
If no engineering time was spent on Firefox, and it’s broken in Firefox, that’s a Firefox problem.
If active engineering time was spent on _deliberately breaking_ Firefox, then yes, I don’t think that’s a Firefox problem. I think it’s a website problem at that point.
im curious to see what effect ublock not working as well on chrome as it will on firefox will have to the demographics, if there's no shift then that's a hurdle that has to be overcome by either firefox by some sort of engineering, google, or via legislation
Besides specific Google products, most everything works across all 3 major engines.
In addition, Mozilla adds specific code to Firefox to counteract anti-competitive practices on specific websites
Unless you use Edge on Windows you still have the same limitation (or the windows store Netflix app).
It is unfortunate that Firefox doesn’t do more to help us avoid sites programmed by devs who are too incompetent to follow standards, really.
Honestly, we should take the same stand against them. Those who are hostile towards Firefox should be publicly named and shamed for sheer incompetence and/or malice.
This is usually the case if there might be forms or something like that. It's minor enough that it doesn't bother me.
Now, on the other hand, tab management is so much better with chrome and I've considered using Chrome for that reason alone. At work I do use chrome because I usually have 10-15 websites open at a time (for example I like to keep one tab group per ticket and every related item to it there).
I do use simple tab groups on Firefox but it's not good enough at least to replace my workflow at work.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://github.com/jessebeard/firefox_settings
I regulary ran across something that does not work or has a broken style. And I know how to turn UO off.
And why should that be a surprise? FF has way less manpower than Chrome. (And even fired lots of engineers, to raise the CEO bonus)
Chrome leads the way and probably the vast majority developes for chrome and with chrome dev tools. So most of the time FF works, but not always. And performance is just worse, but not noticable on a desktop and on mobile it is offset by the working adblock. Meaning perceived performance is usually better, because ads are blocked, unlike in chrome mobile.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks
And sadly it can be worse, with my quite complex app, that I absolutely did not tailor for chrome, but gone out of my way to also support FF - the result is that chrome is just 3x faster.
There are definitely websites that don't work with Firefox out of the box. Just one example that annoys me is https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com. "Firefox users: Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection may interfere with Sign In. Temporarily disable it in Firefox Privacy Settings to load the sign in screen."
I use Chrome at work (corporate provisioned device) and Firefox at home so both get a good amount of usage
I know of several sites that break if you go beyond Standard, but none if you don't.
That’s not “working out of the box”, but leads to a much less broken experience than chrome (especially with the manifest v3 BS).
Never even heard of these... hmm
Yes some sites are "broken" with uBlock Origin. I don't find it to be many, however. I run into paywalls much more often than I do problems with my browser settings.
Firefox doesn't cause broken websites. Websites developers that target only Chrome cause websites to inadvertently become broken in Firefox.
Be evil
I have good luck just using a private window, since that has no extensions by default. Bonus: It's really fast; ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-c enter
FTFY
EDIT: Mine was wrong too. Thanks to ipython for the correction.
So I'm curious, which sites are broken in vanilla FF?
Remember when Google killed the Edge render engine per YouTube problems?
Occasionally, sites are obstinate and I need to use Normie mode (e.g. for Maps)
Normie mode just has uBlock O, containers. I really have zero problems with sites breaking here.
What can go wrong is if you've set a certain site to always open in a certain container and another site redirects you to this site. This can happen with Identity Providers like Okta, ADFS etc. They will then open in a different container (the assigned one) and lose context. Especially microsoft services have an annoying habit of redirecting through 25 different URLs on every sign-in. But if configured correctly it's a godsend, you can use this tool to sign into multiple MS tenants at the same time, something with chrome and not even Edge can do right now (switching teams between multiple tenants is a nightmare).
But I don't think it's the multi accounts containers at fault here, it's the user. Just don't do that :P
Not the same problem, but I wonder when faxes will disappear... For example, Progressive Insurance wanted me fax, mail pictures or bring them in person... email didn't work... Of course they didn't have a safe way to transfer them digitally but I would not care if everyone in the world saw those emails.
The useless requirements that they set just proves that they don't understand technology.
This, again, can be restated as incompetent developers cause broken websites (!)
("... do not attribute to bad faith that which can be explained by stupidity")
Exactly, simply use a second “plugin-less” FireFox profile.
And if you really need a Chromium browser, Brave is a better choice than Google Chrome (for privacy reasons…)
For a time, Firefox performed worse than a rabid dog. Chrome ate their lunch and gained market share fast. I and many of my colleagues switched around that time.
That isn't the main reason they gained market share fast. It's sabotage: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116871245021220875.html
I used Firefox pretty extensively, then switch to Chrome when Firefox fell behind on speed, but the developer tools absolutely sucks in Chrome, so I tried Opera which had a great feature set, speed and wonderful developer tools. It was a pretty sad day when Opera dropped Presto, and more so when they where bought by some Chinese company.
- Some websites still will just not work in FireFox. It's not super common anymore, but if I sense something is fishy, I pop open the console and see some strange error and swap over to Chrome. Things will just work then. All extensions disabled even. I even ran into this on Vanguard's website, albeit for some obscure forms.
- When I worked at a company that had a larger web app presence, I would have to test in Chrome. That's a given, but my Chrome counterparts did not do the same with FireFox. I would fairly regularly (few times a quarter) find things that were completely broked on FireFox.
All that said, I don't really care about my choice in browser very much, but I'd rather support Mozilla over Google still. Especially since they're the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company. I'd like to help support a more open web, even if it's just a little bit.
I run into this as well, but I just use Safari as my backup browser and that usually is good enough. The only thing I still need to use Chrome for is my Nest thermostat.
You know, it's not necessarily a bad thing that another enormous company is competing with Chrome. It might be less than ideal than Firefox having Safari's share, but it still eats at Google's monopoly more effectively.
On Linux, it consumes so much memory it actually slows down my machine...
* Try the same site in a private window (assuming plugins are disabled when in private)
* If on dev or nightly, try those sites on the regular release.
I haven’t bumped into anything in GCP that fails to work on ff, though likely don’t use the console as extensively.
I tried FF for a long time but finally switched to Brave. Yes, I'll be downvoted for saying this but it's objectively one of my top 3 favorite browsers rn.
1. Brave
2. Edge
3. Safari
I like each of them for different reasons. Brave (after disabling annoying features such as crypto and VPN) is awesome and its iOS app is the only one which can play videos in the background, has dark mode, and syncs really well with the desktop app.
Edge is so tempting esp. with recent Microsoft Copilot which makes it so useful (I can summarize pages right in the browser, organize my tabs by telling so to the Copilot, etc.)
Safari is not a good browser per se and lacks many features and plugins, but it's minimal and doesn't drain the battery like Brave and FF.
I really wanted to like FF but it's just not cutting it anymore.
They recently added a chatbot that runs locally they call Leo based on llama2. It's pretty impressive that you can perform LLM tasks on the current page without the use of any 3rd party service. And of course you can pay them for the souped up version. https://brave.com/leo-release/
Feels like I am alone in thinking the crypto features of Brave are cool. And not because I think that industry generally isn't full of slime. But micropayments for content has been a good, latent idea for a generation, and here they've simply built it as a default feature.
I still use FF and Brave equally because of my experience with the first browser wars and my mistrust of Chrome, having become the new IE.
I have used Brave more on Android. I have bounced between Firefox, Brave, and custom builds of Chromium for years. I am currently on Firefox.
My big gripe with FF honestly is the lack for PWA ( progressive web apps) If they resurrect that effort I’d give it a shot. I’m not really interested in running another browser for that feature.
Also the brave privacy settings are remarkably better “by default” across all my devices. I’m sure Firefox can be configured to be hardened I just have other ways I’d like to spend my time. Heck I’d even pay for better option for all my devices.
Bro. You’re still using chrome.
Ironically, focusing on the window chrome does not matter for a healthy web, let alone a healthy open standard.
Edge works fine in those incredibly rare instances since I can't get it off my computer anyway. I think I have one
I'd not encountered anything broken in Chrome that was fixed by FF though.
I'll still be primarily Chrome in DayJob though, as most of our clients' users are (with some on Edge, a few using FF, and a couple of idiots still not off IE though we don't officially support that) so that makes sense even though I very rarely touch anything front-end these days.
Really, I need to get away from using tabs for long-term state rather than finding a better way to use tabs for that. It would make switching UA easier when I want to, and switching machine too for that matter.
Also, I've been burned by tab and/or session management extensions going stalky (TheGreatSuspender & friends), or stagnating and failing after a time.
I want to move as much state beyond active interactive use away from the browser. I've never kept passwords there or gone in for built-in sync options, but feel the need to take this further. The older I get, the more I see tight integration as a lock-in rather than a benefit.
If i were willing to get an iPhone, then i'd be quite happy with Safari (i don't have Chrome installed on my Mac), but I want the ability to have my bookmarks available on multiple phones & computers... so firefox profiles (in LibreWolf) is the mechanism i've decided to use for that (for now)
Considering both Firefox and Chromium are open-source it should be entirely possible.
What helped me was that I switched my phone browser to DuckDuckGo browser. This kind of opened my horizons.
This is true for Google, etc, but definitely not for Apple. Not saying Apple is perfect in every way, but they actually have a track record for privacy protection.
(I am not complaining. long time firefox user)
I love Firefox, but just questioning if there aren’t good solutions available on Chrome.
And while Apple may not have a business model as focused on selling data, they still have a growing ad business + weaker protections against fingerprinting and ad blocking
Crypto features are an easy toggle to disable. The toggle isn't hidden, doesn't re-enable itself, and isn't weird in any way.
Citation?
Firefox, for example, can be hardened very well with options and extensions, but has many bad defaults (like Google default search with search suggestions on).
The site is all baseline, not potential. Not peak potential, not press a couple buttons potential.
Also I think this quote might be technically right, but Mozilla's revenue is almost entirely paid from advertising companies who pay royalties to have their search engines by default in Firefox. So they are very much coupled to the dynamics of the ads industry.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/google-witness-a...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...
A few years down the road, a surprising amount of companies insist you can only use their product on those secure smartphone browsers because of it's enhanced security, so Google helps you out by adding a special "Android Secure Mode" to desktop Chrome.
Web sites want you to visit them, they have no reason to barrier you. Some sites I use still have http and if a site wanted you to visit it in a specific way they'd use an app. If the model is to make web sites less accessible for profit it would need a compelling reason to visit it in spite of the barriers. It will never happen.
I literally said if they want people to visit anywhere they use a site and if not they lock down the experience with an app, and you said they lock down apps as 'proof' that they'd lock down web sites because somehow they are equal. Apps have never been about freedom. Starbucks doesn't want user choice and privacy when they ask you to download their app.
And I'm yet to see what business model it would work for. I'm going with 'none'.
Practically every banking site (or more importantly banking apps). And a lot of weird cases like bus/train timings app, mobile operator apps, etc. You don't see that a lot with websites yet because the web isn't so severely constrained as mobile apps are. But the moment they appear, it will go the other way. One good example of this is AMP - which thankfully fizzled out for other reasons.
> And I'm yet to see what business model it would work for. I'm going with 'none'.
You can go with whatever you feel like. But the real world experience corroborates what the other commenter said. And one good reason for this is the corporate security culture. 'Our app isn't secure if it doesn't use the PIntegrity' type of argument. They'll all fall for it even if it's detrimental to their users.
If they wanted to make it less accessible they could easily do that by forcing you to use newer browser versions which some boilerplate sites with frameworks do, from lack of expertise. No "safety" required. I'm not going off feeling, I'm going off facts. It will NEVER happen.
Website operators don't need to outright block you, they can just start putting certain features behind "the wall".
In Europe traditional media still enjoys relatively high public trust and high circulation. Weekly reach of traditional news media is at 80% to 90% of adult population in the Nordic countries compared to 50-70% of all social media combined, depending on the country.
Double-plus-good rights management!
Most users don't give a shit if their client is "honest", or if it's respects intellectual property. These are concerns of web admins and media companies. Users just want something to load websites.
There's a lot you can justify with a creative thought process.
sure, but in that situation, the "client" is you, and the "server" is the ATM. as the client, its not your job to worry or care if you are being "honest" with the "server". your concern is only getting the money. its the banks job to secure the ATM from bad actors, not yours.
Then they required attestation for Amazon but I did not speak up because I do not use Amazon.
And finally they required attestation for Uber Eats, but there was nobody left to speak up for me.
Better than IE, there was no chrome and safari was a joke.
Entreaties and ‘trying to make Fetch (firefox) happen’ won’t work, evidently.
How do we make Firefox obviously better?
I’m core market for Firefox and just use Safari. Better battery life. And it’s just as good for privacy.
At least that’s my impression. Is it wrong?
If I don’t use it there’s very little chance people will change the defaults.
Defaults are powerful.
I don't mean this as a dig or anything but it's literally what they described.
Yes, which is not Firefox with default settings
For the average user there's not really a particularly good reason to jump for a downstream browser unless you are specifically using their main features (tor or VPN). It's easy enough to get 95% of the way there with 30 seconds of config tweaks off stock upstream.
The extreme bent towards privacy and not retaining any identifiable or fingerprint-able behaviors is exactly what its target audience wants, of course. But it leads to a markedly more inconvenient experience than Chrome or default Firefox or Safari.
So, perhaps the real difference isn't so much the browser as it is UBO?
(I Know that BB is basically Chromium with some changes, just like Chrome. And, that Chromium is not Chrome)
Hard to complain about a browser that still cares about privacy, but with tighter OS integration.
I use UBO on Chrome and find the above experience comparable.
Worth noting they continue to have a lifetime plan.
Adguard [1] is a decent free option.
I also use a Pi-hole [2] on my network. That blocks ads in apps (not in the browser) like Letterboxd for example.
[0] https://kaylees.site/wipr.html
[1] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-safari/overview.html
[2] https://pi-hole.net/
However, I guess you are talking about MacOS.
This is true, though the current dominance of Chrome is evidence that a lot of people will switch. Chrome isn't the default browser on any desktop, after all, and yet a majority of non-technical users have deliberately switched to it...
do you have metrics for that or it's just a feeling?
> it’s just as good for privacy.
ublock origin isn't available for safari, which greatly increases the probability of safari not being just as good for privacy
[1]: https://help.kagi.com/orion/why-orion/orion-vs-safari.html
[2]: https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ublock-origin...
Pop culture references aside, `fetch` was also a browser! Sort of. `fetch` was a CLI predecessor to `wget` and `curl`.
If Firefox decides to not implement blocking restrictions they will then have the chance to be the only browser people will still be able to normally use the internet with. That's the only chance they have for any kind of resurgence from their currently laughable 3% market share.
Small gimmicks like privacy, battery life, customizability, stability, etc. are frankly what 99.9% of people don't give a half a shit about. They will only make the switch from default once they're genuinely annoyed to the point where they can no longer use Chrome/ium. For Firefox users that moment unfortunately happens every time a government website doesn't work.
> Hmm.
> Using Firefox because it has a particular technological feature is a political choice. That political stance would lead users to turn to other browsers as fast as tech is added or removed.
> I use Firefox for political reasons and for what it stands.
> Which means that when Firefox gets worse I still use it and support what it stands for.
> It's very Stallmanesque and let it be clear I am not saying the choice to favour superior tech over ethic concerns is wrong. It's just a different choice.
> That's what I tell people when talking about Signal and messenger, Chrome and Firefox.
> Also, I don't think Mozilla is a white knight and in my opinion they fucked up some good things over the years (tech or ethic). But the good still largely surpasses the bad.
Let's say Firefox was the open platform it is today but with the exception of, hmmm, tabs ? No tabs. Well, using Chrome because FF has not tabs if fine of course but you are trading convenience for a Google controlled Internet viewer. At some point Microsoft tried the EEE tactics with web browsers (jscript and box models and the whole DHTML hell, etc.) and the argument was the same: "do we want a web that is controlled by MS, a web where MS is the only gateway to how content should be displayed/accessed and where MS totally control the evolution of the tech ?"
Why not make it easer for developers to embed Firefox and let a thousand small, weird browsers bloom? Some will be terrible, but a few might be brilliant.
If they don't do this, I'm holding out hope for Servo.
A new browser engine is an incredibly hard thing to program and historically they have always been financed by multi-millions (now billions) companies. Even Firefox via Google.
If you want another engine that is not WebKit or Gecko and you want it open source, you are asking for something that the free software community failed to deliver for the last 30 years and that is harder to deliver everyday.
If Firefox happens to die, we are basically stuck with a Webkit-only internet. We may have open source browsers but nobody is going to pay for the Gecko development (which is not just maintenance but keeping it up to date with the web specs) and nobody is going to pay for a new engine.
With multiple engines that have a big enough user base, you force the actors to negotiate standards.
What will you do with your fork when Google will start to implement a replacement for HTML like they tried to do with Dart or AMP ? With enough competitors, Google is forced to make those unilateral evolutions backward compatible with what works everywhere.
With only one engine they can force their new tech in the engine and bet on the fact that it will be integrated in the forks because it’s mostly one pull request away on GitHub.
Maybe that would work if the fork somehow managed to evolve as fast as Google on Blink. But this literally means that you need Google’s kind of money amounts.
You also probably say you hate "Cancel Culture" while cancelling things including coke.
Daily: Firefox with probably too many blockers, tampermonkey, umatrix, Stylus. I aggressively block any and every element on sites I visit regularly. You get no stats from me.
Also daily: Firefox Developer Ed for frequently visited sites where I need to login and every site is in a container tab.
Brave - my daily puzzle fix for Wordle, Wordiply, Travle, Tradle (no logins, clears data on exit).
Edge, in Private mode, if and only if I cannot get a site to otherwise work.
Also nextdns.io to block as much as I can including all Google, all facebook, all Automattic properties and more.
While I'm sure some data is being collected I am very happy with how my internet looks.
Bypass Paywalls Clean
CSS Exfil Protection
Decentraleyes
DDG Privacy Essentials
Ghostery
NoScript
Privacy Badger
Privacy-Oriented Origin Policy
Stylus
Tampermonkey
uBlock Origin
uMatrix
Yes, there is overkill in there but that's fine. It does not impact my browsing experience.
If I need to unblock trackers in NS, I close the tab and go on my way.
And every once in a while I'll factory reset both NS and uM.
This probably sounds very tinfoil territory but as I've said I'm happy with my internet experience.
As I have said I see no effect on my browsing so I'm happy to just let things lie.
Maybe one day I'll find a good in-depth comparison article.
[1] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions
"Its happened before"
That's not an argument, in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt. On top of that, the internet was very different back then.
"Its actually good"
I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser? I'm very comfortable in my opera/edge/chrome browser and I'd have to change my workflow.
> That's not an argument
It's a subheading to "2. Browser engine monopoly". The subsection's purpose is describing how bad things were during the IE monopoly to reinforce that it's something to be avoided.
> in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt
That would be agreeing with the article, unless I misunderstand what you mean.
> On top of that, the internet was very different back then.
In a way that now makes it harder for truly new competing engines to pop up due to increased complexity of the web.
> I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser?
The points made in the article are:
* Increased privacy, opposed to willingly giving your data to an ad-tech company
* Helps avoid a browser engine monopoly which would effectively let Google dictate web standards
* It’s fast and has a nice user interface
Onto which I'd add:
* Content blockers work best on Firefox (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...), doubly so once Manifest V3 rolls out
* Allows more customization of interface and home page
* UX improvements, like the clutter-free reader mode, aren't vetoed to protect ad revenue as with Chrome (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467)
Firefox's history bar is still superior though
Mozilla tracks and gives (sells?) unique information about every download to Google unless you choose to grab it from the FTP servers.
https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-...
An accusation like this would benefit from some evidence.
By not offering any evidence, you get all the benefits of sowing doubt without having put in any of the work necessary to have an actual discussion about it.
The article quotes Mozilla saying they can correlate the two, but it doesn't state how.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
The name "Google" appears multiple times, sometimes within the phrase "data to Google".
There are also currently references to "third-party ad platform" and "a third-party referral platform", along with other companies/organizations.
Some people will claim that it doesn't matter because some of this Firefox functionality that involves data collection and/or third-parties can be disabled, or that it's fine because it has been disclosed, or it's somehow acceptable because Firefox maybe doesn't send as much info as some of its competitors do, and so on.
I don't buy into those arguments. If Firefox was truly privacy-respecting, it would never collect nor send any data beyond that necessary to provide its core web browsing functionality.
Any functionality that might compromise a user's privacy should not be bundled by default, and would have to be explicitly opted into by manually installing an extension that provides such functionality. This would include Firefox's/Mozilla's own "telemetry".
Since I use Linux I don't download FF manually.
A CEO should stand for the values their organisation represents.
Can't believe how good Firefox is now, and how great it is on Android (addons, config).
Being able to control anything on the browser is fantastic. Want to increase a certain UI elements font size just a tad? Sure! Want to tweak every aspect of the UI? sure! Want a myriad of config options, sure go ahead! Love the concept of Nightly, has worked great for me.
From a web development standpoint, the scrollbars do seem to be an ignored feature for a lot of web pages. Adding scrollbars actually fixes a lot of issues with some sites. For example, some sites often have a frame inside of another frame, and this reveals the scrollbars for both frames. If I were to use my mouse wheel, I might scroll down inner frame or the outer frame, and I wouldn't know which one would be activated until I try, but with the scrollbars on, I always know which one is which. This was a surprise benefit to this change.
But this is coming from somebody who really would like to embrace better privacy...sigh...
Holding out hope for the DuckDuckGo browser on Windows. The current beta is decent, but extensions are yet to come, which means no ad blocking at the moment. That makes it essentially unusable with today's internet
https://i.imgur.com/tuMGc3c.png
I currently do Search Passwords, Search website, Copy password, Paste in Firefox manually.
This might not fulfill your needs though, since it sounds like you'd like to use the Safari password manager in a different browser, which is not possible outside of the Chrome extension [0] that Apple provides. This means that it wouldn't work on Firefox.
[0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-wachtwoorden...
Apple has an extension for Chrome ("iCloud Passwords") that lets you use the keychain passwords there, but nothing for Firefox. It's less-restrictive than it used to be, since the extension used to only support Chrome on Windows, but they gave in back in July of this year and made it easier to use Chrome on Mac.
Apparently, Firefox removed a bunch of password-related APIs back in Firefox 57 that broke some existing keychain extensions[1], so it might not be Apple's fault that they've not provided a Firefox extension. There's no progress on Firefox bugs related to making such an extension possible again, that I could see.[2]
[1]: https://github.com/jfitzell/mozilla-keychain/issues/88
[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650212
Not a day goes by that I don’t strongly miss vertical tabs though.
FYI you can disable it, along with most of the additional button things.
The browser ecosystem as we know it is in a tenuous state. It is unhealthy for the web that Chromium has become so dominant. It is a symptom of this imbalance that users line up to defend Apple's choice to lock out other browser engines from iOS. This kind of popular user sentiment would have been unthinkable to me in the era when Firefox first rose up to fight back against the IE singularity. Yet, here we are.
Average people probably don't care about the latest features but Google pushes Chrome very aggressively, so they end up using it anyway.
What annoys me the most, however, is that several things simply don't work in Firefox and the associated report is over a decade old, so with close to zero chances of ever getting addressed. Copying the content of a canvas element as an image to the clipboard is one of these things. In Chrome, this takes a right and a left click. Firefox didn't have such a basic feature last time I checked. There used to be a workaround, opening a blob URL in a new tab and then copy that, but this got broken later, I believe by a stricter security policy.
Firefox is essentially the browser equivalent of Fairphone. It's the most ethical option but it inconveniences you left, right, and center.
You meant Blink platform?
Rather than wanting the web platform to be first class, they really want it to languish as a second-class citizen. Really sad, seeing as they also fired devs, and invested in "AI" instead.
> Firefox and Safari do not support installing PWAs on any desktop operating systems... Chrome and Edge support installing PWAs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks. [1]
Any idea what Mozilla's motivation is here? (Apple's at least is easy to understand, even if you disagree.)
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
That's not actually true, MDN needs updating. PWAs are installable as standalone apps since macOS Sonoma and Safari 17 - https://webkit.org/blog/14445/webkit-features-in-safari-17-0....
I don't know anything in detail about those protocols though, and don't know why Firefox doesn't have them.
That, or something else will fill the void (maybe something built off Servo, I dunno), but that seems less likely.
They just seem like another way to attempt to shift users from the 'proper web' into a place where blocking ads is more difficult.
Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of 'apps' from the world, they shouldn't be apps in the first place, most have no need to run native code, they should be links to websites, sites that can work on more-or-less any device in any browser.
Letting companies save money while still claiming they have "desktop apps".
Extensions still run in PWAs on Chromium-based browsers, so I'm not sure that's the intent behind implementing them.
> Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of 'apps' from the world
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the distinction between an app and a website? PWAs are largely just websites with an OS shortcut, and in some cases more integration via platform APIs. I'm sure you're familiar with the term "web app", which perfectly highlights how muddied the line is with modern tooling.
We actually shut down the project because a good PWA implementation does this better than we ever could. PWAs can have extensions like ad blockers (very difficult to impossible in Electron). PWAs get automatic browser updates (very difficult with Electron).
PWAs are great, and FF’s implementation of them is not.
Having apps that works as well as native ones, while using the same codebase and open technologies, and that is naturally as decentralized, safe and accessible as the web.
Also not needing to be politically correct, approved by Google and Apple or share large percent of revenue and marketing data with them.
It could be happening if Firefox took it more seriously and Apple didn't prevent it from happening.
On macOS this is even more important because switching windows within an app does not use most recently used order.
I'm still baffled that mobile browsers don't have the desktop equivalent of F11. Or a console for that matter, the ADB is good and all but it's not always an option.
But in all fairness, it’s easier to build one poorly, and there isn’t much incentive not to.
On mobile, I could see privacy reasons for wanting to use a PWA vs a native app, but every time I've seen a site that supports a PWA, they also support a native app and the PWA is usually a sad substitute in comparison.
(Not a leading question. I'm genuinely asking people who like and use PWAs: is there something cool I'm missing out on?)
I think you mean chromeless (an amusingly confusing term when it's chrome hosting the PWA). If it were headless, you wouldn't see anything at all.
Sometimes there is a standalone app available, like with Slack, but often the PWA has the same features and doesn't duplicate the entire Web Platform stack (Electron), which saves some battery.
Apart from that, I have youtube music, slack, discord, whatsapp web just for convenience of having it in alt+tab rather than cycle through a thousand tabs (admittedly, this usecase is nullified by tab search)
Cmd+Tab is far quicker than tab search for me.
https://name:password@news.ycombinator.com
1: When you bookmark them, it shows the auth part when you hover the bookmark with the mouse.
2: When you open them from the command line
And then ctrl+click links on the site, it opens the new tab and shows the auth part in the tab title as long as the link loads. It seems the "current url" in Firefox code is stored with the auth part, and it passes that part on to local links.These issues make it insecure to use auth urls because as soon as someone looks over your shoulder (or there is a camera like in many cafes), you are p0wned.
I wish we had a better way to log into a website from the command line, like ssh keys. But for now, we are stuck with what we have. And Firefox makes it insecure to use it. So for now, I continue to use Chromium.
In the end, every security mechanism is "plain text". Even ssh keys. When someone gains access to your ssh key, which is just an ascii string, they can log in as you.
I strongly suggest looking into multi-factor authentication, or other modern authorization/security mechanisms if you want to see examples of security systems that are not just plain text.
> Chromium does not display it.
Security by obscurity is not ideal, although I can understand that the lack of this feature in Firefox hinders your usecase.
You would also have to get hold of my machine and get past it's security mechanisms.
You can put as many layers on top of what you call "obscurity". But at the bottom it's still just a simple string that holds the power to authenticate you.
And "multi-factor authentication" does not help with the situation "User is allowed to use this script, so they are also allowed to use that website. Let's open it for them.".
That is the bigger security issue you have, not how Firefox is handling the display of the URL.
If anything, Firefox is highlighting your insecure security practice.
Regarding storing them in plain text: That's not much different from ssh keys. When someone can read your ssh key, they can log in as you.
If you know a better way to automatically log a user into a website, let us know!
Maybe I should write a blog post titled "You're writing passive-aggressive articles wrong, read this to do better in 2024"