I switched to Firefox for privacy reasons, and it took a while to get used to it, but I'm completely enjoying Firefox.
There is some subtle tab / link click behavior that takes a bit to get used to, but after a while it just doesn't bother you any more because you're used to the behavior.
It's the closest we have to a browser not controlled by the corporate giants.
Sometimes Mozilla makes unpopular choices and people raise a stink about it, but we do that because we hold them to a higher standard. With Microsoft and Google, we just expect them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good and will complain loudly when they fail to uphold our principles, and we recommend Firefox because we feel like it is possible to expect Good from them.
Yes, pretty much. While I don't concur with Mozilla 100% of the time, it is still the only major browser that I can have control (e.g.: by still having Manifest V2 extensions available). Also most of controversial choices in Firefox can be disabled or changed in `about:config`.
Neither Firefox nor Chrome optimize for battery efficiency like Safari does on Macs or Edge does for Windows.
I’m not trying to be the “just Google it” guy without citations. But I couldn’t find a definitive citation - just general discussions and some YouTube videos including earlier discussions on HN.
I searched for “firefox vs safari battery mac” and the same for Edge on Windows.
Safari have only 2 platforms (actually one since they share pretty much the same kernel and much of the user space code) to support vs Firefox needs to support 4 (macOS, Android, Linux and Windows). I would be surprised if Firefox was the most battery efficient browser on macOS.
You didn't say "like Safari does" and instead made the bullshit and unsupported claim that they chose not to optimize. That's some uninformed garbage if I've ever seen it.
Mozilla does plenty of really useful things! Super happy with Firefox as my primary browser. Shout-out to MDN as well for being an excellent reference on all things web: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
I do web dev and prefer safari. It’s less power hungry on a laptop. If you develop for the lowest common denominator, every other browser just works.
There’s something to be said for adding _less_ features to web browsers. A simple web is a web where open source solutions can compete with chrome. It helps avoid a browser monoculture.
Yeah but we’re not in a simple web. Safari isn’t trying to make it simple for you, they just use it to keep you in their walled garden.
PWAs are a great example of this. The general idea was even a product of the Jobs era of Apple, before the App Store.
Safari and iOS’s poor support of PWAs is exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store.
Choosing safari is choosing a more closed web, where missing standards means that you, as a safari user, are unable to access certain features or apps that Apple doesn’t want you to access.
I get that Apple shouldn't be allowed to dictate which features belong on the web, but you're just letting Google to it instead if you opt to use Chrome.
Maybe I don't care about PWAs (which I don't), maybe I don't feel like the majority of APIs introduced lately belongs in the browser. There's very little of what you should be able to do on the web that you could not do 10 years ago. Yes, flexbox is awesome, let's have that, so is the dialog tag. WebGL, Blutooth, USB, device memory, battery status... No, the browser doesn't need to support that.
The browser doesn't need to support WebGL?! Together with Web Audio and Web Assembly, they are exactly the kind of technologies allowing desktop-class apps like Figma to run in the trustworthy browser sandbox.
I don't want to have to install more apps, and more web APIs means more things can be done inside of the browser shell without having to install software that could literally do anything on your computer (and is often hard to remove completely when you're done).
> exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store
Nah, it's because PWAs were a standard created by Google, with Google being the primary market driver, solely with the interest of advancing Google's own interests (both in undermining Apple, and making lower-end devices more usable in developing markets). Don't think Google invented PWAs, or heavily pushed them, out of some charity. Notice also that as the ultra-cheap phones (~$100) have become more powerful, and as Apple refused to take the bait, that Google's efforts behind PWA have mostly ended.
The same goes for RCS, even though it was initially made by a neutral vendor forum. Google became the heavy pusher of RCS, not just for the sake of Android, but because they had carrier deals to use Google's own infrastructure (Jibe) for RCS, and forcing Apple to accept and integrate with their own infrastructure is a better position to be in.
This is also, let's be clear, not the first time that Google has tried an "open" standard to advance their interests and bludgeon competition. AMP is what happens when the standard catastrophically fails.
Out of curiosity, what's bad about Safari's PWA support? I use it for a bunch of things from Plex to my NAS, and never ran into any issues. In fact, it works better than Windows, in that Safari will open external links in PWAs in my default browser (on Windows, if you use Edge for PWAs, it will insist on opening itself for external links as well).
Probably depends on how you do web development. I don't like Chrome for web development, but others claim it's better than Firefox and Safari. I normally use Firefox, but would probably pick Safari over Chrome, if nothing else to avoid having to install yet another browser.
We all know that the best web development tools ever to be created was those that shipped with Opera when they still used Presto.
I find Safari on iOS to be nice, and Safari on macOS to be horrifically slow and inadequate, even on the newest M-series processors. It's like two different worlds, you can really tell that all of the engineering time is going into iOS because that's where all the money is at.
Indeed, although most of the real work on the hardware side is done by TSMC on the processors, and Apple just does a good job wrapping that piece of silicon into a shiny glass and metal body. Apple's real superpower is getting people to spend money inside their ecosystem. They've essentially turned into a finance corporation pretending to be a tech company.
Sure, that design work and firmware development is probably a miniscule part of their business in comparison to the scale of their App Store and other service revenues though. And Apple does no manufacturing at all, the screens come from Samsung and the phones are assembled by Foxconn.
In my quest to move away from Chrome I tried to daily drive Safari on my new work supplied M4 MBP. I really tried, but it was just too slow in daily use. At first I thought something was wrong with my networking or Internet connection, or possibly all the web apps I use were having a bad week. However, booting up Firefox (or rather Zen browser) immediately solved all of my performance problems on all of my web apps.
There were some other problems with Safari as well; profiles didn't work quite the way I needed them to, limited extensions (no uBlock Origin!), etc. I probably could have worked around them but I didn't need to; Firefox was almost perfect.
I tried switching to Safari 2-3 years back after getting a new M1 Air . After using it for a few hours, websites would just stop working and only fix was to restart the browser. After a few times, I gave up and went back to Firefox.
I find the UI atrocious and primitive. The extensions are ManifestV3 alike and worse yet, pollute /Applications (why?!). I don't particular find Safari fast, it uses just as much memory as any other browser, and all the claims about power efficiency are never backed by any numbers, just like /r/macos parroting "macOS good cus UNIX" while not understanding there have been plenty of shit UNIX distributions.
Plus the incompatibility with various sites... Just sticking with FF. I can certainly appreciate an OS-integrated browser, though. It makes life simpler for users and if you have the full Apple ecosystem, the tab sync is useful.
I find that incompatibilities are less of an issue with Safari than FF simply because Safari actually gets tested. Too many people with iPhones to ignore it, at least in US.
IMO Netscap on Linux was worse. Maybe it was already Firefox by that point? I don't remember. But I do remember the crashes. It crashed so cleanly too. One second you had a browser and the next you didn't.
I don't know if I am rewriting history but when Chrome came out it felt like Google went "hold my beer" and in 6 months developed the first decent browser.
More like "we'll complain all the time regardless of what they do by repeating the same talking points over and over again".
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
> ...and that's why I stick to this Chromium fork with its own digital advertising service and its own cryptocurrency, but you can easily switch it off!
Of all the ways to critique Brave, consider Mozilla's exploration of "other funding options" has recently been digital advertising. They purchased two advertising companies - Anonym[0] and FakeSpot - and have integrated FakeSpot directly into Firefox. Mozilla has an ad sales division [1]. Mozilla even added extra telemetry just for advertisers[2].
I almost never use Chrome-based browsers, but recently was forced because debug points were simply not working on Firefox. You can strawman all you want, there are unfortunately technical points where Google is abusing its position to force its standards, but the primary architects of Firefox downfall is Mozilla.
For the record, I used a Firefox phone for many years (and yes it did cause me a lot of problems), and remember vividly when they announced a luxury Firefox phone about one week before killing the project.
"Talking points" is from the same land as "gotcha questions." "Talking points" are the points that people are talking about that you'd prefer not to talk about because you don't have good answers for. So you pretend like repeating an unanswered question is an dirty underhanded plot.
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
This isn't a quote. Don't make up quotes. This is you putting words in people's mouths, and choosing the ones that allow you to reply with something about Brave. At the same time, you're excusing Firefox for doing things because Brave does similar things. The people switching to for-profit Brave from Firefox would have prefer a non-profit, user-focused Firefox, but have been pushed to the point where they don't see any moral difference between the two, so they might as well experiment. When Firefox was innovating, it was the founder of Brave that was running it.
Most Firefox haters use Firefox. They just wish that it wasn't so bad, that it wasn't so much torture to put it into a usable state, and that the developers weren't actively fighting the users to keep them from putting it in that state, rather than centering on the users. They largely blame this on the company, Google, who subsidizes Firefox while competing with it. And on the company, Mozilla, that sucks all of that subsidy up in salaries, while seemingly neglecting the browser.
Mozilla's brand identity is tethered to specific moral prescriptions[0] that their products are supposed to abide by. People sold on that identity are bound to care.
How are the Firefox dev tools these days? Every time I've tried in the past I end up missing the Chrome dev tools, and it's too much of a pain to have one browser for development and one for browsing. I would love to switch, though.
Dev tools are very decent. At this point it's almost indistinguishable from Chrome dev tools. The "Performance" tab might be the one exception, where it's a different flow for profiling. But otherwise it should feel very familiar.
I can do everything in terms of debugging in firefox than I can in chrome. I've not found any issues thus far, including wrangling cookies and more esoteric auth stuff. Obviosuly every good webdev does multiple browser testing and sometimes firefox behaves differently to chrome so you have to jump in and see why. Never been an issue (to my work at least).
I haven't used Firefox in a bit, but I thought their devtools were pretty good, but last time I used it I used their developer edition browser [1]. I think the devtools were particularly bad when you used to have to install Firebug as a seperate part of the browser which is no longer the case [2]. For a quick view of what the developer tools currently look like you can see here [3]
Depends on what you are used to. Since FF is my main, I try to use it for my pet projects. However, I always start a Chrome instance after several minutes because of two extremely jarring behaviors:
1. "Pause breakpoints" gets unchecked after app rebuilds and/or restarts.
2. The Ctrl+P hotkey only works on the sources tab, unlike Chrome. I just can't bear to always keep in mind what tab I'm on when using a hotkey.
Note that the "Pause breakpoints" [1] should be fixed in the next release, Firefox 135, which should ship on February 4.
Regarding Ctrl+P, there is a bug on file [2], we could easily make it so that it switches to debugger and open that search-for-file UI from there. Showing this UI on top of any panel would be a much more involved change.
I actually have the exact opposite experience when I try out Chromium based browsers. I end up missing FF dev tools. I love the ability to edit and resend network requests. I'm sure I could figure out how do to so in Chrome devtools, but just not as intuitive (at least to me!)
For me it depends on what I'm doing. I too like the edit and resend ability in firefox dev tools but what I've found it lacking is the option to automatically open dev tools for pop ups, which is possible in chrome.
There is a beginning of solution for popups in Firefox DevTools.
You can toggle `devtools.popups.debug` preference [1] to true in about:config
and DevTools should open on popups.
Unfortunately, there is some limitations, highlighted at the end of that bugzilla entry. It won't work for <a target="_blank">, while it should work for window.open usages.
I'd say the Chrome devtools are a tiny bit better, usually with more features or a bit better UX. But there are also things where I find Firefox devtools better. And the features missing are not a deal breaker for me.
Overall it's a pretty similar experience. Most difficult part is the habit changing of getting used to a different UI.
> and it's too much of a pain to have one browser for development and one for browsing.
Why? I am surprised as I use 3 browsers for different contexts:
- ungoogled chromium for everything behind my company's SSO
- firefox with an AWS theme with containers setup for each AWS account under another firefox account.
- librewolf for everything else with containers syncronized under a personal firefox account
I could probably run everything under the same firefox or librewolf browser and different profiles but that way I didn't even had to setup separate launchers for the profiles. I also like that they are all visually different so I can spot them easily when switching windows.
Well, I do try to grab pages using it here and there when reader mode fails. But now most of the time the amount of garbage around the text is so high that command line browser just can’t display anything.
I have definitely looked back. And also gotten to a stable state with Firefox for most things and Vivaldi for most things needing Chrome since web standards when Chrome is around is not a respected thing.
Unfortunately, companies treat chrome like they treated IE. Hard to get rid of.
I could never leave it — even in its worst times of version 4 onwards — for a simple reason of how autoscrolling works (i.e. scroll on middle click). The acceleration curve used by Chromium is awkward, and scrolling in nested containers causes the outer container to start scrolling when you run to the end of the nested one (which makes nested scrolling pretty much unusable if you value efficient interaction with the machine). Pretty minor thing overall, but has been surprisingly important for me.
I don't think that feature even works on linux by default. I have an extension installed in chromium specifically to add it back, and even then it clearly feels like a workaround when using it.
* the defaults in privacy and performance are good enough for me
The bad of Firefox:
* it is a minority web client engine so a few technologies and sites have problems with it. E.g: it is easy to debug WASM in Chrome, it isn't in Firefox
I use Firefox on all my devices. Actually, I am now experimenting with Zen Browser (FF-based fork prettier than Firefox, and even more privacy-focused). My wife and my kids get no say in it: it's Firefox in the whole household.
I'm glad the writer is enjoying Firefox, but posts like these make me realize we've forgotten how to use computers.
Built-in screenshot tool? "You don't need to install extensions"! Really? Dude just press Print Screen, it even works outside a browser, if one day you have to be put through the unspeakable torture of using a native application! Single-use burner emails are also nice and all, but why exactly does this have to be linked to my browser?
Of course switching browsers it's gonna be a big deal, when you actively walk out of your way to lock yourself to your browser's "ecosystem", but better Mozilla than Google I guess.
I see what you mean, but that tool allows you to take a picture of the entire vertical length of the page. You can't easily (i.e.: with one click) do that with the print screen key.
Fair point, but I highly doubt that this is how it's used most of the time. And taking 20 screenshots and compositing them in mspaint can be a meditative experience.
I would put money on it being the most common use case. It's certainly the reason I installed a screenshot extension for Chrome. I like the nod towards humour you've added at the end there, but it's probably time to cash out your chips and accept your losses.
Moreover, Firefox makes it super easy to screenshot individual elements on a webpage, such as photos, by automatically determining the screenshot boundaries, which means I don't have to manually drag the screenshot area.
I used Firefox before Chrome took over, and then stuck with Chrome until about a year ago when I started using Brave.
Last week I switched to Edge. I know some people will turn up their nose at such a choice, but it turns out to actually be a very nice browser. I'm even using it on my phone now too.
Same experience. I've found Edge to be the smoothest-feeling browser I've used on Android. Brave may be objectively faster, but somehow Edge feels better. If Microsoft did this deliberately, I'd love to know how.
Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube.
It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. Instead of building a better experience, these engineers seem to be focused on sabotaging alternatives in the name of profit or control. The kind of mindset behind this reeks of the same tactics we see in some ad networks or big tech companies - if we can’t convince you to opt in, we’ll make sure you’re inconvenienced or frustrated until you do.
It’s a dangerous precedent because it introduces a toxic game of cat-and-mouse, where the user is constantly playing defense, trying to protect themselves from deliberate misdirection. It’s not just an ethical concern, but also an issue of how we value user autonomy in the digital space.
For the hackers out there, this is a opportunity to dig into the JavaScript code responsible for this. There’s almost certainly some interesting obfuscation or odd behavior hiding in the code, and by pulling it apart, we can both understand how these tactics work and build tools or methods to counteract them. Let’s make sure the only thing that slows down the web is bad design or slow servers, not malicious code aimed at punishing the user for making their own choices.
That's how Chrome started. I remember it showing a banner with itself on /. which froze a page on scrolling over it for a few seconds. In all browsers except Chrome. Never understood this Chrome-go-go mob mentality that everyone had back then. It was literally an ads-network prodived crappy browser with just tabs and urlbar. It was fast, because it did nothing and had no cpu pressure from the banners. I wouldn't be surprised if it was "fast" all this time only due to special treatment from google, youtube and the corresponding ads/tracking scripts.
And that was fast because google pushed on megabytes of javascript and tight loops in it. Regular ajax (now known as htmx) webpages worked absolutely fine in other browsers. I regularly scrolled through a whole freebsd single-html handbook and it never lagged in e.g. presto.
Websites aren't expensive to run even on a slow interpreter. Even medium-complexity apps don't do much and could be written in python or ruby back then.
Nah, I remember Firefox in 2008 being a miserably bloated and slow experience. Guess it was because of no Electrolysis and any other refinements in the last two decades.
Yep, same. Firefox now is decent, but back in the day it was awful. I remember trying it out early on and immediately going back to IE because Firefox was significantly slower. Chrome was a marked improvement over both IE and Firefox, so it won.
The irony that Google, who made their bones on the "open web", is now attacking open web standards and trying to turn the internet into their own walled garden that they control every aspect of I hope is not lost on the people here.
Once the love of "Microsoft Loves FOSS Again" fades away as they aim to enter the next phase, some other company (Cloudflare? Tailscale?) will receive all the developer love until yet again, people realize that for-profit companies don't actually have their best interest at heart.
The only one who has your best interests at heart is you. And you sometimes get it wrong.
It is very common the case that someone else will do something that aligns with your best interest. (love for example) In fact it is often in your best interest to do something that helps someone else and appears to harm you. (giving money to the poor at first glance appears to harm you and thus be illogical - but there are a number of secondary results of this that make it in your best interest anyway)
I was convinced at the time--and I'm still convinced--that there was a TON of astroturfing on places like Reddit and even here when Nadella became CEO of Microsoft and there was that whole "Microsoft hearts Open Source" campaign. Every other comment was "You're just stuck in the past. You're as bad as the conspiracy theorists. It's not even the same people running the company anymore. Blah blah blah."
And now they own Github and they're training their AI models on you and your code and forcing that crap into a bunch of PCs. They were about to push out a "feature" to Windows that periodically took screenshots of what you were doing and used AI to analyze what you were doing. Then they sprinkle some glitter for the easily-distracted and tell you that it's actually a feature for you. Last I heard, they shelved the idea for now because of the backlash, but we all know they'll circle back around.
But, yeah, I'm a tinfoil hat weirdo who's just a "hater."
Agreed. It would be ironic if it wasn't literally the exact same arc that every single company in this industry goes through.
* Scrappy upstart catches the industry off guard
* Wild success and growth
* Becomes bloated, unable to innovate, and addicted to its cash cow
* Begins turning the screws on its users to appease shareholders
The lesson here is that there's no such thing as Big Tech that is not hostile towards the people. They will say whatever people want to hear on their way to market dominance, but once there, they will mercilessly fuck those same people for every cent they can get.
(I would actually extend this to all large businesses in general, but we can start with tech.)
The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
The last serious performance issue I saw with FF+YT was when YT added a glowing border around videos when the tab was in dark mode. FF just wasn't able to efficiently run that effect. I don't think it's very reasonable to say that YT or any other site should be limited by the performance problems of FF. Maybe they should have detected the issue before release but the explosion of browser x platform x dark/light theme x graphics driver is a large space to sweep.
"Should have detected the issue" implies it was an accident. YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Even when they weren't actively sabotaging other browsers they had big Chrome banners and "Works Better in Chrome" signs for several years in the past. If they did it _then_, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just "missed it" now, and easier to assume they do things that are broken in other browsers intentionally.
Edge (Spartan or Legacy) had a big fight with YouTube that YouTube was doing a hidden (not visible to users) DOM animation underneath the video player in a way that Chrome ignored but tanked Edge performance. There were several release cycles where Edge would specifically target that hidden animation performance, only for YouTube to make the animation worse and ratchet it back.
I lived through that as a user. (I was one of the like 5 Edge Spartan users, I know, lol.) I could see the dumb animation in dev tools and manually delete it for better performance. It was a nice thing I had some technical skills. I know for mainstream users the solution was "watch YouTube in Chrome".
It's hard to find to other sources because Microsoft intentionally broke the SEO on the Edge brand and you know Google is the only other major search engine. Not that they'd intentionally down-pagerank bad news about a Google property, I'm sure.
A lot of the reported issues with YouTube on Firefox (especially when paired with adblockers) involve things like increased page load times, UI elements not functioning as smoothly, or even video playback glitches. Some of this is due to JavaScript that’s intentionally designed to slow things down if you’re blocking ads or using a non-Google browser, as we’ve been discussing.
I haven't seen any bugs on Firefox mobile + uBlock Origin + Android + Pixel 4a 5g (I hate upgrading phones, sue me).
The only glitch I reliably get is watching videos at 1.5x sometimes freezes video (but audio still plays). Expect that's more hardware and memory pressure related tho.
Also, I wasn't aware YouTube mobile has ads? I think uBlock might be eating them. Although possibly whatever is lagging others experiences too...
IIRC the story was, when Youtube was redesigned a while ago they used an early spec for Web Components, that they were pushing to be standardized and was fully implemented in Chrome. But they had to add Polymer as a polyfill for other browsers. Then the version of Web Components we actually got wasn't entirely compatible with that early spec, so Polymer is still in use for non-Chrome browsers.
I don't know how much of that's changed since then, but the complaints are basically the same as when that happened.
I ended up switching back from Firefox to Chrome after a few weeks because I found that if I had more than about 6 YouTube tabs opened, the YouTube interface would become very laggy. I blamed it on Firefox at the time but maybe it was something intentional by Google.
The fact is, it doesn’t happen in Chrome for “magical” reasons, according to a comment few levels up. And regular non-tech users won’t debug this with click to play or whatever. We expect that YT does it absolutely intentionally.
It bends userbases however it wants due to its multi-dimensional reach, and we’re like “hmm maybe extension would help prevent accidental preloading issue”. I just don’t get it.
I go through my feed or history and bg-open the links I want to watch. Then I watch them.
What a strange confusion, as if all people must have the same "workflow". Sorry, no intent to sound negative, but why not give it some thought at least. It's "6 tabs", not "6 videos playing at the same time".
As someone who hates the auto-recommendation system on YouTube and turns it off, I also appreciate this is sometimes the safest/easiest way to watch only the videos I actually intend to watch.
This seems intentionally YouTube's UX design fault, they too heavily try to push you to "auto-play". YouTube has a "Watchlist" feature where you can build a playlist. When it works it is exactly what I want, but it feels like every so many months it mysteriously breaks for a while or they hide the button for it behind some new hidden gesture or menu they expect you psychic out of their UI. (If you've never heard of "Watchlist", no wonder. It seems intentionally hard to discover.) Lately I've been complaining that YouTube adds random "auto-play" videos even to a manually curated "Watchlist" if you don't pay enough attention or watch past the end of the list (even with auto-play and recommendations entirely off).
Yeah, it was named "Queue" for a while at one point. I think "Watchlist" is the most consistent name it has had, and yeah that does add (intentional?) confusion with Watch Later.
My Firefox does this on Windows. I have no idea how many tabs I have open, but regularly the whole YouTube tab I have open freezes, especially if you try to watch one video, and then another, and the whole UI is delayed by many seconds. Even closing the tab will have the audio playing for several seconds in the background. It's not due to load or hardware as far as I can tell. The videos play just fine in Chrome or Edge. I still use Firefox as my daily browser (previously Chrome), but these issues are super annoying. I don't want to have to restart my browser or PC all the time. I don't know if it's some combination of extension/ad-blocking or YouTube doing stuff, but it's very annoying.
Unrelated to that, but on a Ubuntu laptop I have Firefox tabs regularly stop working entirely. They just won't load anything, and the only fix is to open a new tab and that loads fine most of the time. Other times I have to restart Firefox. I've tried searching for others experiencing this problem and even asked in Mozilla channels on Matrix, but even then I didn't come up with any answers. The laptop's hinge broke last year so I haven't used it since then, so likely never going to figure out what was going on.
Maybe more related to youtube than I thought, but I have trouble closing tabs and firefox with 15 or 20 tabs would eat all my CPU. Pages loaded much slower and the experience across the board was often pretty poor. I had to go back to Chrome and I don't miss FF at all. I tried.
It’s also laziness in software development practices. Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome. My last job a bunch of us used Firefox as our main browser, which was hugely helpful.
As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.
This is a management problem, not a developer problem. Yes, developers should advocate, but it's not the developers' burden to make time out of thin air.
I had one who did say "don't make it work for firefox" but he was the only one.
The basic mechanic is that the off brand browser has to work hard to be compatible whereas the dominant browser works hard to be incompatible. If you develop Firefox first (have some really ideological devs) you'll find Chrome related bugs eat up 1% of your time if that. If you develop Chrome first you'll find supporting other browsers is a bear.
(In the early 2000's when IE was dominant I was afraid it wouldn't be possible to browse the web with Linux. I worked at a library that would have deployed Sun Rays as public computers if we could get Mozilla to compile on Solaris but we couldn't, even with the help of Sun support. I developed Mozilla-first and then Firefox-first and helped keep the flame alive back then.)
The system I work on now works on both because I develop Firefox-first. There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox, but otherwise the site spins like a top on both of those. Once in a while we run into a serious headscratcher on mobile Safari that burns up some dev*weeks.
This is why I always develop to web standards and not to any browser. You follow the web standards and then check to see which browsers do it right. Then adjust for that browser if necessary.
> There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox
Firefox's performance engineers are eager for bug reports! You can record a performance profile [1] and file a performance bug report in Bugzilla [2]. It helps if the slow page is accessible to Firefox engineers for testing, but your performance profile is a big head start.
Early fall 2023 it certainly feels like I caught Verizon discriminating against Firefox. It was a CSS issue in their payment portal where some information wasn't rendering as a DHTML popup but at the bottom of the page. You could still pay your bill, but to an untrained eye it looked broken. I reported it and was sent to "Executive Custom Service", which would never acknowledge the problem. They would call once a week and make some statements like the problem was on my side and they couldn't reproduce it at all, to which my BS meter kept responding "I don't believe you." After several weeks of this, the issue mysteriously disappeared one Saturday morning, with no further word to me. I'd also complained to my state PUC (this was a landline bill) and think the added pressure helped convince them to do the right thing, even though the PUC has no online jurisdiction.
At the time I hadn't thought to go back to tech support and ask somebody there to simply try it with Firefox. Then Verizon would have been pointing fingers at themselves.
Any Verizon developers here? I'd love to know the real story.
Aggressive ad blockers are often the cause of many “site doesn’t work in Firefox” issues. When the Firefox user then loads the site in Chrome, it works because the user doesn’t have an ad blocker installed in Chrome (because they don’t typically use Chrome) or their ad blocker hasn’t updated its blocklists recently.
I agree that this is a "management problem" in the sense that if you want to support Firefox, you should allocate resources for testing on Firefox.
But also - it's not high up the priority list given Firefox's marketshare. In most cases, you'll get the support by default, but I don't really see many US managers being tasked with allocating resources to support UC browser, or Opera, and those are both in the same space marketshare-wise.
My management is actively discussing EOLing several Firefox products because we have basically no real paying customers on them, and Mozilla is unpleasant to deal with in the extension space (genuinely - https://www.neowin.net/news/ublock-origin-lite-maker-ends-fi...)
You're right, although you'd probably find that in many shops developers have the latitude to use Firefox off their own initiative if they so chose.
I recently finished a 7 year stint at a company where I was CTO. I always made it clear that we needed to be testing functionality in more than just Chrome because, apart from anything else, a good chunk of our users would be on mobile, and many of those on iOS (i.e., using Safari). I used Firefox as my main browser for probably 4 - 5 of those 7 years, and I suggested engineers do the same because it tends to hew closer to web standards than Chrome does (meaning that if it works in Firefox it'll almost certainly work in Chrome, but the reverse doesn't necessarily hold). That gradually bled through the development team, with a number of the engineers using Firefox as their main browser. That's really all it needs is a few people using it for their day to day work.
I made the change on principle because I could see the way the wind was blowing and - even then - Google were doing plenty of things I didn't like. I like to think that influenced the team as well but, reality check, they probably did it to avoid me moaning at them about bugs running in Firefox all the time.
The goal of a standard is to not be forced to code specific things for each implementation out there. This is failure of the web standards that the google implementation has become the standard.
We have web standards, but one area they breakdown is adoption of those standards.
Each browser seems to pick and choose which standards they want to adopt and when. Sometimes Chrome will support a new CSS syntax for months or years before another browser finally picks up support (or vice versa).
For web standards to truly work, there would need to be better coordination between browsers to adopt new standards in unison. Until then, developers (should) keep track of whether the syntax they're using is supported by all major browsers. Or, develop just for Chrome, which seems to be favored by most.
We vendors disagree about the relative value of different standards. Adopting at different times makes life harder on web devs, but it also seems like the only route forward. Do you want any one vendor to be able to force the others to implement something they disagree with, or (vice versa) to have veto power?
>> Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
Yep. A majority of HN crowd claim to like open source and all that, but then they use Chrome instead of Firefox due to some small perceived convenience. Nobody makes decisions based on principles these days, only their immediate wants. Hoe_math is right, we're on the edge of civilization collapse because to that.
To some extend this is also down to developer having to stop trying to be clever. I can understand having something look a little weird, maybe not align 100% correctly, but how to you actively go about building something like an e-commerce site that doesn't work in Firefox?
My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.
I randomly browsed the site with Firefox stable and I couldn't see any obvious malfunction. What exactly is not working? Is there a specific webpage where the malfunction can be seen?
What issues specifically? I'm a long time REI customer and a long time (since it was called Firebird) Firefox user, and I've never encountered any issues.
It may be interactions with ublock origin. On Chrome, I only have adblock plus. However, disabling UBO on Firefox does not fix the problems. The most obvious one right now: blank page after login.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money? There is a web based on hobbyist platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon, and you can clearly see why they haven't captured the masses.
The solution is how we solve it. There’s a technical end to every demand, and at the end of the day regulation only can do so much for both sides. The reality sorts everything else.
The solution you mentioned is valid too.
But you cannot ignore the fact that internet is for everyone and not for google. Google minus all the shit it does to the internet can definitely exist in some form. Claiming it’s either this or nothing is just defeatist.
If google and youtube disappeared tomorrow, I’d be the first among those guys who buy hdds and torrent videos from these. For no money, like I did with all torrents in my life. There would be less professional videos obviously, but almost everyone agrees it’s a good thing (quit SM, anxiety, kids social issues, etc talks).
Sorry, I was ambiguous. I just meant not to use the ad-supported part of the web. Yes, the rest of it is fine.
Even a large chunk of the ad supported internet is happy to continue sending you bits if you don’t render their ads. This is fine, the convention has always been I’ll send whatever (non-malicious) bits I want, you send whatever you want, and we’ll render it however we want. YouTube specifically doesn’t send bits to people who don’t render their ads, on purpose, which is also fine, they just don’t want those of us who don’t render ads around.
Entitled ad guys don’t get to change the social convention to add some obligation to render their ads. If they don’t want to serve bits to users that block their ads, that’s fine, but if they send bits I’ll render them however I want on my system.
Exactly. It’s amazing that ads-ers send bits regardless and expect them to be consumed as is, as if it was some fundamental law of nature to do so. Simply don’t send, wink. That wink makes them feel uneasy because it breaks that wonderful narrative of theirs. “If you don’t want to watch ads, just don’t visit”. Yeah, just paywall us then, come on, we’re all yours, signed in, vendor locked. I’m so ready to leave and delete the bookmark, what are you waiting for?
People are playing this cat-and-mouse game with YouTube specifically, where they’ll circumvent the desire to block them for not rendering ads. I think this is a bad thing for users to do. But I mostly think it should make the ad providers uncomfortable. Because they know that most people won’t play cat and mouse for their content. In any case other than YouTube, people would just move on.
They know it. We know they know it, because if they really didn’t want to send bits to ad-blockers, they’d copy the first step of the back-and-forth that Google did with YouTube, and those users would no longer be a problem.
Because you cannot even control your ads to users? No one of you devs gets punishment for tracking users' personal information, pushing scam, phishing and malware to users, and now users are not even allowed to protect themselves? Users don't drop trackers and malwares to your servers, why do you drop trackers and malwares to users' machines?
Because you are working for a corporation that joins in World Wide Web Consortium, who literally says this in the Ethical Web Principles?
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts. We will build features and write specifications that respect people's agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
If you cannot maintain your service, paywall your features, not forcing malwares and trackers to users. No one forced you to serve 1080p, 1440p or 4K videos to everyone for free. You were the one literally "advertised" yourself as a "free" service at beginning, in order to hoard how many users you could. And now when you cannot control your own costs, you push malwares and trackers to users? The mentality of hoarding users with "baits" like "free" are the real poisons for the internet, for both of you and your users, NOT users who are doing exactly what World Wide Web Consortium tells them.
Where are all your MBAs in your corporations? The ones bragging about themselves on LinkedIn and now the only resolutions you can think of is pushing malwares and trackers to users? All of the finance classes in your college should be simplified to advertisement classes I guess? That would save a lot of resources for everyone.
> Those corporations with MBAs will find another way
Not YouTube.
Those "nonsense" are from World Wide Web Consortium, users are just doing what they say. The "hipster" are the ones not respecting those Ethical Web Principles. Users are not injecting trackers and malwares to those independents' servers. Why do those independents inject trackers and malwares to users' machines?
The ones who destroyed the open web are the business, including independents and corporations, with the mentality of luring more users to use their "free" services, without any plans of controlling the cost, ETHICALLY and MORALLY. Scale, scale, scale, more users, more beautiful number; until their pocket is burnt and now their resolution is pushing those trackers and malwares to compensate the cost.
Ads, malvertisements and trackers are not the open web.
Let me remind you that Ad-Block Plus collapsed when it's users revolted over their plan to whitelist simple vetted advertisements in a truce with advertisers.
ABP was foolish and actually believed it's users were trying to make a statement about invasive ads. Really their users just didn't want to see any ads at all, ever, regardless of the circumstances.
ABP didn't even address any trackings with their program. It's just pure cosmetics.
> Really their users just didn't want to see any ads at all
Because the internet was filled with malicious ads before any content blockers having more people? The hazardours time of Windows XP/7 with malwares-affected from the ads appear like meals in every day's news? Sorry, internet ads are doomed from those times. They are migrained to everyone's minds that users are walking in a landmines with those ads. If a business is entirely dependent on those ads, that business should not exist. Doing business is hard, right? I mean, like, most of other ethical jobs on the world.
Users are just doing what World Wide Web Consortium says.
And most people don't have issue with static ads like those in newspapers and magazines. People would be fine if business wants to advertise something, but the tech ads industry does not only want to promote things to you, they want to capture your attention as well, regardless of if you want the thing or not. They think they can only do so by knowing you as well as your mother does.
If a business have something to sell, just let people know. No need to help create a surveillance state.
You forgot to mention it involved paid whitelisting, and the requirements for compliance were so weak that even major malvertising vectors, like Google, were considered acceptable.
Quite frankly, at this point, I just want any business that runs on ads to crash and burn. The whole business model is insanely toxic and sociopathic and shouldn't be tolerated at all.
There is no reason I, a user, will intentionally use your product when you fill it with ads that are, at best annoying, and at worst malware vectors.
You have your right to develop things your way, I have a right to say no thank you. Google, though, is so big it is basically saying "you don't have a choice." That's the problem and one that Google spends billions to enforce. They use the weight of the uninformed to apply pressure to the rest of us.
It was no better when Microsoft did it with IE, nor is it any way proper, now.
A while back nobody would believe that Google's search dominance could be disturbed... and now many have either switched away or stopped using search altogether. It takes me two clicks to set a search to DDG, Kagi or other and Google has lost this customer (often a family) forever.
So let them be arrogant and loose their YouTube customers over time too.
The thing is I see it everywhere around me. People don't care looking for a better search engine. Worse I am pretty sure that most people do not know they can choose their search engine and can define whatever is used when searching in the url bar.
While I’ve been using ChatGPT with web search for almost two years as a paid user, the majority of people don’t and that has just gone free in the last few months.
But when I just want a simple search, I still use Google first out of habit.
about youtube being totally unusable on firefox: is it just youtube/google being evil as is customary or also firefox having loads of memory leaks, as its usual too? (plenty of mem leak bugs with video/audio reported over the years, many very recent and still open)
I was about to write that YouTube works flawlessly for me in Firefox on Mac, but I just upgraded to a monster of a M4 MBP, so it's probably just overcoming these issues (malicious or otherwise) via brute force.
YouTube works perfectly on Firefox if you pay for YouTube Premium. Haven't noticed any bugs, if it leaks memory or something it's not noticeable on my machine.
Firefox + ublock origin seems to be the combo allowing me the best user experience with youtube. I have no idea what the previous poster is talking about really.
Firefox+uBO on Fedora/W11 here, with Firefox being my primary browser for close to 8 years. I only run in to an issues maybe once a year, where I have to pop open Edge/Chrome for some random edge cases to work. I've used Firefox on dodgy, overly burdened and hacked together systems with no issues that were memorable.
The only problem I really remember is at one point Firefox having issues under linux when NVIDIA was swapping their main driver over to the "open-sourced" version, there was some performance issues with decoding, not unusable - but it was resolved within a week.
And the Chromium supporter group is just a subset of those corporations.
Several leading organizations have already pledged their support for the ["Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers"] initiative, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera.
Reminds me of the Open Source Initiative. People tell me that licenses like the SSPL aren't open source because the OSI says they aren't. I tell them to look at who comprises the OSI. Nobody has yet showed me a reason why we should believe the OSI when it tells us what open source is or isn't.
Linus & co do not follow, or respect, the values of the FOSS zealots.
He actively dislikes the GPLv3, has a good working relationship with Google on Android and ChromeOS, and has criticized attitudes in the Linux desktop community for over a decade. He famously roasted his own distribution's package maintainer for wasting their life.
All hats off to him, frankly. The Linux community can be extremely delusional at times.
All that Facebook money has gone to his head I guess. Thankfully we should still have the ability to fork the kernel if he fully loses the plot to corporate interests.
Let me copy the actually important information from the sibling comment that's about to be deleted, because this is actually important:
Linus has hated GPLv3 since at least 2006.
Linux development has been over 80% corporate funded for over a decade. FOSS contributors do not have enough talent or interest to maintain the kernel for even a few weeks. If corporate interests weren't in the kernel, the kernel would not run on modern devices, period. It would have fallen behind the times and been abandoned like countless other technologies, or replaced with a new proprietary kernel from someone else.
Linux on the desktop is not somewhat usable in spite of corporate interests. Linux on the desktop is usable today because of corporate interests.
The original comment I was replying to has an inaccurate mindset: Linux supporters generally still envision this as a community project, with community contributors, and they are so successful, that companies knock at the door politely and are lucky to get code into the kernel.
It's actually the other way around: This is a collaborative corporate project, with corporate employees contributing, but there are some random community members who can knock at the door politely and are lucky to get code into the kernel.
The community-first development model died about 2 decades ago. When the Linux Foundation talks about "community," they are talking about their corporate contributors and their communities, not us. This is also why I cringe at the excessive (not all, just excessive) hate for corporations in the online community. Without their work, rip out 80%-90% of the kernel commits every year for the last decade, and see how advanced Linux would be.
This same change is also underway at another open source project - Blender; which is now increasingly corporate funded and developed. When I see online forum posts arguing that Blender is a perfect example of how we can beat the corporations as a community, I just shake my head now.
I actually agree with you that Linux development has been captured by corporations. Except that I believe it's not sustainable. Eventually the Shareholders are going to come knocking and ask why so much engineering time and money is being wasted on some hippie-dippy Open Source junk and not returning value to them. It needs AI in it, or maybe a Linux Pro subscription with ads for the freeloaders. This is why I'm glad the kernel is tied to the GPL, so we can fork when their interests stop aligning with ours.
You're assuming that community driven FOSS development is sustainable, or can make a good long term project the size of a kernel, or a multimedia package, or anything larger than a tool or library.
In practice, I'm going to be honest and blunt, it's never worked.
3 decades of trying to replace Photoshop with GIMP (founded 1995)? Barely a dent.
3 decades of trying to unsettle Windows with the Linux desktop (KDE, 1998)? Barely a dent.
3 decades of trying to beat 3D packages with Blender (founded 1994)? Finally working now, ironically only because corporations started getting involved. Before then, Blender 2.7 was never going to do it.
2 decades of Apache trying to kill Skype with OpenMeetings (founded 2007)? Not even a dent.
2 decades of trying to kill proprietary CAD packages with FreeCAD (founded 2002)? Not even a dent.
4 decades of trying to beat Microsoft Office with what is now LibreOffice (roots in StarOffice, 1985, which was ironically a proprietary corporate project for the first decade and a half)? Barely a dent.
The Linux community, and FOSS communities, overestimate their strength without corporate interests. They have none.
Why should I care that Microsoft Office has more users than LibreOffice? I care which is the better product and has my interests as the user, and not the product, in mind. For example, and relevant to the article, I can use an ad blocker on Firefox without Big Brother Google stepping in and taking it away. Photoshop takes 30 seconds to open and illegally scrapes its users' private data for AI training. Windows has mass surveillance built in with Recall and shoves tabloid garbage and ads into the Start Menu. It means nothing to me that the worse products have more users, they are still worse products.
> Why should I care that Microsoft Office has more users than LibreOffice?
Because people are going to send you documents in Word format, and expect you to be able to send them documents in Word format. Including embedded objects, RTL text, animations, and many other features that LibreOffice barely support and do not transfer well between its own native format and the Word format.
I'm sure it's a problem for some. But at my company we've been using open/libreoffice for about 20 years and I can count on one hand the times it has actually been a problem.
And all our customers often send us MS Office documents. They never use the fancy features.
> You're assuming that community driven FOSS development is sustainable
I'm confused. Is FOSS is something more than someone or some entity contributing their time and releasing the source for for free? Does it really matter if thing doing the development is a a person in a garage or a company?
There doesn't seem to be a lot of difference to me. Both a people in garages and a company have kept their pet projects going for decades, giving away their efforts over all that time. Both people in garages and and companies have lost interest in open source projects. As an example Debian is one of the longest lived open source projects on the planet. It is a community drive development. To me it looks likely it will outlast Ubuntu, which is a fork that isn't community driven.
The central tenants that make FOSS work don't seem to have much to do with whether it's community driven or not. Both can succeed. Yes, community driven efforts can fail. But so can corporate drive FOSS, as WordPress may well demonstrate.
> ask why so much engineering time and money is being wasted on [Linux]
Most likely the corporations will say "because that is much cheaper than developing our own; 10 of our devs on Linux an 99% of devs from other corporations are much cheaper than 1000 of our devs on our own OS". And the shareholders will likely accept that.
The key thing is that for most corporations that contribute to Linux, Linux is not the product (except Red Hat, SuSe etc). Google, Facebook, etc, just need a good OS to run their billions of servers on.
> so we can fork when their interests stop aligning with ours
You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time.
That is also fine from the perspecitve of Free Software. The 4 freedoms do not include "the program must be maintainable with little enough manpower for people to do it in their free time, free of independence on corporate interests":
The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.
> You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time.
Maybe a question too radical for Hacker News, but why does Linux need 1M hours/year? How much "worse" would Linux be for the end user if this year, that time spent dropped to 100k or even 10k? And which "type" of Linux user was benefiting most from that time spent (person or corporation)? Why is more automatically treated as better than less?
> The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.
Indeed, I respect the wisdom and forethought of Stallman greatly in drafting the GPL.
I think it's a reasonable question to ask, and there's surely some churn that we could do without. But don't underestimate the effort that goes into device drivers.
A. How do you contribute to the kernel in a way that only benefits the contributing organization? That's quite literally impossible in this kind of project. Even the more niche stuff like virtualization support is used by homelab enthusiasts. It's also not like Linux has 100,000 APIs for every customer under the sun.
B. Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement; CPUs, GPUs, power management, etc. Without corporate interests, try running Linux 2.2 from 1999 on a modern PC (which came out just before the $1B IBM investment). See how well it works. Fork modern 2025 Linux, and try running it on a computer that comes out in 2028. See if it even boots. If Intel's only done a minor refresh, it might work; if it's something bigger like the split to P cores and E cores, expect a brick. Even if it does boot, don't be surprised if it crashes, acts unstable, has borked performance, broken sleep/wake, broken audio, broken USB, you name it, it's probably broken.
C. A forked Linux would not have the same level of security research behind it. For example, the Linux 4 era was marked by the introduction of fuzzers and the fixing of countless bugs. A C codebase with handwritten Assembly is rather unlikely to ever become bug-free. How well would your forked non-corporate codebase handle Spectre and Meltdown, just an example, with Google's experts contributing the technique for fixing these problems efficiently (Retpoline)?
D. Added to the above, this isn't a hypothetical: The FSF didn't like the practice of proprietary firmware blobs being in the kernel; so they made their own commercial-interest-free version of Linux called Trisquel. It still uses commercially written code if it's open source; so even it can't be called completely free of commercial influence. The kicker: It runs on almost nothing, and people were complaining about how it works on nothing 13 years ago.
TL;DR: A forked Linux, is a broken Linux, that will never run well on newer hardware, and will quickly become insecure.
> Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement;
Which is why Linux is primarily corporate funded. The corporates want to sell their hardware. To sell their hardware they need to get it running on Linux, so they fund that. As hardware support constitutes most of the code contributions, most of the code that goes into Linux was because corporate actors made a decision to pay for it's development - purely in their own interests.
That's nice - this symbiosis between FOSS and corporates works well for both sides. But it's a stretch to say Linux would not exist today without it. The most you can say for certain is Linux would not have it's great hardware support without it. The BSD's don't get anything like the amount of corporate funding Linux does. They are doing fine, and notably work on common modern hardware. So could Linux even without corporate funding.
In particular, most of the interesting stuff that happens in the kernel, the stuff that determines what the kernel will look like in 10 years time, stuff like adopting Rust, is driven by people scratching itches in the FOSS tradition. Not all of it - pKVM is Google initiative. But eBPF was scratching an itch. Jens Axboe developed io_uring probably as a consequence of wanting storage to run faster at Meta - but it was definitely an itch of his. It's nice that Meta to paid him while he developed it, but saying its creation was "driven by corporate interests at Meta" is a bit of a stretch.
I believe most of this is hardware support, followed by refactoring. The core kernel functionality certainly doesn't change to the tune of 1M hours/year.
I mean it's still a better model than, say, Adobe Photoshop. Even if corporations are contributing to it and making use of it, it still creates a useful tool for individuals that's less susceptible to many of the downsides of corporate products.
It's not too terribly unreasonable. It's largely the Linux Foundation trying to wrest control over chromium from Google before the FTC antitrusts them or before Google does more manipulative market controlling BS.
In more polite terms they are framing themselves as an ideal long term steward for the chromium project given that courts have already ruled that Google isn't a suitable steward anymore. Chromium wouldn't be so problematic if it wasn't run by such an anticompetitive organisation. If the Linux Foundation ran chromium and orgs like Igalia (who already do a near majority of the dev work for chromiumm) took over the brunt of senior development and leadership control then it'd be a pretty solid technology stack (albeit with some weaknesses).
I personally prefer Firefox and it's associated technologies but I also acknowledge the appeal of Chromium distributions like Vanadium.
Ah yep. I'm mistaken there. I had read somewhere at one point that they were the second largest contributor to Chromium and made assumptions I shouldn't have. My apologies.
Last autumn we finally fell to third behind Microsoft, in fairness.. But we're also the second biggest contributors to WebKit (really significant there) and Gecko too, as well as the #1 contributors to Servo, and more - if you're interested: https://bkardell.com/blog/2024-Midseason.html
And yet Google is a member of the initiative. Maybe, possibly, this initiative coupled with detaching Chromium from Alphabet might lead to an opening of the Chromium engine, but more likely Alphabet joined so that if it _does_ get split off from the mother-ship due to anti-trust they'll still have sway over Chromium's direction. And that will be an advertiser-centric direction.
I'll add that whatever the purpose of this project, it isn't going to help the overall openness of the web and will only continue to boost the adoption of an engine that already has an outsized influence over web standards.
How is that possible? Would Chrome Chromium maintainer make a different implementation decision from the original Chrome, and then support and develop a real branch in the code? To have Google less influence? I highly doubt it. It is all chromewashing, to make it sound as if Chrome Chromium is an independent browser.
That's how it is advertised. But in reality all decisions are made by Google for Chrome and other Chrome forks just implement all of them without questions.
Google wants to add a new protocol - all forks add it. Google wants to cripple adblock support - all forks do it. Etc.
Since the development is done in chromium, adding owners to the project, maybe changing governance similar to Kubernetes and the CNCF, could help steering the anti-trust away and benefit the industry as a side effect.
I wish this was the case, I doubt it'll be the case. Suppose for example that the foundation agrees that Manifest V3 is a bad idea (and, objectively, it is an awful idea). I can't imagine a world where the contributors from Google (which currently still make up the vast majority of the commits to the Chromium codebase) go back on their steps and re-implement support for V2, which would basically go against the profitability strategy of their own employer.
Same for intentionally crippling Google websites on non-Chromium browsers: given how deliberate such acts of crippling are, I have reasons to believe that it's part of Google's "works with Chrome" strategy, and I'd doubt that Google employees can do much against it.
The only way to fix the governance of Chromium is to effectively chop all the threads that connect it to Google. As long as Chromium developers who are employed at Google won't do anything that goes against the strategy of their employer, you can't have fair governance.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat
Even market-dominant companies do this. Windows ships a bunch of backward compatibility patches. Graphics card drivers (especially Nvidia) wholesale replace shaders in popular games.
Sure, I don't mind the ads. The pervasive tracking and data collection and profile building is where I draw the line. Tons and tons of JS churning my browser to sell me stuff. If my adblock eventually causes some sort of economic disaster, so be it.
Ads are what make the internet a bloated mess. Ads are why there are a thousand different results for “roasted broccoli recipe”, because they are all trying to get me to pick them so I can see ads. Its why each one is 5 pages of crap before you get to the actual recipe, so they can shove in more ads. Everything is stretched, duplicative, and needless complex, so you will move through as many ads as humanly possible.
Yet hackers would be outside shouting and banging the doors, demanding to be let in to have the free poison, writing five hundred miles of comments about why they should not pay.
You forgot to tell another half of this story where this cafe used all sorts of tactics to kill competition and uses semi-related businesses to ensure its dominance. Then they nicely suggested everyone to pay what they can, or else. It's not an innocent local cafe as you paint it. It is a corporate network monster whose win strategy is "leave no survivors".
And rather than stop going to this evil cafe, people just go and don't pay.
So as long as you make out your flavor of the month business as "greedy and evil" you can paint yourself a moral crusader by going there and taking things for free. How convenient, eh?
"This coffee shop is a terrible place, therefore I will eat there for free everyday in protest!"
The network effect kinda prevents you from finding coffee at an honest place.
(The content is on YouTube and nowhere else)
Until this changes and one can choose to go somewhere else, I wouldn't worry too much about the terrible cafe's income, because it is one of the richest entities in the world, it already shouldn't be that rich and powerful, and if it disappeared, it would finally let one go find coffee somewhere else.
The other possibility is to stop drinking coffee, of course. Though you can't really do this with everything.
YouTube is hardly the only website on the Internet. And besides that, YouTube splits ad revenue 40/60 yt/creator anyway. So I suppose those creators are all in on the scheme too?
If that cafe was part of a megacorp that was doing shady business and driving small business in the ground, as well as exploiting others, I’d drink that free coffee every day!
And rather than blocking me access, like in “please pay to watch it”, they squiggle and babble incomprehensibly. Note that I’m not freeloading Nebula etc.
Your analogy was shallow from
the start. Continuing it makes little sense.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. If one really does believe the place to be evil (and not merely bad at what it does), then actions that cripple it financially and make it more likely to go out of business are commendable if anything.
Of course, better yet is to take it up a notch and advocate for other people to also use ad blockers and to help install and configure them. Thankfully, with how invasive ads are, the advertisers are basically doing all the agitprop; all you need to convince someone to use an adblocker today is to show them how websites look with and without it.
That's possible, but it doesn't sound like an analogy to me, and I've known enough selfish assholes in my life to absolutely be able to picture this as a real thing that's currently happening.
At home we were talking about food ads on Youtube. Sure, once in a while you see an ad for a meal box that is actual food but I see a lot of ads for things like Huel which float in this strange space where it's not "I used to eat bread and meat and vegetables and now I drink all my meals" but where it's normal to drink your meals (they pose as if they were trying to persuade you to switch from some other meal replacement), where you have to work just as hard taking supplements every day as you would work lifting weights or not eating junk food -- there's McDonald's and there are ultra-processed foods, but this is ridiculous.
(A friend of mine received a huge quantity of 4Patriots dried food from his mom who was sucked in by some ad that claimed it was on sale because they made too much. We got some and the smell when my son made it turned my stomach.)
In terms of sponsorships there was the "Established Titles" scandal; I am a big fan of Ryan Szymanski who's a world authority on battleships. One day he got bribed to make a video about
which was a good reason to talk about battleships and Scotland. Pretty soon he's adding a cringy pitch to all his videos and unfortunately it is so hard to give somebody like the right kind of "tough love" which will set him straight, although after the scandal popped most of the people involved went back to remove the junk.
Years ago, when it was the dominant player, Ad-Block Plus sought to strike a truce with advertisers, where they would dial back the invasiveness of ads, and ABP would sign off on these and whitelist them.
This quickly led to a revolt from ABP users, and the ultimate collapse of the plugin. That is when uBlock was born and become the king.
What we have is a positive feedback cycle where creators are forced to resort to worse and worse ads to cover the cost of the ever increasing number of ad-block users. It's just plainly true that every revenue generating ad you block (not necessarily profit generating ad) is an ad that must be fed to someone else to view for you.
I've had a longtime gym habit which sometimes has me in front of the TV around noon where the ads are all for products for people who don't have any money. I remember seeing a series of ads where my first thought was "anybody except a TV executive or a politician would look at that and say it it's a medicare scam" and watching the ads for a decade before it got in the news that it really was a scam and people are going to jail.
Those ads win an auction to get there, they might be the optimal ads for that slot, but if you want to know why people have low trust in the media and low trust in the government, start there.
I watched Tubi a lot last summer, which is in a wonderful honeymoon period, and was watching saturation advertising for P&G products that featured upbeat black people cleaning up (their own messes) with Dawn and Tide. Great, I say. They've got some awareness that they shouldn't run ads that drive viewers away. Maybe targeted ads will be good for television but the specter of
> Please don't use Chrome Mask on YouTube. It won't resolve any issues, and it will make your experience worse over time. If some issue got fixed after toggling Chrome Mask on, it most likely got fixed by the addon clearing the cache. But you can do that yourself, too, without the need for this addon.
Ehh. Youtube has been problematic for 3 or 4 Firefox versions now. If you leave a video open long enough memory usage skyrockets and the page becomes unresponsive.
Using an ad blocker (and not paying for a subscription in the case of YouTube) isn't the "user making their own choices", it's stealing content.
If a creator puts up ads or a paywall, it's because they want to be compensated. You should either respect their wish or simply not view their content.
I understand this perspective, but I disagree with it.
If someone wants to use a public space (i.e., the Internet), then they have accept that technological solutions to annoyances are also part of that.
Block it with a subscription if you don't accept this reality. But getting the benefits of a free, global audience doesn't entitle the artist to any means of revenue they choose, including what annoys and harms people.
It's like saying you have to walk the long way around to your exhibit through the concessions hall before seeing my display, when someone can just take a shortcut and skip that, and blaming them for doing so.
If the restaurant puts food on the public sidewalk I'm free to pick it up. The internet is not inside of someone's business, they are inside of it. It is a public space and if they publish without a paywall, I'm free to consume that how ever I like. Your analogy is ridiculous and makes you come across as a simp for Big Advertising.
> If the restaurant puts food on the public sidewalk I'm free to pick it up.
If someone leaves their purse on the sidewalk and you just take it, you're committing a crime. Consuming a restaurant's food without paying for it is also a crime. It being on the sidewalk doesn't make it not their property (or the property of whoever paid for it).
> The internet is not inside of someone's business, they are inside of it. It is a public space and if they publish without a paywall, I'm free to consume that how ever I like.
There's already many court precedents that no, you can't consume it "however" you like. For example, all copyright laws apply.
Ad blockers are a grey area in that yes, they're not disallowed, but that also means that companies are allowed to mess with you more or less however they want (YouTube for example throttles browsers with active ad blockers).
using an ad blocker is the ONLY option to avoid adds. You can pay evilcorp for a subscription/premium account/whatever and they'll still try to force you to watch 10 minutes of adds for a 1 minute video. Fuck them. We own them nothing.
Banksy said it better:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
> using an ad blocker is the ONLY option to avoid adds. You can pay evilcorp for a subscription/premium account/whatever and they'll still try to force you to watch 10 minutes of adds for a 1 minute video. Fuck them. We own them nothing.
On YouTube? No. I pay for Premium, there's no ads.
I pay for YouTube Premium. I'm thankful that it exists. I still get sponsored segments in the middle of my videos (from the content creators themselves). I haven't (yet) installed SponsorBlock -- currently, I have no plans to, but I do fast-forward to skip those commercials in the middle of the videos.
I pay for Amazon Prime, and they've started showing me preroll ads on my streaming content. I also still get sponsored product recommendations in my search list.
I pay for Kagi search. Thankfully, this area is still relatively clean.
Also it boggles my mind that an advertising company (1) offers its own ad blocker to block competitors ads, and (2) circumscribes what ad blockers can do, and (3) nobody stops them... All when the FBI is saying you should run an ad blocker to avoid being the victim of a crime.
It's not the engineers making these decisions. They write the code they are told to write. Some middle manager / VP gets a promotion if they 'increase engagement', 'increase ad-spend', or some other hollow metric they chase. They are the ones deciding to send any 1-3 star ratings to customer support, and 4-5 ratings recorded as an actual rating. It's not about the users at all. It's about gaming the system for some manager's benefit.
I am not a person who normally moralizes to others, but I can say I have quit jobs where I found the work to be unethical or that company policies required me to bend my ethics.
The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical engineers who do not consider the effect of their work in the long run.
Same here. Ultimately, the engineer is the one typing in the code and hitting submit. They are at the very least complicit and need to at least share responsibility.
maybe my rant is going to be a bit out of place here but here it goes anyways:
sometimes im glad im a technical person that can get away with a somewhat "healthy digital life" im basically immune to all the crap going on. i don't need to work too hard to meet my digital needs because im also a simple person.
but i really feel bad for the normies who have to deal with all the shit the tech industry throws at them. they don't even know what's wrong, they can't pinpoint what's giving them that extra stress, building up day by day when they use their devices, handle their info, or consume entertainment. like account exhaustion, confusing UI changes every day, or why they have to navigate a sea of crap just to unsubscribe. and why do they need a new computer for software that worked fine 15 years ago?
and don't even get me started on what they're doing to older people. cable companies for example are ripping them off with terrible TV boxes and nonsense plans. all their appliances need subscriptions or apps and have cryptic buttons. stores now feel like border control, straight out of a black mirror episode.
i can't imagine the frustration they must feel. it just feels backwards.
AFAICT, current tech industry culture is most like what I understood of the '80s stereotype of Wall Street bro culture: sociopathic unchecked-greed that will do whatever it can get away with.
I'm not saying this to complain, but to suggest a risk of what might come next.
So far, they've run wild, and taken over computers, the Internet, AI, and information technology in general.
What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Right now, one of the few firewalls against that might be that doctors generally have traditions of ethics, and some stature to hold their ground and influence things.
Earlier Internet didn't have the same formalized ethical traditions, but had a lot of very smart people people who had altruistic intentions, as well as suspicion of those who'd attempt to twist online potential. All those ethical people were pretty much swept away in a funding gold rush, suddenly with little to no influence over it.
(Google did grab some of those people, because Google said the right words, so the altruistic techies thought it was their people, but look what eventually happened even there.)
Just like virtually every IoT product and Web site violates every user, what happens if a medical gold rush (say, some kind of implant, or transformative process) means that what we thought was a bulwark of ethical practitioners, is easily bulldozed over, by investment money and culture. And then everyone's body is violated by the newly unchecked industry-wide socipathy, with no alternatives to even live?
> What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Allow me to simultaneously assuage and stoke your fears. There is little chance of big tech disrupting the medical field; Because every aspect of the medical field has already been seized by the insurance companies. See United Health / Optum.
Google has a habit of intentionally delivering degraded versions of their services to not Chromium based browsers, particularly non-Chrome versions of their browsers (determined by User Agent).
There's a pretty famous example of Google deploying a specific variations of Youtube to Microsoft Edge browsers (back when Edge had it's own engine) and that specific variation would cause Edge's hardware acceleration to break. If you overrode the user agent to present as google chrome, the problematic invisible parts of the page disappeared and everything worked as intended. And what the specific problem HTML was would change just as fast as the MS team could roll out fixes. In effect they were playing a game of "break the browser" against their competitors to force them to apply temporary fixes that would then later have to be removed resulting in unnecessary code churn in their competitors' code bases.
Youtube intentionally degrades the user experience if you use Firefox, at least if you are using a proper ad blocker. And there really isn't much reason to use Firefox if you aren't also using uBlock. So by targeting the users of uBlock+Firefox, YouTube is aggressively degrading the experience of Firefox users. Things I've noticed include:
1. Every video defaults to the absolute lowest resolution (240 or 320) until I manually switch it to a higher setting.
2. Occasional (but fairly frequent) 30-second delay before a page loads (loads enough to show a black page, then just freezes for a while. During this delay, refreshing the page gives the same result.
3. Rarely, interstitial notice pages threatening vague consequences if I continue to use an ad blocker.
They may actually be implementing something on the server side to degrade the performance of connections because they have me flagged as a ublock user.
>it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them.
I don't think its "almost like", I think it "actually is", and that its intentional.
There is a perspective that is now prevalent in tech and business that users are good only as far as you can monetize them. Any concepts of respect or value outside of that have been discarded.
There used to be a sense that you needed to continue improving a product to keep charging the same or more for it. Now companies expect you to pay more every year while products are stagnating or being enshittified to extract higher profit margins on top of the increased prices they are charging.
Tech is now run by Business/Sales people, and every user is a statistic in a spreadsheet they are trying to extract the most money from for the least amount of investment.
Data collection and behaviour tracking is one side of the coin, but we really don't talk about why companies are willing to pay so much for that data or what they do with it... that's a conversation I think needs to be focused on.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
It's also crazy that we've let ad companies tell us that using a non-Google browser is the same thing as using an adblocker. It is not the same and it never was.
I use Firefox with no adblocker installed. I don't mind ads to an extent. I do mind tracking and find micro-targeting disgusting and creepy and evil, so I use Firefox, and I use its Enhanced Tracking Protection, and I only log in to the major Ad Companies like Google/YouTube, Amazon, Meta, others in dedicated containers that only are for their sites themselves. It's sad and annoying how many ad networks accuse me of having an adblocker just for using Firefox (or Safari) with relatively cleaner than average cookies.
Show me the old school of ads, the "Superbowl" broadest audience ads, the stuff that advertising companies "knew" for centuries of their existence as "common sense" that was the most useful way to make and sell ads before tech companies got involved and decided that user privacy was up for auction to the highest bidder. The way I see it: If an ad network can't do that and sees this as "adblocking", it deserves to die and something better needs to step up and eat their lunch. That includes Google and Meta's ad networks. That includes "Admiral" and any other network that buys ads from creepy "Temu".
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers
Is this actually a thing? As far as I'm aware all degradations in non-Chromium browsers have been unintentional bugs, either caused by a YouTube bug or a non-YouTube bug (i.e. in the browser or an extension) (note I'm specifically not commenting on the last portion of your comment regarding "for people using adblockers").
If you have a lot of technical churn, and only test perf on Chromium, then you could certainly claim that the result is "unintentional", but it's almost guaranteed based on that circumstance.
I unintentionally burned down a dozen houses because I was too incompetent to properly test the propane systems I was hooking up to houses, but only the ones built by competing contractors that didn't quite fit my way of doing things. How can you call that anything but unintentional and how can you possibly hold me accountable?
> it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads
AKA depriving content creators of their revenue. If you're saying their content isn't good enough to pay for directly, and isn't good enough to endure ads in order to engage, then why are you trying to consume it? Look elsewhere.
> or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them
I agree with this depending on what you mean by "surveillance." There's a minimum amount of "surveillance" required to measure ad penetration and effectiveness and essentially provide assurance to advertisers that they aren't getting scammed. There's a whole other level of "surveillance" where the ad network (usually Google) is building a dossier on all your interests and every site you've ever visited. Some of that information enables targeted advertising, but you should always retain the right to opt-out, and see all the data that's been collected on you and edit it. You should also be able to opt-in to that data being sold and getting a cut of the proceeds, should you so desire. I wouldn't, but I could imagine some people would.
Bottom line - people gotta make money to eat and oftentimes they're not giving away content for free. If you don't want to pay for it - that's your choice as a user: pay and consume or don't pay and move on. Calling on hackers to figure out a way to steal it may not have a future that works out to your liking.
I'm curious if you know of any court cases that back up your position. I've connected to a lot of servers today and downloaded all the information they sent me.
Google isn't entitled to invade my privacy, harvest my data and waste my time with ads. Installing an adblocker isn't an act of entitlement, it's an act of self-defense.
It's not possible to shame a group of people who can't even agree on baseline ethical issues around their profession. For every engineer who refuses to work on guided missiles or the Torment Nexus and would feel shame to do so, there's another engineer who would find it an interesting technical problem.
When such things work, it's not because people who do it feel ashamed, it's because the society ostracizes them so much that it becomes actually inconvenient to function in it.
Oh, and it is an interesting problem. In the abstract.
You should instead support businesses with a business model that fits your philosophy and try to persuade other users to do the same. If you aren't helping make other business models successful, you aren't really achieving anything.
They are if you use their service. You agree to their terms when you want the services they provide. Of course, you can violate the terms of service, but that puts you in the wrong legally and potentially morally, depending on your specific moral values.
You aren't entitled to their service, but they are entitled to your data (as allowed under the relevant jurisdiction) if you choose, of your own volition, to use their service.
Or we could just let you and other people like you subsidize it.
I've used Pocket Cast for a little over a year and a half. Just manually skipping through ads when I have my phone handy and they come on, the app reports I've apparently saved 14 hours of wasted time.
I've been blocking ads in Firefox for nearly 20 years and have been helping friends and family do it for nearly as long. I'm not going back because I should feel bad for some company with billions of dollars in profits that doesn't care about me or any of my privacy. I go the extra step further and use the banned from Chrome store extension, Ad Nauseum, to click on nearly every single blocked ad.
I'm not saying you anyone should feel bad. If you have a principled objection to the status quo you should support companies with business models you prefer, and try to persuade others to do the same. Otherwise your just taking advantage of a loop hole, and shouldn't complain if/when the company tries to block it.
freetube is a superior experience for consuming youtube content in every way, including not running google’s javascript so they cannot mess with the users in the same way. it has adblock and sponsorblock built in.
that said, firefox has been my browser of choice as a web dev for most of my career. (im old enough to have used netscape before that).
i remember having super powers compared to other devs with the help of firebug :-)
What irks me even a bit more is that user experience is degraded even for logged in premium users. They just really don't want us using other browsers.
FF has been my dailer driver for a long time. But google blocking ublock origin was a deal breaker. I now only use chrome when a site is otherwise unusable.
Empirical, but I have noscript and ublock enabled on Mozilla and whenever I go to youtube, it reloads three times in a laggy manner before it will let me type into the search. I check to see that I am not logged into gmail before using youtube.
I am happy to do all that, because I like my videos uninterrupted and my web experience lean.
YouTube is totally bricked for me on Firefox, and the quality of use of Gmail + anything Google Drive related has degraded severely over the past ~year. Feels concerted.
Mozilla is an advertising company now, and by many accounts Mozilla has been the main attack on Firefox for the many years even before they explicitly shifted to advertising.
My very old, and bad, laptop takes an extremely long time to start Firefox.
However, forks like Floorp are a lot quicker to start.
And since I'm pretty strict about using the same tools everywhere (no matter the OS) I'm now using Floorp on my main PC as well.
But I'm not sure Floorp can be trusted... does anyone have anything to say about it?
Is it not the case of using Ubuntu with Snap? I have experienced similar things with Chrome and Firefox on Ubuntu starting extremely slowly when using the snap version. And Ubuntu does not offer deb packages for those anymore, you have to manually add the Mozilla repo to use that.
It's extremely outdated now because the developer has abandoned it. I have the vague impression it's lying about the chromium version it's based on as well, or something related to that.
It depends on the extension, what are you using? Search in the Add-on store[0] If It's present there, then Firefox can even import them from Chrome for you if it matches certain criteria[1]
Unfortunately, I have had to move in the opposite direction. I have been a Firefox user for more than a decade but after an upgrade to Linux Mint 22 I have had very regular crashes on Firefox which took the entire computer down and so now I am on Brave which seems to be so much faster.
Have you tried a clean install of firefox? A separate profile even. A lot of people switching to another browser and finding it much more performant/stable is just them starting with a default browser with minimal addons.
Sometimes a clean install isn't even needed. I moved my ~/.mozilla directory across all my main PC installs (and different flavors such as Palemoon and Waterfox) for years and all I had to do was cleaning the cache and every now and then the years long history which can really slow down the browser at each startup (note: system disk on SSD, home on mechanical HD, so YMMV).
Firefox still crashes for me. Multiple computers and laptops, PC’s and Macs - it always crashes. I test it every few years and the crashes still occur. It makes it an unusable browser. Instead I use Brave.
It crashes with per-tab thread isolation? When was the last time you tried it? I don't believe I've had a single crash in the past five years and it's my daily driver.
Ditto, the only time I use Chrome is when some old portals in work require it. I've never had a crash in the past 8 years, but then again, I keep my tabs clean and have uBlock Origin.
Yes - I've been quite disappointed by this recently. I'm trying to make something that can interact with embedded devices and wanted to use the web serial JS API.
Unfortunately it seems that the powers that be at Firefox have no plans to support it on account of privacy and security - which I half get, but, it appears to be an established standard in Chrome. The discussion surrounding it kinda sucked and well.
I tried it a while back to configure my keyboard but it didn't seem to work at the time, I think it is a nice solution to Mozilla's problems with the API though
I have been using mozilla for _years_ it got shit, then better, then shit, and now its close enough.
The thing I _Love_ is container tabs. I can isolate empires by using container tabs to sandbox cookies and other web state. This means that ebay doesn't change my adverts to the last thing I searched on every site, and autoplay embedded youtube doesn't fuck up my video recommendations.
It means I can hide my work gmail from my home, and separate search histories (although thats less relevant now with AI.)
lastly, being able to scroll left and right on my tabs, rather than new ones being unaccesable is great.
I've been using the silly hack of using two versions of Firefox side-by-side (so, multiple browsers but they are both Firefox today), one which is Default in the OS and focuses on a single profile and Container Tab management. The other launches into the ProfileManager at startup to choose a Profile and doesn't pick up random links because it isn't Default.
Better Profile Management tools may be nice to see. Maybe I won't need dueling builds of Firefox. Or maybe I'll keep it, we'll see.
Finally, it only took them 10 years to get around to updating that decades old UI. Wonder which other decade old UI parts are they gonna tackle next? ooh, will they finally do something about Library and the whole bookmarks/history menu/sidebar/window mess? It's a little insane how so much time has passed and so many versions were released, and some interface stuff still remains unpolished and disparate. Firefox simply can't get it together on that front.
For tab containers, maybe there's a "good reason" that no other browser has that feature, cause it is confusing both as a concept and in use, and doesn't separate the rest of the stuff (or even the stuff in intends to separate when it's cumbersome and peculiar to use). Like, shared history, or inability to have separate extensions, defeats many of the purposes people use profiles for - which is an actual complete separation of things.
As a consultant, switching between my many clients, testing, and home accounts is simply Alt+F+B+Arrow down ("Open new container tab"), all within the same UI, in the same window, with colored tabs, with the same extensions, and same password manager.
I've been in situations needing up to half a dozen different Microsoft accounts (multiple Teams clients in Firefox, for instance), other browsers haven't solved this daily use-case for me.
"Shared everything", is exactly what's undesirable about container tabs and what makes them a non-starter. I'd like to keep work actually separate. I don't need work tabs, or work history, or work downloads polluting the "main" profile. I don't need work extensions to be active outside of work. (there's just no way to make some extensions to work with just specific containers, so that's a dud.) All of that stuff can be in it's own space, and it would also make switching a bit easier - open profile, resume tabs, close profile, things stay put and ready to pick up where you left off, without needing to juggle tabs within the same profile and having them be an eyesore, be it work stuff on a regular profile or vice versa.
OTOH Vivaldi guys said that much as they'd like to implement this, they're unable to due to some architectural issues with Blink. So basically no Blink browser will have that unless and until Google decides to do it in Chrome - which seems unlikely given their incentives.
If I remember correctly, these are profiles in the same sense this term is used in Firefox - i.e. a global setting that can be switched, but applies to all active browser windows at the time. So you can't use it to (easily) browse different websites in different profiles side by side.
In Safari, "profiles" are a per-window thing, and there are facilities to open a website in a different profile etc, so effectively they work much more like Firefox containers (which are even more fine-grained tho: per-tab).
That said, it's telling that it's so difficult to disable auto-playing video entirely in Firefox. I'm not convinced that a profit motive is NOT the reason behind that (it is possible but requires a bunch of about:config changes; it's not exposed in the settings UI and that smells sinister)
Unfortunately at work I must use Chrome without an adblocker. It's pretty terrible.
I'd been using Firefox for my work device for years but I only discovered containers and how awesome they are. My company was acquired and we still use microsoft accounts for different purposes. Jira works with this account, but sharepoint works with that account. Can't be logged in with the same azure account at the same time, but with containers, I can. It's great.
If you haven't checked out the "AWS SSO Containers" extension they you are missing out! I recently found this beauty and it's literally changed the way I work. I couldn't be happier.
Yes I know about it but I try to limit the extensions I use to:
- the ones that are built by Mozilla
- the ones that are endorsed by Mozilla
- the ones I take time to read the code (and usually disable auto-updates)
I haven't had time to do the later for aws-sso-containers. Thanksfully I don't have that many account to work on at the same time these days so I didn't push it high in the priority list.
I have 4 Microsoft accounts I use regularly for work. I also do some consulting and often end up with credentials provisioned at a client (don't get me started on this).
It is so convenient to have container tabs. All my extensions are available in new containers, unlike multiple Chromium profiles (or Firefox profiles).
Container tabs also pair very well with Simple Tab Groups, which allow you to pin a container to a group, so that everything for one account ends up in one place.
I live in the AWS console for work and am constantly switching between accounts. The "AWS SSO Containers" extension has been a godsend for me. I used to use Chrome profiles for this but it was very clunky and only allowed access to a limited number of accounts at a time. Firefox container tabs allow me to access simultaneously all of my AWS accounts, in one window, automatically. It literally made my work life better.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadThere is some subtle tab / link click behavior that takes a bit to get used to, but after a while it just doesn't bother you any more because you're used to the behavior.
Safari does admittedly set a very high bar though, and only cares about 1-2 platforms at most.
I’m not trying to be the “just Google it” guy without citations. But I couldn’t find a definitive citation - just general discussions and some YouTube videos including earlier discussions on HN.
I searched for “firefox vs safari battery mac” and the same for Edge on Windows.
https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...
There’s something to be said for adding _less_ features to web browsers. A simple web is a web where open source solutions can compete with chrome. It helps avoid a browser monoculture.
PWAs are a great example of this. The general idea was even a product of the Jobs era of Apple, before the App Store.
Safari and iOS’s poor support of PWAs is exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store.
Choosing safari is choosing a more closed web, where missing standards means that you, as a safari user, are unable to access certain features or apps that Apple doesn’t want you to access.
Maybe I don't care about PWAs (which I don't), maybe I don't feel like the majority of APIs introduced lately belongs in the browser. There's very little of what you should be able to do on the web that you could not do 10 years ago. Yes, flexbox is awesome, let's have that, so is the dialog tag. WebGL, Blutooth, USB, device memory, battery status... No, the browser doesn't need to support that.
I don't want to have to install more apps, and more web APIs means more things can be done inside of the browser shell without having to install software that could literally do anything on your computer (and is often hard to remove completely when you're done).
Nah, it's because PWAs were a standard created by Google, with Google being the primary market driver, solely with the interest of advancing Google's own interests (both in undermining Apple, and making lower-end devices more usable in developing markets). Don't think Google invented PWAs, or heavily pushed them, out of some charity. Notice also that as the ultra-cheap phones (~$100) have become more powerful, and as Apple refused to take the bait, that Google's efforts behind PWA have mostly ended.
The same goes for RCS, even though it was initially made by a neutral vendor forum. Google became the heavy pusher of RCS, not just for the sake of Android, but because they had carrier deals to use Google's own infrastructure (Jibe) for RCS, and forcing Apple to accept and integrate with their own infrastructure is a better position to be in.
This is also, let's be clear, not the first time that Google has tried an "open" standard to advance their interests and bludgeon competition. AMP is what happens when the standard catastrophically fails.
We all know that the best web development tools ever to be created was those that shipped with Opera when they still used Presto.
Most of the iOS / MacOS software issues are things that more bodies could fix.
Apple designs their own processors (now), specs/sources their components (e.g. screens), and then does all the integration engineering.
That's the bulk of device work.
Which isn't to say that semi manufacturing isn't hard, but is to say there's a lot of effort between a chip and a device.
I don't think you realize how much work goes into building and cerifying a working, mass market device.
There were some other problems with Safari as well; profiles didn't work quite the way I needed them to, limited extensions (no uBlock Origin!), etc. I probably could have worked around them but I didn't need to; Firefox was almost perfect.
Plus the incompatibility with various sites... Just sticking with FF. I can certainly appreciate an OS-integrated browser, though. It makes life simpler for users and if you have the full Apple ecosystem, the tab sync is useful.
> With Microsoft and Google, we just expect them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good
And with Safari, a loathsome browser that's intent on recreating the IE6 conditions of yore, we give it a free pass.
I'm sorry, but comparing modern Safari to the worst software ever widely used is just not remotely reasonable.
I don't know if I am rewriting history but when Chrome came out it felt like Google went "hold my beer" and in 6 months developed the first decent browser.
I can imagine the 7 people who used Netscape on Linux were very annoyed every so often.
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
> ...and that's why I stick to this Chromium fork with its own digital advertising service and its own cryptocurrency, but you can easily switch it off!
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/formats/
[2] https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-di...
For the record, I used a Firefox phone for many years (and yes it did cause me a lot of problems), and remember vividly when they announced a luxury Firefox phone about one week before killing the project.
"Talking points" is from the same land as "gotcha questions." "Talking points" are the points that people are talking about that you'd prefer not to talk about because you don't have good answers for. So you pretend like repeating an unanswered question is an dirty underhanded plot.
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
This isn't a quote. Don't make up quotes. This is you putting words in people's mouths, and choosing the ones that allow you to reply with something about Brave. At the same time, you're excusing Firefox for doing things because Brave does similar things. The people switching to for-profit Brave from Firefox would have prefer a non-profit, user-focused Firefox, but have been pushed to the point where they don't see any moral difference between the two, so they might as well experiment. When Firefox was innovating, it was the founder of Brave that was running it.
Most Firefox haters use Firefox. They just wish that it wasn't so bad, that it wasn't so much torture to put it into a usable state, and that the developers weren't actively fighting the users to keep them from putting it in that state, rather than centering on the users. They largely blame this on the company, Google, who subsidizes Firefox while competing with it. And on the company, Mozilla, that sucks all of that subsidy up in salaries, while seemingly neglecting the browser.
Sometimes? They tend to hit the mark of bad decisions more often than not
Most good decisions don't get a full press cycle (because they are boring).
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
I'm talking about frequency, you're talking about severity. People don't remember the 1000 times you did something correctly.
Good job. Smart tactics.
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
[2]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefo...
[3]: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/
1. "Pause breakpoints" gets unchecked after app rebuilds and/or restarts.
2. The Ctrl+P hotkey only works on the sources tab, unlike Chrome. I just can't bear to always keep in mind what tab I'm on when using a hotkey.
Regarding Ctrl+P, there is a bug on file [2], we could easily make it so that it switches to debugger and open that search-for-file UI from there. Showing this UI on top of any panel would be a much more involved change.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1933764 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409544
You can toggle `devtools.popups.debug` preference [1] to true in about:config and DevTools should open on popups.
Unfortunately, there is some limitations, highlighted at the end of that bugzilla entry. It won't work for <a target="_blank">, while it should work for window.open usages.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1569859
Overall it's a pretty similar experience. Most difficult part is the habit changing of getting used to a different UI.
Why? I am surprised as I use 3 browsers for different contexts: - ungoogled chromium for everything behind my company's SSO - firefox with an AWS theme with containers setup for each AWS account under another firefox account. - librewolf for everything else with containers syncronized under a personal firefox account
I could probably run everything under the same firefox or librewolf browser and different profiles but that way I didn't even had to setup separate launchers for the profiles. I also like that they are all visually different so I can spot them easily when switching windows.
I use links to browse maps from openstreetmap servers.
BTW, I use lynx/links too, among sacc and gemini browsers.
News/portal/translator and so over gopher: gopher://magical.fish
Blogs: gopher://sdf.org
Text wikipedia: gopher://gopherpedia.com
Graphical: I forgot the URL for Gemini
Weather: finger yourcity@graph.no
Weather over gopher, replace Madrid with your city: gopher://graph.no:79/0/madrid
Web decrapifier: gemini://gemi.dev (News Waffle)
Everyhing else: IRC, Usenet, Bitlbee, sxiv, mocp, mpv, mupdf.
Unfortunately, companies treat chrome like they treated IE. Hard to get rid of.
The good of Firefox:
* the extensions ecosystem (KeepassXc, TamperMonkey, AdBlock, Disable Javascript, Youtube Audio, etc)
* the defaults in privacy and performance are good enough for me
The bad of Firefox:
* it is a minority web client engine so a few technologies and sites have problems with it. E.g: it is easy to debug WASM in Chrome, it isn't in Firefox
I use Firefox on all my devices. Actually, I am now experimenting with Zen Browser (FF-based fork prettier than Firefox, and even more privacy-focused). My wife and my kids get no say in it: it's Firefox in the whole household.
Today? Not at all.
Built-in screenshot tool? "You don't need to install extensions"! Really? Dude just press Print Screen, it even works outside a browser, if one day you have to be put through the unspeakable torture of using a native application! Single-use burner emails are also nice and all, but why exactly does this have to be linked to my browser?
Of course switching browsers it's gonna be a big deal, when you actively walk out of your way to lock yourself to your browser's "ecosystem", but better Mozilla than Google I guess.
There are situations where it’s really useful to be able to capture the entire web page and not just the visible viewport.
[0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/how-to-capture-...
Last week I switched to Edge. I know some people will turn up their nose at such a choice, but it turns out to actually be a very nice browser. I'm even using it on my phone now too.
It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. Instead of building a better experience, these engineers seem to be focused on sabotaging alternatives in the name of profit or control. The kind of mindset behind this reeks of the same tactics we see in some ad networks or big tech companies - if we can’t convince you to opt in, we’ll make sure you’re inconvenienced or frustrated until you do.
It’s a dangerous precedent because it introduces a toxic game of cat-and-mouse, where the user is constantly playing defense, trying to protect themselves from deliberate misdirection. It’s not just an ethical concern, but also an issue of how we value user autonomy in the digital space.
For the hackers out there, this is a opportunity to dig into the JavaScript code responsible for this. There’s almost certainly some interesting obfuscation or odd behavior hiding in the code, and by pulling it apart, we can both understand how these tactics work and build tools or methods to counteract them. Let’s make sure the only thing that slows down the web is bad design or slow servers, not malicious code aimed at punishing the user for making their own choices.
"Precedent", yeah.
Eventually competitors caught up.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)
Websites aren't expensive to run even on a slow interpreter. Even medium-complexity apps don't do much and could be written in python or ruby back then.
The only source of website lag is ads networks.
Rinse and repeat forever...
It is very common the case that someone else will do something that aligns with your best interest. (love for example) In fact it is often in your best interest to do something that helps someone else and appears to harm you. (giving money to the poor at first glance appears to harm you and thus be illogical - but there are a number of secondary results of this that make it in your best interest anyway)
And now they own Github and they're training their AI models on you and your code and forcing that crap into a bunch of PCs. They were about to push out a "feature" to Windows that periodically took screenshots of what you were doing and used AI to analyze what you were doing. Then they sprinkle some glitter for the easily-distracted and tell you that it's actually a feature for you. Last I heard, they shelved the idea for now because of the backlash, but we all know they'll circle back around.
But, yeah, I'm a tinfoil hat weirdo who's just a "hater."
* Scrappy upstart catches the industry off guard * Wild success and growth * Becomes bloated, unable to innovate, and addicted to its cash cow * Begins turning the screws on its users to appease shareholders
(I would actually extend this to all large businesses in general, but we can start with tech.)
Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.
The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
Can you please share sources regarding this? I'm not familiar with any instance like this.
I lived through that as a user. (I was one of the like 5 Edge Spartan users, I know, lol.) I could see the dumb animation in dev tools and manually delete it for better performance. It was a nice thing I had some technical skills. I know for mainstream users the solution was "watch YouTube in Chrome".
It's hard to find to other sources because Microsoft intentionally broke the SEO on the Edge brand and you know Google is the only other major search engine. Not that they'd intentionally down-pagerank bad news about a Google property, I'm sure.
The only glitch I reliably get is watching videos at 1.5x sometimes freezes video (but audio still plays). Expect that's more hardware and memory pressure related tho.
Also, I wasn't aware YouTube mobile has ads? I think uBlock might be eating them. Although possibly whatever is lagging others experiences too...
That would be the point of an ad-block add-on wouldn't it?
IIRC the story was, when Youtube was redesigned a while ago they used an early spec for Web Components, that they were pushing to be standardized and was fully implemented in Chrome. But they had to add Polymer as a polyfill for other browsers. Then the version of Web Components we actually got wasn't entirely compatible with that early spec, so Polymer is still in use for non-Chrome browsers.
I don't know how much of that's changed since then, but the complaints are basically the same as when that happened.
I expect YT is probably doing some preloading or heavyweight running in a loaded-but-not-playing tab.
Convert that to load-on-click, and you'll likely fix your issue.
The fact is, it doesn’t happen in Chrome for “magical” reasons, according to a comment few levels up. And regular non-tech users won’t debug this with click to play or whatever. We expect that YT does it absolutely intentionally.
It bends userbases however it wants due to its multi-dimensional reach, and we’re like “hmm maybe extension would help prevent accidental preloading issue”. I just don’t get it.
What a strange confusion, as if all people must have the same "workflow". Sorry, no intent to sound negative, but why not give it some thought at least. It's "6 tabs", not "6 videos playing at the same time".
This seems intentionally YouTube's UX design fault, they too heavily try to push you to "auto-play". YouTube has a "Watchlist" feature where you can build a playlist. When it works it is exactly what I want, but it feels like every so many months it mysteriously breaks for a while or they hide the button for it behind some new hidden gesture or menu they expect you psychic out of their UI. (If you've never heard of "Watchlist", no wonder. It seems intentionally hard to discover.) Lately I've been complaining that YouTube adds random "auto-play" videos even to a manually curated "Watchlist" if you don't pay enough attention or watch past the end of the list (even with auto-play and recommendations entirely off).
I’m still using Watch Later, but for long videos I have no time for.
Unrelated to that, but on a Ubuntu laptop I have Firefox tabs regularly stop working entirely. They just won't load anything, and the only fix is to open a new tab and that loads fine most of the time. Other times I have to restart Firefox. I've tried searching for others experiencing this problem and even asked in Mozilla channels on Matrix, but even then I didn't come up with any answers. The laptop's hinge broke last year so I haven't used it since then, so likely never going to figure out what was going on.
I have over 1200 tabs open at the moment, including at least 100 youtube tabs, and mine runs fine even with a bunch of other stuff running.
I do find that if I go over 150 windows open then things start to become problematic, but I think that's because my GPU is only 8Gb.
CPU is usually at about 10% on an i7-12900k.
Update your firefox now and the issue is gone.
It was basically the whole reason for the update.
Google changed their code to create a bunch of objects over time, and those objects didn't get cleaned up. It was just a standard memory leak issue.
Except it heavily impacted users who kept a youtube tab open or pinned.
The bug was reported and a fix released in a little under 2 weeks.
I mean if you care enough to not use the default mobile browser, surely you found out about newpipe and the myriad of other youtube frontends.
While using firefox mobile + ublock its easier to be logged into a youtube account and dig through favorites, etc.
I think what's actually happening is that they are targeting uBlock + Firefox on desktop for punishment.
On Android, Firefox has much more extensions, such adblockers.
FUD
As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.
I've heard this before...
Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.
What I have seen is developers do it wrong to start, then tasks to fix it get low priority due to market share based priority.
The basic mechanic is that the off brand browser has to work hard to be compatible whereas the dominant browser works hard to be incompatible. If you develop Firefox first (have some really ideological devs) you'll find Chrome related bugs eat up 1% of your time if that. If you develop Chrome first you'll find supporting other browsers is a bear.
(In the early 2000's when IE was dominant I was afraid it wouldn't be possible to browse the web with Linux. I worked at a library that would have deployed Sun Rays as public computers if we could get Mozilla to compile on Solaris but we couldn't, even with the help of Sun support. I developed Mozilla-first and then Firefox-first and helped keep the flame alive back then.)
The system I work on now works on both because I develop Firefox-first. There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox, but otherwise the site spins like a top on both of those. Once in a while we run into a serious headscratcher on mobile Safari that burns up some dev*weeks.
Firefox's performance engineers are eager for bug reports! You can record a performance profile [1] and file a performance bug report in Bugzilla [2]. It helps if the slow page is accessible to Firefox engineers for testing, but your performance profile is a big head start.
[1] https://profiler.firefox.com/
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp...
At the time I hadn't thought to go back to tech support and ask somebody there to simply try it with Firefox. Then Verizon would have been pointing fingers at themselves.
Any Verizon developers here? I'd love to know the real story.
But also - it's not high up the priority list given Firefox's marketshare. In most cases, you'll get the support by default, but I don't really see many US managers being tasked with allocating resources to support UC browser, or Opera, and those are both in the same space marketshare-wise.
My management is actively discussing EOLing several Firefox products because we have basically no real paying customers on them, and Mozilla is unpleasant to deal with in the extension space (genuinely - https://www.neowin.net/news/ublock-origin-lite-maker-ends-fi...)
I recently finished a 7 year stint at a company where I was CTO. I always made it clear that we needed to be testing functionality in more than just Chrome because, apart from anything else, a good chunk of our users would be on mobile, and many of those on iOS (i.e., using Safari). I used Firefox as my main browser for probably 4 - 5 of those 7 years, and I suggested engineers do the same because it tends to hew closer to web standards than Chrome does (meaning that if it works in Firefox it'll almost certainly work in Chrome, but the reverse doesn't necessarily hold). That gradually bled through the development team, with a number of the engineers using Firefox as their main browser. That's really all it needs is a few people using it for their day to day work.
I made the change on principle because I could see the way the wind was blowing and - even then - Google were doing plenty of things I didn't like. I like to think that influenced the team as well but, reality check, they probably did it to avoid me moaning at them about bugs running in Firefox all the time.
Each browser seems to pick and choose which standards they want to adopt and when. Sometimes Chrome will support a new CSS syntax for months or years before another browser finally picks up support (or vice versa).
For web standards to truly work, there would need to be better coordination between browsers to adopt new standards in unison. Until then, developers (should) keep track of whether the syntax they're using is supported by all major browsers. Or, develop just for Chrome, which seems to be favored by most.
Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
Yep. A majority of HN crowd claim to like open source and all that, but then they use Chrome instead of Firefox due to some small perceived convenience. Nobody makes decisions based on principles these days, only their immediate wants. Hoe_math is right, we're on the edge of civilization collapse because to that.
My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.
Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money? There is a web based on hobbyist platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon, and you can clearly see why they haven't captured the masses.
The solution you mentioned is valid too.
But you cannot ignore the fact that internet is for everyone and not for google. Google minus all the shit it does to the internet can definitely exist in some form. Claiming it’s either this or nothing is just defeatist.
If google and youtube disappeared tomorrow, I’d be the first among those guys who buy hdds and torrent videos from these. For no money, like I did with all torrents in my life. There would be less professional videos obviously, but almost everyone agrees it’s a good thing (quit SM, anxiety, kids social issues, etc talks).
Even a large chunk of the ad supported internet is happy to continue sending you bits if you don’t render their ads. This is fine, the convention has always been I’ll send whatever (non-malicious) bits I want, you send whatever you want, and we’ll render it however we want. YouTube specifically doesn’t send bits to people who don’t render their ads, on purpose, which is also fine, they just don’t want those of us who don’t render ads around.
Entitled ad guys don’t get to change the social convention to add some obligation to render their ads. If they don’t want to serve bits to users that block their ads, that’s fine, but if they send bits I’ll render them however I want on my system.
They know it. We know they know it, because if they really didn’t want to send bits to ad-blockers, they’d copy the first step of the back-and-forth that Google did with YouTube, and those users would no longer be a problem.
Because you are working for a corporation that joins in World Wide Web Consortium, who literally says this in the Ethical Web Principles?
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts. We will build features and write specifications that respect people's agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#render
If you cannot maintain your service, paywall your features, not forcing malwares and trackers to users. No one forced you to serve 1080p, 1440p or 4K videos to everyone for free. You were the one literally "advertised" yourself as a "free" service at beginning, in order to hoard how many users you could. And now when you cannot control your own costs, you push malwares and trackers to users? The mentality of hoarding users with "baits" like "free" are the real poisons for the internet, for both of you and your users, NOT users who are doing exactly what World Wide Web Consortium tells them.
Where are all your MBAs in your corporations? The ones bragging about themselves on LinkedIn and now the only resolutions you can think of is pushing malwares and trackers to users? All of the finance classes in your college should be simplified to advertisement classes I guess? That would save a lot of resources for everyone.
Not YouTube.
Those "nonsense" are from World Wide Web Consortium, users are just doing what they say. The "hipster" are the ones not respecting those Ethical Web Principles. Users are not injecting trackers and malwares to those independents' servers. Why do those independents inject trackers and malwares to users' machines?
The ones who destroyed the open web are the business, including independents and corporations, with the mentality of luring more users to use their "free" services, without any plans of controlling the cost, ETHICALLY and MORALLY. Scale, scale, scale, more users, more beautiful number; until their pocket is burnt and now their resolution is pushing those trackers and malwares to compensate the cost.
Ads, malvertisements and trackers are not the open web.
ABP was foolish and actually believed it's users were trying to make a statement about invasive ads. Really their users just didn't want to see any ads at all, ever, regardless of the circumstances.
> Really their users just didn't want to see any ads at all
Because the internet was filled with malicious ads before any content blockers having more people? The hazardours time of Windows XP/7 with malwares-affected from the ads appear like meals in every day's news? Sorry, internet ads are doomed from those times. They are migrained to everyone's minds that users are walking in a landmines with those ads. If a business is entirely dependent on those ads, that business should not exist. Doing business is hard, right? I mean, like, most of other ethical jobs on the world.
Users are just doing what World Wide Web Consortium says.
If a business have something to sell, just let people know. No need to help create a surveillance state.
You have your right to develop things your way, I have a right to say no thank you. Google, though, is so big it is basically saying "you don't have a choice." That's the problem and one that Google spends billions to enforce. They use the weight of the uninformed to apply pressure to the rest of us.
It was no better when Microsoft did it with IE, nor is it any way proper, now.
Why would I, as a doctor whose income stream is based on people getting sick, intentionally support policies that make people healthier
Thank goodness you're not a doctor.
So let them be arrogant and loose their YouTube customers over time too.
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo...
Edit:Wrong year - that was 2020 this is 2024
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo...
In the grand scheme of things, they’re still a fairly young giant.
That’s what I’m saying. Search engines are still a part young technology in the grand scheme of things.
No reason to believe this is the end state.
2024 is at https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo..., but the numbers seem to be identical.
But when I just want a simple search, I still use Google first out of habit.
The only problem I really remember is at one point Firefox having issues under linux when NVIDIA was swapping their main driver over to the "open-sourced" version, there was some performance issues with decoding, not unusable - but it was resolved within a week.
But, this is just my experience.
I would add to the list the Linux Foundation too.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-annou...
Edit: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
Several leading organizations have already pledged their support for the ["Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers"] initiative, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera.
I wish Linus & co would distance themselves from these people.
He actively dislikes the GPLv3, has a good working relationship with Google on Android and ChromeOS, and has criticized attitudes in the Linux desktop community for over a decade. He famously roasted his own distribution's package maintainer for wasting their life.
All hats off to him, frankly. The Linux community can be extremely delusional at times.
Linus has hated GPLv3 since at least 2006.
Linux development has been over 80% corporate funded for over a decade. FOSS contributors do not have enough talent or interest to maintain the kernel for even a few weeks. If corporate interests weren't in the kernel, the kernel would not run on modern devices, period. It would have fallen behind the times and been abandoned like countless other technologies, or replaced with a new proprietary kernel from someone else.
Linux on the desktop is not somewhat usable in spite of corporate interests. Linux on the desktop is usable today because of corporate interests.
It's actually the other way around: This is a collaborative corporate project, with corporate employees contributing, but there are some random community members who can knock at the door politely and are lucky to get code into the kernel.
The community-first development model died about 2 decades ago. When the Linux Foundation talks about "community," they are talking about their corporate contributors and their communities, not us. This is also why I cringe at the excessive (not all, just excessive) hate for corporations in the online community. Without their work, rip out 80%-90% of the kernel commits every year for the last decade, and see how advanced Linux would be.
This same change is also underway at another open source project - Blender; which is now increasingly corporate funded and developed. When I see online forum posts arguing that Blender is a perfect example of how we can beat the corporations as a community, I just shake my head now.
In practice, I'm going to be honest and blunt, it's never worked.
3 decades of trying to replace Photoshop with GIMP (founded 1995)? Barely a dent.
3 decades of trying to unsettle Windows with the Linux desktop (KDE, 1998)? Barely a dent.
3 decades of trying to beat 3D packages with Blender (founded 1994)? Finally working now, ironically only because corporations started getting involved. Before then, Blender 2.7 was never going to do it.
2 decades of Apache trying to kill Skype with OpenMeetings (founded 2007)? Not even a dent.
2 decades of trying to kill proprietary CAD packages with FreeCAD (founded 2002)? Not even a dent.
4 decades of trying to beat Microsoft Office with what is now LibreOffice (roots in StarOffice, 1985, which was ironically a proprietary corporate project for the first decade and a half)? Barely a dent.
The Linux community, and FOSS communities, overestimate their strength without corporate interests. They have none.
And all our customers often send us MS Office documents. They never use the fancy features.
I'm confused. Is FOSS is something more than someone or some entity contributing their time and releasing the source for for free? Does it really matter if thing doing the development is a a person in a garage or a company?
There doesn't seem to be a lot of difference to me. Both a people in garages and a company have kept their pet projects going for decades, giving away their efforts over all that time. Both people in garages and and companies have lost interest in open source projects. As an example Debian is one of the longest lived open source projects on the planet. It is a community drive development. To me it looks likely it will outlast Ubuntu, which is a fork that isn't community driven.
The central tenants that make FOSS work don't seem to have much to do with whether it's community driven or not. Both can succeed. Yes, community driven efforts can fail. But so can corporate drive FOSS, as WordPress may well demonstrate.
Most likely the corporations will say "because that is much cheaper than developing our own; 10 of our devs on Linux an 99% of devs from other corporations are much cheaper than 1000 of our devs on our own OS". And the shareholders will likely accept that.
The key thing is that for most corporations that contribute to Linux, Linux is not the product (except Red Hat, SuSe etc). Google, Facebook, etc, just need a good OS to run their billions of servers on.
> so we can fork when their interests stop aligning with ours
You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time.
That is also fine from the perspecitve of Free Software. The 4 freedoms do not include "the program must be maintainable with little enough manpower for people to do it in their free time, free of independence on corporate interests":
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.
Maybe a question too radical for Hacker News, but why does Linux need 1M hours/year? How much "worse" would Linux be for the end user if this year, that time spent dropped to 100k or even 10k? And which "type" of Linux user was benefiting most from that time spent (person or corporation)? Why is more automatically treated as better than less?
> The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.
Indeed, I respect the wisdom and forethought of Stallman greatly in drafting the GPL.
B. Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement; CPUs, GPUs, power management, etc. Without corporate interests, try running Linux 2.2 from 1999 on a modern PC (which came out just before the $1B IBM investment). See how well it works. Fork modern 2025 Linux, and try running it on a computer that comes out in 2028. See if it even boots. If Intel's only done a minor refresh, it might work; if it's something bigger like the split to P cores and E cores, expect a brick. Even if it does boot, don't be surprised if it crashes, acts unstable, has borked performance, broken sleep/wake, broken audio, broken USB, you name it, it's probably broken.
C. A forked Linux would not have the same level of security research behind it. For example, the Linux 4 era was marked by the introduction of fuzzers and the fixing of countless bugs. A C codebase with handwritten Assembly is rather unlikely to ever become bug-free. How well would your forked non-corporate codebase handle Spectre and Meltdown, just an example, with Google's experts contributing the technique for fixing these problems efficiently (Retpoline)?
D. Added to the above, this isn't a hypothetical: The FSF didn't like the practice of proprietary firmware blobs being in the kernel; so they made their own commercial-interest-free version of Linux called Trisquel. It still uses commercially written code if it's open source; so even it can't be called completely free of commercial influence. The kicker: It runs on almost nothing, and people were complaining about how it works on nothing 13 years ago.
TL;DR: A forked Linux, is a broken Linux, that will never run well on newer hardware, and will quickly become insecure.
Which is why Linux is primarily corporate funded. The corporates want to sell their hardware. To sell their hardware they need to get it running on Linux, so they fund that. As hardware support constitutes most of the code contributions, most of the code that goes into Linux was because corporate actors made a decision to pay for it's development - purely in their own interests.
That's nice - this symbiosis between FOSS and corporates works well for both sides. But it's a stretch to say Linux would not exist today without it. The most you can say for certain is Linux would not have it's great hardware support without it. The BSD's don't get anything like the amount of corporate funding Linux does. They are doing fine, and notably work on common modern hardware. So could Linux even without corporate funding.
In particular, most of the interesting stuff that happens in the kernel, the stuff that determines what the kernel will look like in 10 years time, stuff like adopting Rust, is driven by people scratching itches in the FOSS tradition. Not all of it - pKVM is Google initiative. But eBPF was scratching an itch. Jens Axboe developed io_uring probably as a consequence of wanting storage to run faster at Meta - but it was definitely an itch of his. It's nice that Meta to paid him while he developed it, but saying its creation was "driven by corporate interests at Meta" is a bit of a stretch.
In more polite terms they are framing themselves as an ideal long term steward for the chromium project given that courts have already ruled that Google isn't a suitable steward anymore. Chromium wouldn't be so problematic if it wasn't run by such an anticompetitive organisation. If the Linux Foundation ran chromium and orgs like Igalia (who already do a near majority of the dev work for chromiumm) took over the brunt of senior development and leadership control then it'd be a pretty solid technology stack (albeit with some weaknesses).
I personally prefer Firefox and it's associated technologies but I also acknowledge the appeal of Chromium distributions like Vanadium.
I'll add that whatever the purpose of this project, it isn't going to help the overall openness of the web and will only continue to boost the adoption of an engine that already has an outsized influence over web standards.
Same for intentionally crippling Google websites on non-Chromium browsers: given how deliberate such acts of crippling are, I have reasons to believe that it's part of Google's "works with Chrome" strategy, and I'd doubt that Google employees can do much against it.
The only way to fix the governance of Chromium is to effectively chop all the threads that connect it to Google. As long as Chromium developers who are employed at Google won't do anything that goes against the strategy of their employer, you can't have fair governance.
Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat
Examples:
- https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...
- https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pl...
I guess they only want spyware browsers on DDG.
"I don't know how to explain that ads (and the "suckers" who view them) are what keep the internet running"
So as long as you make out your flavor of the month business as "greedy and evil" you can paint yourself a moral crusader by going there and taking things for free. How convenient, eh?
"This coffee shop is a terrible place, therefore I will eat there for free everyday in protest!"
(The content is on YouTube and nowhere else)
Until this changes and one can choose to go somewhere else, I wouldn't worry too much about the terrible cafe's income, because it is one of the richest entities in the world, it already shouldn't be that rich and powerful, and if it disappeared, it would finally let one go find coffee somewhere else.
The other possibility is to stop drinking coffee, of course. Though you can't really do this with everything.
Indeed, but it's the video hosting platform. Initiatives like PeerTube try to fix this, but most videos can be only found on YouTube.
> So I suppose those creators are all in on the scheme too?
Mostly yes. Creators today rely on:
- sponsors
- youtube ads
- donations
- merch
- other revenues, for instance if they have a business and their videos bring customers
At least you can often donate if you skip the ads and the sponsors, so there is a way to pay the metaphorical coffee.
Your analogy was shallow from the start. Continuing it makes little sense.
Of course, better yet is to take it up a notch and advocate for other people to also use ad blockers and to help install and configure them. Thankfully, with how invasive ads are, the advertisers are basically doing all the agitprop; all you need to convince someone to use an adblocker today is to show them how websites look with and without it.
Even here on HN, the first thing people do when a paywalled article is posted is provide the archive.ph bypass.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model
where you have no "Voice".
At home we were talking about food ads on Youtube. Sure, once in a while you see an ad for a meal box that is actual food but I see a lot of ads for things like Huel which float in this strange space where it's not "I used to eat bread and meat and vegetables and now I drink all my meals" but where it's normal to drink your meals (they pose as if they were trying to persuade you to switch from some other meal replacement), where you have to work just as hard taking supplements every day as you would work lifting weights or not eating junk food -- there's McDonald's and there are ultra-processed foods, but this is ridiculous.
(A friend of mine received a huge quantity of 4Patriots dried food from his mom who was sucked in by some ad that claimed it was on sale because they made too much. We got some and the smell when my son made it turned my stomach.)
In terms of sponsorships there was the "Established Titles" scandal; I am a big fan of Ryan Szymanski who's a world authority on battleships. One day he got bribed to make a video about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapa_Flow
which was a good reason to talk about battleships and Scotland. Pretty soon he's adding a cringy pitch to all his videos and unfortunately it is so hard to give somebody like the right kind of "tough love" which will set him straight, although after the scandal popped most of the people involved went back to remove the junk.
This quickly led to a revolt from ABP users, and the ultimate collapse of the plugin. That is when uBlock was born and become the king.
What we have is a positive feedback cycle where creators are forced to resort to worse and worse ads to cover the cost of the ever increasing number of ad-block users. It's just plainly true that every revenue generating ad you block (not necessarily profit generating ad) is an ad that must be fed to someone else to view for you.
I've had a longtime gym habit which sometimes has me in front of the TV around noon where the ads are all for products for people who don't have any money. I remember seeing a series of ads where my first thought was "anybody except a TV executive or a politician would look at that and say it it's a medicare scam" and watching the ads for a decade before it got in the news that it really was a scam and people are going to jail.
Those ads win an auction to get there, they might be the optimal ads for that slot, but if you want to know why people have low trust in the media and low trust in the government, start there.
I watched Tubi a lot last summer, which is in a wonderful honeymoon period, and was watching saturation advertising for P&G products that featured upbeat black people cleaning up (their own messes) with Dawn and Tide. Great, I say. They've got some awareness that they shouldn't run ads that drive viewers away. Maybe targeted ads will be good for television but the specter of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
haunts the industry.
While I agree; between an up-to-date uBlock Origin and https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/chrome-mask YT is quite usable.
Long term I'm more worried by Mozilla leadership than Google shenanigans.
> Please don't use Chrome Mask on YouTube. It won't resolve any issues, and it will make your experience worse over time. If some issue got fixed after toggling Chrome Mask on, it most likely got fixed by the addon clearing the cache. But you can do that yourself, too, without the need for this addon.
Might be a placebo but YT appear more responsive with it on than off after a ctrl+f5.
Edit: appears to be in the reviews: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/r...
Supposedly it's just been fixed?
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1i182q7/firefox_13...
If a creator puts up ads or a paywall, it's because they want to be compensated. You should either respect their wish or simply not view their content.
If someone wants to use a public space (i.e., the Internet), then they have accept that technological solutions to annoyances are also part of that.
Block it with a subscription if you don't accept this reality. But getting the benefits of a free, global audience doesn't entitle the artist to any means of revenue they choose, including what annoys and harms people.
It's like saying you have to walk the long way around to your exhibit through the concessions hall before seeing my display, when someone can just take a shortcut and skip that, and blaming them for doing so.
The benefit of the audience is literally the ad views (or Premium views).
If someone leaves their purse on the sidewalk and you just take it, you're committing a crime. Consuming a restaurant's food without paying for it is also a crime. It being on the sidewalk doesn't make it not their property (or the property of whoever paid for it).
> The internet is not inside of someone's business, they are inside of it. It is a public space and if they publish without a paywall, I'm free to consume that how ever I like.
There's already many court precedents that no, you can't consume it "however" you like. For example, all copyright laws apply.
Ad blockers are a grey area in that yes, they're not disallowed, but that also means that companies are allowed to mess with you more or less however they want (YouTube for example throttles browsers with active ad blockers).
Banksy said it better:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
On YouTube? No. I pay for Premium, there's no ads.
I pay for Amazon Prime, and they've started showing me preroll ads on my streaming content. I also still get sponsored product recommendations in my search list.
I pay for Kagi search. Thankfully, this area is still relatively clean.
I do agree, Prime is annoying with their ads, it definitely affects how much I watch on their platform.
YT might want me to do something else, but I am not bound by their wishes.
The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical engineers who do not consider the effect of their work in the long run.
sometimes im glad im a technical person that can get away with a somewhat "healthy digital life" im basically immune to all the crap going on. i don't need to work too hard to meet my digital needs because im also a simple person. but i really feel bad for the normies who have to deal with all the shit the tech industry throws at them. they don't even know what's wrong, they can't pinpoint what's giving them that extra stress, building up day by day when they use their devices, handle their info, or consume entertainment. like account exhaustion, confusing UI changes every day, or why they have to navigate a sea of crap just to unsubscribe. and why do they need a new computer for software that worked fine 15 years ago? and don't even get me started on what they're doing to older people. cable companies for example are ripping them off with terrible TV boxes and nonsense plans. all their appliances need subscriptions or apps and have cryptic buttons. stores now feel like border control, straight out of a black mirror episode. i can't imagine the frustration they must feel. it just feels backwards.
I'm not saying this to complain, but to suggest a risk of what might come next.
So far, they've run wild, and taken over computers, the Internet, AI, and information technology in general.
What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Right now, one of the few firewalls against that might be that doctors generally have traditions of ethics, and some stature to hold their ground and influence things.
Earlier Internet didn't have the same formalized ethical traditions, but had a lot of very smart people people who had altruistic intentions, as well as suspicion of those who'd attempt to twist online potential. All those ethical people were pretty much swept away in a funding gold rush, suddenly with little to no influence over it.
(Google did grab some of those people, because Google said the right words, so the altruistic techies thought it was their people, but look what eventually happened even there.)
Just like virtually every IoT product and Web site violates every user, what happens if a medical gold rush (say, some kind of implant, or transformative process) means that what we thought was a bulwark of ethical practitioners, is easily bulldozed over, by investment money and culture. And then everyone's body is violated by the newly unchecked industry-wide socipathy, with no alternatives to even live?
Allow me to simultaneously assuage and stoke your fears. There is little chance of big tech disrupting the medical field; Because every aspect of the medical field has already been seized by the insurance companies. See United Health / Optum.
Can you explain this more? I don't understand what this means.
There's a pretty famous example of Google deploying a specific variations of Youtube to Microsoft Edge browsers (back when Edge had it's own engine) and that specific variation would cause Edge's hardware acceleration to break. If you overrode the user agent to present as google chrome, the problematic invisible parts of the page disappeared and everything worked as intended. And what the specific problem HTML was would change just as fast as the MS team could roll out fixes. In effect they were playing a game of "break the browser" against their competitors to force them to apply temporary fixes that would then later have to be removed resulting in unnecessary code churn in their competitors' code bases.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
I avoid YouTube as much as possible anyway as they force me to login.
I don't think its "almost like", I think it "actually is", and that its intentional.
There is a perspective that is now prevalent in tech and business that users are good only as far as you can monetize them. Any concepts of respect or value outside of that have been discarded.
There used to be a sense that you needed to continue improving a product to keep charging the same or more for it. Now companies expect you to pay more every year while products are stagnating or being enshittified to extract higher profit margins on top of the increased prices they are charging.
Tech is now run by Business/Sales people, and every user is a statistic in a spreadsheet they are trying to extract the most money from for the least amount of investment.
Data collection and behaviour tracking is one side of the coin, but we really don't talk about why companies are willing to pay so much for that data or what they do with it... that's a conversation I think needs to be focused on.
It's also crazy that we've let ad companies tell us that using a non-Google browser is the same thing as using an adblocker. It is not the same and it never was.
I use Firefox with no adblocker installed. I don't mind ads to an extent. I do mind tracking and find micro-targeting disgusting and creepy and evil, so I use Firefox, and I use its Enhanced Tracking Protection, and I only log in to the major Ad Companies like Google/YouTube, Amazon, Meta, others in dedicated containers that only are for their sites themselves. It's sad and annoying how many ad networks accuse me of having an adblocker just for using Firefox (or Safari) with relatively cleaner than average cookies.
Show me the old school of ads, the "Superbowl" broadest audience ads, the stuff that advertising companies "knew" for centuries of their existence as "common sense" that was the most useful way to make and sell ads before tech companies got involved and decided that user privacy was up for auction to the highest bidder. The way I see it: If an ad network can't do that and sees this as "adblocking", it deserves to die and something better needs to step up and eat their lunch. That includes Google and Meta's ad networks. That includes "Admiral" and any other network that buys ads from creepy "Temu".
Is this actually a thing? As far as I'm aware all degradations in non-Chromium browsers have been unintentional bugs, either caused by a YouTube bug or a non-YouTube bug (i.e. in the browser or an extension) (note I'm specifically not commenting on the last portion of your comment regarding "for people using adblockers").
Managers.
It's such an unprecedented amount of money that it corrupts everything else and distorts the market.
AKA depriving content creators of their revenue. If you're saying their content isn't good enough to pay for directly, and isn't good enough to endure ads in order to engage, then why are you trying to consume it? Look elsewhere.
> or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them
I agree with this depending on what you mean by "surveillance." There's a minimum amount of "surveillance" required to measure ad penetration and effectiveness and essentially provide assurance to advertisers that they aren't getting scammed. There's a whole other level of "surveillance" where the ad network (usually Google) is building a dossier on all your interests and every site you've ever visited. Some of that information enables targeted advertising, but you should always retain the right to opt-out, and see all the data that's been collected on you and edit it. You should also be able to opt-in to that data being sold and getting a cut of the proceeds, should you so desire. I wouldn't, but I could imagine some people would.
Bottom line - people gotta make money to eat and oftentimes they're not giving away content for free. If you don't want to pay for it - that's your choice as a user: pay and consume or don't pay and move on. Calling on hackers to figure out a way to steal it may not have a future that works out to your liking.
Nope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Department_of_Element...
I'm curious if you know of any court cases that back up your position. I've connected to a lot of servers today and downloaded all the information they sent me.
My client: "Hey, I didn't pay, but can I have that data?"
Your server: "Sure! Here it is!"
Oh, and it is an interesting problem. In the abstract.
You aren't entitled to their service, but they are entitled to your data (as allowed under the relevant jurisdiction) if you choose, of your own volition, to use their service.
I've used Pocket Cast for a little over a year and a half. Just manually skipping through ads when I have my phone handy and they come on, the app reports I've apparently saved 14 hours of wasted time.
I've been blocking ads in Firefox for nearly 20 years and have been helping friends and family do it for nearly as long. I'm not going back because I should feel bad for some company with billions of dollars in profits that doesn't care about me or any of my privacy. I go the extra step further and use the banned from Chrome store extension, Ad Nauseum, to click on nearly every single blocked ad.
that said, firefox has been my browser of choice as a web dev for most of my career. (im old enough to have used netscape before that).
i remember having super powers compared to other devs with the help of firebug :-)
FF has been my dailer driver for a long time. But google blocking ublock origin was a deal breaker. I now only use chrome when a site is otherwise unusable.
I am happy to do all that, because I like my videos uninterrupted and my web experience lean.
Mozilla is an advertising company now, and by many accounts Mozilla has been the main attack on Firefox for the many years even before they explicitly shifted to advertising.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1e0p62h/mozilla_i...
Chrome feels too shallow.
I am always stunned when I have to use anything else at how unusable some pages are without my extensions.
I don't know how people use phones with ublock or leechblock. I guess "with less battery life" and "more".
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-google...
Unfortunately it seems that the powers that be at Firefox have no plans to support it on account of privacy and security - which I half get, but, it appears to be an established standard in Chrome. The discussion surrounding it kinda sucked and well.
https://github.com/kuba2k2/firefox-webserial
I tried it a while back to configure my keyboard but it didn't seem to work at the time, I think it is a nice solution to Mozilla's problems with the API though
The thing I _Love_ is container tabs. I can isolate empires by using container tabs to sandbox cookies and other web state. This means that ebay doesn't change my adverts to the last thing I searched on every site, and autoplay embedded youtube doesn't fuck up my video recommendations.
It means I can hide my work gmail from my home, and separate search histories (although thats less relevant now with AI.)
lastly, being able to scroll left and right on my tabs, rather than new ones being unaccesable is great.
But yes, people should learn about Multi-Account Containers if they haven't, yet. It's a killer feature that no other browser has. This is the extension to enable the UI for it: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
Oh wow! I totally missed this. Thank for sharing!
I've been using multiple browsers for as long as I can remember. But always liked Firefox ocer the others. Especially now with container tabs.
And the only thing I keep wishing for, has been a better experience with profile management, but also running the browser in different profiles.
I'm really looking forward for these updates
Better Profile Management tools may be nice to see. Maybe I won't need dueling builds of Firefox. Or maybe I'll keep it, we'll see.
For tab containers, maybe there's a "good reason" that no other browser has that feature, cause it is confusing both as a concept and in use, and doesn't separate the rest of the stuff (or even the stuff in intends to separate when it's cumbersome and peculiar to use). Like, shared history, or inability to have separate extensions, defeats many of the purposes people use profiles for - which is an actual complete separation of things.
I've been in situations needing up to half a dozen different Microsoft accounts (multiple Teams clients in Firefox, for instance), other browsers haven't solved this daily use-case for me.
It's an easier account management tool.
OTOH Vivaldi guys said that much as they'd like to implement this, they're unable to due to some architectural issues with Blink. So basically no Blink browser will have that unless and until Google decides to do it in Chrome - which seems unlikely given their incentives.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824
In Safari, "profiles" are a per-window thing, and there are facilities to open a website in a different profile etc, so effectively they work much more like Firefox containers (which are even more fine-grained tho: per-tab).
That said, it's telling that it's so difficult to disable auto-playing video entirely in Firefox. I'm not convinced that a profit motive is NOT the reason behind that (it is possible but requires a bunch of about:config changes; it's not exposed in the settings UI and that smells sinister)
Unfortunately at work I must use Chrome without an adblocker. It's pretty terrible.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...
- the ones that are built by Mozilla
- the ones that are endorsed by Mozilla
- the ones I take time to read the code (and usually disable auto-updates)
I haven't had time to do the later for aws-sso-containers. Thanksfully I don't have that many account to work on at the same time these days so I didn't push it high in the priority list.
Recently, many sites won't fix the viewport horizontally. Why such a major bug happens is baffling
It is so convenient to have container tabs. All my extensions are available in new containers, unlike multiple Chromium profiles (or Firefox profiles).
Container tabs also pair very well with Simple Tab Groups, which allow you to pin a container to a group, so that everything for one account ends up in one place.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...