Nah. One step at a time. That's the end goal, but by throwing everything all at once it's too easy to tell yourself it can't be done; so start with the worst offenders.
I’ve had quite a few issues with Firefox crashing or otherwise behaving poorly in recent years.
Switched over to Brave and have had perhaps a day or two of failed ad blocking on YT. Otherwise it’s been a rock solid experience and the built in Tor is nice when I need to quickly test geo rules.
The Android/iPhone duopoly is nearly impossible to break because very few people want to carry two personal phones, and it takes only one app that they can't do without being only available on Android/iPhone to make it impossible to choose anything else. The app providers likewise have no incentive to support anything else because everyone has one of these two.
Bank apps are the prime example here that's unlikely to start supporting other systems. Public transit (and in some places parking) is another potential problem where even the unhinged "well just change banks to the one that does support your favorite phone" argument fails. ID apps (either governmental or de facto standards like the Swedish BankID) are coming too.
In most countries you can switch to a bank not forcing you into the duopoly. Worked for me. Also there are usually alternative options for the public transit, too. I complain to every organization that doesn't support my GNU/Linux phone. Sometimes they even listen, despite it being niche. Imagine if more people joined this push.
Blame the brain damaged judge that literally told Google
"The Apple app store is not a monopoly because Apple has no competitors on their platform."
Google is just doing what they need to do to stop being a monopoly....by becoming a monopoly, because of a ruling that the internet actually celebrated. Which we can trace back to Epic not being happy that sideloading on Android wasn't perfectly frictionless.
(Note: Epic also sued Apple, but lost, because the Apple app store is not a monopoly.)
I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to use it.
Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.
Were you a Mac/Windows or Linux user? Personally I was an early adopter of Firefox and it worked great on Windows, but on Mac for a long stretch of time it was significantly slower than other Mac first browsers.
Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling for the longest time, and the UI was dated.
Most of these things were not true on the Windows side. At least not to the same degree.
I remember Google buying Chrome market share by tricking users into installing Chrome when they didn't pay attention while clicking next through the installers for more popular software.
Your memory seems to be broken, since what really happened was that Chrome was just stupidly faster and nicer to use than IE and Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox.
Rewriting history is wrong - Firefox was kind of a dog for a long time.
Etc. This stuff was very real and is a ten second search away, maybe try that before accusing parent of having a faulty memory because it doesn’t agree with yours.
Those weren't advertisements. The browser was packaged with other software and automatically installed if you didn't catch it and prevent it. I'm pretty sure it also made itself the default browser during the installation without user interaction.
There are screenshots of the installers in those links.
I disagree, if you opened enough tabs back then Chrome was unusable.
But if that is your view, you should switch to Brave. 44% less memory use, (1/3) longer battery life, no telemetry and if you block undesirables it is obviously much much faster.
> AnandTech tested median page load time across one hundred top-trafficked websites in WebPageTest using a 50 Mbps cable connection. Brave 1.69 loaded the median page in 2.1 seconds, while Chrome 147 took 6.7 seconds. The 3.2x difference is not engine speed, it is Brave Shields aborting requests for ad networks, analytics SDKs, and third-party fingerprinting scripts
They added the installer to unrelated software, paid other companies to do the same, and defaulted the checkbox to on, so that unsuspecting users who didn't read all the tiny text with Adobe Reader or RealPlayer also installed Chrome.
Even if it was the most amazing browser ever written and came with a free puppy, it is shady to rely on tricking people to get your software installed, and pretending that this is just "advertising a browser" is incredibly disingenuous.
By replying to this comment you agree that I can install some of my software on whatever device you are currently using. <-- this is basically what they did.
None of my machines or most other machines used those tactics to install it. We installed it because it was heck of a faster browser in times when others sucked.
Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".
In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!
It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.
Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.
When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.
If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...
I know people don't like apple and safari here, but I like safari. It works good enough for me. And when an experience is off, it helps me develop my web developer hat by better understanding webkit and why safari has a different experience or frontend like behavior.
I'm with you. I've been riding with Safari for almost 20 years now. It's been nothing but great for me. I cannot think of a time I have used a website that did not function properly in Safari.
Prior to the reintroduction of UBO (lite), I feel like Safari helped me reduce my trash content consumption. Page with tons of ads? Not worth visiting. Youtube keeps playing ads? My frustration is a sign I need to get off YouTube and do something else. I do not need nor want to mange tens of plugins. I like to keep things simple and slim. So, perhaps that is one dealbreaker for some?
Even if I believe Apple hung the Moon, I still seriously recommend Safari to anyone using Apple devices.
>I feel like Safari helped me reduce my trash content consumption. Page with tons of ads? Not worth visiting
Nice. I thought that was just me! Same with ads on YouTube.
One thing you may be surprised with, not sure if this helps or harms you lol, is you can develop some decent safari plugins for personal use with todays AI tools. I made a little popout extension for giving me a more minimal viewer experience with a button in safari with a few days of work (still maintain and update it occasionally, getpoppy.io if you're curious - and the vibe code tools also used webkit in the browser engine of its Mac app)
Few years ago when google announced their MV2 plan I moved to Firefox. I don't think in all this time I ever missed Chrome for anything in particular outside of maybe 1 or 2 websites that didn't have proper support.
I would question if those sites only worked with Chrome or just had some user agent filtering in place. There are Chrome only websites, but thankfully most things I encounter are just requiring a blessed id, which can be easily faked.
For Work they actively deactivate Linux users for "security reasons", or Microsoft makes their web apps intentionally hostile like disabling copy/paste or disabling photo/picture or file uploads for Linux users when you're allowed in the policies.
Turns out, it's bypassable.
They just check the User Agent and Sec-CH headers, so I built a small browser extension for Chrome that allows to modify those headers.
On top of that I built chromium-profiles [1], my tool for managing those isolated sandboxes so that I can tweak/change them based on the stupid policies per O365 tenant I have to work with.
So I use 3 different profiles for 3 different customers with 3 different security policies set for their organization... For being allowed to use a freaking web app.
That, for me, is the only reason I still have to have chromium installed. Microsoft stupidity.
I wish Firefox would focus on this sort of use case, like the "--pwa" and "--user-data" CLI flags and preinstallable extensions for those profiles. But it can't be done due to how they manage extensions with their own signing cert, how dev mode extensions are always cleared etc.
Same here, not using firefox because of worse compatibility (maybe not their fault, many devs only test in chrome) and weaker security (maybe not their fault, they don't have as much money). I appreciate the people who do and help diversify the ecosystem though.
I made a conscious attempt to try to switch to Zen (built on Gecko/Firefox), but ended up switching back to Chromium-based browsers because pages just feel like they load faster. :(
If I remember correctly, ~10 years ago one of Waterfox's main points was 64-bit + Intel compiler with aggressive optimization flags. At that time Firefox was 32-bit only on Windows, at least the stable version. From my experience, it didn't feel faster. Actually, it felt slightly more sluggish, I guess pointers and some data structures become larger, so the browser used more memory and put more pressure on CPU caches. It's probably no longer relevant as all major browsers are 64-bit by default.
I'm fairly happy with uBlock Origin Lite. Sure the original was better but this one does the job as well. uBlock Origin Lite is a MV3 extension, by the same author.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... has a few of the more practical concrete examples. Namely content can load without the blocker being ready to filter, CNAME cloaking can't be handled properly (in Chrom* at least), and the filter rules aren't as flexible.
Interestingly, the rule count limits themselves do not (currently) seem to be much an issue despite it being one of the more common concerns on the original MV3 announcement.
> content can load without the blocker being ready to filter
This isn't an MV3 issue, it's a Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization. It was also true with MV2. In fact, MV3 has improved the situation because DNR rules are enforced immediately.
You could certainly argue that Chrome should allow extensions to block browser initialization, or that it should be user configurable - but it seems like an entirely defensible decision. Regardless, it's nothing to do with MV3.
Any MV3 issue could probably be summed up as "MV3 the standard isn't so bad, just the implementation in Safari/Chrome" where Safari/Chrome are the only browser groups forcing MV3 to be done that way. That isn't to say 100% of the changes in MV3 are bad, just, practically, what the standard leaves unspecified matters little compared to what the restrictions on what's shipped as MV3 are.
> Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization
It's not "browser initialization" that was blocked, it was blocking network requests for pages until they were processed by all components in the chain. Notably, this could never apply applied to the browser or its internal pages itself.
> did you know that you can change your User-Agent with uBO lite?
With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders. I'm not sure uBO ever bothered with this before uBO Lite, but it's a bit of a double standard to say "MV2 didn't offer blocking requests, that was a different API which happ
> and then the request had to wait until it was given to and processed by the blocker.
Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately.
> With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders
Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.
> Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately.
There were several workarounds like suspendTabsUntilReady which helped greatly in this half of the problem. Then it would solidly stay permanently registered too. I'm pretty sure none of these work in Chrome anymore though, it was obvious they never intended these sorts of things to work that way.
Nevertheless, MV3's ability to offer limited filtering on startup does not seem like such a blessing when the other option was to just support full filtering on startup like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1447551
> Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.
What you want to highlight would hold a lot more relevance if the reason it wasn't there before had something to do with the difficulty pre MV3. uMatrix had it for a while and Gorhill regretted it because it didn't change things like the user agent JS would report and such. The above filter has the same problems. Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher, that it's normal quality is why it was never in the original though until it was just included with DNRs. This really has nothing to do with the good parts of MV3 though.
> Nevertheless, MV3's ability to offer limited filtering on startup does not seem like such a blessing when the other option was to just support full filtering on startup
Sure, but as I said, it's a design decision, and nothing to do with MV3. I'm not trying to litigate it one way or the other.
I do think DNR is a good solution, and that request callbacks were a bad idea. That's my opinion - and the counterargument is obvious -- you can't do literally everything you could do in a callback declaratively. That doesn't sway me, I still think it's better!
> Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher
It was just a trivial example of using a powerful new feature that uBO doesn't have, not a full featured extension! The fact that it's possible at all is the point, it's cool.
You can definitely do anything that DNR can do with webRequest, nobody can dispute that. The point is that there are things you can do with uBO lite that you can't do with uBO (and vice versa!). It's not a straight downgrade, there are powerful new features.
Again, we really need to separate "MV3 - the theoretical definition" and "MV3 - the actual implementation which ships with Chrome".
Nobody should be swaying you to prefer DNR over webRequest or vice versa when in other browsers they are both just options for the extensions yo use as makes sense for what they try to do.
> You can definitely do anything that DNR can do with webRequest, nobody can dispute that. The point is that there are things you can do with uBO lite that you can't do with uBO (and vice versa!). It's not a straight downgrade, there are powerful new features.
In ~15 minutes this morning I implemented this on a normal uBO git clone using the MV2 webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders API - would anyone be calling that powerful? If so, what about all of the actually powerful capabilities missing?
> the biggest failure of MV3 is not in lacking anything new whatsoever, it's in forcing the removal of a lot of API options which were useful in the name of ulterior motives.
What was the ulterior motive? If it was to break ad blocking, it seems like they did a really terrible job, as MV3 ad blockers work great. That's not me saying that, here is a paper from researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt:
> Moreover, cross-browser experiments yield comparable outcomes, and visual inspection confirms that MV3 ad blockers work effectively without significant ad flickering or loss of functionality
> Funnily enough, this morning I ran across another feature I didn't realize was missing in MV3
I think you can do this, just redirect to a WAR with a SW instead of block, then increment a counter. There is obviously a performance cost, as blocking has less overhead than redirecting... but as a callback advocate you are presumably willing to pay that :)
Regardless, I think it's jarring hearing you call custom DNR rules "painting the house red", a legitimately powerful feature... and then point to a missing counter in the UI as evidence of lacking features!
Anyway, let's leave it there! It seems unlikely I'm going to convince you, and as blocking webRequest will never return to Chrome your efforts are better focused on petitioning Microsoft and Mozilla not to abandon it.
> content can load without the blocker being ready to
That issue does not exist for uBO Lite. I specifically wrote in the FAQ under "What are the upsides of an MV3-based content blocker?":
> For Chromium-based browsers specifically, MV3-based content blockers which are entirely declarative will properly filter at browser launch, which is not the case for MV2-based content blockers
I've seen some ads slip through the cracks nowadays, like I think Wikia ads for some TV shows I go to now have ads on them. They gave up on blocking Meta.
The companies that don't want you using the lite version are waiting for full version to completely go away before blocking the lite one. No sense driving you to that. So, check back in a couple months and see if it's all still good.
Isn’t the idea that over time chrome will limit what ubo lite blocks? It will phase out all of its own ad networks so they’re not blocked first, but it’s possible they also start allowing third party ads through for a price.
The main reason uBlock on Firefox works better is because of CNAME de-cloaking. All the tracking shit that appears to load as first-party, but isn't, can be correctly detected and blocked on Firefox. On Chrome it cannot, and with Google, Facebook, et al. encouraging site owners to move to these fake first-party conversion tracking solutions, your exposure to profiling has increased dramatically. You may see fewer ads but it does not do the same job.
Serious question: why do people use non-OS browsers?
Most devs I know are on Mac. Why not just use Safari? Works in most cases, helps you catch issues earlier on, looks beautiful and is super customizable, still supports UBlock, has vertical tabs, syncs profiles to your focus, is way more memory efficient, etc.
I've daily driven Safari for ~3y after Arc got sunset and the only site that gives me issues is Hulu (but not Disney+ weirdly). Similarly drive Edge on Windows, I can't think why I'd ever reach for Chrome.
You mean OS as in "operating system", not "open source", which made me question how you'd suggest Safari and Edge before I realized what was going on.
I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better? Who cares? All that matters for me is what features it has and that performance isn't horrible, and if I cannot have vertical tree-style tabs in it and hide the tab-bar, then I personally have no use for it. So stuck with Firefox I am, and been for decades.
Besides, if my OS is Arch Linux, what browser is my "OS-browser" anyway?
I recently switched from Safari to Zen and the Firefox extension for Apple passwords works well. You have to enter a pushed 6 digit code when you first start the browser, but it’s relatively painless.
> Apple's Safari has integration with Apple's Password app which firefox does not. Edge automatically connects with your Microsoft account.
I'm already using Firefox, you don't need to sell me on using it!
> On top of that, Safari is still the most 'energy efficient' browser you could use on macOS.
Ok cool, but I think some other people might be using some other OS than macOS, but don't quote me on that. Not sure why "Always use the default browser your OS developer has packaged for you" applies just because Safari happens to work well (only?) on macOS.
One data point: I’ve been building Web GIS applications for the past 15ish years and Firefox has one and off been a real pain in the neck, suffering from canvas API quirks and performance issues. I think the current state at work is that Firefox is palpably slower than Chrome and I need to find time to go figure out why.
Another point: I’m not sure if Safari’s dev tools are worse but I feel friction any time I have to use them. It’s probably partly just that I don’t want to learn the quirks of both sets. Firefox’s is much closer to Chrome’s. I bet they’re both inspired by Firebug.
Using Mac is a no-go. For me, they became insufferably power-user hostile over the years.
Second,
God the safari rendering was so horrible for so many years. As a web developer, you have to target your greatest demographic, and Safari just broke everything more often than not.
Finally, even using Mac on enterprise, Chrome use is required because of the profile controls that can be exerted. And items #1/2 don’t help
I'm a dev and use windows (sadly have to), android and linux, and would never use edge, because why? when it randomly opens because of a wrong file association or whatnot, I only see a bucket of ms nags and dark patterns. It's disgusting.
Firefox allows me to share stuff across devices, block anything I want to and does not get in my way.
The UBO on Safari has the same issue as chrome except that it has been that way for several years longer. They brought back the lite form of UBO only recently as, presumably, the developer saw the writing on the wall and mv3 and Safari carry the same limitations.
I think safari is largely fine but there are a lot of web APIs that it doesn’t support, rightly or not. A lot of devices are configurable through serial connections using the Web Serial APO thats only available in chromium browsers.
As a primary browser it really comes down to ergonomics. Things on top of the engine that make someone prefer one browser over the other.
I use Safari for nearly everything and it's my favorite browser. It has some oddities, but I find just as many Chrome and Firefox bugs as I do Safari bugs. I use Firefox on everything else though.
The inspector is a nightmare if you're doing web dev (imo; it always felt clunky). If they replaced that with a Chromium-style inspector, I'd probably jump over.
I use Safari, but don’t really like it. I don’t want to use Chrome or Chromium derivatives and Firefox doesn’t support AppleScript (that’s essential for me), so all that’s left is Safari. Or Orion, I guess, but it’s not good enough to offset Safari’s iCloud Private Relay.
Things I dislike about Safari include not being able to setup alternative search bar engines other than the awful default choice; not being able to disable JavaScript by default and enable it selectively; not being able to have it auto-delete site data on close except for defined domains; iCloud tab sync is finicky and doesn’t always work.
Some of those can be solved with extensions, but then the system to allow or deny extensions is atrocious: You can’t easily say “allow extensions everywhere except these domains”. You have to open each domain in tabs, then deny each domain individually in each extension. It’s also not kept in sync with iOS, where it’s even worse because you have to accept an extension on a domain before you get the option to deny it.
However, this paper[1] suggests that uBO Lite (MV3) which is still supported in the latest Chrome/chromium browsers, works at least as well for almost all users as the original (MV2) uBO, and, in some cases even better than before... so it's really no cause for alarm IMO.
This (whether MV3 blocking is sufficient) is the right question to ask, but also a premature answer.
Because here's the future: Google is already promoting that sites have their tag management (including ad network JS) resolve at the CDN level, with randomized custom-built URLs baked into your page source as served.
In this context, the only thing that can sufficiently block ads as this is more broadly adopted, is dynamic code whose definitions and behaviors can be updated regularly. Because ad networks, including Google, will become increasingly creative (especially with the ability to use AI) in having a near-infinite set of embedding techniques.
And Google sits as both the beneficiary of unblockable ads, and (with MV3) the gatekeeper of timing for executable code updates for ad blocking extensions. Core to the MV3 model is that any use of dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension (and subject to a mandatory review period for every update) is forbidden.
Google doesn't need to do something as drastic as disallow uBO and other extensions; they simply need to "boil the frog" over the course of years as more and more of their clients move to Tag Gateway and similar approaches, and give their ad implementation an increasing "head start" by delaying approval of uBO code updates that are trying to keep pace.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of permanent absence.
> dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension
How could that be enforced on open source browsers like chromium which can always sideload extensions and/or be modified/forked to not have such limitations?
I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Really? I don't remember it from back then, but right now must be better in terms of the content available, the player (not the shorts one; that's awful), automatically generated subtitles with transcripts that can be searched, automated translation, dubbing, etc.
I would enjoy automatically generated subtitles more if they weren't wrong about 10% of the time.
I constantly get something like "Today, we are going to discuss which model is better at programming. Is it an tropic's latest model, Cloud Fable? Or is it, Open AI's Chat G pity?"
It's as though Google hired my dyslexic ass to write the subtitles. It trips me up even more because I can't tell if I misread something or the chat messed up sometimes.
I cannot comment on translation or dubbing. English is the only language I can somewhat understand.
That's so long ago I honestly can't see that being true. It used to be a funny home video hosting platform in those days. The quality of content you can get on youtube these days is incredible.
Okay, Google bought YouTube earlier than I remembered (2006). For some reason, I remembered the purchase being somewhere around 2009-2012.
So, if I may change my opinion, early YouTube was better, despite being owned by Google. I feel like the platform has been atrocious in the last decade or more. Constant clickbait, a new NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends ad every 15 minutes, politics being injected into every other video, creators trying to game the algorithm to escape the rat race, the obnoxious algorithm itself, and now I am getting an absurd amount of LLM generated videos.
I would not dare claim there is not great content though. I am listening to a YouTube video as I type this. Though, I have been listening this particular creator since 2006, if that tells you anything.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel YouTube is just getting the slow squeeze of death -- like everything Google wraps its tentacles around.
The LLM scripts has been a plague but I don't think that's Google pushing it, it's youtubers optimizing to create the most minutes of video as quickly as possible.
Paying for views is both why we have high quality content, and why the site is so gamed.
This type of populist message seems like such an easy path to popularity for an aspiring politician. You don't have to be a leftist like Bernie Sanders to be a trust buster. Just acknowledge that almost every large corporation has seemingly made it their mission to make life worse for the citizenry in the name of profit and vow to fight it.
Anyone running with that type of message will be squashed by said "every large corporation". They will finance their opponent(s). They will run deep fakes against them. Until "every large corporation" is prevented from spending unlimited money, things will not change.
What would limiting corporations from contributing more than the total of max donation per employee? I've never seen numbers from that, but I've heard people discuss it.
So next time around they point to every instance of this, post it all somewhere and link to it everywhere, and make a big point about how they are actually scaring them enough that maybe they can make a difference this time.
I do agree that we need to limit spending, but I don't know how to get there without a candidate like this getting traction. Sort of a chicken and egg thing.
This won't ever happen, the US and the US government can't afford to weaken its corporations and risk impact their data collection, social control, influence and profitability world-wide.
Sadly you are right, but the people can still learn. There is a reason more and more folks move towards De-Googling. This is also a world-wide movement - it is not just the US government. Tons of lobbyists in other countries support mega-corporations dictating terms to us. Just look at EU legislation recently in the news again - constant betrayal of EU citizens here. All paid for EU taxpayers. The EU commission works for these mega-corporations.
The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe.
In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world.
I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
Why would you be "torn" on this? Competition breeds innovation, and monopolies are literally the opposite of competition. A break up of big tech doesn't destroy anything or reduce economic activity, it can only accelerate it.
America is totally fucked if we keep betting it all on these monopolies. China figured out that competition is the key to winning, and is why their AI companies have been able to catch up so quickly despite all the sanctions.
> I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you placing degenerate bets on HN threads? Also the second sentence is unrelated, so now I'm wondering if you're a bot.
The US just added a colony in Venezuela in cooperation with their local Reichskommissar and is looking to secure its oil. American perception of their country is quite something.
Hahaha, today I learned that we need to keep Google's advertising income intact (~75% of their revenue) so that the US economy doesn't fall apart. We can't stop projecting these ads onto people's eyeballs, or literally the entire world goes to shit! AHAHAHAHA
Why are these two points, countering China and keeping Europe safe, the framing for this? Who is needed to counter the US and keep foreign countries, like Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and so on, safe from the US? And who needs to be strong to counter the US's state-sponsored terrorism via Israel?
Actually the opposite monopolist (and oligopoles etc.) tend to sooner or later stop innovating (they don't need to, they win by default) and decay into customer abusive absurdity. And to some degree we are already seeing this with alphabet.
What such concentration of money also means, is a concentration of power under the hand of a few people, wich then can use that power to e.g. undermine or outright destroy democracy, force countries to make really bad decisions (including economic ones), destroy industries "on a whim" etc. Worst huge economic crisis tend to long term make the richest of the rich even more wealthy and more important tends to open doors for even more power/abuse, exceptions in laws, state subsidization etc. So you can't even rely on them not intentionally fucking up their countries economy because "that would be bad". Not for them, at least not long term. And tbh. at the net worth we are speaking about "it being bad" still means they can live in luxury for the not just the rest of their lives and have multiple millions left to inherit to their children.
> know (academic) international relations Realism.
or you not knowing less about economics then you think
> to counter China and keep Europe safe.
eh, the financial support of right US milliadaries of right radical political groups which want to both dismantle the EU (and overthrow democracy) in combination with US mono/-oligopols in combination with corruption & US political pressure, is effectively killing most efforts for local EU competition. Honestly this is likely doing far more harm in how much EU is "able to resist" China then any "safekeeping" the US does (mostly indirectly by protecting their own interests).
Why would you need to keep Europe safe? It's not your colony, I'd much rather prefer if China wanted to keep us safe, by their track record over last 50 years seems like much more peaceful country than US, I don't see them invading other countries, kidnapping presidents, bombing schools full of kids or otherwise kill civillians outside China.
So what Europe need is strong economy to counter US and keep us safe from them, the most dangerous country for world peace together with Israel.
Sadly for EU they will keep shooting themselves in one leg with RU sanctions and shooting themselves to other leg with Green Deal nonsense, so you don't really need strong economy to be better than EU, just a bit of common sense.
Bonus: they might not be able to fund the anti-user behavior like sunsetting MV2, all of the "anonymous audience tracking" that prevents any other advertiser from identifying you (but Google's scale still can), aggressively pushing 'sign in with Google', retracting their stance on blocking third party cookies, continually removing settings that drive user control, and more.
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Short answer? Yes.
Long answer? Definitely.
> I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
I see you have an unconventional definition of the word "great". I'll take that to mean you're an outside-the-box thinker, so you're in a good position to understand that a break up of Google would radically change all the markets they're dominant in.
If Android 'dies' post-breakup, that would leave a gaping hole in the economy. iOS might fill it, but regulators would need to break them up too. Say iOS 'dies' too, would we all collectively just stop using smartphones? Obviously not. Entrepreneurs who can see opportunity will raise money and hire the right people to build a new OS, foundations will apply for grants to maintain Android or iOS forks, industry standards will form to improve interop and reduce development costs, etc. The sky's the limit!
Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? It never had a business model besides "support Google's monopolies", so it shouldn't survive (IMO). Lots of browser vendors already use Chrome's open source codebase, so those orgs can fork it, or they can collectively come together to fund development, or apply for government grants or something.
I think that Chrome development team members will have plenty of new job and business opportunities available to them if this ever happens. New markets will open up for browser tech that didn't exist before, and I think everyone will come out winning in the end, even users who would never even consider paying money for a web browser.
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? It never had a business model besides "support Google's monopolies", so it shouldn't survive (IMO)
You just explicitly claimed that Chrome has definitively a viable business model as a stand-alone company ("Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely."). Now you claim the opposite...
Is the argument also as strong for the other cases?
Sorry, I forgot this was HN and wasn't obnoxious enough in my reply.
The original question was:
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Please take note of the absence of the word "standalone" in that quote.
My response to the response to my response (henceforth responses['bogwog'][1]) was thus:
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? ...
Please note the truthiness of `'standlone' in responses['bogwog'][1]`
From this evidence we can surmise that my point was 'Chrome' the non-business can't survive as an independent business, because Chrome is not a business. Likewise, the 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' you get on an airplane can't survive as an independent business were we to break up the airline, as 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' isn't a business.
But can Chrome the project survive without Google? I say yes, just like Cheez-Its can survive without being complimentary additions to overpriced flights. For why I think that, please refer to my other comment in this thread.
No one is paying for browsers. Maybe there is a market for enterprise support contracts for it, but this is not going to replace the money spigot of Google Ads. If I were to guess, Chrome "as its own business" would go bust very fast, with the staff being picked up by Microsoft (to support Edge, which basically is a Chrome fork) and Apple (to make Safari decent).
Android I'd say could survive, at least as long as it is bundled in the same entity that handles Play Store, that thing is a money printer. Without it... I'd say Samsung won't care, they already have their own marketplace and mess around in AOSP to an unholy degree, and everyone else will either attempt to fork Android like some Chinese brands did, go for Graphene or go bust like HTC.
Youtube... they probably got enough Premium subscribers now to keep the lights on, the problems are going to start when they have to separate their infrastructure. Bandwidth is still insanely expensive and at the moment they benefit a lot from Google being the top dog, able to tell even the largest ISPs "peer with us for free, or else". Without that leverage, with their own infra, bandwidth costs are going to eat them alive.
We've done this in the past. AT&T was broken up into the regional baby bells. Eventually, the baby bells started to get absorbed back into the monolith AT&T again. Nobody stopped it. I assume that the fact that few people use landlines and there are more than one provider of communication services where the AT&T voltron is no longer a monopoly.
The point? Not really sure, but as much as I'm all for breaking up Alphabet, I'm not convinced it will work. I'm willing to give it a go though
Trustbusting is like weeding your garden. It's just a chore that must be done periodically to counteract the natural tendency of markets to degenerate into monopolies. It's not something you do once and then never again, it's something that you have to do regularly, forever, if you want a functioning market.
Your "do regularly" got me thinking. There's only been 2 companies in the US to have been busted up, Standard Oil (1911) and ATT (1984). Microsoft (2000) got close but cut a deal. So yeah, we haven't been tending garden very well
I think there's a remarkably clear precedent at least for browsers, which is having Android users pick from a list of browsers instead of having Chrome as the pre installed default. That's already been done previously with Microsoft and I believe with search on Apple, andI think it would reverse the Mozilla market share trend overnight.
I don't think Chrome being spun off as a company leaves them with a realistic path to revenue unless, ironically, they do something like what Mozilla does, and strike a search licensing agreement albeit a much bigger one proportionate to their share of users.
I also don't think it should just be Alphabet/Google because at full strength they are an important check against the power of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and arguably Facebook. Weakening Alphabet while leaving them unchecked could have the net effect of increasing monopoly power of the other giants. I think the order of operations would go something like (1) Amazon (online retail), (2) Google (search and web), (3) Facebook (social media). Microsoft and Apple are giants but I don't think they are strategically cornering any particular tech markets right now (though I could be wrong).
And I think international competition is complicating the picture of how close to monopolies they really are, though Google at least is clearly abusing its position in the browser and web standards space.
They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.
The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.
> They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari)
They don't need to. Chrome does extremely well on Windows without "owning the OS".
> nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome
Very few people go to that page anyway.
> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
> They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
QFT. The biggest impediment to Firefox's success is the Mozilla Org, which sees it as a cash cow to fund a zillion projects no one wants (sacrificing the future of the browser everyone wants).
Silly take. Chrome does extremely well on Windows because every Google site, from search to Youtube to Gmail to Docs nudges people to install it. Without that 99% of people would just stay on Edge.
Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
> Silly take. Chrome does extremely well on Windows because every Google site, from search to Youtube to Gmail to Docs nudges people to install it. Without that 99% of people would just stay on Edge.
No they wouldn't. Everyone recommended Chrome, and it came long before Edge (given Edge is based on Chromium). People have got used to Chrome. That's why it does well. People don't even interact with those sites so much any more, as they've all moved to phone apps, but they all still use Chrome.
> Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
Just paying far fewer executives and putting money aside for lean years is a good start. Put aside $150m/year and spend $100m on servers and engineers and that'll get you a long way. But because it's free money it gets spent on nonsense.
Being beholden to Google who might decide that the risk of antitrust is lower than the price they are paying for that search box is a pretty precarious place to be in.
The series of own goals is a bigger problem. They should spend their $ on FF and allow direct donations that only go to FF and not to their hobby projects.
Such a wonderful take on Firefox. The only thing it is really missing to make it perfect for everyone is proper sync not just on one computer but across systems.
Without wanting to sound rude: you're talking about browsers – serious business. Most hackers – I feel – need a bit more than 'I strongly suggest it' to even consider switching to a nascent browser :D
it’s a firefox fork. ‘most hackers’ would research it no matter what was typed on a msg board prior to installing. the first step is knowingg about it. personally, im a big fan and daily drive it on my personal systems. but I do find their tab groups implementations to be a bit subpar.
I use firefox on all devices, but there are two notches against it in my book:
Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.
Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:
>Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.
Vanadium is a good browser but I wish it had Firefox's Private Mode toggle, for permanent private mode *
It's fiddly to even manually wipe history in Vanadium as it defaults to the '15 mins' option, and then it tries to suggest a subset of sites it thinks you want to retain data for **
* (Yes I know about the suboptimal workaround of the intent shortcut)
I've had the issue on multiple phones. Firefox nightly seemed to fix it for a while but it suffers from it too after a while. I need to test if it's UBO or the sister comment that says closing tabs and restarting helps. It's only on certain sites I really notice it, maybe JS or video heavy sites. NYTimes in particular.
I stopped using Firefox when it had massive performance issues (CPU and memory) to the point it was unusable. Chrome in comparison was lightning fast and since then I somehow cannot get myself to use Firefox though I know they likely have fixed those issues long time ago. I have Firefox installed but never open it.
Same. I found Firefox was fast on Windows at the time, but on Mac it was so slow (compared to Chrome), and had weird non-native scrolling for the longest time. As a Mac user it felt like they developed for Windows, and occasionally do some work on the Mac app too.
There was a period in time, few years ago, when I was going back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, driven by alternate paranoia about privacy vs performance. These days I don't really have to. Firefox on Android, at least for the phones I regularly used, like several OnePlus from 7T up and now razr ultra, has been very stable. Only blip was the one month I was on Pixel 10- turns out they have special hardware optimization for Chrome that cripples Firefox on Pixel 10 otherwise. All the more reason to (return the phone and) stick to Firefox.
I feel like with the advent of vibe coding, the bar to making your own browser is gradually lowering. People are already making all sorts of useful "houseplant programming" to serve their own pain points. Sooner or later, agentic coding will actually become really good and people will be able to just vibe code a whole browser in Rust or something that addresses the exact pain points that power users have.
The core will have to still be a solid battle tested thing. Imagine having to worry about if your vibed browser is quietly dropping some elements. Firefox and Chromium browsers are valuable because they are the targets, if a site doesn't render properly in them, it can be said that the site is wrong.
If everyone runs a vibe coded browser engine that evaporates and you might as well just have sites serve a bunch of markdown for LLMs to render in whatever inconsistent way they choose.
Vibe coding is obviously not quite there yet right now. But in the future it will be. The output of agents will be just as correct and rock solid as the software from the most experienced software developers. We'll also have the additional advantage of there being existing browsers to use as an oracle to test against to ensure that nothing regresses.
With the same logic there can never be another browser engine ever again. Which I think is actually true as everyone is converging on Blink/Chromium but it is depressing to think about.
I also was a Firefox user, but Mozilla killed Firefox many years ago. I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio in order to watch videos (well, hear audio) on youtube. Chrome worked fine. At that moment in time I knew mozilla no longer cared about the users. (I use thorium though, so actually I can still use ublock origin fine. But I am sad that I ended up with the evil Google empire. There is no real competition against it anymore, sadly enough.)
> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Indeed. Hopefully more and more people realise this. Google has underestimated The People here.
Um.... If I learned anything from Apple, the best and brightest don't matter. Capitalism forces the best and brightest to make apps for the walled prison because the masses saw someone dancing with colorful backgrounds.
I do know a few perpetually single people working in academia using some obscure Linux distro(btw my company is 90%+ Fedora).
I am completely over thinking HN nerds can cause an uprising. Somehow the aristocrats have almost no power in democracy and capitalism. Power is held in 0.1%ers and the masses.
> I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio
I am 99% sure Firefox will run just fine without systemd, or OpenRC half of Gentoo would be with pitchforks and torches.
It isn't correct, either, that it requires PulseAudio; I'm running FF with PipeWire, for example. But perhaps let's steelman that to "does not work with ALSA". I'm not sure what the objection to PA would be. It appears you can run FF under an adapter that will backport FF's PA output to ALSA — so it is possible to do —, I'm just not fathoming what the objection to Pulse is. (Or for that matter, its successor, PipeWire.)
I've been using Firefox since the beginning and will continue using it. I only use Chrome for occasional testing, but close to 100% of the time, everything works in Firefox unless an overzealous add-on breaks a page and then I simply disable it to get going again.
I'm always so shocked to see so many ads when I see people using Chrome or I have to use it for something myself.
I know it's more infrastructure, but just use pi-hole and then it doesn't really matter what browser you use, if we're just talking about pop ups and malicious ads.
Or just use these AdGuard DNS servers, no infrastructure setup needed
Primary: 94.140.14.14
Secondary: 94.140.15.15
uBO does so much more though, with it ability to block particular elements and inject CSS. It can do more than remove ads, but also any annoying elements like autoplaying videos from news sites.
I've been using Firefox as my main browser since I switched from Windows to Linux.
No real complaints so far, haven't really noticed any difference from Chrome to be honest which is about as good a recommendation as I could give. It does chew up memory but so did Chrome I guess, I haven't done a head-to-head comparison.
Firefox is a terrible browser. The engine is alright, and good just because it's not the monoculture. The browser is terrible. When you open it up in a fresh profile, it starts asking you to sign up for things and spend money.
I switched to Firefox like 6 months ago. I’m happy with it even though Chromium is a better engine imo. What Google is doing with Chrome is unacceptable.
Yeah, consider the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink if an existing browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
I feel the opposite, the more chrome abuse their dominance the closer they move to a tipping point where enough people become browser interested to return to browser wars. It's likely one of those things where it has to go to far, then change will happen fairly quickly.
> I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
Market share appears to be hovering around 4%, which sounds small but that is still a massive amount of people, over 200 million users. It is even more impressive considering it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users, people overwhelmingly just use what is already installed. That's a huge number of users earned rather than inherited.
I use firefox and sometimes safari. I had to install chrome recently, and I don’t understand how people stand it. It’s a half-assed attempt to reimplement windows 95 era preload spam. (Or non-decrapified win11).
I don’t understand how it has any market share. It’s like finding out that 80% of people voluntarily install browser toolbars that force penis pill ads down your throat, and then there are a bunch of HN fanboys saying that all other alternatives are worse.
By the time FF isn't a thing we'll have AI distilling site content for us and removing all the bullshit and there won't be anything site operators can do about it. And it'll use sandboxed browser instances that are immediately deleted
As someone with both Chrome and Firefox installed why should I click the Firefox button? I mean it's mostly the same but gives me out of memory errors.
Last time I tried it a thing saying "Refresh Firefox" popped up which I clicked and it wiped the extensions which I got back following some online help but lost completely I think the crypto keys in metamask - like https://www.reddit.com/r/Metamask/comments/14rcg6k/firefox_r...
Luckily I had backup elsewhere but it kind of freaked me out.
I've never seen Firefox use more memory than Chrome on modern versions. They're pretty on par.
It's far more likely that one of the many addons/extensions you had was the cause.
As for 'Refresh Firefox', it does exactly what it says it does - wipe a lot of your configuration to bring it closer to stock. It's intended as a way to show people new defaults and help clear out old, bloated configs. It shouldn't be used unless you know what you're doing.
I believe era of custom software is coming. AI is getting much powerful from month to month and that day will come when you can implement your own browser someday and no one like Google can stop you from it ;)
The reality is that Chrome users still have sufficient ad blocking so as to not be impacted by this. What will be interesting is if it stops being sufficient, at which point I think people will migrate. But until then, why would they? Most people don't really care if their extension is MV2 or MV3, they just want their youtube video to play faster.
DNS blocking just isn't as good as a browser extension, because it can only block based on domain names. Pihole helps block ads on non-browser apps, but a real ad blocker extension in a browser is much better. I run pihole on my network, but I still run uBlock Origin on Firefox.
I ran pihole for a while, but I ran into way too many issues with certain sites simply not working at all (booking travel, online shopping...), and it was bothersome to have to constantly allowlist those. UBO works out better.
I'm pretty sure it is just a matter of time before the first (open source?) extensions marketplace for Chromium fork extensions will hit the net.
A party like Helium or Brave might even already be working on it. Because while Google might not like it at all, a huge chunk of people love extensions like uBO and ease of use a little bit too much.
Avoid Brave. It is basically Chromium, with commercial shitware slapped on, and an ad-blocker which performs worse than UBlock Origin on Firefox. Brave Inc. (a for-profit company) is openly hostile to forks and independent builds, and expects you to run and trust their binaries. It also wants to charge you a one-time fee for a build free of crapware, i.e. something you can get for free from Chromium.
I like Brave, and I know and respect many of the technical team there. I looked into the various stories about the browser that led to it being unpopular in some key communities, and I really couldn't find anything some misunderstandings, common business practices (which you can legitimately disapprove of), and a wish to register opposition to their connection to cryptocurrency/web3.
I think many people would choose not to use Brave because of its association with Brendan Eich (details at Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... ), which stands as separate from the browser itself, or the actions of the company.
I've been using Brave for years and its great. Having JS off by default (i.e. shields) is excellent for security. They provide MV2 versions of AdGuard and uBlock Origin that you can enable directly from the browser settings. Those are also both excellent for security since the main threat is malicious scripts served up by ad networks.
Brave does what it says on the tin: It's another Blink based browser that is now rather mature and trouble free, supported by very responsive developers, and they provide a fully integrated ad blocking engine that is superior to every browser add-on/extension solution ever created.
That's it in a nut shell. Take a few minutes and go solve all your browser problems.
I used to be interested in it but ever since they launched Brave Orion it has become clear they intend to actively monetize the free public versions they have been releasing, and the path they're taking with crypto and add-on bloat just feels ickier than most of its competition including Chrome.
It's been working great for me as the primary browser for a couple of years now.
Prior to that I was on Firefox (for the sake of browser engine diversity) but left as soon as they announced they were turning into an AI powered advertising company, and would use your data for training. However, I keep it around for cross-browser testing.
Hopefully more and more people wake up as to what this adMonster has become.
If we want a real open world wide in the future, we need to do something about Google. UBO is not the only one killed by Google here. They will continue on their wicked path. (And, while it may be great that Ladybird exists, I have some doubts that this will really be a contender. We should not become lazy and think that Google will just comply with the demands of The People here - its business is based on controlling influx of adMoney via its Evil Empire, and it secures this by de-facto controlling the browser stack. Just look how many people in % use the chrome-codebase now. That IS effectively a monopoly powered by greed.)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] thread* Android * All websites hosted on Google Cloud, Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure * All websites using React * Github
Life is tough. Good luck.
I don't know why you didn't include Apple on the list and why you use Meta's old company name.
Apple is not that evil in my opinion compared to the rest. If I don't use Apple then they don't bother me.
I don't care about Facebook's rebranding. I'm allowed to call them what they are.
Apple fined $8.5M for illegally collecting iPhone owners' data for ads (gizmodo.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected (aalto.fi)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657
Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them (lapcatsoftware.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588
Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952
Apple memory holed its broken promise for an OCSP opt-out (lapcatsoftware.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41184153
Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS (therecord.media) [but Apple still collects a lot!]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
That your examples are rather weak proves my point, not the opposite.
Switched over to Brave and have had perhaps a day or two of failed ad blocking on YT. Otherwise it’s been a rock solid experience and the built in Tor is nice when I need to quickly test geo rules.
The Android/iPhone duopoly is nearly impossible to break because very few people want to carry two personal phones, and it takes only one app that they can't do without being only available on Android/iPhone to make it impossible to choose anything else. The app providers likewise have no incentive to support anything else because everyone has one of these two.
Bank apps are the prime example here that's unlikely to start supporting other systems. Public transit (and in some places parking) is another potential problem where even the unhinged "well just change banks to the one that does support your favorite phone" argument fails. ID apps (either governmental or de facto standards like the Swedish BankID) are coming too.
"The Apple app store is not a monopoly because Apple has no competitors on their platform."
Google is just doing what they need to do to stop being a monopoly....by becoming a monopoly, because of a ruling that the internet actually celebrated. Which we can trace back to Epic not being happy that sideloading on Android wasn't perfectly frictionless.
(Note: Epic also sued Apple, but lost, because the Apple app store is not a monopoly.)
Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.
Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.
Most of these things were not true on the Windows side. At least not to the same degree.
Hasn't been the case since at least 2017.
Rewriting history is wrong - Firefox was kind of a dog for a long time.
https://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pa...
https://community.adobe.com/questions-638/adobe-flash-instal...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission
https://www.findmysoft.com/news/google-gets-pushy-with-chrom...
Etc. This stuff was very real and is a ten second search away, maybe try that before accusing parent of having a faulty memory because it doesn’t agree with yours.
It's really disgusting to see such misinformation spread because you hate what actually happened.
There are screenshots of the installers in those links.
But if that is your view, you should switch to Brave. 44% less memory use, (1/3) longer battery life, no telemetry and if you block undesirables it is obviously much much faster.
> AnandTech tested median page load time across one hundred top-trafficked websites in WebPageTest using a 50 Mbps cable connection. Brave 1.69 loaded the median page in 2.1 seconds, while Chrome 147 took 6.7 seconds. The 3.2x difference is not engine speed, it is Brave Shields aborting requests for ad networks, analytics SDKs, and third-party fingerprinting scripts
Rewriting history is wrong
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/528214/browser_speed_compari... [2] https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-chrome-bund...
And yes, both things can be true which is why lying about one of them is wrong.
Even if it was the most amazing browser ever written and came with a free puppy, it is shady to rely on tricking people to get your software installed, and pretending that this is just "advertising a browser" is incredibly disingenuous.
By replying to this comment you agree that I can install some of my software on whatever device you are currently using. <-- this is basically what they did.
All of the things that made Chrome great in 2010 are still there, and are, in most cases, even better today than they were back then.
It's strange how we can distort our memories to fit whatever narrative we want to believe.
Something that was great in 2010 may not look great in 2026.
It's been 16 years. The Internet has moved on. Blocking ads is the norm now, and they are removing that functionality.
In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!
It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837
Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.
When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.
If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...
A - Billions
B - not Billions
I never did because I remember internet explorer and lack of transparent PNG support.
Prior to the reintroduction of UBO (lite), I feel like Safari helped me reduce my trash content consumption. Page with tons of ads? Not worth visiting. Youtube keeps playing ads? My frustration is a sign I need to get off YouTube and do something else. I do not need nor want to mange tens of plugins. I like to keep things simple and slim. So, perhaps that is one dealbreaker for some?
Even if I believe Apple hung the Moon, I still seriously recommend Safari to anyone using Apple devices.
Nice. I thought that was just me! Same with ads on YouTube.
One thing you may be surprised with, not sure if this helps or harms you lol, is you can develop some decent safari plugins for personal use with todays AI tools. I made a little popout extension for giving me a more minimal viewer experience with a button in safari with a few days of work (still maintain and update it occasionally, getpoppy.io if you're curious - and the vibe code tools also used webkit in the browser engine of its Mac app)
Switch to Firefox if you haven't already really.
Turns out, it's bypassable. They just check the User Agent and Sec-CH headers, so I built a small browser extension for Chrome that allows to modify those headers.
On top of that I built chromium-profiles [1], my tool for managing those isolated sandboxes so that I can tweak/change them based on the stupid policies per O365 tenant I have to work with.
So I use 3 different profiles for 3 different customers with 3 different security policies set for their organization... For being allowed to use a freaking web app.
That, for me, is the only reason I still have to have chromium installed. Microsoft stupidity.
I wish Firefox would focus on this sort of use case, like the "--pwa" and "--user-data" CLI flags and preinstallable extensions for those profiles. But it can't be done due to how they manage extensions with their own signing cert, how dev mode extensions are always cleared etc.
[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/chromium-profiles
We really need independence from Google in the browser landscape if we want the open web to survive.
Interestingly, the rule count limits themselves do not (currently) seem to be much an issue despite it being one of the more common concerns on the original MV3 announcement.
This isn't an MV3 issue, it's a Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization. It was also true with MV2. In fact, MV3 has improved the situation because DNR rules are enforced immediately.
You could certainly argue that Chrome should allow extensions to block browser initialization, or that it should be user configurable - but it seems like an entirely defensible decision. Regardless, it's nothing to do with MV3.
> the filter rules aren't as flexible.
That's true, but they are still very flexible.
> Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization
It's not "browser initialization" that was blocked, it was blocking network requests for pages until they were processed by all components in the chain. Notably, this could never apply applied to the browser or its internal pages itself.
> It was also true with MV2.
With MV2 you used a blocking https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/w... and then the request had to wait until it was given to and processed by the blocker.
> did you know that you can change your User-Agent with uBO lite?
With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders. I'm not sure uBO ever bothered with this before uBO Lite, but it's a bit of a double standard to say "MV2 didn't offer blocking requests, that was a different API which happ
Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately.
> With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders
Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.
There were several workarounds like suspendTabsUntilReady which helped greatly in this half of the problem. Then it would solidly stay permanently registered too. I'm pretty sure none of these work in Chrome anymore though, it was obvious they never intended these sorts of things to work that way.
Nevertheless, MV3's ability to offer limited filtering on startup does not seem like such a blessing when the other option was to just support full filtering on startup like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1447551
> Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.
What you want to highlight would hold a lot more relevance if the reason it wasn't there before had something to do with the difficulty pre MV3. uMatrix had it for a while and Gorhill regretted it because it didn't change things like the user agent JS would report and such. The above filter has the same problems. Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher, that it's normal quality is why it was never in the original though until it was just included with DNRs. This really has nothing to do with the good parts of MV3 though.
Sure, but as I said, it's a design decision, and nothing to do with MV3. I'm not trying to litigate it one way or the other.
I do think DNR is a good solution, and that request callbacks were a bad idea. That's my opinion - and the counterargument is obvious -- you can't do literally everything you could do in a callback declaratively. That doesn't sway me, I still think it's better!
> Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher
It was just a trivial example of using a powerful new feature that uBO doesn't have, not a full featured extension! The fact that it's possible at all is the point, it's cool.
You can definitely do anything that DNR can do with webRequest, nobody can dispute that. The point is that there are things you can do with uBO lite that you can't do with uBO (and vice versa!). It's not a straight downgrade, there are powerful new features.
Nobody should be swaying you to prefer DNR over webRequest or vice versa when in other browsers they are both just options for the extensions yo use as makes sense for what they try to do.
> You can definitely do anything that DNR can do with webRequest, nobody can dispute that. The point is that there are things you can do with uBO lite that you can't do with uBO (and vice versa!). It's not a straight downgrade, there are powerful new features.
In ~15 minutes this morning I implemented this on a normal uBO git clone using the MV2 webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders API - would anyone be calling that powerful? If so, what about all of the actually powerful capabilities missing?
What was the ulterior motive? If it was to break ad blocking, it seems like they did a really terrible job, as MV3 ad blockers work great. That's not me saying that, here is a paper from researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt:
> Moreover, cross-browser experiments yield comparable outcomes, and visual inspection confirms that MV3 ad blockers work effectively without significant ad flickering or loss of functionality
From: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01000
> Funnily enough, this morning I ran across another feature I didn't realize was missing in MV3
I think you can do this, just redirect to a WAR with a SW instead of block, then increment a counter. There is obviously a performance cost, as blocking has less overhead than redirecting... but as a callback advocate you are presumably willing to pay that :)
Regardless, I think it's jarring hearing you call custom DNR rules "painting the house red", a legitimately powerful feature... and then point to a missing counter in the UI as evidence of lacking features!
Anyway, let's leave it there! It seems unlikely I'm going to convince you, and as blocking webRequest will never return to Chrome your efforts are better focused on petitioning Microsoft and Mozilla not to abandon it.
That issue does not exist for uBO Lite. I specifically wrote in the FAQ under "What are the upsides of an MV3-based content blocker?":
> For Chromium-based browsers specifically, MV3-based content blockers which are entirely declarative will properly filter at browser launch, which is not the case for MV2-based content blockers
uBO Lite is entirely declarative.
Most devs I know are on Mac. Why not just use Safari? Works in most cases, helps you catch issues earlier on, looks beautiful and is super customizable, still supports UBlock, has vertical tabs, syncs profiles to your focus, is way more memory efficient, etc.
I've daily driven Safari for ~3y after Arc got sunset and the only site that gives me issues is Hulu (but not Disney+ weirdly). Similarly drive Edge on Windows, I can't think why I'd ever reach for Chrome.
I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better? Who cares? All that matters for me is what features it has and that performance isn't horrible, and if I cannot have vertical tree-style tabs in it and hide the tab-bar, then I personally have no use for it. So stuck with Firefox I am, and been for decades.
Besides, if my OS is Arch Linux, what browser is my "OS-browser" anyway?
Are being ignorant on purpose now?
Apple's Safari has integration with Apple's Password app which firefox does not. Edge automatically connects with your Microsoft account.
Both browsers sync tabs, bookmarks and so on across your Microsoft/Apple account connected devices.
For a lot of 'average' users this is already extremely convenient.
On top of that, Safari is still the most 'energy efficient' browser you could use on macOS.
I'm already using Firefox, you don't need to sell me on using it!
> On top of that, Safari is still the most 'energy efficient' browser you could use on macOS.
Ok cool, but I think some other people might be using some other OS than macOS, but don't quote me on that. Not sure why "Always use the default browser your OS developer has packaged for you" applies just because Safari happens to work well (only?) on macOS.
Another point: I’m not sure if Safari’s dev tools are worse but I feel friction any time I have to use them. It’s probably partly just that I don’t want to learn the quirks of both sets. Firefox’s is much closer to Chrome’s. I bet they’re both inspired by Firebug.
Using Mac is a no-go. For me, they became insufferably power-user hostile over the years.
Second,
God the safari rendering was so horrible for so many years. As a web developer, you have to target your greatest demographic, and Safari just broke everything more often than not.
Finally, even using Mac on enterprise, Chrome use is required because of the profile controls that can be exerted. And items #1/2 don’t help
Firefox allows me to share stuff across devices, block anything I want to and does not get in my way.
I think safari is largely fine but there are a lot of web APIs that it doesn’t support, rightly or not. A lot of devices are configurable through serial connections using the Web Serial APO thats only available in chromium browsers.
As a primary browser it really comes down to ergonomics. Things on top of the engine that make someone prefer one browser over the other.
I'm thinking of switching to Zen which is a Firefox based clone of Arc
:r !curl?
In all other cases Firefox, I'd assume.
It's not. It's barely functional, slower than Chrome, and always trails it in feature compatibility.
Because Edge sucks, and FF is better than Safari.
I use Safari, but don’t really like it. I don’t want to use Chrome or Chromium derivatives and Firefox doesn’t support AppleScript (that’s essential for me), so all that’s left is Safari. Or Orion, I guess, but it’s not good enough to offset Safari’s iCloud Private Relay.
Things I dislike about Safari include not being able to setup alternative search bar engines other than the awful default choice; not being able to disable JavaScript by default and enable it selectively; not being able to have it auto-delete site data on close except for defined domains; iCloud tab sync is finicky and doesn’t always work.
Some of those can be solved with extensions, but then the system to allow or deny extensions is atrocious: You can’t easily say “allow extensions everywhere except these domains”. You have to open each domain in tabs, then deny each domain individually in each extension. It’s also not kept in sync with iOS, where it’s even worse because you have to accept an extension on a domain before you get the option to deny it.
However, this paper[1] suggests that uBO Lite (MV3) which is still supported in the latest Chrome/chromium browsers, works at least as well for almost all users as the original (MV2) uBO, and, in some cases even better than before... so it's really no cause for alarm IMO.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01000
Because here's the future: Google is already promoting that sites have their tag management (including ad network JS) resolve at the CDN level, with randomized custom-built URLs baked into your page source as served.
https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/gatew...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/google-tag-gateway-for-advertise...
In this context, the only thing that can sufficiently block ads as this is more broadly adopted, is dynamic code whose definitions and behaviors can be updated regularly. Because ad networks, including Google, will become increasingly creative (especially with the ability to use AI) in having a near-infinite set of embedding techniques.
And Google sits as both the beneficiary of unblockable ads, and (with MV3) the gatekeeper of timing for executable code updates for ad blocking extensions. Core to the MV3 model is that any use of dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension (and subject to a mandatory review period for every update) is forbidden.
Google doesn't need to do something as drastic as disallow uBO and other extensions; they simply need to "boil the frog" over the course of years as more and more of their clients move to Tag Gateway and similar approaches, and give their ad implementation an increasing "head start" by delaying approval of uBO code updates that are trying to keep pace.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of permanent absence.
How could that be enforced on open source browsers like chromium which can always sideload extensions and/or be modified/forked to not have such limitations?
But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
As well as youtube, and the combination of google drive/docs.
I constantly get something like "Today, we are going to discuss which model is better at programming. Is it an tropic's latest model, Cloud Fable? Or is it, Open AI's Chat G pity?"
It's as though Google hired my dyslexic ass to write the subtitles. It trips me up even more because I can't tell if I misread something or the chat messed up sometimes.
I cannot comment on translation or dubbing. English is the only language I can somewhat understand.
So, if I may change my opinion, early YouTube was better, despite being owned by Google. I feel like the platform has been atrocious in the last decade or more. Constant clickbait, a new NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends ad every 15 minutes, politics being injected into every other video, creators trying to game the algorithm to escape the rat race, the obnoxious algorithm itself, and now I am getting an absurd amount of LLM generated videos.
I would not dare claim there is not great content though. I am listening to a YouTube video as I type this. Though, I have been listening this particular creator since 2006, if that tells you anything.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel YouTube is just getting the slow squeeze of death -- like everything Google wraps its tentacles around.
Paying for views is both why we have high quality content, and why the site is so gamed.
What would limiting corporations from contributing more than the total of max donation per employee? I've never seen numbers from that, but I've heard people discuss it.
I do agree that we need to limit spending, but I don't know how to get there without a candidate like this getting traction. Sort of a chicken and egg thing.
The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe.
In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world.
I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
America is totally fucked if we keep betting it all on these monopolies. China figured out that competition is the key to winning, and is why their AI companies have been able to catch up so quickly despite all the sanctions.
> I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you placing degenerate bets on HN threads? Also the second sentence is unrelated, so now I'm wondering if you're a bot.
Actually the opposite monopolist (and oligopoles etc.) tend to sooner or later stop innovating (they don't need to, they win by default) and decay into customer abusive absurdity. And to some degree we are already seeing this with alphabet.
What such concentration of money also means, is a concentration of power under the hand of a few people, wich then can use that power to e.g. undermine or outright destroy democracy, force countries to make really bad decisions (including economic ones), destroy industries "on a whim" etc. Worst huge economic crisis tend to long term make the richest of the rich even more wealthy and more important tends to open doors for even more power/abuse, exceptions in laws, state subsidization etc. So you can't even rely on them not intentionally fucking up their countries economy because "that would be bad". Not for them, at least not long term. And tbh. at the net worth we are speaking about "it being bad" still means they can live in luxury for the not just the rest of their lives and have multiple millions left to inherit to their children.
> know (academic) international relations Realism.
or you not knowing less about economics then you think
> to counter China and keep Europe safe.
eh, the financial support of right US milliadaries of right radical political groups which want to both dismantle the EU (and overthrow democracy) in combination with US mono/-oligopols in combination with corruption & US political pressure, is effectively killing most efforts for local EU competition. Honestly this is likely doing far more harm in how much EU is "able to resist" China then any "safekeeping" the US does (mostly indirectly by protecting their own interests).
So what Europe need is strong economy to counter US and keep us safe from them, the most dangerous country for world peace together with Israel.
Sadly for EU they will keep shooting themselves in one leg with RU sanctions and shooting themselves to other leg with Green Deal nonsense, so you don't really need strong economy to be better than EU, just a bit of common sense.
Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely.
> I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
I see you have an unconventional definition of the word "great". I'll take that to mean you're an outside-the-box thinker, so you're in a good position to understand that a break up of Google would radically change all the markets they're dominant in.
If Android 'dies' post-breakup, that would leave a gaping hole in the economy. iOS might fill it, but regulators would need to break them up too. Say iOS 'dies' too, would we all collectively just stop using smartphones? Obviously not. Entrepreneurs who can see opportunity will raise money and hire the right people to build a new OS, foundations will apply for grants to maintain Android or iOS forks, industry standards will form to improve interop and reduce development costs, etc. The sky's the limit!
If they charged users directly, everyone would just switch back to Firefox.
I think that Chrome development team members will have plenty of new job and business opportunities available to them if this ever happens. New markets will open up for browser tech that didn't exist before, and I think everyone will come out winning in the end, even users who would never even consider paying money for a web browser.
You just explicitly claimed that Chrome has definitively a viable business model as a stand-alone company ("Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely."). Now you claim the opposite...
Is the argument also as strong for the other cases?
The original question was:
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Please take note of the absence of the word "standalone" in that quote.
My response to the response to my response (henceforth responses['bogwog'][1]) was thus:
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? ...
Please note the truthiness of `'standlone' in responses['bogwog'][1]`
From this evidence we can surmise that my point was 'Chrome' the non-business can't survive as an independent business, because Chrome is not a business. Likewise, the 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' you get on an airplane can't survive as an independent business were we to break up the airline, as 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' isn't a business.
But can Chrome the project survive without Google? I say yes, just like Cheez-Its can survive without being complimentary additions to overpriced flights. For why I think that, please refer to my other comment in this thread.
Thank you.
No one is paying for browsers. Maybe there is a market for enterprise support contracts for it, but this is not going to replace the money spigot of Google Ads. If I were to guess, Chrome "as its own business" would go bust very fast, with the staff being picked up by Microsoft (to support Edge, which basically is a Chrome fork) and Apple (to make Safari decent).
Android I'd say could survive, at least as long as it is bundled in the same entity that handles Play Store, that thing is a money printer. Without it... I'd say Samsung won't care, they already have their own marketplace and mess around in AOSP to an unholy degree, and everyone else will either attempt to fork Android like some Chinese brands did, go for Graphene or go bust like HTC.
Youtube... they probably got enough Premium subscribers now to keep the lights on, the problems are going to start when they have to separate their infrastructure. Bandwidth is still insanely expensive and at the moment they benefit a lot from Google being the top dog, able to tell even the largest ISPs "peer with us for free, or else". Without that leverage, with their own infra, bandwidth costs are going to eat them alive.
It's an old American Tradition in need of revival
The point? Not really sure, but as much as I'm all for breaking up Alphabet, I'm not convinced it will work. I'm willing to give it a go though
I don't think Chrome being spun off as a company leaves them with a realistic path to revenue unless, ironically, they do something like what Mozilla does, and strike a search licensing agreement albeit a much bigger one proportionate to their share of users.
I also don't think it should just be Alphabet/Google because at full strength they are an important check against the power of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and arguably Facebook. Weakening Alphabet while leaving them unchecked could have the net effect of increasing monopoly power of the other giants. I think the order of operations would go something like (1) Amazon (online retail), (2) Google (search and web), (3) Facebook (social media). Microsoft and Apple are giants but I don't think they are strategically cornering any particular tech markets right now (though I could be wrong).
And I think international competition is complicating the picture of how close to monopolies they really are, though Google at least is clearly abusing its position in the browser and web standards space.
They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.
The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.
They don't need to. Chrome does extremely well on Windows without "owning the OS".
> nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome
Very few people go to that page anyway.
> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
QFT. The biggest impediment to Firefox's success is the Mozilla Org, which sees it as a cash cow to fund a zillion projects no one wants (sacrificing the future of the browser everyone wants).
Most "internet users" are mobile. The ones using windows are doing it from work laptops that are locked down and use edge (chrome).
If windows was a growing market MS would not be so far down the extraction path they have gone with the OS.
Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
No they wouldn't. Everyone recommended Chrome, and it came long before Edge (given Edge is based on Chromium). People have got used to Chrome. That's why it does well. People don't even interact with those sites so much any more, as they've all moved to phone apps, but they all still use Chrome.
> Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
Just paying far fewer executives and putting money aside for lean years is a good start. Put aside $150m/year and spend $100m on servers and engineers and that'll get you a long way. But because it's free money it gets spent on nonsense.
I'd gladly do the same for firefox, but they have not given the opportunity.
If I had the cash back then I'd do the same for B2G/firefoxOS.
If they stop paying tens of millions to their management, they could easily afford paying devs in perpetuity just from investing that money.
At $1M per year (equivalent to a good startup exit, but zero risk), that’s 70 engineers; probably senior to principal phd’s with 10 yr+ experience.
If that’s not enough to maintain a web browser, then pay them to simplify the damn thing.
Firefox works everywhere I point it to, for now. "Let the user modify their own software" does not cost extra.
The entire point was that it was a browser built by a warm and friendly community, and not corporate interests.
I have no hope that they will keep their other values if they’ve already been so quick to let this one go.
Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.
Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:
>Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.
It's fiddly to even manually wipe history in Vanadium as it defaults to the '15 mins' option, and then it tries to suggest a subset of sites it thinks you want to retain data for **
* (Yes I know about the suboptimal workaround of the intent shortcut)
** (Yes I know this is upstream behaviour.)
It starts to lag after a while on some sites but force-stopping occasionally fixes it for me.
If everyone runs a vibe coded browser engine that evaporates and you might as well just have sites serve a bunch of markdown for LLMs to render in whatever inconsistent way they choose.
You've just re-invented plain HTML.
I use chrome and those sites are miserable.
> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Indeed. Hopefully more and more people realise this. Google has underestimated The People here.
I do know a few perpetually single people working in academia using some obscure Linux distro(btw my company is 90%+ Fedora).
I am completely over thinking HN nerds can cause an uprising. Somehow the aristocrats have almost no power in democracy and capitalism. Power is held in 0.1%ers and the masses.
I am 99% sure Firefox will run just fine without systemd, or OpenRC half of Gentoo would be with pitchforks and torches.
It isn't correct, either, that it requires PulseAudio; I'm running FF with PipeWire, for example. But perhaps let's steelman that to "does not work with ALSA". I'm not sure what the objection to PA would be. It appears you can run FF under an adapter that will backport FF's PA output to ALSA — so it is possible to do —, I'm just not fathoming what the objection to Pulse is. (Or for that matter, its successor, PipeWire.)
I'm always so shocked to see so many ads when I see people using Chrome or I have to use it for something myself.
No real complaints so far, haven't really noticed any difference from Chrome to be honest which is about as good a recommendation as I could give. It does chew up memory but so did Chrome I guess, I haven't done a head-to-head comparison.
Now that mv2 is going away, I switch back to firefox, and it still has memory leak issues after all these years, it is really disappointing.
Market share appears to be hovering around 4%, which sounds small but that is still a massive amount of people, over 200 million users. It is even more impressive considering it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users, people overwhelmingly just use what is already installed. That's a huge number of users earned rather than inherited.
I don’t understand how it has any market share. It’s like finding out that 80% of people voluntarily install browser toolbars that force penis pill ads down your throat, and then there are a bunch of HN fanboys saying that all other alternatives are worse.
Remember when Microsoft was sued for having installed one browser in their OS and making it default?
Now suddenly we're okay with another company installing another browser in their OS
Cloudflare with their "checking if the site connection is secure" (while being MITM) is another example.
We've been here before with Windows and IE dominance!
IE peaked at ~95% market share, and windows peaked at ~97%.
Broadly it seems to me that Google is behaving much like MS did.
But who knows, everything is the same and different this time around.
I strongly believe firefox and ff-based browsers will make a comeback.
Last time I tried it a thing saying "Refresh Firefox" popped up which I clicked and it wiped the extensions which I got back following some online help but lost completely I think the crypto keys in metamask - like https://www.reddit.com/r/Metamask/comments/14rcg6k/firefox_r...
Luckily I had backup elsewhere but it kind of freaked me out.
It's far more likely that one of the many addons/extensions you had was the cause.
As for 'Refresh Firefox', it does exactly what it says it does - wipe a lot of your configuration to bring it closer to stock. It's intended as a way to show people new defaults and help clear out old, bloated configs. It shouldn't be used unless you know what you're doing.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
> Towards the end of 2023 [...] we’ll decide on an appropriate timeframe to deprecate MV2.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manif...
> Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future.
Seems they changed their mind in 2024.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-manifest-v3-adbl...
It was such a big hit to my online life to lose my email like that.
Their appeal system is fully automated, impossible to get a human to look at your case.
This is warning to any reader of this comment, do not depend on your google account to be forever.
A party like Helium or Brave might even already be working on it. Because while Google might not like it at all, a huge chunk of people love extensions like uBO and ease of use a little bit too much.
I think many people would choose not to use Brave because of its association with Brendan Eich (details at Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... ), which stands as separate from the browser itself, or the actions of the company.
Also all the crap in the toolbar.
Also on the sides now...
That's it in a nut shell. Take a few minutes and go solve all your browser problems.
I think you mean Brave Origin. It's the minimal version without the extra services. Free on Linux and purchaseable on other platforms.
I think that's a fair compromise, since the company needs to somehow make money.
Prior to that I was on Firefox (for the sake of browser engine diversity) but left as soon as they announced they were turning into an AI powered advertising company, and would use your data for training. However, I keep it around for cross-browser testing.
Hopefully more and more people wake up as to what this adMonster has become.
If we want a real open world wide in the future, we need to do something about Google. UBO is not the only one killed by Google here. They will continue on their wicked path. (And, while it may be great that Ladybird exists, I have some doubts that this will really be a contender. We should not become lazy and think that Google will just comply with the demands of The People here - its business is based on controlling influx of adMoney via its Evil Empire, and it secures this by de-facto controlling the browser stack. Just look how many people in % use the chrome-codebase now. That IS effectively a monopoly powered by greed.)