Use Firefox for anything app-site-ish, but something else for the rest of the non-JS "document web".

HN doesn't need much in the way of a browser, for example. Ditto for a lot of other forums out there. The sooner we get rid of the notion that the only browsers we're supposed to use are Firefox or something else by Big Tech, and the sooner developers stop drinking the Goog-Aid of "progress", the more true browser diversity will occur.

Fully agreed; i also enjoy using an actual video player to play videos vs letting the now operating-system-sized-javascript-cruft-in-browser to try to do its thing. there are alternatives out there, use them; its called "the open web" for a reason, that "source code" fed to us can is code that we can choose to render, or not

I enjoyed Suckless Surf, although I always had the vague, nagging suspicion that Firefox must be doing something extra behind the scenes with privacy and security…

...which leads to yet another paradoxical situation: 80-90%+ of Mozilla's yearly revenue comes from google [0]. they keep firefox afloat (with 3% market share) with the sole purpose of avoiding antitrust action vs. chrome. IMHO if Firefox starts gaining traction big G takes the gloves off and employs different tactics to protect the vertical integration.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...

The more people that use Firefox, the more revenue Mozilla will earn as there are various ancillary services they sell and integrate into Firefox, along with things like sponsor links.

> if Firefox starts gaining traction...

yeah, so lets make that happen and then find out what the response is.

right now we're stuck in the "tried nothing and all out of ideas" state.

Firefox used to have traction, enough to be a threat to Internet Explorer.

People won't switch when you get a degraded experience of Google services on Firefox.

Similarly, if Firefox was as easy to embed as Chrome we'd probably see a lot more alternatives based on it.

i dont have any degraded experience of "google services on firefox"; sounds quite false. Of course i dont have my browser feeding into google 24/7 like folks do with chrome now (but even that "feature" is still relatively new).

People switched when google (having the site everybody went to daily) started advertising on the home page "use our browser" - must be nice; and in the start it seemed like a tool for users to use to harvest data; unlike today where chrome is the tool that the data-collectors use to harvest people

Google did start advertising chrome, but the speed of chrome (and stability) was not fake and it won over the early adopters.

Firefox dropped the ball at the time, and now even tho it has mostly caught up in speed and stability, their market share doesn't grow because it's not substantially better feature wise.

May be the adblock wars can change that, because chrome seems to be going towards eliminating adblocker.

There's a feature I use heavily that I cannot get in Chrome: Multi-Account Containers[1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

unfortunately, such a feature is so niche that almost nobody cares about it, and so does not move the needle in the fight against chrome.

According to a quick statistic search, firefox has about 363 million users, while the multi-account addon has about 368,938 users - that's 0.1% of users. Compared to ublock origin, which has 7,388,295 and thus is at least within 2% of all users.

i do wish FF shipped the multi-account-containers bundled with the install of FF; it is quite possibly the #1 most used plugin - esp with each tab being a random temp containter. It might be confusing for some folks with the advanced bit; but professionally it saves the day when testing front ends and peoples instructions are "clear your cache, find out how via your browser ect" - nah just open a new temp container

I've switched to Firefox after a long time on Chrome in preparation to avoid the Manifest V3 changes and it isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Overall performance feels slower (although not drastically so, they've made big strides since last I used it) and some newer features (Nvidia Super Resolution is the big one for me) work only half the time.

Having been using Firefox for years, I don't think I'm missing out on anything. I wouldn't trade my privacy for bleeding edge features

You seem to think that a choice of two things isn't a choice. If/when Firefox disappears and you only have chrome, that is what I would call not having a choice.

To repeat: if you can choose between two things then you've got a choice.

GP is saying that yes, you have a choice now, but if you want to preserve that choice, you should use Firefox.

You're right, I misunderstood. Thanks.

Why?

If tomorrow Google turns next-level evil in terms of privacy / steering the web, Microsoft will have forked Chromium within a week, and everyone (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc) will swap their upstream immediately.

People have this illusion that Google has an ironclad grip on Chromium, but they don’t. It’s maximally permissively licensed, the only reason they get to decide much is because they put in (pay) the dev hours.

> If tomorrow Google turns next-level evil in terms of privacy / steering the web, Microsoft will have forked Chromium within a week

Or, Microsoft will be happy with this "next-level evil."

> If tomorrow Google turns next-level evil in terms of privacy / steering the web

My fear isn't that tomorrow Google will start doing the browser-monopoly equivalent of kicking puppies and twirling a black mustache.

My fear is that Google has gradually accustomed everyone to their monopolistic dominance over the web, to the point where they can engage in blatant monopolistic privacy-destroying activities like privacy sandbox and people will still rush to their defense saying "but they haven't broken out the mustache twirling yet!"

I’m not defending Google. I completely excised them from my life almost a decade ago already.

I’m simply freeing people from the illusion that Google has “won the web” or whatever. Google is effectively giving everyone a free ride with Chromium. They aren’t forcing anyone onto Chrome (where the real tracking happens), and if they did by making Chromium private from now on, again, forks and upstream swaps would happen at lightspeed.

How much more evil do you want Google to get before it’s problematic that they control the portal through which most people interact with the web (both browser/engine and search)? And why not use Firefox (or Safari/WebKit) already?

> And why not use Firefox (or Safari/WebKit) already?

Mozilla these days seems more happy at pumping out tech-woke messages rather than being privacy first. Hell, they’ve refused to add an adblocker to their iOS browser for years now.

3rd party WebKit browsers are more rare, thus less well-developed.

I’ve settled on using Brave.

I like Brave, but I cant recommend it to my less-than-techie friends because of the bullshit that you have go through to disable (VPN, Wallet, advert related stuff, etc), which confuses people and gets in the way.

Yeah I agree it is annoying, but ultimately browser dev needs to be paid for somehow.

Brave does it via their extras. Mozilla mostly via their search deal with Google.

What are “tech-woke” messages?

> Today, I upgraded to Firefox 106. Upon opening Firefox, I received a very creepy message saying:

> "Thank you for loving Firefox".

> I really resent the presumptuousness of this message. I never told you I "loved" Firefox. How could anyone "love" a Web browser? It's a functional tool: a doorway to the Web.

I am dying. This has to be one of the funniest things I've read all year.

Agreed that was fun to read. I can relate as sometimes I too get angry and rant at marketing copy. And really, why does Mozilla want me to pick a color for Firefox when I just want to use it? I guess I'll stop now.

> why does Mozilla want me to pick a color for Firefox when I just want to use it?

Guess I just don't care. Some people want it. I mean I change my theme. But there's defaults and I don't have to think about most of these things and they don't affect me or anyone I know, so why care? lol

Afaik they want the same thing as google, our data, just geared their way. We are not protesting that Google is doing it, but more the general fact that it is done.

Or Safari / WebKit (like Orion)

I get everyone hates on Safari but it is legitimately also a different engine and they have shown to be privacy conscious.

Orion in particular is very good IMO

Why does everyone hate Safari? I’ve used it for almost a decade with few complaints and it’s only gotten better.

There's alot of developers who think Safari is the new Internet Explorer[0][1][2][3][4][5][6]

As for my view, I think thats a bit extreme, though until relatively recently, Safari was slow to update and support many standards that came out in the last 4-5 years, though I think this is largely resolved, Apple does have some security and privacy concerns with APIs like the proposed File System Access API[7] that some feel is overblown and still holding the web back as a platform, specifically around gaining access to native functionality, particularly with iOS.

Also until very recently, their PWA support for things like push notifications were non-existant, they have slow rolled any web platform gains being supported on iOS and that could be perceived as protecting their App Store as the web platform becomes more app like.

My own opinion is somewhere in the middle, but this is the overall scope of the complaints summarized

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/safari_risks_becoming...

[1]: https://blog.logrocket.com/when-will-safari-finally-get-it-t...

[2]: https://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/

[3]: Even here on hacker news, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377890

[4]: Dev advocate for Safari Team addressing the statement headon: https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1491064075987873792

[5]: Op-ed by Nolan Lawson on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed...

[6]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/09/safari-team-asks-for-fe...

[7]: https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api

Thanks for the thorough reply.

I'll switch to FF when they let the scrollbars be styled properly so my got-damn apps don't look like got-damn 1999 with those ugly ass scroll gutters.

Between that and the embed situation FF is clearly engaged in some sorta self-sabotage cycle.

They've made it way too difficult, but you can add your own CSS to inject into webpages if you want. Not sure if that helps.