I use Brave and am satisfied with it. The occasional hassle involved in turning things off when a new unwanted feature shows up or when I have to install it on a new machine is worth it for uBlock Origin and the Chromium performance and compatibility.

However the theoretical downside of Brave is that as Google continues changing Chromium's codebase, there's incentive for them to make it harder and harder to maintain a manifest v2-enabled fork. Wouldn't be surprised if extensive refactors randomly happen that multiply the effort needed to merge changes from upstream while maintaining the v2 capability. And how motivated is Brave to do all this labor? At some point they're going to say the tax is too high, we have a nice built-in ad blocker anyway, just use that.

A well-maintained, funded, and focused Firefox would be a good thing for when that day comes.

Brave does not need manifest v2 for it's ad blocker to work. It is not implemented as an extension. It is built into the browser itself.

Right but in my non-scientific test I found uBlock to work better so I don’t use the Brave blocker. My prediction is that Brave will eventually say that it’s too costly to maintain v2 in their fork and that people should just use the Brave blocker.

Interesting. What are you noticing? I might run ublock on top as well if it's worth it.

Brave has built-in functionality that can replace uBO, but it doesn't replace all of the other Manifestv2-only extensions that are not necessarily adblockers. For example https://libredirect.github.io/faq.html#chrome_web_store

> We can't publish LibRedirect to the Chrome Web Store as it requires Manifest v3, which removed essential features that LibRedirect needs.

uBlock Origin is just the tip of the iceberg since it's the most popular one, there is an entire ecosystem of Mv2 extensions that can never be replaced by Brave's built in functionality

My parent poster and I mentioned specifically ublock origin features

I’m wondering why Chrome forks don’t just maintain a shared patch enabling MV2.

That said, uBlock Origin works best on Firefox: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Does the default Brave ad blocker block Youtube ads?

Yes.

You can have all the usual ublock origin behaviour custom filter lists and all that, about:adblock

How does Brave survive financially?

> How does Brave survive financially?

Crypto [1].

[1] https://brave.com/wallet/

Also it's just a Chrome / Blink derivative. They don't actually have an independent web stack like Mozilla does. That independent stack requires a lot of developer effort to maintain.

They sell traditional browser and search ads. https://ads-help.brave.com/ The crypto thing is more a moonshot.

Instead of selling their default search engine they do their own and capture the value themselves.

I use Firefox for Container tabs. It’s useful for sites where I can’t have multiple tabs opened to same site but different login. That’s my main reason for sticking to Firefox.

Container tabs is the most useful browser feature anywhere. Now if they would just add tab history tracking.

Their current market share is 3%. What do you think it will be once they add tab history tracking, and every other feature under the sun that you think their browser should have?

I use Firefox and I tell everyone in know about ublock.

If chrome is force divested the browser market is going to look very different.

Mine too, but they have existed for a while now and seems their development is stuck and left to rot, there's many improvements around them that could be made to help improve privacy.

just curious - why not use browser profiles available in Chrome/Brave…?

It's not even on the same level. Container tabs as the name implies are all in the same window, and you can program them, for example always open up google.com domains in my Google container, while opening amazon.com in my shopping container.

This keeps the cookies separate and means you are tracked less. Yes you can manually do this with Chrome profiles, but before this feature was introduced into Firefox I had a dozen or more Chrome profiles to keep all my work, community and personal Google/Microsoft logins separate.

And then you can use specific proxies (via your VPN) per container, it's a game changer for consuming media

With profiles can you use the same window for multiple tabs? Based on a video I saw, the entire window is only used for that profile and switching between profiles will lose your other profiles tabs.

Can you have each tab use a different browser profile?

I wish they improved the UX so that it is as easy as possible to switch between profiles and to always launch certain websites on isolated profiles that you set for them

Container tabs and specifically Temporary Containers are the two things I always miss on non-Firefox browsers

Neither Safari nor -B- are opensource. Brave is even chromium based.

EDIT: Brave is opensource

Brave is definitely open source [1] (under the MPL)? The source for Safari is closed, but their rendering engine is completely open source [2].

[1]: https://github.com/brave/brave-core

[2]: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

Brave appears to be opensource: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

While Safari is not open source, WebKit is[0].

[0] https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

Yup, Bun uses WebKit. And even credited it for why it was able to achieve such better performance than Node

It's to the point where there doesn't seem to be much left to lose. Anything is worth trying. Their CEO should definitely be out the door. Still, I won't be holding my breath. They're hostile to their community, developers who want to work on web technologies, and to the open web.

https://www.theregister.com/Tag/Firefox/

So I am glad to see this page full of signatures. It might not help, but it won't hurt either.

> Firefox is no longer a developer default

Web developer here, and Chrome dev tools suck balls. I exclusively use Firefox.

Yeah, the chrome dev tools seem to have gotten worse over the last 10yrs. Basic CSS editing stuff breaks all the time.

Firefox has always been ahead of the game when it comes to devtools. It's pretty recent that Chrome has differentiated itself from Safari-tier crap devtools

Same. I absolutely hate using Chrome dev tools. It's because of the dev tools I still use Firefox.

> Some argue that it's good to have an independent rendering engine. Here too Firefox plays no role at all. The only counter force to Google's web feature roadmap is Apple/Webkit, not Mozilla.

I'd like to understand this point better. Does Firefox use the Chromium engine under the hood?

It doesn't use Chromium. I think that their point is that Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko, can only have an impact on the rendering engine space proportional to its user base, which they have argued is insignificant.

Nope, Firefox still uses its own rendering engine and JavaScript engine—except on iOS, where it's essentially Safari with a UI wrapper. But that’s due to Apple’s ToS, not Firefox’s fault.

I assume the previous comment was about market share. It’s low, yes, but I still think Firefox has influence despite that. Having a third rendering engine is valuable—especially now, after Microsoft killed IE/Edge and turned it into a Chromium fork. The percentage might not be high, but the people who use Firefox are usually the ones pushing for keeping the web an open standard.

I have never once had an issue with a website that was solved by opening it in Chrome instead. and I switched to firefox like three years ago. If firefox is so much less supported, I'm not seeing it at least

I've been bringing this up in every single thread about Chrome and Manifest V3 pops up. I'm been using Firefox, 100% of the time, on three different operating systems, for probably six years at this point.

I can remember a single time I had to swap to Chrome for something, and it was three years ago, and involved some flavor of WebAssembly, I believe.

If anyone can point out a current website that is acting up under Firefox and not Chrome, please post it. I just want want to know that the "Firefox is inferior" argument isn't a decade old echo.

Snyk

Any feature specifically? I added a project+repo, and it scanned and reported successfully - but this is only the free tier.

IIRC it was related to viewing vulnerabilities or integrations.

ZenDesk is another, related to their SSO logins.

Unfortunately once bitten I become twice shy. These kind of works-in-popular-browser circumstances pushed me to making my own browser navigation switcher, so I never have to worry about any one site again. Of course that also means that even if they fix it in Ff then I won't notice. (It also doesn't help that Manifest V3 has taken a while for me to support and Apple keeps changing things.)

I have had to use Chrome at least three times.

Which has made a knock on effect that if I’m using Firefox and something doesn’t work - I very much wonder if it would work in Chrome.

It’s burned into my brain now.

> "Firefox is inferior" argument isn't a decade old echo.

IMO this isn't the argument. Firefox users aren't discussing superior or inferior, but sites that accidentally or purposefully break or over-optimize for Chrome, making Firefox users second class citizens.

I commented about YouTube and Google Suite on another thread, but your webassembly example reminds me of the GCP dashboard and in browser virtual machine, which is also horrible in anything but Chrome if you plan to use it day in day out. I was spending my life there for a few months, and sure enough a dedicated Chrome instance made my life a lot better.

I do agree with you about what the argument actually is, I should have worded it differently. Any time someone brings up Firefox, it always seems to be an ex-Firefox user talking about compatibility issues. Even your GCP, I've personally used GCP with Firefox with no issues, but I have no doubt you spent more time in it than I have. But it does make me wonder if maybe there are platform specific issues with Firefox.

It's still interesting to contrast my personal experience re: Firefox with everyone elses when it comes to the "Manifest V3 ! Abandon ship, but to where?" conversation.

I think having a browser managed by one of the most powerful company in the world is the core of the issue, albeit in indirect ways.

I have no insight into Firefox' technical foundations, but to your point I've been using it since the IE days and never had critical performance issues or compelling reasons to use another browser short of company specific sites: Google properties is one: while Firefox works, Google has obviously no incentive to make it work better than Chrome, and potentially incentives for the opposite.

Companies' internal sites and tools are another: fixating on one specific browser has been an (unwise) long lasting trend, and for a company Chrome being backed by Google has a lot more appeal than Firefox. That was the same dynamic that cemented IE6 in it's position.

Perhaps Firefox missed the V8/electron train that would have made it in the same position as Linux: a platform to run other things on. But I don't know the history around that.

There’s one feature on LinkedIn that doesn’t work in Firefox (you can’t reorder skill list in your profile – dragging doesn’t do anything). That was the only time I’ve opened Chromium in the past couple of years, though – apart from testing my own websites, of course.

Drag and drop controls exist on the Web for decades. How did Microsoft mess theirs up so that it doesn't work on Firefox?

(I actually had that exact issue yesterday; I managed to do it on the Android app, and didn't think this was an issue with Firefox specifically.)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Teams web interface is better under Chromium. At least it was and I haven't tried it with Firefox recently - I use chromium like a Teams app.

Huddles in Slack don't work on Firefox on Linux: https://github.com/aws/amazon-chime-sdk-js/issues/2044. Works fine in Chrome.

This is the only reason I keep the Slack "desktop app" around.

I've been interviewed by podcasters using Riverside a bunch these last few months, and it just wouldn't load on Firefox and would scream for Chrome (and the latest Chrome version, at that). I had to use Brave in the end.

I switched to firefox when Firebug came out. I haven't switched since, although I spend a lot of time on iOS so maybe half my browsing is FF.

I'm sure I've seen a few things not work on FF, but not many, and likely things that would break on Safari too (I've had govt stuff just not work on tablet safari for sure).

Firefox works pretty well on most sites. Web standards are IMHO in a good enough Shape that anything properly developed will be fine.

Firefox doesn't work well on Google properties (for obvious and non obvious reasons). It's decent, but in my experience it 's significantly slow and resource intensive in most of Google Suite and subpar on YouTube[0]. Useable, but definitely heavier than Chrome. I ended up with a dedicated Chrome instance for meet and Sheets.

Recently I found Notion to be more and more sluggish, it might be because of cache and other relics as I spend my life in Notion, but fresh Chrome instances behave better. All in all, Notion has become worse and worse, so it might be just part of that trend.

Many enterprise extensions currently won't work at all in Firefox. It's in no part Firefox's fault, and enterprise software has always been shitty, but this is becoming a reality to me.

[0] I don't have the link at hand, but it was notably due to Google intentionally screwing up Firefox last time I looked into it...

Let me introduce you to Microsoft's Office 365 or w/e this pile of garbage is called. Especially Teams. This fiasco of Web chat programs is the reason I have to keep two browsers open.

Also Slack.

For me, webgl/shadertoy stuff as well as webusb and webserial while tinkering with esp32-based boards.

these threads really are ads huh? hilarious

> On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile

I'm not too sure why it's majorly relevant. The fact that it's not popular doesn't make it any less of a desirable option

> From a privacy preserving perspective, Firefox has no unique value

Similarly, the fact that it's not unique is somewhat irrelevant. Though the thing that's scary is what they removed from their terms and conditions.

Chrome users are often really familiar with Chrome's devtools and think Firefox is behind because they have trouble finding their way around FireFox's devtools. Truth is that Firefox built a reputation for itself amongst developers specifically because of it's very advanced devtools. Chrome has mostly caught up, but I'd still place Firefox ahead here

Besides that, uBlock Origin, Bypass Paywalls Clean, and AdNauseum working have been enough of an argument for me to be able to convince my friends to make the switch.

Even better than Brave is a "no-name" browser like Ungoogled Chromium made to protect actual privacy, not the interests of some company!

No thinly-modified version of Chromium is going to save us from Google having almost unilateral power over the implementation of web standards, creating a browser monoculture. None of these forks is making substantive changes to the browser engine; it's often just Chromium with a few configuration tweaks and cosmetic enhancements.

I agree a Firefox or WebKit browser would be better, but give me one.

I still think having an independent browser matters... especially as Google tightens its grip on the web

Those arguments all sound like "We nearly have a monoculture so let's embrace the monoculture and give up". The downward curve needs to be counter-acted, not accelerated.

good points. I use it for a very specific plugin which the author only makes available on that platform.

Firefox on iOS has a feature called “Turn on Night Mode” which can color invert any page. I use it about 100x a day and couldn’t find it anywhere else. A perfect example of why we need options.

It's true that Apple has the only independent browser engine that has enough users to make developers cater to it. But it's also true that Mozilla has seats on the relevant standards bodies, and on privacy-related issues, their presence helps act as a counterweight along with Apple.

> Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers

Chrome, Edge and Safari are all bigger than Firefox. But Firefox not in the top ten results? Unless you are counting different versions of browsers as unique entries, I cant imagine what other 7+ browsers are bigger than Firefox.

Firefox wins handily on the following:

- Sidebery (tree style vertical tabs)

- userChrome.css editing

- Stylus and all other manifest v2 extensions that Brave won't be developing custom replacements for

- Better performance with lots of tabs/windows

- Container tabs

Firefox is better for powerusers and those who like customization, Chrome is better for those who don't care about customization and just watch Netflix. Pretty much equivalent to the Android/iOS debate.