>How’s firefox these days?

Surviving but continues to bleed users.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

I wonder how much of that is user aging out of active usage for one reason or another (retirement, switching to a tablet from a desktop, etc) and how much of it is people switching (and how much of that switching is to something newer and small (e.g. not Safari, Edge, etc).

It is definitely going to go back up in June. I don't use Firefox now, it's now a good experience when compared to Chrome but will definitely switch if that's how I get my clean web browsing back.

I would use Firefox, if not for Mozilla.

And instead you use what? And why is that better or worse in specific ways?

I just don't like Mozilla, as a company, for many reasons.

The main ones being:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

The pay wouldn't be so egregious if it wasn't a constant pattern of pay raises, despite by their own stats, losing MAU and revenue. They also laid off 250 people (which is much more than $5MM, any way you cut it) but it seems in bad taste to give the CEO a raise in the same year.

And:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/

The fact that they're leaning so much into political activism.

On their homepage they're promoting a journalist involved in some misinformation controversy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220928230910/https://www.washi...

The journalist has blamed all this on "editors" -- so we'll never know _who_ exactly did the stealth edits and lied about contacting for comment. In any case, it is pretty ironic, given the CEO of Mozilla seems to think we need more than de-platforming to combat "misinformation":

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

Not a fan of statements that creep into invasions of privacy from a supposedly privacy focused browser.

So, to sum it up;

Wild executive pay for poor performance and too much political activism (that I tend to not agree with) for a web browser.

Those are all valid reasons for not liking Mozilla. What do you use instead then?

Safari and Brave

Fairly good choices from what I understand (although I'm not sure I would consider Safari is a good alternative for someone with complaints about corporate pay and structure, even if that was a concern of yours I suspect you don't have much of a choice on the device you're using it on).

For me, one of the most important reasons to use Firefox is to support one of the few remaining alternate browser implementations. Sure, Chrome and Safari and Edge have all likely diverged to a degree since their shared ancestry (which really wasn't that long ago), but I suspect they're far more similar underneath than different. I would prefer they not be political (but I can see how they get mixed up, as leaning in heavy on privacy is necessarily political in some ways, such as when it involves opinions of nations that disagree, and then there are probably some at he org that want to push in what they see as a similar direction on other topics), but I don't really care about the pay of the CEO in comparison to the vital importance I think heterogeneity in the actual engines browsers use is for many reasons.

I totally agree its important, so I hope it doesn't go the way of Netscape. If they focused only on privacy, that would be fine (since its advertised as such). It really wasn't one issue or another that caused me to abandon it, rather just reading post after post from the org about how they're tackling issue X, Y or Z.

I also don't care about the CEO's comp either _unless_ the business is just... sucking... for lack of a better word. When they let go of 250 people and then bump the CEO's salary by nearly 50%, it just looks a little self-serving.

If Brave or Safari end up sucking enough I look into trying another browser again, I'll give FF a shot. I used it from about 2008 to 2020.

Brave? So the cryptocurrency-laced browser made by the guy who donated $1000 to a Republican candidate who the year before said "our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide" and "homosexuals have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution"? [0] Huh. Really not seeing how that's somehow preferable over the company that.. checks notes.. demands transparency in funding for advertising, and calls for research into how centralized social platforms and their algorithms work and are affecting people -- none of which have anything to do with invading anyone's privacy.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controver...

It has built-in ad-block, reading lists and vertical tabs. That's about all I need from a browser.

As for the CEO's donations, I couldn't care less. I don't care who the CEO of Mozilla donates to. I used Firefox for years, even when they (individuals at Mozilla) donated exclusively to democrats: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/mozilla-foundation/recipien...

Mozilla (as an organization) has chosen to participate in political activism and pay their executives ridiculous wages. I don't agree with a lot of the decisions they've made, so I don't use their browser. Simple as that.

Perhaps if the browser was just so good, it was impossible to live without, their MAU wouldn't be dropping... but that's not the case.

> none of which have anything to do with invading anyone's privacy.

Nor their bedrooms. The gall of people to judge others by their consensual love is something I'll never understand.

Right? I find that ppl who are so afraid of this kind of stuff generally have a view like "I'm worried non-straight ppl will force their views unto me, sorta like I force my views onto them", one of those "seeing in others what is in yourself" kinda thing. Thus their constant fear and outrage about anything different. But seriously, don't worry guys, people just want to live their lives. You know, "live and let live"? What someone wears or who someone "gets it on" with is not an existential threat to your astronomically-inflexible views or values. (Though if your views/values are "LGBTQ ppl have less rights than others", yeah those are definitely going to be deeply and directly challenged, moreso every day, and I'm here to do my part in that, cheers)

How is Mozilla worse than Google?

I don't use Chrome. I just don't agree with the political activism and business decisions of Mozilla.

It’s been my browser for both web development and personal browsing for more years than I can remember. It is terrific. I don’t even have chrome installed on any of my computers.

I really like Arc. Takes some getting used to but worth the adjustment I think.

Arc had terrible adblocking out of the gate, I tried it out and immediately went back to Brave

Did you try ublock origin on Arc? Seems to be just as effective as it is with other browsers.

I can recommend librewolf, firefox with all the mozilla crap stripped out and good default privacy settings. Can tweak the options easily too if there's anything too annoying.

Quoting another HN user regarding librewolf:

> Binaries are unsigned, third party update service, Google safe browsing disabled unless you build from source, running unusual browser setups can actually make you more distinctive online, unencrypted DNS by default, speed of security patches is slower than base Firefox, etc.

All of those except the last one are positives.

Yeah I like what LibreWolf is doing, but it seems more reasonable to just disable the Firefox features you don't like.

Unsigned binaries is good, update service is good, google safe browsing disabled is mega good, unencrypted dns is comparatively good from what i understand compared to mozilla's imperfect solution. Speed of security patches is not great, but having non-mozilla vetting on security patches is a tradeoff that is worthwhile.

> Unsigned binaries is good

Why?

Librewolf is great, but an easy way to lock down regular Firefox is to generate a profile on something like ffprofile.com and replace the default config.

Been my daily driver since 2021 and its rock solid, performance is maybe 5-10% slower.

Theres only one site I know of that doesn't 100% work in it, thankfully its not one I use all the time.

It's my daily driver, but it's energy inefficient on my Macbook Pro compared to Safari.

Better than chrome, like always. Customizable and better at ram consumption.

It's always good to have a backup besides chrome/Firefox, in case Mozilla decides to commit yet another absurd move due to weird political trends.

I prefer it over Chrome. It's a (mostly) de-botnetted browser that allows deep customization and control.

Firefox is my main browser for many years, and it's still good.

(The only main thing I don't use it for is for the DRM that my main streaming service wants right now. I dedicate Chromium to that, to keep the nastiness away from my main browser.)

With Firefox, you probably do want to change a lot of settings from the default, for privacy&security reasons.

Firefox is absolutely not holistically security&privacy-friendly overall -- there's a long history, of often behaving like a for-profit tech company, to grow out of -- but it's the closest I'm aware of that we have right now.

Not helping is that browser standards were captured and turned into both serving the needs of particular kinds of businesses, and as massive market moats for dominant players.

I don't know what to think of all the browser startups and open source forks. I know at least one person at Brave, and that person is a 100% straight-shooter true-believer in privacy&security (and intellectually formidable), but some things leadership has done are too trust-me and bad optics. Regarding the rest of the efforts, there might be gold in there, but we have to skeptical of each one by default, for two reasons: (1) our field is bad at what we do, and that's now reflected deep in our technology stacks, as well as in practices for new development; (2) our field has normalized a lot of sociopathic behavior in the last 25 years, so it's easy for even well-intentioned people to inadvertently do bad things, and there are also a lot people with not as admirable of intentions.

If you want to use uBlock Origin on iOS, there's Orion browser. Enabling extensions and installing uBlock Origin on it requires a tedious step and the app is noticeably slower to respond and just overall worse and buggier than Safari, but the ad blocking works.

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...

https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...

If you're a duel monitor nerd it feels required if you want to do something besides internet surf on one monitor and stream something on other.

I dont have the most powerful computer but if I want to play baldurs gate 3 on one monitor while stream something on the other monitor it has to be in firefox over chrome.

Why is this? Memory usage?

I've been using it for the last 5 or so years with no real issues (Linux, Windows and Android).

I'd say the Android one is probably the weakest link but still usable and of course having ad-block on mobile is a huge quality of life improvement.

Other than that I don't notice any slowdowns compared to Chrome, the UI is very similar anyhow and the addon ecosystem is decent too.