A large reason why I have not moved on from Firefox is that Gecko remains the only independent full-featured browser-engine. If Firefox were to be discontinued by Mozilla, Google would gain even more control over web standards than it already has. I'm aware that there are other independent, open-source browser-engines available, I'm not aware of any others that are equally usable as an everyday browser for ordinary users though. This fact alone has remained enough for me to continue using it in the face of a continually declining quality, and Mozilla's totally misguided corporate leadership.

> I'm aware that there are other independent, open-source browser-engines available, I'm not aware of any others that are equally usable as an everyday browser for ordinary users though.

Safari is both usable for everyday users and is used every day by more than those that use Firefox, which means WebKit is a viable alternative to Blink.

WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though... GP was probably referring more to efforts like WebSurf.

> efforts like WebSurf

I guess this is a reference to the browser that's actually called NetSurf? Or maybe not?

It's not clear, either, what the statement that "WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though" means.

Overall, this comment is very confusing.

> this is a reference to the browser that's actually called NetSurf

Yes, sorry, I meant http://www.netsurf-browser.org/. (I knew I should look up and put in the link, but it was late... Turns out I even misremembered the name.)

> what the statement that "WebKit hardly qualifies as independent from an ecosystem health standpoint, though" means.

That the Blink layout engine is a fork of the WebKit codebase, so if the issue is keeping the standard healthy by ensuring multiple people can implement it independently, having WebKit and Blink be the only implementations is less than ideal, even if not a complete failure.

Only on Apple hardware though.

No, in fact Mozilla’s hostility to embeddability makes the world’s largest megacorp look positively selfless as a contributor to the FLOSS community: the WebKit devs actually give 2¢ about it and webkit2gtk, and it enables a whole range of cross platform (GNU/* and *BSD) browsers from GNOME Web to suckless surf to luakit.

In terms of non-Apple WebKit browsers, that's about it though. And they're all quite niche in terms of intended audience.

I wish there was a more Firefoxy WebKit browser out there, I'm not going back to a web without Ublock.

> they're all quite niche in terms of intended audience

I wouldn’t say that of GNOME Web.

> I'm not going back to a web without Ublock

I do every day (switching between luakit on a laptop and firefox-mobile-config on a smartphone), and IMO a good /etc/hosts is good enough (edit: luakit can also read the same blocklist format as µBlock, though it ignores cosmetic filters).

> hostility

I wouldn't say it was really hostility. But Gecko just wasn't designed to be embeddable in the first place. And they have millions of things to catch up at the time they ultimately decided they could only focus on a few things like Quantum and other things in Project Snappy. May be in the future.

Compared to Webkit the whole engine was designed as an embeddable engine from Day one.

> Gecko just wasn't designed to be embeddable in the first place.

This is untrue in the starkest sense. Please don't make stuff up and then present it as fact.

Embeddability was a major goal for Gecko at the outset. It's the reason for many of the architectural decisions that exist today (past the point where that goal has been abandoned).

except that Safari doesnt have a decent adblocker like ublock is for me a big issue. Plus Safari 15 must have some kind of a bug or something it drains my battery just like Brave.

That's beside the point. I didn't recommend Safari. Safari is a Web browser. The discussion is about alternatives to Blink and Gecko—browser engines, not browsers.

The fact that WebKit is in Safari and Safari is used by millions of ordinary people means that Webkit meets the commenter's criteria and is a viable option as the basis for building a (perhaps yet-to-be conceived) Web browser.

This argument I can understand, and I'm torn between Firefox and Brave because of it. Maybe the best option for people like me is to use both. Or create a Brave-like browser with Gecko?

But what's the point of Gecko now? It's not like the 2000s where Firefox was still able to affect the browser landscape and drive development.

Google has become the web standards body, and Webkit/Blink are the only renderers that matter anymore. Mozilla doesn't have enough influence to change anything anymore, it just dies a little more every year as browser support for it decreases even further. It's already down to <5% marketshare, what's left for it but to die?

The only reason it "dies" is because people aren't using it. By using it, you help it to not "die."

By using Firefox you show web developers that they need to support you as a user, or risk losing your business. That in turn makes Mozilla influential.

People flocked from Netscape to IE because it was better. People flocked from IE to Phoenix/early Firefox because it was better. People flocked from Firefox to Chrome because it was better. People aren't flocking from Chrome back to Firefox because Firefox has gotten worse while Chrome has gotten better.

Why would I use something that most of the web doesn't support, is full of crapvertising, doesn't work seamlessly with my other Google services and Android, and on top of that, gets worse every year?

I opened it just now, just for kicks, and it's begging me to pin itself to my taskbar (even though I'm on a Mac). And the tab right behind the modal popup is a bigass advertising for some Mozilla VPN product. The New Tab below that is a grid of six more ads from something called Pocket.

How the hell did it get so bad? At this point I'd rather just see Firefox die entirely, or be made into another Chromium reskin. It's just malware these days.

> People flocked from Firefox to Chrome because it was better.

This part isn’t entirely true. One large and influential reason why people switched to Chrome was because every Google search result page and many other pages on Google properties heavily and prominently advertised Chrome. Chrome was also bundled with some other third party software. Chrome may have been better in its initial years than Firefox, but that wasn’t the main trigger for people to switch.

For most people, the default browser installed with their OS is what they’d use unless they’re sold another browser or they know that another browser is what works for them.

The ads is just Firefox trying to become independent from the Google money flow. I don't like it either but at least they're not tracking.

They should just charge a fiver a month for Firefox Sync IMO. It's a valuable feature. I have no need for pocket and VPN.

But the web works just fine on FF. I have no issues with it save for the odd site that just blocks it. If I ever have problems it's always due to my extensive adblocking.

You call Firefox malware, but use Google services?

Google services are deeply invasive, but also tremendously useful. It's a tradeoff.

Firefox ads are just pure spam.

All Firefox ads can be turned off. You can very quickly remove Pocket from new tab pages.

Meanwhile, Firefox is providing useful features like tab containers and Facebook container that are not replicable in Chrome even with extensions.

When you use Chrome you're using a browser made by an advertisement COMPANY. Every time you Google search you are looking at Google ads, and Chrome itself integrates with Google search and other services so that users feel like they are missing out if they decide to choose an alternative.

The entire purpose of Chrome is to lock you into Google services, Android, and make it just that much more convenient to use Google products for everything you do.

But somehow, the independent alternative run by an actual non-profit is worse because they dared to try and monetize their product, in a unintrusive and fully optional way. No, it'd be better if we all subscribe to Google's information dragnet, because that's "free" and has "no ads."

You know, kudos to Mozilla for trying so hard... but Google is just better at it. shrug. By all means, they can keep fighting that losing battle if they want, but the world has already moved on and forgotten them. Nobody cares anymore except a tiny niche on here and what's left on slashdot.

Maybe the ideology of it is really important to you. To me it's just a browser, and not worth fiddling with. Chrome does one thing really well, and that's getting out of my way. Firefox constantly interrupts, whatever the reason. I don't really care if they're struggling, sorry. Maybe that's an indication of their plummeting value to society. It's just not a useful product for most of the world anymore. If they can't afford to keep the lights on, maybe they could go the Brave or Opera route and make it a Chromium reskin without the Googly bits, and deprecate Gecko altogether. Maybe Firefox has some value as a nonprofit browser, but Gecko, as far as I can tell, does not -- to me and to most of the world.

Besides, it's not like the internet is any more open with Firefox... 90% of the content is just served from like 5 huge tech companies anyway. Third party tracking is less significant when all the first parties track everything directly and they host most of the content to begin with. And at the end of the day, the internet is just a time-waster full of crap, not some beautiful ideological hill for humanity to die on. We already lost that battle in the 2000s, and capitalism won.

As for Google, I already don't see any Google ads anywhere. The only effect I notice from their dragnet is that my Google News feed is annoyingly based on my browsing habits, which is unfortunate indeed. Other than that, Chrome is wonderfully unnoticeable... YMMV may vary, of course. And if they deploy those changes to the extension model and break uBlock, sure, I'll consider another browser. Probably Safari or Brave. Still not worth the hassle of Firefox.

Choose whatever browser you want, I just think it's disingenuous for you to claim that Firefox "constantly interrupts."

It absolutely does not do that.

It absolutely has every time I've launched it in the last 5-10 years.

Because you only launch it every once in a while, because it's not your preferred browser. So, every time you launch it it's installing an update.

Having some kind of message when you update is not abnormal.

> Having some kind of message when you update is not abnormal.

But having new adware every time IS abnormal. When any other modern browser* self-updates, it does so unobtrusively. Maaaaaaaaybe (very rarely) opens a new tab with a changelog -- even that's rare, though. I don't get that issue when I reopen Safari once in a while, despite never using that either.

With Firefox, there's always some new adware being shilled. It decreases trustworthiness a lot. Every time I open it, I can't help but be turned off by wondering what new shady partnership they've joined this time, or what terrible UX change they've decided to unilaterally implement because they have too many designers with time on their hands.

The whole Mozilla operation went from "let's make a really lean and mean engineering powerhouse browser" to "incompetent technocracy with too many people and not enough vision". It's just a mess. The new anti-features they keep adding aren't useful to anyone except maybe their execs... every new release is a desperate, flailing attempt at relevance instead of core improvements. The LAST thing I want is a new browser experience every few months. Just let me check my email and get out of my way, damn it.

*Except maybe Edge? Haven't used that in a while, understand it's gotten pretty intrusive lately too.

I moved from Chrome to Firefox a year ago, because:

1) Multi-account containers - open each tab in an isolated container with its own session cookies etc. Use case? Login to multiple Google/Azure/AWS/etc accounts at the same time on different tabs. This is a game-changer if you have to login to multiple cloud accounts because you work for a multinational and each subsidiary you support is on a different tenant.

2) Firefox Lockwise - (though they are deprecating this on Dec 13) standalone password manager that syncs with Firefox's passwords, and which works on any iOS browser/password window. (I would use Keychain except I don't use Mac desktops).

There are some downsides:

1) Some plugins don't exist on Firefox (e.g. Language Learning with Netflix), and those that do don't compare well to their Chrome cousins (Google Translate -- doesn't do popup translations). Most mainstream plugins however work extremely well (uBlock Origin etc.)

2) Some pages don't render because webpage author targets Chrome (but this is very very very tiny % of pages that one would normally encounter -- I encounter them because of poor web authoring practices on the company intranet).

The render/Javascript performance is pretty darned good. Benchmarks say it is hair slower than Chrom(ium), but in practice, it's pretty snappy even on older hardware (I run Linux on a 2014 Dell) so I'd say it's a non-issue.

Also, one more thing to note, uBlock Origin works better in Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

> 2) Firefox Lockwise - (though they are deprecating this on Dec 13) standalone password manager that syncs with Firefox's passwords, and which works on any iOS browser/password window. (I would use Keychain except I don't use Mac desktops).

Deprecated only in that it's being integrated with Firefox on iOS and Android, which (at least on iOS) will then show up as a valid password provider...

Bitwarden's firefox plugin has been flawless for me.

Bitwarden on firefox buggy as hell for me, it does not autofill (except using shortcuts) and does not work on private nav ...

> does not work on private nav

Did you enable it? Firefox requires you to opt-in to any extensions running in private browsing (there’s a checkbox in the pop up that appears when you install them, and also on the add on preferences page).

>>1) Multi-account containers - open each tab in an isolated container with its own session cookies etc.

I also like having separate profiles for stuff like banking, browsing, shopping, gmail, etc. You can combine this with containers and 'force open in container' setting.

Yeah https://business.apple.com is an example of a site that explicitly blocks Firefox. If it was just some indie web dev with no time to spare i could understand...

That's shocking. Why would it do this?

Well it hides website ads, which is fine, but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not.

It has a history of injecting its own affiliate codes into your URLs.

It has a history of accepting "donations" for people who cannot claim them, and pretending to represent those people.

Many of their more egregious issues have been "fixed", but the pattern is clear. Their CEO provided institutional support to the proposition 8 campaign (to ban same-sex marriage), and they get consistent placements on the far-right's pet hardware projects.

I'm not here to promote Firefox (indeed, I use Safari and, on Linux boxes, Falkon), but no-one should be supporting Brave.

What are "the far-right's pet hardware projects"?

We shouldn't use Brave because the CEO, not the company, has a particular political (and moral) position you don't approve of - one which has no chance in hell of ever becoming law. This is the guy who invented JavaScript, should we also stop using that? Are you saying he's a neo nazi or neo nazi sympathizer?

I noticed that Mozilla is making decisions that work against cryptocurrencies, while Brave is embracing them. Does that have anything to do with your dislike of Brave?

The "Freedom Phone" is one of the more high profile examples.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/06/technology/freedom-phone-...

As for Javascript, hopefully the difference between an abstract programming language he doesn't have total control over and a closed-sourced software project that handles your personal data on a daily basis is obvious.

Oh, we should fear the fascist underpinnings of a "privacy focused" phone with an "uncensorable app store" designed by a yuppie who has no idea what he's doing.

Are you being serious?

I was expecting some kind of phone that blocks certain political viewpoints and reports your location and activities to the authorities.

You do understand that Brave's philosophy is based on the utopian (maybe naïve,IMHO) idea of fair profit distribution and automatic revenue share, right? And thus as "left" as it can be if we are going for the political spectrum.

Also have you boycotted Javascript-related tech already? Because its founder was a big part of its development...

I feel like I would use Vivaldi before I did Brave.

At least Vivaldi has a different philosophy for what a browser should be which justifies using it.

I’m not sure what Brave adds to the mix other than schemes to make money for themselves.

>but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not.

To be clear, the software pops up OS level ad notifications, whether you visit sites with ads to block or not. The two features are independent of each other.

It may still be a gray area, but its unfair to paint it as what its not.

Doesn’t the user have to specifically turn that option on?

I was replying to

>but has an option to then show its own ads instead, which is not.

While conceptually sure they offer ad replacement, technically they sort of dont. Ads support their product, and their product blocks ads. You can turn off the support ads, you can turn off ad blocking. They are two independent unrelated features.

Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution. This is very bad for guaranteeing a healthy competition on the market, it creates an enormous walled garden.

Firefox is truly multiplatform, open source, committed to privacy, security and an open web and Mozilla is an authority on these topics. Sure, they're not perfect, but so far they proved to do a great job most of the time. Firefox is updated, alive and vibrant, very performant, welcoming and produces the ONLY remaining alternative to Microsoft/Apple/Google's joint effort to own the web with Chrome.

> Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution.

Good. The Basic Attention Token is meant to take the power away from adtech by making ads less intrusive and establishing a market directly between content consumers and content creators, cutting out the advertising middleman. The safe ads can eventually be completely removed from the transaction, as users can fund their BAT wallets instead of seeing ads, and support the creators they want directly.

There's a lot to dislike about Brave Inc., but the BAT is the only scalable solution to the ad-infested web we have today. Yes, Brave Inc. makes a profit from this (and other arguably shady means), but this is a far more consumer friendly way of supporting a browser vendor than the established alternatives.

Please read https://basicattentiontoken.org/

"Brave promotes a toxic business model centered in killing off internet's advertisement and providing their own in house solution. This is very bad for guaranteeing a healthy competition on the market, it creates an enormous walled garden."

So has anyone using an Adblock in the past 20 years. Also what do Ads have to do with market competition? And what is "toxic" about having a browser that promotes alternative revenue models?

I'd argue the worse "toxic business model" is the advertising model you're advocating for. I'm not saying Brave's solution is correct, but I'm glad someone is at least trying something different.

Sure I hate ads as well, but Brave's proposal is just making it worse. It's like a different incarnation of Facebook.

To me it's not the advertising that's wrong or bad per se. It's the tracking. The personal privacy violations. That's what I find toxic and ultimately unethical.

Killing off the competition? Enormous walled garden? If that is Brave's business model, it's a delusional pipe dream. Brave trying to kill Google, or even merely match with the scale of Google's garden let alone surpass it, is like trying to cool down a volcano by pissing into it. The scale discrepancy between these two organizations is off the charts.

The browser is a user agent. In this case, the user has decided that the ads Brave serves are better than the original ones on the website (otherwise they would't use this browser). Why is that so bad?

Although I don't wish to participate in it, I find Brave's business model an interesting pro-user take on the problem of a toxic industry. Calling _Brave_ toxic is a weird turnaround of the facts.

I use Firefox. Honestly, some sites are broken, like my brokerage account and Zillow. Having uBlock work at blocking 100% of known-bad requests is worth it to me. Chrome only blocks something like 60% due to the asynchronous nature of the extension API.

> Chrome only blocks something like 60% due to the asynchronous nature of the extension API.

Let's not kid ourselves. This is clearly a 100% deliberate design decision, aimed at making content blockers less effective. This has nothing to do with the API being asynchronous. It is just the excuse Google went with.

On my smartphone uBlock Origin adds ~10 seconds in startup delay, which is fairly annoying. Having the Adblock be asynchronous but the browser start a lot faster would be an reasonable trade-off for me.

I didn’t express an opinion on the motivation for the API, I just mentioned why uBlock doesn’t work as well.

> Can anyone sell me on/off this idea?

It's open source Free Software so if you try it and don't like it you can switch back with no loss? Personally I've never used anything but Mozilla since the days of the Suite 1.0 milestones, through Camino (RIP) on OS X, through Firefox today. Nothing else has as nice a UI as Firefox + Tree Style Tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I use Firefox as my main browser, and have done so for years now. I really like it, I've had no problems with it, and I like the fact that it's the only major non-Webkit browser.

"The only major non-WebKit browser", if it exists, is a title that would have to go to Chrome, and it would require you to consider Firefox a "minor non-WebKit browser". At <5% (on par with Opera circa 2012), that wouldn't necessarily be an inaccurate way to describe it.

Biggest advantage for me is the container tabs. One clicka nd I can be logged into the same service as 3 different users (regular account, test account, admin account) plus puts a firewall between work stuff and personal stuff.

Really love the container tabs.

I never used this feature personally. Do you think it’s better than a separate profile which you can launch with -p flag or a profile switcher extension?

It's a ux improvement over manually managing profiles. You can tell it to always open certain tabs in their own containers for example, or you can reopen your current page in a new container all from the same browser window

never got into Brave because I found their growth-hacking techniques to piggyback on gullible crypto-bros coin-peddling highly questionable, perhaps even predatory if you get randos believe that they can earn money by clicking on ads. https://twitter.com/NoNameGladiator/status/12589167028063682...

they disappeared from my radar the moment they mentioned tokens.

It's simple, do you want to contribute to the Webkit dominance or would you like to support the last remaining engine not in the hands of Google (or Apple if you happen to use their hardware)?

For me the answer will be Firefox as long as it's a thing and I have no intention of switching to any Chromium derivatives.

> do you want to contribute to the Webkit dominance

There is no WebKit dominance. This is not 2012. WebKit, used in Safari et al, accounts for <20% of browser usage. The majority comes from Chrome, which uses Blink.

(Every time you conflate WebKit and Blink, you harm the cause you're ostensibly pledging yourself to.)

I am in the same boat and I was just thinking about it after upgrading to a Mac M1 pro. One plus point for Firefox is the dev tools, especially for grid and flex.

Like others have already written: Firefox is the most effective at suppressing ads, _with the uBlock Origin extension_. Ironic that most of Mozilla's funding comes from ad king Google. M's corporate leadership has really driven the project into the ground, and still... Firefox is the only browser that makes mobile Internet usable for me, and so I stick with it everywhere to take advantage of sync for bookmarks (bookmarks being something that someone with influence at M must really hate).

Brave's credulous promotion of crypto currency turned me off, as did what I perceived to be a terrible UI design (being a long time Mozilla user, back to the days of Netscape Navigator 1.0, my bar is clearly set pretty low).

The fact that I can't have a new tab open with a list of all my bookmarks on Fennec is still just ludicrous.

What's the problem with bookmarks, Mozilla??

I find the way Firefox handles displaying lots of tabs in the top bar really intuitive - instead of trying to cram them all within the width of your display they overflow, allowing you to scroll through them while still being able to see favicons and some title text. Can’t remember if Brave uses the same approach as Chrome for this

Also if you’re hardcore about managing your tabs I hear people swear by tree-style tabs https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Chrome has seen have an option for fixed width Tabs along with Tab overflow.

But yes in terms of Super lots of tabs Firefox still wins in terms of resource usage and UX.

Does Brave have the resources to maintain a fork of Chromium once upstream moves to Manifest v3 (which would kneecap uBlock origin)?

Probably mentioned here but its UI customization is pretty much limited to your css skill. You can go dense as much as you want or elegant with much paddings as usual. I tried almost every chromium variants but can't bear the touch friendly paddings and scaling.

I was a Brave hardcore user but decided to just try Firefox again and really liking it so far.

Can't really say why though, it just feels nice. For extensions, Multi account containers and uBlock origin are nice. You can also hook up the containers with proxies so that when you're in container A, all sites in that container get loaded over that proxy connection.

But there wasn't a killer feature in Brave that kept me there, and there also isn't a killer feature in Firefox that's keeping me here though

> I can't remember why I moved from Firefox to Brave.

You moved from Firefox to Brave because of the cosmetic change that made tabs look like buttons, detached from the content it's associated with. There were many other straws (random freezing, memory bloat etc.) but that was the last straw that broke the camel's back. You tried Brave, and found that it offers pretty much anything you'd expect from a web browser.

I use them all for specific purposes.