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.