I just use Firefox with uBlock Origin on all my devices. Better blocking than Brave and no concerns about future monetization.

I'm currently using Firefox on all devices as my primary browser, but there is a single feature that I've gotten used to in Chrom* browsers on mobile - 'pull down to refresh' - that looks indispensable to me, and I'm planning to move to Brave on mobile just because of that (already replaced Chrome with Brave on Desktop as my secondary browser). Yes, there are add-ons to do that on mobile too, but they are all inconsistent and half-baked. Chrom*'s built-in pull to refresh is very smooth.

There's also Reload in Address Bar, which I prefer.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reload-in-add...

Or you can use the "double tap the dots menu" trick.

Thanks. The 'Double tapping dots menu' trick is neat indeed, sometimes we don't figure these things on our own :).

I primarily use Firefox on my desktop, but I use Brave on mobile. It seems somewhat easier on the battery than Chrome, which would make sense being as it's blocking content that can be CPU intensive.

You might like it, though. I've used Brave's mobile sync and it works for bookmarks across devices quite well. It's surprisingly simple to set up, too. I don't fret much about forgetting whether I opened a tab on my phone or desktop if I remember to bookmark it.

That said, I still use KDE connect to send links to my primary Firefox instance and vice-versa, but the bookmark sync is in some ways more convenient. I'd imagine they'll eventually synchronize more things, like tabs.

That's because bad developers focused on WebKit-only experience, forgetting about other browsers.

The same happens when some sites require Chrome to work, blocking all the rest. In 2019 it's unacceptable

Am I misunderstanding your comment or are you implying that the missing "pull to refresh" feature is somehow the website developers' fault?

Because it's 100% just a missing feature in Firefox mobile, there's nothing website developers should add to "make it work" on it.

Try Kiwi Browser for Android. Its a Chromium-based browser with built-in ad-block. If you want, you can even install uBlock Origin or any other extensions as it natively supports extensions.

I use this, though disclaimer, its not "really" open source.

I'm not a mobile dev so maybe this is a naive question, but wouldn't this be pretty easy for FF to add?

Also, for developers, you can't inspect web-socket frames natively in FF yet, you have to use an extension.

That was my setup, and much prefer integrated blocking and the additional polish and features. The yubikey integration coming is particularly interesting: https://brave.com/ios-yubikey-support/.

Future monetization: that was actually an incentive for me. Having been in the belly of the beast on ad-tech I'm cheering the new ad model Brave proposes for the industry.

If you're not aware how messed up the industry currently is, keep an eye on Ad Fraud Historian on Twitter: https://twitter.com/acfou.

On the crypto front, proposing ideas like staking / slashing on their extension store for extension authors is also very interesting: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1143630584310202369

The new browser wars are certainly spurring innovation again: good for everyone regardless of personal browser preferences.

Firefox needs to respect the OS certificate store instead of using its own. Without it client-cert authenticated sites cannot be accessed. IT admins usually have policies on Windows and MacOS that prevent export of client cert+priv key.

I disagree.

OS certificate stores often come with the political baggage of the OS manufacturer. When a Chinese Gov't CA was found to have engaged in fraudulent behavior [0] Google and Firefox were quick to revoke/remove the CA cert from their products. Apple and Microsoft did not do the same, likely because they do not want to upset the Chinese Gov't. (IIRC Iphone users cannot even manually revoke CA's on their own phones.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Network_Informa...

Then FireFox has made the deliberate choice of excluding millions of users. There are millions of users who use identity management solutions where user-certs and priv-keys are put into the OS store of their devices.

Using the OS secure-store should be a preference option. The folks who don't want to use the "political baggage" of the OS manufacturer - as you put it - can continue to use their pristine gardens.

I've never used this personally, but it is a preference option?

https://serverfault.com/questions/722563/how-to-make-firefox...

Or am I totally misunderstanding this and that's something totally different?

I didn't know about this option - thanks. This option basically uses the OS cert store for server certificates, which is one part of the story.

Now, if they also did this for client-certificates then all the folks in companies that use corporate certificate-based single-sign-on can use FireFox!

I’m actually happy that Firefox uses its own store. This means that I can use it for browsing through the corporate proxy without having the corporate CAs installed in my OS. This way I’m always aware which data is inspectable by the company.

It would be nice however if Firefox had an option to use the OS store, including devices like yubikey.

Doing that gives me a weird, inexplicable feeling. I know Firefox blocks stuff, especially if you set tracker blocking to "Strict". It doesn't block all ads so I still want to use uBO... but do I disable Firefox's blocking to avoid doing the same thing twice? Or are there things Firefox handles better than uBO? It's really too much thinking so for now I'm using Edge Chromium with uBO, and that's not a solution :D

"Blocking ads and trackers by default is pretty much essential in 2019."

How is it better than a choice of plug-ins to block them?

I've never understood this either. I think a deep dive into add blocking as we enter web3.0 makes sense. Granularity is missing in the new "browser wars"

The article does briefly mention some reasons they perform better than plugins.

It's not as good as containers, but as a replacement I use SessionBox chrome extension in Brave.. it mostly accomplishes the same purpose.

> The myth about ad replacement doesn't seem to want to die though!

Just want to reinforce this from my experience. I've been using Brave since before they were based on Chromium. And a lot of comments were saying that Brave replaces adds with their own. But I never saw that.

Now they have a feature you can opt-in, to see adds and get BATs for that. I actually wanted to test this and opted in, but still never seen an add. I guess my location is not yet included.

So at least based on my experience from using Brave for a long time - it's hard to get adds even if you want to.

I'm going to plug 'ungoogled-chromium' here as well as I personally found it better and more stable than Brave.

Problem with both is that they are still Chrome at the core. Currently Google has way too much power dictating how browsers render the web for users and things don't get any better by using any Chrome(ium) forks.

Only real hold out is Firefox even Microsoft buckled under the pressure. If we lose Firefox then in the future don't be surprised when Chromium support suddenly stops and only game left in town is Chrome.

Now all the nay sayers will come in defense of open source and my only response is: don't be so fast to forget "embrace, extend, and extinguish"

Apple will keep developing Safari, luckily, so there's still a 3-way race in many ways.

Safari is only ~4% of desktop/laptop browsing but over 20% of mobile and with mainstream users slowly moving to tablets over laptops this presents an important and large user base.

If it comes down to Chrome or Safari, I will gladly use Chrome. Safari is far too wonky for me, and whenever I tried using it, I always had bad experiences. Google might be evil-ish, but I find their ecosystem far more pleasant than Apple's. And while Google might try to collect lots of data about my online behavior, I can always use something like a Pihole or other kinds of ad-block to stop them from getting that data.