And I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it we will be worse for it.

I'm a big fan of WaterFox! I switched when Firefox decided to add a ton of AI crap without providing a "turn this crap off" button (you could force it, but I don't want to fight my tools). Really good experience, been recommending it to all my friends.

Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut the mold off the tasty cheese that is Firefox

I've been using Waterfox on deskop for years and adore it. Firefox for mobile does great. I don't grasp how anyone uses Chrome as their daily driver willingly aside from just inertia.

Most computer users have very few real demands to make and it suffices.

And there's LibreWolf, for people who want to use Firefox without Mozilla.

I use Safari, and it’s good.

And useless if you don't have or want a Mac.

Software you can’t run on your machine is useless? Okay.

How does it helps with this issue? It becomes a much bigger fork if they keep the manifest support.

Hear, hear!

Mozilla seems to have a string of bad leadership but when compared to Alphabet, I don't see how there can be any choice. Use Firefox or one of the niche privacy focused forks.

My uBlock Origin works perfectly well.

Necessary, but not sufficient. Sometimes you want to block certain URLs and not whole domains.

They're built on Chromium, they still reinforce the Chromium monoculture and expand Google's influence.

I thought that brave was caught injecting affiliate links. That alone makes it worse than anything mozilla has done.

Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1ebbeas/why_...

Those 2 browsers used a rendering engine developed by Google. It would not be wrong to consider them partial chromium reskins with all the technical dependency it entails.

How so?

Yeah. Take Firefox choosing to create PDF.js to have a clean minimalist sandboxed PDF parser. Chrome instead used an existing one that has been the source of dozens of vulnerabilities.

Or Firefox pulling in a ton of anti-fingerprinting measures from the Tor team. Not even worth talking about anti-fingerprinting as a serious consideration in Chrome.

Rust - a mozilla effort that resulted in code from servo being pulled into Firefox - chrome is headed that way too.

Even WASM was definitely a security improvement over NaCL, and Mozilla also led the way on Flash replacements in the day, making one of the first JS flash players (in the end, the solution was no more flash, but hey, at least they tried).

Font sanitisation - originally a mozilla security effort...

I feel I could go on and on.

Cite? I think the timeline has issues there. That predates the CEO controversies AFAIK. They did ditch a lot of R&D as their userbase kept shrinking due to chrome growth. 'course this sort of thing keeps coming up - yeah, I do think their CEO is overpaid ... and? Solution is what. Kill firefox off completely, hand internet over to chrome? Basically, where is this point going?

In 2018, Baker received $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla. In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5.5 million, and again to over $6.9 million in 2022. In August 2020, the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues after laying off roughly 70 employees in January 2020. Baker stated this was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundat...

As long as Firefox keeps up with the standards treadmill, I could be the only person using it, and it really wouldn't affect me any. As of right now, there are vanishingly few sites that earnestly work differently on Firefox than on Chrome. Significantly more sites arbitrarily block non-Chrome User Agents, but that's trivially avoided by just serving a Chrome UA on Firefox.

Which makes it trivial to switch. There's really no justification for sticking with Chrome. Switching to Firefox takes about a minute, you can import all your saved logins and bookmarks, and then maybe spend a whole whopping 30 seconds adding Ublock Origin. Complaints about Chrome amount to "I am too inconceivably lazy to spend 90s switching to a browser that doesn't hate me".

Agree.

I only keep a Chromium based browser around because of Mozilla's asinine decision not to support Web Bluetooth and Web USB that are needed to interact with devices, microcontrollers, etc.

I think there was a huge missed opportunity with the recent Google monopoly case, which could have been used to give users a dialog box to select a browser from a list instead of starting with Chrome as the pre-installed default.

It's less drastic than forcing Chrome to be spun off, which I don't think was realistic, and it's almost an exact copy of an anti monopoly remedy used against both Microsoft and Apple. It likely would have a meaningful impact on browser market share and it would be very similar in spirit in terms of its impact to the proposed remedy of spinning off Chromium to a new company.

It would also be a convenient natural experiment testing the anti-Mozilla narrative that contends the browser market share decline had absolutely nothing to do with distribution defaults, but was instead exclusively driven by minutia of Mozilla's strategic decisions.

Because Mozilla allocates far too much of their budget to executive compensation, which has led to the layoff of many Firefox maintainers, including the entire Servo team.

A self-respecting hacker would choose a piece of tech that is well-maintained, not one that only recently added profile support after all these years, or one that still offers an ancient bookmark and history UI.

This is confidently repeated but extremely misleading claim that seems to pop up ad nauseam in the comment sections. They spend more now on development than they ever have in their history, and the CEO spending is something like 1.6% of the budget, which I don't love, but which is not enough to sustain the narrative of all the money being siphoned into executives.

They also break down spending into a pie chart of different types and development gets more than anything. If you look at their actual budget or the published changes to new releases it tells a different story than vibes based internet comment sections. But you have be approaching conversations in an open-to-new-information kind of way.

1.6% is insane though. That would be like Google, Apple, or MSFT paying their CEO $4-6 billion a year.

I remember when they first announced it years ago and they pretended to care by walking back the change. As always, the strategy is to wait for the dust to settle and then push the changes again.

Well it got me to uninstall chrome so that’s something.

Bad headline. Popular ad blockers have already switched to MV3, and MV2 has already been disabled for all users.

The headline is correct. The popular ones like uBO are 100% dead on Chrome thanks to googles coercion.

They didn't just "switch". They had to fundamentally change how they block ads and the new version the adtech company forced upon everyone...drumroll...is less effective at blocking ads. What a coincidence!

Per uBlock:

>uBOL will be less effective at dealing with websites using anti-content blocker or minimizing website breakage because many filters can't be converted into DNR rules

I was under the impression MV3 is stricly less capable in terms of blocking ability than MV2?

Yeah. MV3 is a faster but less capable version.

With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.

There is a limit on how large the list can be, depending on the browser.

JavaScript really isn't that slow. JIT compilation can wind up faster than AOT compilation. And much of the APIs called by JavaScript is natively-implemented browser code. JavaScript is faster than C# yet people implement games in C# (not the engine cores, but that's a very similar situation to JS) and don't bat an eye.

> JavaScript is faster than C#

Apples to oranges, scripts need an entire browser/Interpeter framework underneath it to even function

I also thought under MV3 you could block ads, but not the tracking that they do.

that is theoretically true. but i switched to the v3-compatible ublock origin lite a year ago and i've noticed essentially no difference in the performance. all the ads are blocked, just like they were with the v2-compatible adblocker.

MV3 is not an improvement over MV2 for the purposes of ad blocking.

Most would not consider MV3 versions as ”adblockers” anymore.

Do they block ads though? I am now only using Firefox because I can install Ublock origin and that works out for me.

Most (real world, not HN) users don't really notice any difference between MV2 and MV3 based extensions.

MV3 won't (and will not) block Youtube ads properly. There's the entire point of removing MV2.

Is that actually true? I've never looked into the API differences or how YouTube ads actually work, but I'm using a current Google Chrome version on MacOS, with uBlock Origin Lite and SponsorBlock, and I'm watching YouTube with no ads as far as I can tell (logged in, not subscribed to Premium). Is that supposed to be impossible now?

I'm still not seeing any ads. Works fine for me.

Yeah, I think calling the Mv3 versions "secure adblockers" would be more accurate.

How about "nerfed adblockers"? Do any of the MV3 versions replicate the full power of ublock origin on Firefox? (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...)

Secure for whom?

Browser users. Pre Mv3 extensions were a huge vector for malware. My in-laws were hit by that.

You can write malicious MV3 extensions. The changes' stated reason was performance, not security.

This is your sign to start using a DNS based ad/tracking blocker. Run it on your VPS with tailscale if you want it available everywhere without significant security overhead.

DNS adblocking doesn't catch everything.

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48555244

More discussion from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970

i keep hoping google will stop giving me reasons to switch ,because i can't be bothered to move all my passwords and stuff over, but every year they keep making it harder.

Likewise, I desperately want to stay on windows because of anticheat, but every year they keep making it harder.

There's an automatic import tool. It takes 30s. Settings -> Import Browser Data. Select Chrome. It even prompts you during installation, in case you don't want to scan through the settings page.

Make the switch now! Gaming on Linux is really only getting better every year with much hard work from valve.

Outside of developers opting out pretty much every single game works out of the box. I value my limited leisure time and to be able to just jump on my computer and start playing without any annoying nags about windows updates or restart this and strange unexplainable issues.

Move all of your passwords and logins too!

Someone in the Thief community was celebrating the Nightdive remaster announcement because it is apparently getting much harder with each passing year to install and run the Dark Engine games on Windows; meanwhile I've been doing this multiple times a year for about a decade with Lutris.

It takes two mouse clicks to import bookmarks, cookies and passwords from one browser to another.

Those passwords are not yours unless you did the work and enabled on-device encryption which is disabled by default.

Brave, Vivaldi (successor of opera), a few others also based on chromium work just fine. No ads.

I'm also on brave and they've promised support for M2 for the future but they're of course a fork of chromium, so we'll have to see how committed they are to implement improvements that they can't simply merge in due to conflicting behaviours. Which you can almost guarantee Google will do.

[dupe]

Source links only please

Discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48555244

Firefox is great. Safari is also pretty good, Apple ADP is true e2e encrypted bookmarks, history and so on. I really do not see the reason to be using Chrome for multiple years now.

I do not mind advertising on websites. What I mind is bad ads, ads with malware, way too many ads, and ads that track me. This is where Google gets the whole ad thing wrong. They are focusing on the wrong problem.

If you think about the economics of it, a very popular website could survive on only on ad because the advertiser would pay a premium to be seen on the website.

So that is my other argument, bad websites need a whole bunch of ads to be profitable. So better websites would help as well.

The problem with that logic is that if one advertiser is willing to pay a premium for placement on the site, more advertisers likely are. Which perverse incentive to inject exactly as many ads as most users will put up with, which shifts the users' perspective on the amount of acceptable ads, which encourages more ad placement. Rinse, repeat until you reach the current state of affairs.

The thing is that they don’t care about what you and I mind or don’t mind. The only goal is to maximize profit to shareholders. Our only option is to use ad blockers for now.

On Chrome* Firefox is just fine.

Can we update the title, should be, "Google Chrome's next update will mark the end of me using it"

I'm surprised you were using a proprietary browser in the first place

An expansion rather than just a contradiction would be welcome. In what way is it not true?

I’m going home for a visit. Will make sure to switch the family over to Firefox and explain why. Just as all us nerds did back when Chrome came out and we switched our family to that.

> Just as all us nerds did back when Chrome came out and we switched our family to that.

This is one of my earliest tech memories. It was so fast when it came out.