I'm all in Firefox too, but Brave is not just a Chrome privacy thing.

Brave goes out of its way to make money by ripping off publishers.

As a publisher myself, I respect ad blockers. If they block ads, they aren't gonna click the ads in the first place, so it's their choice. I even respect DNT header and not put my pixel tracking for the users.

Brave, on the other hand, is doing these sneaky stuff to earn from my efforts. A site that has Alexa rank hovering 10,000 accumulated about $10 worth of BAT currency (their own shitcoin) in exchange of showing ads.

>accumulated about $10 worth of BAT currency (their own shitcoin) in exchange of showing ads.

Thats not how it works. The user receives BAT for opting into OS notification tray ads. Then the user is tipping your blog with their earnings. It may be somewhat of a moot argument, but there is a distinction. The user is accumulating BAT from having the browser open, not necessarily when they are on your site.

Maybe this is just a function of how few users Brave has :)

I always whitelist places that I actually use. Turn off pihole and adblockers for those sites in FF

Are use Firefox for my primary browser, but there are certain sites (made by google primarily) which work much better in chromium based browsers.

Whether Google is intentionally degrading their performance in Firefox or simply doesn't care is an interesting technical detail, but from a practical standpoint I need to use these sites for my job, so I also need to keep a chromium-based browser around.

True, but unless you are a heavy Google user I don't see a cap in my performance to work with, GMail for example from time to time or using Drive, etc.

The Google Voice desktop site performs remarkably poorly on Firefox, often locking up entirely.

The Google voice desktop site is a piece of crap on chrome too... Though I totally believe it's way worse on Firefox.

If you need to use it heavily, then yes. But I don't. I think Firefox performs optimaly 99% times for everyone. There will be a point where you may switch to Chrome, or Safari, but just for specific things unless that specific is the most important one.

With Chrome taking the lion's share of the browser user market, you end up with a lot of sites that work well in Chrome but not so well with other browsers.

So even if you use Firefox as your main driver, you'll still want to have a Chromium-based browser as a backup.

Now the problem for Android users is that, in light of this news, there's now one less (seemingly) viable option if you're using Google Play services.

If you're using F-droid, however, you have Bromite and ungoogled-Chromium as prime candidates.

> So even if you use Firefox as your main driver, you'll still want to have a Chromium-based browser as a backup.

Nope. When something doesnt work in my FF then good bye. I cant be bothered to do extra work like switching browsers for to support their incompetence. It'been rare though.

Very rarely, I fall back to Safari because I'm on Mac. But on my laptop, I don't have anything installed from Google. It's just not necessary.

I'm the same way unless it's a company site. I even changed banks when they "upgraded" their site and it was no longer FF compatible. I figured if they couldn't stick to web standards they might not stick to security standards either. Sometimes I will change the user agent to chrome though in emergency situations and that sometimes fixes things.

> With Chrome taking the lion's share of the browser user market, you end up with a lot of sites that work well in Chrome but not so well with other browsers.

TBH the only sites where I have noticed this are Google sites like Hangouts and YouTube. But even those work fine, they just seem to use quite a lot more CPU than I think they should. I do have Chrome as a backup in case something doesn't work, but I can't remember the last time I had to use that.

I've honestly never had any major problems with sites working on Chrome but not Firefox, and I use both on a regular basis.

The only cases that I couldn't trace back to an extension were: 1. a major news site thinking Firefox was in incognito mode, and refusing to display any contents. 2. Google Stadia

Somehow Samsung Internet and Vivaldi, both closed-source chromium skins available on the Play Store, have always sparked more trust in me than the seemingly open Brave ever did.

Because they don't have convoluted policies. You get what a user might expect rather than a bunch of rigamarole.

"If you're using F-droid, however, you have Bromite and ungoogled-Chromium as prime candidates."

I can't seem to find bromite on fdroid. Why it not there anymore?

Firefox is STILL largely funded by Google right?

I find it odd that one of Firefox's only features, over Chrome, is privacy, but they're funded by Google who is the anti-hero right now in the privacy space.

If Firefox's mission is successful they would lose all their funding.

Mozilla is indirectly funded by Google, yes. They don't have ownership. It's the same way that the NY Times is indirectly funded by Mazda. They pay for ads.

Mozilla is funded by Google and also sends user data to Google:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1165858896176660480.html

It would inform people better if you would be more precise here.

According to the links, the "Get Add-ons" view in Firefox uses Google Analytics to collect aggregate visitor statistics. Furthermore they note that they negotiated a special contract with Google to only collect a subset of data.

I don't believe any kind of personal or special contracts/negotiations/etc will deny Google to track analytics.google.com connection logs. So, "private browser" and Google servers aren't compatible by design.

> Mozilla is indirectly funded by Google, yes

There's nothing indirect about Google cutting checks directly to Mozilla.

So that’s why Paul Krugman’s latest article was making the point that Jerome Powell’s handling of monetary policy pales in comparison to the handling found in a Mazda CX-5!

Agreed, I haven't seen or heard anything off kilter with Firefox in a very very long time and they have always been on the forefront of privacy and development features.

Mozilla make their fair share of fuckups and bad moves, but they're still on a different level from these niche Chromium derivatives that invariably come with ugly business models attached.

Well, there was the DNS-over-HTTPS thing and the Mr. Robot thing, and the Pocket thing and ... they're not perfect.

However, I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for about five years and have been very happy with it -- especially post Quantum. I can't even remember the last time I've had to switch to Chromium because something wasn't working.

I am personally a fan of the DNS-Over-HTTPS experiment,I think it has a lot of benefits and hope it becomes standard.

The pocket thing isn't that bad, it's legitimately just a free cloud sync bookmarking service that you can use, or not. It's basically an extension of FF Sync, and no one has problems with that.

The Mr Robot plugin catastrophe was abhorrent, I certainly won't deny that.

Agree. Not sure what else needs to happen to encourage Chromium users to finally give Firefox a try.

Latency. Just tested with a "hello world" page (18ms ping).

Chrome takes 102-200ms to render the page, Firefox takes 150-400ms. 1.5 to 2x slower -- and that's after all the performance upgrades they've done with Rust and Quantum.

Network inspector says Firefox is spending 150-270ms "blocked" before it even initiates the connection. On Chrome the block is 3-18ms (15-50x (!!) faster).

There's also UI lag. When I press Ctrl+N, I expect a new window to open immediately. Chrome and Chromium based browsers do that. I cannot even perceive the delay between pressing Ctrl+N and a new window appearing. With Firefox it takes about 0.5-1 seconds before anything happens at all. This seems to be another 10-20x difference (though I'd have to record my screen and measure the difference).

Curiously, Re: UI lag, I think the actual time until the navbar is usable is about the same. But Firefox waits until the whole window is built before it displays it, while Chrome opens the window immediately and fills it in. From a user experience (I do command, I expect feedback) this makes a huge difference.

I switch back to Firefox roughly once a year after reading how fast it's gotten. But I have been disappointed on this front every single time. I want Firefox to succeed, I really do. I am donating to Mozilla every month. But as it is right now, I can't tolerate such lag, for a trivial action I perform thousands of times a day.

> Chrome takes 102-200ms to render the page, Firefox takes 150-400ms. 1.5 to 2x slower -- and that's after all the performance upgrades they've done with Rust and Quantum.

How did you actually measure this? I wonder whether these small timing differences may just be differences in how the respective dev tools report the timing info.

FWIW I also don't think the relative difference will be this large for bigger sites - I'd be very surprised if a site that takes 1s to load in Chrome would take 1.5-2s in Firefox.

There was a noticeable increase in GMail loading time (when I switched to FF a while back), but once it actually loaded it was the same speed (slow af on both lol). As an aside, it's gotten even more bloated in the meantime (for some Google PM's promotion), I just use Basic HTML now. Loads instantly :)

So once the page is loaded, JS performance seems to be about on par, but page loads are faster in Chrome.

To measure I just used dev tools. But there is quite a lot of randomness involved -- sometimes the engine scheduling planets align, and sometimes they are way out of alignment. You'd need thousands of samples or more to get an accurate reading. I just refreshed a few times to get ballpark numbers.

I am using Firefox now for almost 7 years as my main browser (Chrome still installed for some pages not properly working in other Browser). But the number you are mentioning here are just not true with current versions of both browsers. Overall I agree that FF still has potential to improve it’s rendering performance (like every other browser). But as an end user it’s not noticeable anymore. Quite the opposite is the case for me since FF always used way less resources than Chrome on my notebook.

This is always the answer for me. I stayed on Firefox long after most of my friends had switched to Chrome back when it came out, but it was eventually impossible to deny the difference. Every time I've tried to switch back over the years, the difference in latency is still noticeable.

I'm using Firefox and getting navigation times on par with Chromium when loading simple documents (tested with example.com).

From pressing enter to the browser initiating a fetch was around 16ms.

This is useful feedback for building non browser uis. Instant feedback followed by a progressive loading rather than build it all then render.

Also performance issues, especially on Linux. Fan works in ~50% of my laptop usage.

I try it regularly but it just doesn't work for me. Here are just a few of the reasons why:

1. Chromium based browsers give me control over extensions that require access to everything. https://imgur.com/a/ENZkQyc

2. Firefox doesn't support media keys.

Edit: Turns out it does if you enable them in about:config. See bad_user's comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442732

3. There are still some areas in which Firefox's performance isn't competitive. Try using it with something like Rainway and it will completely fall over.

#3 isn't that big of a deal to me. #2 I could probably adapt to. #1 makes Firefox a non starter for me.

Firefox does support media keys, but it's experimental and you have to enable them in about:config:

- media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled

- dom.media.mediasession.enabled

#1 seems nice. Note however that Firefox was safer even before they introduced their permissions system simply by having a review system that works.

The review system of Chrome Web Store is broken, there's a lot of malware on it, extensions bought and turned malware and then you've got completely legitimate extensions being banned due to some automatic process flagging them. And then it's really hard to get in touch with humans. All the while reported malware take months to be taken down.

Of course, it's also true that Chrome is simply the bigger target. And what Mozilla is doing now probably doesn't scale. But for now Firefox's ecosystem of add-ons is much, much safer (and arguably more useful). Has been that way for some time.

I used to complain that it doesn't have a permissions system, I then complained that you can't disable add-ons in private mode. But it keeps evolving and I'm sure it will implement your favorite too, if useful.

> Firefox does support media keys, but it's experimental and you have to enable them in about:config:

Nice! Thank you. :)

I still don't understand why everyone moved away from Firefox back in the day. Is it really just the fact that Google put up so many ads everywhere?

First, old firefox (pre-quantum) really started to be slow and non-competitive.

Second, Google actually were caught on making their resources work worse on firefox and other competitors with some hacks.

E.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Assuming that literally everyone use gmail, youtube, etc - it had looked that mozilla doesn't work reliably for end users.

I switched for that exact reason - Firefox was starting to become really slow. After a few years of exclusively using Chrome, Firefox (thanks to Quantum) became my default browser again. It still sometime feels slower than Chrome, especially on Google sites (YouTube and GMail are incredibly slow). But that could just be my current pc starting to show its age.

I've heard this a lot. I use youtube fairly regularly with firefox, and have never noticed any performance problem.

Chrome was also much more secure and didn't lock up as much thanks to process isolation.

Chrome was waaaaaay faster. It made Firefox look like a student project. I held out a lot longer than all of my laymen friends, but the gap eventually was hard to ignore.

There were also a ton of innovations that caused real quality of life improvements that it took firefox an incredibly long time to catch up to, like process isolation preventing a single misbehaving tab from crashing your entire session.

I can’t speak for the users of other OS, but for a long time Firefox was essentially unusable for me on OSX.

I have always liked Mozilla though so kept trying builds over time, eventually leading up to Quantum the nightlies became better and better and it was easy to switch back at that point.

What a shame it happened in the first place though.

Other than the performance, I think Mozilla changed their focus to browser based mobile operating systems and starved Firefox from developer talent.

I moved because Chrome shown a nice promise in speed, standard support and features, it seemed a good move. Same move I did back in the day when Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4, it was so good in comparison with Netscape 3-4 than it was too late when i got tired of it.

I've never used a Chromium-variant as a primary browser. Used Opera until they switched to Chromium and their Presto-based brower became untenable, then switched to Firefox.

Chrome had v8, it was fast. Forefox sort of got left behind performance wise.

You could still have a million tabs open, something chrome struggled with, so it kept some users.

But it took quantum to get users back.

Yes, my experience resumes like this: breakthrough browser, adoption, bloating experience, adopt next fast breakthrough browser.

The devtools really were ahead of any browser.

For the average person it was so much faster than ie 6,7,8,9 and google pushed it everywhere.

It comes default on android helps.

I gave it a try tens of times, and continue trying to switch every major release, but keep going back. Too many things are just not right, and can't be fixed for me because I am not ALL of the users + not even the most vocal part of the user base + some things are just meant to be like that in Firefox and that's their "thing" that I don't like. It's pointless to list it here, but I really do continuously try it in good faith and hope to switch someday.

Have you written about your experience with Firefox somewhere else? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

I just wrote another comment here about its performance, about how I want it to succeed, how I donate to Mozilla, and yet still use a Chromium-based browser due to the performance issues.

At this point (I mean, they've literally invented a new programming language to make it faster, and it's still slow) I think the only thing left to do is to learn C++ and Rust and fix it myself...

I have the feeling that Firefox development is a bit distanced from the real users.

It's bugzilla is quite unfriendly, and pretty much everything users wish for is already there, in a ticket that is several years old with no action taken.

An then, the next Firefox version comes with some crappy UX decision made, and it is not configurable. /r/Firefox comes up with _yet another_ userChrome.css tweak to revert it.

And the cycle continues as the user base grows thin. I wonder why.

Not sure what else needs to happen to encourage Chromium & Firefox users to finally give Pale Moon a try.

I'm quite happy with FF on desktops, but the mobile version is just ... overall a miserable experience compared to Brave. After using it for a while, going back to FF constantly makes me feel like useful QoL features are missing and I end up going back to Brave.

If you have Android try the new Firefox Preview, best browser I've used on mobile so far. Complete rewrite.

Which is missing nearly all of the addons that I use and which don't seem to be a priority for Mozilla. Their whole strategy regarding addons is incredibly frustrating.

They are opening it up, just taking time as they are developing the appropriate API points. This is a complete rewrite, going to take awhile before all the same API is available. They have opened some major addons as they are tested and stable.

I agree that the lack of full support for add-ons is frustrating, but the alternative you end up going back to, Brave, doesn't (seem to) support add-ons at all. How is that better?

Because using Firefox nightly would signal to Mozilla that I'm fine with how they're handling add-ons. If they're not going to support add-ons properly, I'm not going to use their browser.

True dat.

Personalization is super important (in any software), it's a shame that in general, it's not being the focus of most of them.

Sure, but Brave on Android has no extension support, so still better.

I'm not okay with how Mozilla behaves regarding add-ons. As in, they have all this addon support, but it's not in any way a priority for them so they've basically taken it all away. So I won't support them or use their browser until they do.

You don't like that one browser has poor extension support, so you use a browser with no extension support? How does that make sense?

riddled with bugs, used it for few months until I finally gave up when they introduced new build where I could not even type address in address bar, they are really doing zero testing, during those months I experienced pretty much every week new bug I could noticed and I saw literally ONE of these bugs fixed in those few months

I prefer fast stable bugfree chromium

Using FF on mobile, I have no complains.

I recently tried moving from mobile Brave to Firefox as I've used desktop FF for years, and wanted cross platform bookmarks.

The experience was incredibly sub par on Android. I tried browsing a video heavy subreddit, and FF just hung (well, all videos stopped playing, which is what I was there for).

I want to use it, but if it can't manage my base use case, I can't warrant it.

I will try again one day, I'm sure.

Firefox is the slowest mobile browser I ever seen.

On what basis do you say that?

I'm considering trying FF on mobile and I am curious what QoL features are missing? Thanks!

From my perspective, none of them. The browser is reasonably fast, and you can still share bookmarks and logins with other installations if you create a Mozilla account (or host your own sync server!).

But, from my perspective, just having uBlock Origin installed in the extensions is a huge differentiator, that gives most pages a lot of speedup. Stylus can also be helpful to fix some suboptimal mobile designs.

Thanks for sharing! I think I will give it a go.

One of the things that annoys me on a daily basis is how FF handles the address bar. In Brave, if I click on the address bar. It gives me a button to copy the link. If I have a link copied, there's a paste button. If I use FF, I have to go through the whole monkey dance of clicking on the address bar, tap holding the address until the copy menu shows up, then I can copy.

Then there's absolutely infuriating stuff like the address bar and tabs disappearing when scrolling, which is fine, but it can be really fucking annoying trying to get it to show up again. It doesn't respond properly, sometimes I'll have to scroll back up a whole page before it does anything and all I wanted to do was switch tabs, so I have to scroll back down when I come back. Makes me want to punch an FF developer.

Just longclick the address bar without clicking it first, it then gives you the choice to copy, and even paste&go in one click.

You could always make it not to hide when scrolling. I btw use gestures to switch tabs via an extension, works great.

Your last several comments have broken the HN guidelines. I actually banned you for this, but decided to unban you because your earlier comment history seems fine.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I think I will give FF a try. I can understand why the address bar / tabs disappearing while scrolling would be annoying but I'll see if it is enough for me to revert.

Bromite?

I only use them at work, where I have no expectation of privacy, and our SSO occasionally has issues with FF.

At home? FF all the way, plus the usual bevy of ad blockers and PiHole.

As of last year, Firefox pinged telemetry every time you visit certain targeted sites, controlled by the "Recommend extensions as you browse" feature. They may actually still do this.

In 2018, Mozilla surreptitiously installed a mysterious plugin named Looking Glass to every installed browser as part of a marketing deal with the Mr. Robot TV show. Thus plugin altered websites for an alternate reality game promoting the show.

Back in 2017 Firefox Focus, one of their iOS efforts marketed as being about user privacy, collected telemetry and sent it to Adjust GMBH, a tracking/analytics company based in Germany.

Also in 2017 Firefox integrated a Cliqz plugin to recommend content in the searchbar based on your browsing history, which was sent to the Cliqz servers and theoretically anonymized. Cliqz GMBH is another German company involved in analytics/tracking, and a notoriously scummy one to boot.

I mean, I could go on. Mozilla's hands ain't clean, they make mistakes, but at least their _manifesto_ is worthy.

Firefox on Android has a much poorer UX than Brave, which is the only thing that keeps me from using it.

Pull to reload, tab accessibility, and other performance and rendering oddities need to be fixed before I switch back.

I'm happy with Firefox on Linux though.

Firefox's performance on Linux is markedly worse than Chrome's.

This has never been my experience, FWIW.

You may need to manually tune your configs. Often, people just forget to enable HW acceleration.

Personally, Chromium crashes too often to rely on it.

How ironic

Try running firefox on a a53 based phone.

Its miserable, you can't quite see how badly optimized it is on a high end phone because the page load time is 1/4 second instead of 1/10 of a second. On a low end phone that becomes 2-3 seconds rather than 1/2 a second.

I have a Moto X4. At the moment it is sitting around 150USD new. It's got a snapdragon 630 in it and despite struggling on several other applications, Firefox is super snappy and far faster than any other browser I've tried using despite having several add-ons installed.

Firefox Preview runs much better on low end phones than regular Firefox if you don't mind occasional crashes after certain updates.

I've found that any JS-heavy sites works much better in Chrome than FF.

Do you find that there are irritating glitches?

A lot of the web doesn't officially support Firefox anymore (Groupon, Airbnb, my organization).

A year or so ago, I occasionally found weird breakages on sites. Haven't in a while, though. The one thing I recommend when switching is installing a user agent switcher for the browser, so it presents as chrome, and websites don't throw a fit at you for using a different browser.

because one version of Firefox on Android is extremely slow and the other one faster is extremely buggy? for the record I use Firefox on desktop, but all their versions on Android are unusable, so I use Kiwi browser waiting for some updated browser with extensions, ungoogled chromium doesn't really work and yandex is shady

pretty much nobody use brave on desktop

Well much of Firefox was done by Brendan Eich, he is a founder of both Mozilla and Brave

As a long-time Firefox user, I find the constant drama over Brave rather amusing. It seems to be an intersection of internet publishers upset about Brave's ad blocking/replacing, people who hate Eich for his politics/beliefs, and cryptocurrency critics.

It's a perfect storm of drama, centered around a browser that has a very small market share from what I can tell (otherwise I'd probably find it all less amusing.)

Firefox enables just as much telemetry as Chrome. Fortunately they provide policy options to disable them, but they are enabled by default. Chrome and Chromium also has an equal amount of policies that can be disable to better protect privacy.

Chromium was never intentionally limiting any APIs to prevent ad-blockers. I think the whole thing was blown out of proportion, although I get some of the frustration, especially when their main stream of revenue is advertising.

I personally don't use Firefox because it doesn't work as well on modern Linux. Chromium supports Wayland much better. I get weird artifacts on Firefox when running in Sway on Wayland, especially when switching between full-screen and split. Additionally, I still don't believe Firefox properly handles video hardware acceleration and Chromium does on my distro using the native package manager.

Both browsers could benefit from separating their solutions into open source protocols, for example bookmarks, password, and other sync services. This way syncing is done at file-system level like gopass-bridge and Browserpass. GPGme already has an app called gpgme-json for app integration. That way people can use Syncthing, Nextcloud, or whatever preferred cloud-sync solution. I know Firefox has tried building it's own password manager into Firefox, and Chromium has half-assed this as well, but the tools are already there they could just adopt and would provide a much safer and better overall experience.

These platforms and engineers should feel a duty to innovate—not for the sake of a paycheck, company directive, or personal enrichment—but for the community to have a piece of software that is a message of freedom. When they send URLs to remote services by default for safe search, network prediction, etc. they aren't free. When they implement their own centralized sync solution, but make it difficult for you to implement a decentralized or locally-hosted sync solution, then they aren't free. When advertisers are able to use supported JavaScript to port scan your computer, track every pixel movement, and track you around the web; then the software isn't free and neither are you.