Firefox has no real competitive pressure and no need to improve. Google is their sugar daddy and Mozilla stopped innovating a decade ago. It's just constantly playing catchup while suckling on Google teats, desperately clinging onto relevance. Without Google nobody would pay for their browser.

At this point it'd be better for the web if we standardized on Blink and moved on, cleaning up some of the invasive tracking in Chrome but leaving the renderer intact. Gecko and Safari/Webkit are just holding back the web.

Firefox provides nothing but a bunch of incompatibilities these days and some warm fuzzies that honestly haven't been deserved for years and years. Modern Firefox is slow, bloated spamware.

Firefox has fixed a lot of issues in their Quantum release. It removed a lot of what you called bloat as well. In tests it uses a lot less memory on average compared to Chrome. The privacy settings have been extended even further in recent years. Chrome’s settings come not even close to it. The extension system is still more flexible than Chrome’s. It has some built-in features such as autoplay stop and audio control that Chrome lacks. I also think you’re vastly overstating the incompatibilities on Firefox.

Finally, isn’t it better if there are multiple browser engines instead of just one? This allows for more innovation and has done so in the past too. The past pretty much proves that Firefox has and still can innovate despite your assertion.

I also wonder why you are stating all this in such a polemic and vulgar fashion. “ suckling on Google teats”, “bloated spamware”. None of this is even remotely accurate. But anyhow, what’s the point?

Sure, you go ahead and believe that. Every release of Firefox I've tried, including the recent ones, have sucked and been full of spam.

I'm angry at them because how the hell did we get here from the beauty of early Firefox and Phoenix? They've become the monster they were trying to fight.

You don't agree with my assertions, that's fine. Its marketshare speaks for itself. People don't trust Mozilla anymore, with good reason.

I'm old enough to remember the news of a "young kid" taking on Mozilla, IE and Netscape with their super lean Firefox browser, that was 20 years ago. It was meant to be lean, with the ability to install additional optional functionality through Plugins.

Now Firefox is old and bloated (Pocket?). It never got to be "lean" (always struggling with memory leaks, bad performance, etc) and poor compatibility (not Firefox fault, but still Firefox problem).

Yeah, exactly. Somewhere along the way leadership lost their way and made Firefox into bloated adware and kept uglifying it and mutating its interface to be worse and worse every iteration, all while posting flamboyant front-page news that they've made some major innovation. They haven't, they just... sucked even more.

It's not about trust. It's about convenience. Chrome comes with Android, so it's more convenient to use. Most people already use Google as search engine, and Google spams you to get Chrome, so it's more convenient to just use Chrome since you're also using Google, somehow using both products from the same house should be better, right?

If that's the case, Edge would be clear winner and it's still not. No, Firefox just... isn't good anymore.

Modern firefox is called librewolf or waterfox.

It respects privacy and works quite well (Actually much better than chrome based browser on my machine).

Mozilla management seems to be the issue, not firefox itself.

Yeah, but those projects are forever downstream of Firefox, no? Like they still depend on Mozilla to build new features and such, but then remove the Mozilla-y stuff before publishing?

I think the Chromium model has them forking from a shared base, and Google adds their own Chrome bits after that...? Or am I wrong?

So Google is keeping Firefox alive as a way to stave off anti-trust scrutiny, but crippling it to keep Chrome dominance...?

I honestly don't know why Google keeps funding Mozilla. Maybe it's a "useful fool" type of situation where having an inferior browser they can financially puppeteer helps them set their own standards (via WHATWG), since Firefox tries to keep parity with Chrome. Having another browser toe that line maybe helps legitimize those standards such that Google can remain in control and not worry as much about W3C/Microsoft/Apple domination? I dunno. Just speculating here.

It matters less these days since Microsoft gave up and went Chromium and Apple just doesn't care about its browser. Maybe Google already won and Firefox is on its last breaths?

I changed my default browser few days ago back to Safari. In Firefox, I would usually click the first two items on the home page which would be photopea or reddit. That day, they put 2 sponsored items for Amazon and Trivago instead at the first 2 spots and I accidentally clicked the amazon one without realizing because that first item was supposed to be Photopea. That was enough to piss me off:

https://i.imgur.com/s7NIfCX.png

Advertising inside of Firefox is going insane, even if it’s just ads for Mozilla. Tabs that opens when you open FF, little lines on the home page, “Big browser takes care of your privacy” starts looking very creepy.

They're desperate. The whole organization is dying.

The whole organization is dying while the CEO gets raises.

Well, they did fire the Christian CEO.

Well he did step down, he still didn't deserve all the ridiculousness that went on, though. glad he was able to make something good out of it.

The asshole homophobe who was CEO for like a week? Yeah, he deserved that. If you're going to try to tell people who they can fuck, don't be surprised if they say fuck you right back. He deserved it.

Mozilla was on its downhill slide long before him anyway.

You can disable the sponsored links.

Yeah, by using a better browser... Mozilla is kinda incompetent these days and shouldn't be trusted with stewardship. All they do is posture and market. All the real engineering seemingly stopped a long time ago.

Arguably Google can't either but at least they provide the engineering talent, if not the ethical leadership. Mozilla just offers spam.

In what areas do you think Chrome demonstrates engineering talent where Firefox is lacking?

Sorry but that's not good enough for a browser whose main selling point is "privacy". You don't get to play the good guy underdog and pull any shit.

These ads are not targeted ones, one may find them intrusive, but they supposedly respect your privacy.

More information about this (and how to disable these ads) can be found here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy

What do you use for adblocking on safari?

1Blocker is pretty good, especially if you use iOS (syncs rules, etc). Not free, though. Worth it to turn off annoyances IMHO.

I use Adblock Pro. I got it for free a while back and it’s perfect. AdGuard is another good one.

I switched to AdGuard after Safari stopped supporting uBlock Origin.

/etc/hosts

I switched to Brave - no regrets

People complain about firefox doing shady stuff and then use Brave lmao. Just leaving these here: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/19125#issuecom...

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/16611#issuecom...

The first bug is because of daylight savings the was also in chrome. People mistakenly thought it was to do with brave servers being down.

The second one is people trying to install plugins from the chrome web store, apparently it has to do this through brave servers. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable that when installing a plugin from your browser that your browser has to connect to a server to do so.

Trying to present bugs as some sort of malware is dishonest, the source code is open if it was really phoning home why not just link that code?

> Steps to Reproduce

> 1. Open Brave

This is way too funny for me.

>High CPU usage

I have that problem all the time in Firefox

But probably I just opened too many tabs

I'd suggest the Auto Tab Discard extension. It's wonderful.

I tend to open multiple thousands of tabs because Firefox lets me, and it hasn't been a cpu issue on desktop or Android.

Eats battery like Hell on my Android phone.

From Wikipedia:

> On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users type a URL of Binance into the address bar, which earns Brave money. Further research revealed that Brave redirects the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites, too. In response to the backlash from the users, Brave's CEO apologized and called it a "mistake" and said "we're correcting". [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Insertion_...

I'm almost certain Brave would have something like this too as advertising is their business model, right?

It does: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html

Suggest everyone here read up on Brave - internally the care for privacy is much higher than Mozilla [I have worked for both] and things like P3A liked here are carefully designed to avoid leaking PII and implemented honestly somewhat begrudgingly.

I did, too. All I can tell you is that when I have Brave running on an M1 with four tabs open, it's consistently using 240MB of memory. When I fire up Firefox Developer Edition with the same tabs open, it starts at 660MB and quickly balloons up to 1.05GB of memory usage.

My experience also. I’ve slowly edged away from Firefox and have primarily been using Brave and Safari for the last 6mos or so. Brave just feels snappier, and it’s close enough to Chrome that most work required websites aren’t broken.

Ive made the opposite switch, many sites were broken in brave (eg google docs, google sheets) and aren’t in firefox

I currently have a number of Google Docs and Sheets open in Brave. Because of your comment, I started poking around. Try as I might, I couldn't break anything. That probably doesn't mean there's absolutely no way anything could be broken, but just anecdotal—I couldn't find anything.

They are still broken, you just can’t see it.

Because Brave (and chrome, edge, opera) runs on Blink, and Firefox runs on Gecko

How are the devtools in Brave?

They're comparable to Chromium's, if not identical: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

Same as Chrome

a browser who does not develop their own code base but reuse google's, with a business model based on monetizing users attention to ads network while pretending to protect privacy and block ads.

I wonder what could go wrong here ? maybe their history of misbehaving with money and injecting affiliate links in users browsing or the security issues and leaks could give us a pointer or two.

Lol; this isn't something you should boast about.

little snitch pops up more here for updates checks and others i assume for brave (idle, not browsing) than chrome does.

Interestingly this is likely for privacy reasons in a roundabout way. Brave doesn't connect to Google and so had to implement much of the serverside functionality (updates, sync etc) itself.

You don't regret supporting a guy who wants to ban same sex marriage and pushes covid misinfo?

All people are fallible — by this logic, you should stop buying anything at all. Someone associated with anything you purchase or use just might have a scary opinion you can't tolerate, and we can't have that, can we now? Oh the agony!

Does he use the browser for that? If not, how is it relevant?