I don't think Mozilla's trying to please Google in any way. Google's keeping Firefox around to try to avoid the appearance of a total monopoly.
But Mozilla's behavior certainly is influenced by trying to find alternative business models, sometimes not perhaps with the best results, (Mr Robot promotion everyone), I still think it's worth using it over Chrome.
Did you know that Apple does in fact get more money from Google than Mozilla does, for keeping their search engine as the default? 12 billion dollars in 2019. Do you think Apple would activate ad blocking by default and risk losing that many billions of dollars? Speaking of which, Safari's ad blocking is the joke of the industry.
You could make the case that Safari might survive if Google cuts its funding, but judging from the history of IExplorer, I have my doubts. One could make the case that Safari is alive just because Apple is making a shit ton of money on it.
Did you know that Microsoft's Bing Ads platform made them 8 billion dollars in 2019? Do you think Microsoft would do anything to jeopardize that ads revenue? Did you know that Windows 10 has an "advertising ID" used to personalize ads, that via Edge is transmitted to Bing?
Did you know that Brave, that leech which is piggybacking on other people's work, that's supposedly blocking ads by default, is effectively replacing publisher ads with their own, then forcing those publishers to enter into deals with them for a piece of the action, while making it really hard to detect and block Brave? All the while pushing shady cryptocurrency affiliate ids straight in their source code?
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Mozilla might not push for ads blocking by default.
But they do block trackers by default and their browser is afaik the only one that has legitimately supported uBlock Origin on top of Android. And uBlock Origin is the best, most aggresive ads blocker available and given Google deprecating the blocking ability of the WebRequest API, Firefox might remain the only one with a uBlock Origin implementation.
Could Firefox survive without Google?
I don't know, but can any other browser survive without Google or Bing? I have my doubts and you'd be naive to think otherwise. Plus this is just whataboutism.
Brave does not depend on Google, directly or otherwise. They depend on an open source project called Chromium, which is largely developed by Google, but because it is open source anyone can build off of it.
Brave funds their development through the BAT token and through affiliate marketing, both of which are much better for user privacy and security, and much more resilient to Google than where Mozilla is getting its money.
No, I don't think Apple would integrate thorough ad-blocking by default, just as I don't think Mozilla will do this either. Brave has already done it. Brave's ad-blocker works better by default than any ad-blocker I've used, and I've tried them all.
HN's hate-boner for Brave is very strange. They clearly care more about user privacy than any other browser vendor (except maybe Safari, but again they have a conflict of interest), and it is built on a core that is arguably the best at handling the modern web (Chromium).
Microsoft wasn't able to keep developing a browser on their own, I doubt that Brave could. The problem is that a browser nowadays is so complex to develop that you need serious resources to invest in it. Without Google's ongoing development, Brave would not survive. And given Google's changes to undermine ads blockers, it's going to be interesting to see Brave struggling to maintain their fork.
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> much better for user privacy and security
Right, keep telling yourself that.
Btw, I actually wonder how what Brave is doing isn't copyright infringement, given they are directly profiting from blocking the ads of publishers. I guess they are small enough to not matter, for now.
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> Brave's ad-blocker works better by default than any ad-blocker I've used, and I've tried them all.
I worked on anti-ad-blocking technology.
Nothing beats uBlock Origin running on top of Firefox, everything else was strictly inferior. Not even blocking JavaScript in the page, because you can easily force the user to enable JS for you by breaking the content on that page. uBlock Origin is so bad that we avoiding it entirely, being useful for people frustrated with AdBlock Plus to turn to, sort of like in the Matrix.
IE was woefully out-of-date. MSFT then tried to build a browser from scratch. That was a lot of effort, so they decided to fork Chromium (like Brave) instead. What exactly do you think would happen in Google dissappeared tomorrow in their case? Do you think they would go back to trying to build their own browser from scratch? No, they'd just keep developing Chromium. Many (most) changes would probably be upstreamed. Forking a browser and maintaining it is orders of magnitude easier than starting from scratch in [current year]. As you point out, there are not multiple parties building on Chromium, so I'm sure slack could be picked up if Google switches gears. But you're right, maybe Brave won't be able to keep up with upstream changes that make ad-blocking harder. In that case, you can always just switch browsers. In the meantime, however, I'll use the browser that does a better job of protecting privacy by default.
> Right, keep telling yourself that.
Luckily, I don't need to. A browser that blocks ads by default is objectively better for user privacy and security than one that doesn't.
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> Btw, I actually wonder how what Brave is doing isn't copyright infringement, given they are directly profiting from blocking the ads of publishers. I guess they are small enough to not matter, for now.
They aren't directly profiting off of ad-blocking, so maybe that helps.
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> I worked on anti-ad-blocking technology. Nothing beats uBlock Origin running on top of Firefox, everything else was strictly inferior.
Have you actually tried Brave? Works better for me, and I've tried Firefox with uB0. Have also tried Chrome with uB0. Brave blocks both ads and tracking more consistently across the board. It occasionally breaks a webpage, but I have reported those to Brave and two of them have been fixed (out of like 5). This process is clearly better for users than everyone having to configure their uB0 Matrix and such separately. Brave is creating a web where all the privacy violating / attention grabbing shit is very much blocked by default in a much stricter way than other options. When this breaks the internet, they fix it and because this fix is part of the blocker it fixes it for everyone.
"Updates" may be, large, architectural upgrades? Doubt it. There's a reason they didn't start fresh and I very much doubt they'd muster the resources to maintain development were Google to drop it. Google has invested billions, probably tens of billions into Blink engineering.
What I could see happening is Brave forming some sort of a coalition with KDE and the wider open-source community in the better case or trying to switch to WebKit in the worse case as that is exchanging one corporate overlord for another.
Not to mention Brave's VC funded, so they'd want some form of a meaningful exit at some point.
The bigger concern however is not that Google will not fund Blink development, but that it will increasingly implement features that primarily benefit itself and Brave, as a dependent player, will be spending an increasing amount of resources trying not to get eaten by Google's "direction tax", as all developers depending on a 3rd party corporation they're in some sense competitors with find out eventually.
See also Twitter 3rd party client developers or the many AppStore devs Apple burned and ruined their business overnight.
And its content blocking, speaking both as a user and as somebody that worked on anti-ad-blocking technology, is really easy to circumvent and only useful on websites that haven't adapted yet.
As an iPhone user for me it's bad enough to make me want to switch to Android. What works consistently well has been DNS-level blocking (Pi-hole, NextDNS).
For you it might be OK, but I can tell you Safari is a favorite among the big players in this space [1].
> I never switched away from Firefox.
I switched to Firefox... from Netscape/Mozilla.
Edit - found it: the setting "browser.urlbar.trimURLs" hides the "http://" protocol if it's used. I do a lot of local development and found it annoying that Firefox was hiding it.
Do you think IE6 was bad? Remember how long it took to get rid of it? Imagine a world where the monopoly leader doesn't just walk away from the browser (which is what MS did with IE6) but actively abuses the situation. It will be orders of magnitude worse. Say hi to amp. Say hi to chrome. Say hi to google. Say goodbye to the web.
I suspect a lot of people in this conversation are not old enough to remember, even if they wanted to.
Maybe universities should have an obligation to promote nonprofit tools (i.e. Firefox) rather than shady commercial software that only happens to be gratis.
Now… well, IE11 doesn't even support ES6 properly, and good sites have started relying on that, and Edge is just evil Chrome – unless it's got Firefox installed, Chrome's your only option. But sites that use Chrome-only APIs aren't worth using anyway.
(Oh, wait, Zoom needs either Chrome or a malwarey desktop program.)
And there are alternatives to Zoom, e.g. Jitsi.
...and the malwarey desktop program is also Chrome.
I also don't understand why everyone is up with pitchforks at Google on this when Apple did the same thing to URLs a while ago. I guess engineers are just as susceptible to groupthink as anyone else.
They do kind of do that. Rather than going through the consensus process for getting a web standard added, they implement it in chrome then unilaterally write a standard for themselves. See for example, the SGX (signed exchange) "standard" they pushed out.
I think this feature is important enough for me to consider switching this time.
That being said, I admit that staright out of the box Firefox doesn't have the same experience but you can customize every little thing about it to make it suit your needs.
This said, I honestly don’t understand what people mean when they say the experience is “superior” in Chrome. It’s a web browser. It browses. You get passwords saved and synchronised. Everything else is an extension. What’s so bad about FF...?
It also felt noticeably slower at the time.
Finally, with Chrome's market share, good extensions that Just Work are more common there, in my experience. I use a whole host of plugins on desktop, and when I looked at switching back to FF last year, I did not find equivalents for everything.
I did go back to FF on mobile, because I do remember the nightmare of IE 6 and want to protect the web from total Google control. On mobile, I miss the dev tools and array of extensions less.
I just could not live without firefox and being unable to share tabs/links from anywhere in my phone to my desktop and or laptop
I hate the hell out of that. My phone is my phone, my laptop is my laptop, just leave them alone.
As for bookmark, firefox should be able to import chrome bookmark. It can even import saved passwords and cookies so your active session is preserved.
Can I pull that off in FF?
Interesting. Other comments in this thread indicate that the only extension that can do this has its ID hard-coded in the url parsing code to be whitelisted.
1 - Selecting multiple tabs and saving to bookmarks: you can't add to an existing folder without creating a subfolder.
2 - Add keywords to bookmarks: no way to filter bookmarks that have keywords. Also, when typing on the address bar, the keyword doesn't get highlighted or anything
3 - can't add a custom search engine. You have to add its extension, if available. Or add as a bookmark with a keyword, but then you won't be able to see a list of all search engines...
As a full time, happy Firefox user, this annoys me to no end, increasingly so as there are more and more competing search engines that I want to try.
I’m pretty sure that you used to be able to add arbitrary search engines too (by specifying the search URL with %q for the search query). It’s amazing to me that they would remove this.
Not only that, but on Chrome I have Amazon, Youtube, Reddit, all setup as search engines. For reddit, besides 'rdt' for general search, I also added keywords for searching inside /r/anime, /books, /ps4, and a few other subs I occasionally search.
I also think they used to have this, as Chrome still has. But no idea why they changed it.
I hope I'm just being alarmist.
I don't know if there is a way to "bless" such an authority once it's added to the trust store.
When I wrote the message I wasn't in front of Firefox, now I am. So to summarize:
* The CA's certificate is added to the Firefox store and trusted.
* Visiting a site gets the lock in the address bar.
* Clicking on the lock in bar shows "Connection secure. Connection is verified by a certificate issuer that is not recognized by Mozilla"
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/T4rznXK
A screenshot of the browser will not show the www, making it more difficult to find the website.
At this point, That's just sloppiness on USFCA's part.
You don’t have this issue at all for domains that don’t have a www subdomain.
Furthermore it would be extremely confusing to have different content for www.example.com & example.com.
My company uses DNS load balancing for a root domain, though, so either I'm misunderstanding you or you're mistaken about what's possible here.
We use Constellix's DNS management to have round-robin DNS via multiple A records for 'nxtbook.com'.
If you're thinking of some other form of DNS load balancing, would you please clarify?
Edit: another common use case is hosting your static website on S3 or github pages. Typically it's done by adding a cname entry to s3 or github.io (been a while so hopefully I remember it right). You can't do this on root, unless you're using another server as reverse proxy (e.g. cloudflare's cname flattening service). Again, it's benefits cloud vendors (cloudflare got more potential customers by offering this service for free) but ultimately hurt people that want to host their small websites.
Definitely simpler, and a good argument against using the root domain.
Thanks for clarifying!
But why?
So yeah, hiding www is annoying and confusing in this situation, because Google just assumed something about the web/domains and forced their assumptions on everyone.
But www.example.com isn't necessarily the same website as example.com.
As a practical example, the website for my current employer had not configured their "bare" domain. When applying for a job I decided to check out their website, and copied only the "bare" domain and pasted it in my browser. Didn't work, just timed out.
I tried a few times and through "huh, website down for a few days, that sure doesn't look good". Then on a whim I figured I might try the "full" domain, and sure enough that loaded up straight away.
One of the first things I got done when I was hired was to ensure the "bare" domain worked.
If I want to be on www.example.com and I'm actually on example.com, then yes I can discover that by looking at the URL.
I feel like I'm going in circles.
They're two different web pages. Possibly with entirely different information. Possibly run by entirely different people. Possibly with entirely different trust levels and threats. It conveys which of the two web pages I'm looking at. How is that not useful information?
The specific of how you've decided to run your site or serve your pages is irrelevant. You may serve a page depending on if the http request came over port 80 or some other port or via http or https or at this time or that time or other.
www.example.com and example.com might be two different websites.
If you want the content at www.example.com and you go to example.com, then may not get the content that you wanted. One might be a shop selling shoes and the other might be a shop selling hats.
If you want a hat and you go to the one selling shoes then you're going to be disappointed.
'www.' doesn't 'mean was HTTP accessible'. You can make any system HTTP accessible, or not if you want to.
It doesn't matter how you or I set up our websites, or whether you or I think it's a good idea to have different websites at these addresses, it matters how other people set up their websites and if they choose to do this or not. Some do! Therefore the user needs the information.
You could send different websites based on what port the request comes from. But doing so would be bad and wrong, and showing the user the outgoing port is definitely not necessary.
But that's you controlling that, as the person running the website.
When it's the user controlling it, by setting which domain to visit, that's in their control, so they need to see it in their UI.
If you're going to reduce to the absurdity of 'anyone could serve anything from anywhere' then why show a domain at all? ebay.com could serve me the content of google.com, so let's not bother with domain names? Is that your argument?
I'm not making an argument about what should be shown right now, I just think your argument, based on what "might be different", is pretty flawed.
But there's no standard that requires this, that I'm aware of.
Chrome are acting like there is, but I believe there isn't.
This list is necessary anyway, because you have top level domains that look like .co.uk, so you can't just split the domain name by dots and take the last component to determine the top level domain.
So, not saying I unconditionally like the fact they are hiding important information in the URL bar, but I would not say their default behavior is that broken.
[1] https://publicsuffix.org - probably the list being mentioned in the video linked by the parent commenter, I guess
For example if I were to go to something like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<user>/<proj>/<path> or
the most relevant parts of the url as far as security/trust is concerned is the domain githubusercontent and <user> not the raw subdomain
Here the address bar would show "(padlock) [Github Inc] Github.com > Name Of Account > Name Of Project" for example. This is much clearer for end users.
Developers can always toggle an option to always show the URL or something.