Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube.
It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. Instead of building a better experience, these engineers seem to be focused on sabotaging alternatives in the name of profit or control. The kind of mindset behind this reeks of the same tactics we see in some ad networks or big tech companies - if we can’t convince you to opt in, we’ll make sure you’re inconvenienced or frustrated until you do.
It’s a dangerous precedent because it introduces a toxic game of cat-and-mouse, where the user is constantly playing defense, trying to protect themselves from deliberate misdirection. It’s not just an ethical concern, but also an issue of how we value user autonomy in the digital space.
For the hackers out there, this is a opportunity to dig into the JavaScript code responsible for this. There’s almost certainly some interesting obfuscation or odd behavior hiding in the code, and by pulling it apart, we can both understand how these tactics work and build tools or methods to counteract them. Let’s make sure the only thing that slows down the web is bad design or slow servers, not malicious code aimed at punishing the user for making their own choices.
> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube.
I would add to the list the Linux Foundation too.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-annou...
Note that the effort there is to shift chromium to a more open governance model. This would mean Google has less influence on the project.
I don't believe splitting Chromium governance model across Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera will help Firefox in any way.
How is that possible? Would Chrome Chromium maintainer make a different implementation decision from the original Chrome, and then support and develop a real branch in the code? To have Google less influence? I highly doubt it. It is all chromewashing, to make it sound as if Chrome Chromium is an independent browser.
The origin(al) is developed within the chromium project, Chrome is already a Google styled chromium fork.
That's how it is advertised. But in reality all decisions are made by Google for Chrome and other Chrome forks just implement all of them without questions. Google wants to add a new protocol - all forks add it. Google wants to cripple adblock support - all forks do it. Etc.
Since the development is done in chromium, adding owners to the project, maybe changing governance similar to Kubernetes and the CNCF, could help steering the anti-trust away and benefit the industry as a side effect.
I wish this was the case, I doubt it'll be the case. Suppose for example that the foundation agrees that Manifest V3 is a bad idea (and, objectively, it is an awful idea). I can't imagine a world where the contributors from Google (which currently still make up the vast majority of the commits to the Chromium codebase) go back on their steps and re-implement support for V2, which would basically go against the profitability strategy of their own employer.
Same for intentionally crippling Google websites on non-Chromium browsers: given how deliberate such acts of crippling are, I have reasons to believe that it's part of Google's "works with Chrome" strategy, and I'd doubt that Google employees can do much against it.
The only way to fix the governance of Chromium is to effectively chop all the threads that connect it to Google. As long as Chromium developers who are employed at Google won't do anything that goes against the strategy of their employer, you can't have fair governance.
And yet Google is a member of the initiative. Maybe, possibly, this initiative coupled with detaching Chromium from Alphabet might lead to an opening of the Chromium engine, but more likely Alphabet joined so that if it _does_ get split off from the mother-ship due to anti-trust they'll still have sway over Chromium's direction. And that will be an advertiser-centric direction.
I'll add that whatever the purpose of this project, it isn't going to help the overall openness of the web and will only continue to boost the adoption of an engine that already has an outsized influence over web standards.
This is so backwards it seems like a joke. Honestly it reads like a rebel group announcing peace with the dictator and joining the oppression.
Linux foundation is far from a rebel group. Look at who is involved.
Linux Foundation is much closer to an Evil Corporate than a rebel group. It is a pay-for-legitimacy scheme that abuses the Linux name and goodwill.
I wish Linus & co would distance themselves from these people.
Linus & co do not follow, or respect, the values of the FOSS zealots.
He actively dislikes the GPLv3, has a good working relationship with Google on Android and ChromeOS, and has criticized attitudes in the Linux desktop community for over a decade. He famously roasted his own distribution's package maintainer for wasting their life.
All hats off to him, frankly. The Linux community can be extremely delusional at times.
All that Facebook money has gone to his head I guess. Thankfully we should still have the ability to fork the kernel if he fully loses the plot to corporate interests.
Let me copy the actually important information from the sibling comment that's about to be deleted, because this is actually important:
Linus has hated GPLv3 since at least 2006.
Linux development has been over 80% corporate funded for over a decade. FOSS contributors do not have enough talent or interest to maintain the kernel for even a few weeks. If corporate interests weren't in the kernel, the kernel would not run on modern devices, period. It would have fallen behind the times and been abandoned like countless other technologies, or replaced with a new proprietary kernel from someone else.
Linux on the desktop is not somewhat usable in spite of corporate interests. Linux on the desktop is usable today because of corporate interests.
The original comment I was replying to has an inaccurate mindset: Linux supporters generally still envision this as a community project, with community contributors, and they are so successful, that companies knock at the door politely and are lucky to get code into the kernel.
It's actually the other way around: This is a collaborative corporate project, with corporate employees contributing, but there are some random community members who can knock at the door politely and are lucky to get code into the kernel.
The community-first development model died about 2 decades ago. When the Linux Foundation talks about "community," they are talking about their corporate contributors and their communities, not us. This is also why I cringe at the excessive (not all, just excessive) hate for corporations in the online community. Without their work, rip out 80%-90% of the kernel commits every year for the last decade, and see how advanced Linux would be.
This same change is also underway at another open source project - Blender; which is now increasingly corporate funded and developed. When I see online forum posts arguing that Blender is a perfect example of how we can beat the corporations as a community, I just shake my head now.
I actually agree with you that Linux development has been captured by corporations. Except that I believe it's not sustainable. Eventually the Shareholders are going to come knocking and ask why so much engineering time and money is being wasted on some hippie-dippy Open Source junk and not returning value to them. It needs AI in it, or maybe a Linux Pro subscription with ads for the freeloaders. This is why I'm glad the kernel is tied to the GPL, so we can fork when their interests stop aligning with ours.
> ask why so much engineering time and money is being wasted on [Linux]
Most likely the corporations will say "because that is much cheaper than developing our own; 10 of our devs on Linux an 99% of devs from other corporations are much cheaper than 1000 of our devs on our own OS". And the shareholders will likely accept that.
The key thing is that for most corporations that contribute to Linux, Linux is not the product (except Red Hat, SuSe etc). Google, Facebook, etc, just need a good OS to run their billions of servers on.
> so we can fork when their interests stop aligning with ours
You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time.
That is also fine from the perspecitve of Free Software. The 4 freedoms do not include "the program must be maintainable with little enough manpower for people to do it in their free time, free of independence on corporate interests":
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.
> You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time.
Maybe a question too radical for Hacker News, but why does Linux need 1M hours/year? How much "worse" would Linux be for the end user if this year, that time spent dropped to 100k or even 10k? And which "type" of Linux user was benefiting most from that time spent (person or corporation)? Why is more automatically treated as better than less?
> The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.
Indeed, I respect the wisdom and forethought of Stallman greatly in drafting the GPL.
I think it's a reasonable question to ask, and there's surely some churn that we could do without. But don't underestimate the effort that goes into device drivers.
Are other kernels that don't get the 1M hours per year as usable by end users as Linux?
I believe most of this is hardware support, followed by refactoring. The core kernel functionality certainly doesn't change to the tune of 1M hours/year.
A. How do you contribute to the kernel in a way that only benefits the contributing organization? That's quite literally impossible in this kind of project. Even the more niche stuff like virtualization support is used by homelab enthusiasts. It's also not like Linux has 100,000 APIs for every customer under the sun.
B. Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement; CPUs, GPUs, power management, etc. Without corporate interests, try running Linux 2.2 from 1999 on a modern PC (which came out just before the $1B IBM investment). See how well it works. Fork modern 2025 Linux, and try running it on a computer that comes out in 2028. See if it even boots. If Intel's only done a minor refresh, it might work; if it's something bigger like the split to P cores and E cores, expect a brick. Even if it does boot, don't be surprised if it crashes, acts unstable, has borked performance, broken sleep/wake, broken audio, broken USB, you name it, it's probably broken.
C. A forked Linux would not have the same level of security research behind it. For example, the Linux 4 era was marked by the introduction of fuzzers and the fixing of countless bugs. A C codebase with handwritten Assembly is rather unlikely to ever become bug-free. How well would your forked non-corporate codebase handle Spectre and Meltdown, just an example, with Google's experts contributing the technique for fixing these problems efficiently (Retpoline)?
D. Added to the above, this isn't a hypothetical: The FSF didn't like the practice of proprietary firmware blobs being in the kernel; so they made their own commercial-interest-free version of Linux called Trisquel. It still uses commercially written code if it's open source; so even it can't be called completely free of commercial influence. The kicker: It runs on almost nothing, and people were complaining about how it works on nothing 13 years ago.
TL;DR: A forked Linux, is a broken Linux, that will never run well on newer hardware, and will quickly become insecure.
> Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement;
Which is why Linux is primarily corporate funded. The corporates want to sell their hardware. To sell their hardware they need to get it running on Linux, so they fund that. As hardware support constitutes most of the code contributions, most of the code that goes into Linux was because corporate actors made a decision to pay for it's development - purely in their own interests.
That's nice - this symbiosis between FOSS and corporates works well for both sides. But it's a stretch to say Linux would not exist today without it. The most you can say for certain is Linux would not have it's great hardware support without it. The BSD's don't get anything like the amount of corporate funding Linux does. They are doing fine, and notably work on common modern hardware. So could Linux even without corporate funding.
In particular, most of the interesting stuff that happens in the kernel, the stuff that determines what the kernel will look like in 10 years time, stuff like adopting Rust, is driven by people scratching itches in the FOSS tradition. Not all of it - pKVM is Google initiative. But eBPF was scratching an itch. Jens Axboe developed io_uring probably as a consequence of wanting storage to run faster at Meta - but it was definitely an itch of his. It's nice that Meta to paid him while he developed it, but saying its creation was "driven by corporate interests at Meta" is a bit of a stretch.
You're assuming that community driven FOSS development is sustainable, or can make a good long term project the size of a kernel, or a multimedia package, or anything larger than a tool or library.
In practice, I'm going to be honest and blunt, it's never worked.
3 decades of trying to replace Photoshop with GIMP (founded 1995)? Barely a dent.
3 decades of trying to unsettle Windows with the Linux desktop (KDE, 1998)? Barely a dent.
3 decades of trying to beat 3D packages with Blender (founded 1994)? Finally working now, ironically only because corporations started getting involved. Before then, Blender 2.7 was never going to do it.
2 decades of Apache trying to kill Skype with OpenMeetings (founded 2007)? Not even a dent.
2 decades of trying to kill proprietary CAD packages with FreeCAD (founded 2002)? Not even a dent.
4 decades of trying to beat Microsoft Office with what is now LibreOffice (roots in StarOffice, 1985, which was ironically a proprietary corporate project for the first decade and a half)? Barely a dent.
The Linux community, and FOSS communities, overestimate their strength without corporate interests. They have none.
Why should I care that Microsoft Office has more users than LibreOffice? I care which is the better product and has my interests as the user, and not the product, in mind. For example, and relevant to the article, I can use an ad blocker on Firefox without Big Brother Google stepping in and taking it away. Photoshop takes 30 seconds to open and illegally scrapes its users' private data for AI training. Windows has mass surveillance built in with Recall and shoves tabloid garbage and ads into the Start Menu. It means nothing to me that the worse products have more users, they are still worse products.
> Why should I care that Microsoft Office has more users than LibreOffice?
I'm sure it's a problem for some. But at my company we've been using open/libreoffice for about 20 years and I can count on one hand the times it has actually been a problem.
And all our customers often send us MS Office documents. They never use the fancy features.
> You're assuming that community driven FOSS development is sustainable
I'm confused. Is FOSS is something more than someone or some entity contributing their time and releasing the source for for free? Does it really matter if thing doing the development is a a person in a garage or a company?
There doesn't seem to be a lot of difference to me. Both a people in garages and a company have kept their pet projects going for decades, giving away their efforts over all that time. Both people in garages and and companies have lost interest in open source projects. As an example Debian is one of the longest lived open source projects on the planet. It is a community drive development. To me it looks likely it will outlast Ubuntu, which is a fork that isn't community driven.
The central tenants that make FOSS work don't seem to have much to do with whether it's community driven or not. Both can succeed. Yes, community driven efforts can fail. But so can corporate drive FOSS, as WordPress may well demonstrate.
I mean it's still a better model than, say, Adobe Photoshop. Even if corporations are contributing to it and making use of it, it still creates a useful tool for individuals that's less susceptible to many of the downsides of corporate products.
The mission of the Linux Foundation is not to mount a rebellion, it is to make Linux good.
It's not too terribly unreasonable. It's largely the Linux Foundation trying to wrest control over chromium from Google before the FTC antitrusts them or before Google does more manipulative market controlling BS.
In more polite terms they are framing themselves as an ideal long term steward for the chromium project given that courts have already ruled that Google isn't a suitable steward anymore. Chromium wouldn't be so problematic if it wasn't run by such an anticompetitive organisation. If the Linux Foundation ran chromium and orgs like Igalia (who already do a near majority of the dev work for chromiumm) took over the brunt of senior development and leadership control then it'd be a pretty solid technology stack (albeit with some weaknesses).
I personally prefer Firefox and it's associated technologies but I also acknowledge the appeal of Chromium distributions like Vanadium.
Igalia is a valued Chromium contributor, but your notion that they do a near-majority of the dev work is off by an order of magnitude.
Ah yep. I'm mistaken there. I had read somewhere at one point that they were the second largest contributor to Chromium and made assumptions I shouldn't have. My apologies.
Last autumn we finally fell to third behind Microsoft, in fairness.. But we're also the second biggest contributors to WebKit (really significant there) and Gecko too, as well as the #1 contributors to Servo, and more - if you're interested: https://bkardell.com/blog/2024-Midseason.html
They should go all in for Servo as the only future-proof browser engine.
My first though: WTF? All hail Manifest v3?
Linux Foundation is made up of corporations. This should not be a surprising outcome when you think about it that way.
And the Chromium supporter group is just a subset of those corporations.
Several leading organizations have already pledged their support for the ["Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers"] initiative, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera.
Reminds me of the Open Source Initiative. People tell me that licenses like the SSPL aren't open source because the OSI says they aren't. I tell them to look at who comprises the OSI. Nobody has yet showed me a reason why we should believe the OSI when it tells us what open source is or isn't.
It’s also laziness in software development practices. Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome. My last job a bunch of us used Firefox as our main browser, which was hugely helpful.
As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.
For years I have used Firefox as my daily driver, anything I work on works on Firefox. Maybe once a year my tester finds a problem w/ Chrome, if that.
Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
>> Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
Yep. A majority of HN crowd claim to like open source and all that, but then they use Chrome instead of Firefox due to some small perceived convenience. Nobody makes decisions based on principles these days, only their immediate wants. Hoe_math is right, we're on the edge of civilization collapse because to that.
To some extend this is also down to developer having to stop trying to be clever. I can understand having something look a little weird, maybe not align 100% correctly, but how to you actively go about building something like an e-commerce site that doesn't work in Firefox?
My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.
I randomly browsed the site with Firefox stable and I couldn't see any obvious malfunction. What exactly is not working? Is there a specific webpage where the malfunction can be seen?
> Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome
I've heard this before...
Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.
Developers will always be time crunched / lazy. Why target multiple platforms when you can just support one?
This is a management problem, not a developer problem. Yes, developers should advocate, but it's not the developers' burden to make time out of thin air.
I agree that this is a "management problem" in the sense that if you want to support Firefox, you should allocate resources for testing on Firefox.
But also - it's not high up the priority list given Firefox's marketshare. In most cases, you'll get the support by default, but I don't really see many US managers being tasked with allocating resources to support UC browser, or Opera, and those are both in the same space marketshare-wise.
My management is actively discussing EOLing several Firefox products because we have basically no real paying customers on them, and Mozilla is unpleasant to deal with in the extension space (genuinely - https://www.neowin.net/news/ublock-origin-lite-maker-ends-fi...)
You're right, although you'd probably find that in many shops developers have the latitude to use Firefox off their own initiative if they so chose.
I recently finished a 7 year stint at a company where I was CTO. I always made it clear that we needed to be testing functionality in more than just Chrome because, apart from anything else, a good chunk of our users would be on mobile, and many of those on iOS (i.e., using Safari). I used Firefox as my main browser for probably 4 - 5 of those 7 years, and I suggested engineers do the same because it tends to hew closer to web standards than Chrome does (meaning that if it works in Firefox it'll almost certainly work in Chrome, but the reverse doesn't necessarily hold). That gradually bled through the development team, with a number of the engineers using Firefox as their main browser. That's really all it needs is a few people using it for their day to day work.
I made the change on principle because I could see the way the wind was blowing and - even then - Google were doing plenty of things I didn't like. I like to think that influenced the team as well but, reality check, they probably did it to avoid me moaning at them about bugs running in Firefox all the time.
I have never had a manager that said “don’t make it work for firefox”.
What I have seen is developers do it wrong to start, then tasks to fix it get low priority due to market share based priority.
I had one who did say "don't make it work for firefox" but he was the only one.
The basic mechanic is that the off brand browser has to work hard to be compatible whereas the dominant browser works hard to be incompatible. If you develop Firefox first (have some really ideological devs) you'll find Chrome related bugs eat up 1% of your time if that. If you develop Chrome first you'll find supporting other browsers is a bear.
(In the early 2000's when IE was dominant I was afraid it wouldn't be possible to browse the web with Linux. I worked at a library that would have deployed Sun Rays as public computers if we could get Mozilla to compile on Solaris but we couldn't, even with the help of Sun support. I developed Mozilla-first and then Firefox-first and helped keep the flame alive back then.)
The system I work on now works on both because I develop Firefox-first. There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox, but otherwise the site spins like a top on both of those. Once in a while we run into a serious headscratcher on mobile Safari that burns up some dev*weeks.
> There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox
Firefox's performance engineers are eager for bug reports! You can record a performance profile [1] and file a performance bug report in Bugzilla [2]. It helps if the slow page is accessible to Firefox engineers for testing, but your performance profile is a big head start.
[1] https://profiler.firefox.com/
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp...
This is why I always develop to web standards and not to any browser. You follow the web standards and then check to see which browsers do it right. Then adjust for that browser if necessary.
Early fall 2023 it certainly feels like I caught Verizon discriminating against Firefox. It was a CSS issue in their payment portal where some information wasn't rendering as a DHTML popup but at the bottom of the page. You could still pay your bill, but to an untrained eye it looked broken. I reported it and was sent to "Executive Custom Service", which would never acknowledge the problem. They would call once a week and make some statements like the problem was on my side and they couldn't reproduce it at all, to which my BS meter kept responding "I don't believe you." After several weeks of this, the issue mysteriously disappeared one Saturday morning, with no further word to me. I'd also complained to my state PUC (this was a landline bill) and think the added pressure helped convince them to do the right thing, even though the PUC has no online jurisdiction.
At the time I hadn't thought to go back to tech support and ask somebody there to simply try it with Firefox. Then Verizon would have been pointing fingers at themselves.
Any Verizon developers here? I'd love to know the real story.
Aggressive ad blockers are often the cause of many “site doesn’t work in Firefox” issues. When the Firefox user then loads the site in Chrome, it works because the user doesn’t have an ad blocker installed in Chrome (because they don’t typically use Chrome) or their ad blocker hasn’t updated its blocklists recently.
The goal of a standard is to not be forced to code specific things for each implementation out there. This is failure of the web standards that the google implementation has become the standard.
We have web standards, but one area they breakdown is adoption of those standards.
Each browser seems to pick and choose which standards they want to adopt and when. Sometimes Chrome will support a new CSS syntax for months or years before another browser finally picks up support (or vice versa).
For web standards to truly work, there would need to be better coordination between browsers to adopt new standards in unison. Until then, developers (should) keep track of whether the syntax they're using is supported by all major browsers. Or, develop just for Chrome, which seems to be favored by most.
We vendors disagree about the relative value of different standards. Adopting at different times makes life harder on web devs, but it also seems like the only route forward. Do you want any one vendor to be able to force the others to implement something they disagree with, or (vice versa) to have veto power?
Part of the problem is that so many web standards these days are basically an officially blessed repackaging of what Chrome is already doing.
rei.com generally continues to have issues with firefox. Completely absurd.
What issues specifically? I'm a long time REI customer and a long time (since it was called Firebird) Firefox user, and I've never encountered any issues.
It may be interactions with ublock origin. On Chrome, I only have adblock plus. However, disabling UBO on Firefox does not fix the problems. The most obvious one right now: blank page after login.
I've never noticed any issues and I use Firefox as my daily driver.
maybe my rant is going to be a bit out of place here but here it goes anyways:
sometimes im glad im a technical person that can get away with a somewhat "healthy digital life" im basically immune to all the crap going on. i don't need to work too hard to meet my digital needs because im also a simple person. but i really feel bad for the normies who have to deal with all the shit the tech industry throws at them. they don't even know what's wrong, they can't pinpoint what's giving them that extra stress, building up day by day when they use their devices, handle their info, or consume entertainment. like account exhaustion, confusing UI changes every day, or why they have to navigate a sea of crap just to unsubscribe. and why do they need a new computer for software that worked fine 15 years ago? and don't even get me started on what they're doing to older people. cable companies for example are ripping them off with terrible TV boxes and nonsense plans. all their appliances need subscriptions or apps and have cryptic buttons. stores now feel like border control, straight out of a black mirror episode. i can't imagine the frustration they must feel. it just feels backwards.
AFAICT, current tech industry culture is most like what I understood of the '80s stereotype of Wall Street bro culture: sociopathic unchecked-greed that will do whatever it can get away with.
I'm not saying this to complain, but to suggest a risk of what might come next.
So far, they've run wild, and taken over computers, the Internet, AI, and information technology in general.
What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Right now, one of the few firewalls against that might be that doctors generally have traditions of ethics, and some stature to hold their ground and influence things.
Earlier Internet didn't have the same formalized ethical traditions, but had a lot of very smart people people who had altruistic intentions, as well as suspicion of those who'd attempt to twist online potential. All those ethical people were pretty much swept away in a funding gold rush, suddenly with little to no influence over it.
(Google did grab some of those people, because Google said the right words, so the altruistic techies thought it was their people, but look what eventually happened even there.)
Just like virtually every IoT product and Web site violates every user, what happens if a medical gold rush (say, some kind of implant, or transformative process) means that what we thought was a bulwark of ethical practitioners, is easily bulldozed over, by investment money and culture. And then everyone's body is violated by the newly unchecked industry-wide socipathy, with no alternatives to even live?
> What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Allow me to simultaneously assuage and stoke your fears. There is little chance of big tech disrupting the medical field; Because every aspect of the medical field has already been seized by the insurance companies. See United Health / Optum.
We have never asked for this (c) :)
The irony that Google, who made their bones on the "open web", is now attacking open web standards and trying to turn the internet into their own walled garden that they control every aspect of I hope is not lost on the people here.
I have trouble seeing that as irony in a world where "embrace, extend, extinguish" exists.
Agreed. It would be ironic if it wasn't literally the exact same arc that every single company in this industry goes through.
* Scrappy upstart catches the industry off guard * Wild success and growth * Becomes bloated, unable to innovate, and addicted to its cash cow * Begins turning the screws on its users to appease shareholders
It's all just a natural part of the enshittification progression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis.... We could also start calling it Embrace, Extend, and Enshittificate
Extinguish is fine.
The lesson here is that there's no such thing as Big Tech that is not hostile towards the people. They will say whatever people want to hear on their way to market dominance, but once there, they will mercilessly fuck those same people for every cent they can get.
(I would actually extend this to all large businesses in general, but we can start with tech.)
Once the love of "Microsoft Loves FOSS Again" fades away as they aim to enter the next phase, some other company (Cloudflare? Tailscale?) will receive all the developer love until yet again, people realize that for-profit companies don't actually have their best interest at heart.
Rinse and repeat forever...
The only one who has your best interests at heart is you. And you sometimes get it wrong.
It is very common the case that someone else will do something that aligns with your best interest. (love for example) In fact it is often in your best interest to do something that helps someone else and appears to harm you. (giving money to the poor at first glance appears to harm you and thus be illogical - but there are a number of secondary results of this that make it in your best interest anyway)
I was convinced at the time--and I'm still convinced--that there was a TON of astroturfing on places like Reddit and even here when Nadella became CEO of Microsoft and there was that whole "Microsoft hearts Open Source" campaign. Every other comment was "You're just stuck in the past. You're as bad as the conspiracy theorists. It's not even the same people running the company anymore. Blah blah blah."
And now they own Github and they're training their AI models on you and your code and forcing that crap into a bunch of PCs. They were about to push out a "feature" to Windows that periodically took screenshots of what you were doing and used AI to analyze what you were doing. Then they sprinkle some glitter for the easily-distracted and tell you that it's actually a feature for you. Last I heard, they shelved the idea for now because of the backlash, but we all know they'll circle back around.
But, yeah, I'm a tinfoil hat weirdo who's just a "hater."
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat
Somehow I wasn't previously familiar with about:compat, which led me down a rabbit hole to finding about:about. Great stuff!
Even market-dominant companies do this. Windows ships a bunch of backward compatibility patches. Graphics card drivers (especially Nvidia) wholesale replace shaders in popular games.
> DuckDuckGo discriminates against WebKitGTK's standard user agent by returning an HTTP 400 Bad Request error when loading every search result.
I guess they only want spyware browsers on DDG.
Thing is, Opera had to do this specifically to work around stuff like UA-based degradation of service on YouTube etc.
Also it boggles my mind that an advertising company (1) offers its own ad blocker to block competitors ads, and (2) circumscribes what ad blockers can do, and (3) nobody stops them... All when the FBI is saying you should run an ad blocker to avoid being the victim of a crime.
Anti trust has been a joke since the 70s, when the threshold moved to "consumer harm (so blatant people will vote me out of office)"
> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube.
While I agree; between an up-to-date uBlock Origin and https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/chrome-mask YT is quite usable.
Long term I'm more worried by Mozilla leadership than Google shenanigans.
From your link:
> Please don't use Chrome Mask on YouTube. It won't resolve any issues, and it will make your experience worse over time. If some issue got fixed after toggling Chrome Mask on, it most likely got fixed by the addon clearing the cache. But you can do that yourself, too, without the need for this addon.
I can't seem to find your citation from the add-on page.
Might be a placebo but YT appear more responsive with it on than off after a ctrl+f5.
Edit: appears to be in the reviews: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/r...
YT is quite usable
Supposedly it's just been fixed?
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1i182q7/firefox_13...
What irks me even a bit more is that user experience is degraded even for logged in premium users. They just really don't want us using other browsers.
FF has been my dailer driver for a long time. But google blocking ublock origin was a deal breaker. I now only use chrome when a site is otherwise unusable.
It's not the engineers making these decisions. They write the code they are told to write. Some middle manager / VP gets a promotion if they 'increase engagement', 'increase ad-spend', or some other hollow metric they chase. They are the ones deciding to send any 1-3 star ratings to customer support, and 4-5 ratings recorded as an actual rating. It's not about the users at all. It's about gaming the system for some manager's benefit.
I am not a person who normally moralizes to others, but I can say I have quit jobs where I found the work to be unethical or that company policies required me to bend my ethics.
The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical engineers who do not consider the effect of their work in the long run.
This. If you only shoot the crowds when your overlord demands it, that does not make you innocent.
Yes because implementing a pop-up is akin to murder.
The moral issues are the same even when the gravity of the offense is different.
Same here. Ultimately, the engineer is the one typing in the code and hitting submit. They are at the very least complicit and need to at least share responsibility.
That's privilege talking. Not everyone is in a position to quit their jobs over the morality of implementing a pop-up.
Empirical, but I have noscript and ublock enabled on Mozilla and whenever I go to youtube, it reloads three times in a laggy manner before it will let me type into the search. I check to see that I am not logged into gmail before using youtube.
I am happy to do all that, because I like my videos uninterrupted and my web experience lean.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money? There is a web based on hobbyist platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon, and you can clearly see why they haven't captured the masses.
There is no reason I, a user, will intentionally use your product when you fill it with ads that are, at best annoying, and at worst malware vectors.
You have your right to develop things your way, I have a right to say no thank you. Google, though, is so big it is basically saying "you don't have a choice." That's the problem and one that Google spends billions to enforce. They use the weight of the uninformed to apply pressure to the rest of us.
It was no better when Microsoft did it with IE, nor is it any way proper, now.
Because it's not catering, it's actively making it worse for the rest of us? Because not everything is about money? Because of ethics?
Why would I, as a doctor whose income stream is based on people getting sick, intentionally support policies that make people healthier
This is basically true. The ad supported web sucks, but the solution is to not use it.
The solution is how we solve it. There’s a technical end to every demand, and at the end of the day regulation only can do so much for both sides. The reality sorts everything else.
The solution you mentioned is valid too.
But you cannot ignore the fact that internet is for everyone and not for google. Google minus all the shit it does to the internet can definitely exist in some form. Claiming it’s either this or nothing is just defeatist.
If google and youtube disappeared tomorrow, I’d be the first among those guys who buy hdds and torrent videos from these. For no money, like I did with all torrents in my life. There would be less professional videos obviously, but almost everyone agrees it’s a good thing (quit SM, anxiety, kids social issues, etc talks).
Sorry, I was ambiguous. I just meant not to use the ad-supported part of the web. Yes, the rest of it is fine.
Even a large chunk of the ad supported internet is happy to continue sending you bits if you don’t render their ads. This is fine, the convention has always been I’ll send whatever (non-malicious) bits I want, you send whatever you want, and we’ll render it however we want. YouTube specifically doesn’t send bits to people who don’t render their ads, on purpose, which is also fine, they just don’t want those of us who don’t render ads around.
Entitled ad guys don’t get to change the social convention to add some obligation to render their ads. If they don’t want to serve bits to users that block their ads, that’s fine, but if they send bits I’ll render them however I want on my system.
Exactly. It’s amazing that ads-ers send bits regardless and expect them to be consumed as is, as if it was some fundamental law of nature to do so. Simply don’t send, wink. That wink makes them feel uneasy because it breaks that wonderful narrative of theirs. “If you don’t want to watch ads, just don’t visit”. Yeah, just paywall us then, come on, we’re all yours, signed in, vendor locked. I’m so ready to leave and delete the bookmark, what are you waiting for?
People are playing this cat-and-mouse game with YouTube specifically, where they’ll circumvent the desire to block them for not rendering ads. I think this is a bad thing for users to do. But I mostly think it should make the ad providers uncomfortable. Because they know that most people won’t play cat and mouse for their content. In any case other than YouTube, people would just move on.
They know it. We know they know it, because if they really didn’t want to send bits to ad-blockers, they’d copy the first step of the back-and-forth that Google did with YouTube, and those users would no longer be a problem.
> Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money?
Thank goodness you're not a doctor.
You can tell who has never been in control of a budget and had to fire people because more than half their audience is using adblockers.
Why you even start a business so risky and bad mannered?
I get your points, but have you tried with less invasive advertising? Like, you know, static pictures downloaded from your domain with a HREF on them?
Because you cannot even control your ads to users? No one of you devs gets punishment for tracking users' personal information, pushing scam, phishing and malware to users, and now users are not even allowed to protect themselves? Users don't drop trackers and malwares to your servers, why do you drop trackers and malwares to users' machines?
Because you are working for a corporation that joins in World Wide Web Consortium, who literally says this in the Ethical Web Principles?
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts. We will build features and write specifications that respect people's agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#render
If you cannot maintain your service, paywall your features, not forcing malwares and trackers to users. No one forced you to serve 1080p, 1440p or 4K videos to everyone for free. You were the one literally "advertised" yourself as a "free" service at beginning, in order to hoard how many users you could. And now when you cannot control your own costs, you push malwares and trackers to users? The mentality of hoarding users with "baits" like "free" are the real poisons for the internet, for both of you and your users, NOT users who are doing exactly what World Wide Web Consortium tells them.
Where are all your MBAs in your corporations? The ones bragging about themselves on LinkedIn and now the only resolutions you can think of is pushing malwares and trackers to users? All of the finance classes in your college should be simplified to advertisement classes I guess? That would save a lot of resources for everyone.
Let me remind you that Ad-Block Plus collapsed when it's users revolted over their plan to whitelist simple vetted advertisements in a truce with advertisers.
ABP was foolish and actually believed it's users were trying to make a statement about invasive ads. Really their users just didn't want to see any ads at all, ever, regardless of the circumstances.
ABP didn't even address any trackings with their program. It's just pure cosmetics.
> Really their users just didn't want to see any ads at all
Because the internet was filled with malicious ads before any content blockers having more people? The hazardours time of Windows XP/7 with malwares-affected from the ads appear like meals in every day's news? Sorry, internet ads are doomed from those times. They are migrained to everyone's minds that users are walking in a landmines with those ads. If a business is entirely dependent on those ads, that business should not exist. Doing business is hard, right? I mean, like, most of other ethical jobs on the world.
Users are just doing what World Wide Web Consortium says.
And most people don't have issue with static ads like those in newspapers and magazines. People would be fine if business wants to advertise something, but the tech ads industry does not only want to promote things to you, they want to capture your attention as well, regardless of if you want the thing or not. They think they can only do so by knowing you as well as your mother does.
If a business have something to sell, just let people know. No need to help create a surveillance state.
You forgot to mention it involved paid whitelisting, and the requirements for compliance were so weak that even major malvertising vectors, like Google, were considered acceptable.
Quite frankly, at this point, I just want any business that runs on ads to crash and burn. The whole business model is insanely toxic and sociopathic and shouldn't be tolerated at all.
Those corporations with MBAs will find another way-- you're only hurting the independents and destroying the open web with your hipster nonsense
> Those corporations with MBAs will find another way
Not YouTube.
Those "nonsense" are from World Wide Web Consortium, users are just doing what they say. The "hipster" are the ones not respecting those Ethical Web Principles. Users are not injecting trackers and malwares to those independents' servers. Why do those independents inject trackers and malwares to users' machines?
The ones who destroyed the open web are the business, including independents and corporations, with the mentality of luring more users to use their "free" services, without any plans of controlling the cost, ETHICALLY and MORALLY. Scale, scale, scale, more users, more beautiful number; until their pocket is burnt and now their resolution is pushing those trackers and malwares to compensate the cost.
Ads, malvertisements and trackers are not the open web.
What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox?
Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.
> What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox?
The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
The last serious performance issue I saw with FF+YT was when YT added a glowing border around videos when the tab was in dark mode. FF just wasn't able to efficiently run that effect. I don't think it's very reasonable to say that YT or any other site should be limited by the performance problems of FF. Maybe they should have detected the issue before release but the explosion of browser x platform x dark/light theme x graphics driver is a large space to sweep.
"Should have detected the issue" implies it was an accident. YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Even when they weren't actively sabotaging other browsers they had big Chrome banners and "Works Better in Chrome" signs for several years in the past. If they did it _then_, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just "missed it" now, and easier to assume they do things that are broken in other browsers intentionally.
> YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught.
Can you please share sources regarding this? I'm not familiar with any instance like this.
Edge (Spartan or Legacy) had a big fight with YouTube that YouTube was doing a hidden (not visible to users) DOM animation underneath the video player in a way that Chrome ignored but tanked Edge performance. There were several release cycles where Edge would specifically target that hidden animation performance, only for YouTube to make the animation worse and ratchet it back.
I lived through that as a user. (I was one of the like 5 Edge Spartan users, I know, lol.) I could see the dumb animation in dev tools and manually delete it for better performance. It was a nice thing I had some technical skills. I know for mainstream users the solution was "watch YouTube in Chrome".
It's hard to find to other sources because Microsoft intentionally broke the SEO on the Edge brand and you know Google is the only other major search engine. Not that they'd intentionally down-pagerank bad news about a Google property, I'm sure.
"Intentionally tanked" is just nerd spin. I've never seen an actually convincing recitation of these stories.
A lot of the reported issues with YouTube on Firefox (especially when paired with adblockers) involve things like increased page load times, UI elements not functioning as smoothly, or even video playback glitches. Some of this is due to JavaScript that’s intentionally designed to slow things down if you’re blocking ads or using a non-Google browser, as we’ve been discussing.
I would guess most of that is probably Polymer.
IIRC the story was, when Youtube was redesigned a while ago they used an early spec for Web Components, that they were pushing to be standardized and was fully implemented in Chrome. But they had to add Polymer as a polyfill for other browsers. Then the version of Web Components we actually got wasn't entirely compatible with that early spec, so Polymer is still in use for non-Chrome browsers.
I don't know how much of that's changed since then, but the complaints are basically the same as when that happened.
I haven't seen any bugs on Firefox mobile + uBlock Origin + Android + Pixel 4a 5g (I hate upgrading phones, sue me).
The only glitch I reliably get is watching videos at 1.5x sometimes freezes video (but audio still plays). Expect that's more hardware and memory pressure related tho.
Also, I wasn't aware YouTube mobile has ads? I think uBlock might be eating them. Although possibly whatever is lagging others experiences too...
>Also, I wasn't aware YouTube mobile has ads? I think uBlock might be eating them.
That would be the point of an ad-block add-on wouldn't it?
I ended up switching back from Firefox to Chrome after a few weeks because I found that if I had more than about 6 YouTube tabs opened, the YouTube interface would become very laggy. I blamed it on Firefox at the time but maybe it was something intentional by Google.
My Firefox does this on Windows. I have no idea how many tabs I have open, but regularly the whole YouTube tab I have open freezes, especially if you try to watch one video, and then another, and the whole UI is delayed by many seconds. Even closing the tab will have the audio playing for several seconds in the background. It's not due to load or hardware as far as I can tell. The videos play just fine in Chrome or Edge. I still use Firefox as my daily browser (previously Chrome), but these issues are super annoying. I don't want to have to restart my browser or PC all the time. I don't know if it's some combination of extension/ad-blocking or YouTube doing stuff, but it's very annoying.
Unrelated to that, but on a Ubuntu laptop I have Firefox tabs regularly stop working entirely. They just won't load anything, and the only fix is to open a new tab and that loads fine most of the time. Other times I have to restart Firefox. I've tried searching for others experiencing this problem and even asked in Mozilla channels on Matrix, but even then I didn't come up with any answers. The laptop's hinge broke last year so I haven't used it since then, so likely never going to figure out what was going on.
This was fixed in the latest update: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/134.0.1/releasenotes/
Update your firefox now and the issue is gone.
It was basically the whole reason for the update.
Google changed their code to create a bunch of objects over time, and those objects didn't get cleaned up. It was just a standard memory leak issue.
Except it heavily impacted users who kept a youtube tab open or pinned.
The bug was reported and a fix released in a little under 2 weeks.
Maybe more related to youtube than I thought, but I have trouble closing tabs and firefox with 15 or 20 tabs would eat all my CPU. Pages loaded much slower and the experience across the board was often pretty poor. I had to go back to Chrome and I don't miss FF at all. I tried.
That is not my experience. I use FF exclusively, I can't remember the last time I used Chrome.
I have over 1200 tabs open at the moment, including at least 100 youtube tabs, and mine runs fine even with a bunch of other stuff running.
I do find that if I go over 150 windows open then things start to become problematic, but I think that's because my GPU is only 8Gb.
CPU is usually at about 10% on an i7-12900k.
How…how many videos are you watching at one time?
I go through my feed or history and bg-open the links I want to watch. Then I watch them.
What a strange confusion, as if all people must have the same "workflow". Sorry, no intent to sound negative, but why not give it some thought at least. It's "6 tabs", not "6 videos playing at the same time".
As someone who hates the auto-recommendation system on YouTube and turns it off, I also appreciate this is sometimes the safest/easiest way to watch only the videos I actually intend to watch.
This seems intentionally YouTube's UX design fault, they too heavily try to push you to "auto-play". YouTube has a "Watchlist" feature where you can build a playlist. When it works it is exactly what I want, but it feels like every so many months it mysteriously breaks for a while or they hide the button for it behind some new hidden gesture or menu they expect you psychic out of their UI. (If you've never heard of "Watchlist", no wonder. It seems intentionally hard to discover.) Lately I've been complaining that YouTube adds random "auto-play" videos even to a manually curated "Watchlist" if you don't pay enough attention or watch past the end of the list (even with auto-play and recommendations entirely off).
I guess it’s not the same as Watch Later. I think I remember “add to queue” button right on videos, that was it probably.
I’m still using Watch Later, but for long videos I have no time for.
Yeah, it was named "Queue" for a while at one point. I think "Watchlist" is the most consistent name it has had, and yeah that does add (intentional?) confusion with Watch Later.
On the internet, no one knows you have compound eyes.
Not OP but I read it as "6 tabs" not "6 YouTube tabs."
I sometimes do have several Youtube tabs open to line up things I want to watch next.
To this, have you tried running a no-autoplay style extension? (Not exactly this scenario, but lists might be modifiable)
I expect YT is probably doing some preloading or heavyweight running in a loaded-but-not-playing tab.
Convert that to load-on-click, and you'll likely fix your issue.
We’re shifting targets here.
The fact is, it doesn’t happen in Chrome for “magical” reasons, according to a comment few levels up. And regular non-tech users won’t debug this with click to play or whatever. We expect that YT does it absolutely intentionally.
It bends userbases however it wants due to its multi-dimensional reach, and we’re like “hmm maybe extension would help prevent accidental preloading issue”. I just don’t get it.
No need – Firefox does that out of the box for tabs opened in the background (I open tabs via middle/command click)! So there is no problem for me.
Not totally related but on Firefox mobile you can't have a Youtube video playing while switching to another app anymore.
I think this is something that Google requires on Play Store, but there's a Firefox extension you can install to make it work: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-backgro...
Aren't every firefox user using newpipe or other yt frontends on mobile?
I mean if you care enough to not use the default mobile browser, surely you found out about newpipe and the myriad of other youtube frontends.
My main issue is NewPipe struggles with being attached to an account. Its a great app for me to open a video link in / use to download it.
While using firefox mobile + ublock its easier to be logged into a youtube account and dig through favorites, etc.
Are you on Android? AFAIK Mobile Firefox on iOS is just safari with a different skin and on Android it's still not really the same as desktop Firefox.
I think what's actually happening is that they are targeting uBlock + Firefox on desktop for punishment.
Mobile Firefox on Android.
With Firefox on Linux HD Videos are the default, whilst Chrome hasn't integrated DRM for a long time, leading to SD only.
On Android, Firefox has much more extensions, such adblockers.
FUD
Don't like YouTube's ads, great don't use it. You aren't entitled to get it for free though.
Google isn't entitled to invade my privacy, harvest my data and waste my time with ads. Installing an adblocker isn't an act of entitlement, it's an act of self-defense.
And google is entitled to infer that you're using it and serve you different content, or none at all.
And I'm entitled to publicly shame software engineers who implement this kind of stuff for Google.
You should instead support businesses with a business model that fits your philosophy and try to persuade other users to do the same. If you aren't helping make other business models successful, you aren't really achieving anything.
Best of luck. I actually hope it works, but I'm not optimistic.
I'm pretty sure it won't, given that it hasn't worked so far for much worse stuff (like people implementing the panopticon at Palantir).
It's not possible to shame a group of people who can't even agree on baseline ethical issues around their profession. For every engineer who refuses to work on guided missiles or the Torment Nexus and would feel shame to do so, there's another engineer who would find it an interesting technical problem.
When such things work, it's not because people who do it feel ashamed, it's because the society ostracizes them so much that it becomes actually inconvenient to function in it.
Oh, and it is an interesting problem. In the abstract.
If your internet server serves content, I'm entitled to connect to it. If you don't want to serve content without a login, you have the option to not do so. That's the way the internet works. You don't get to have your cake - free and public access to content - and eat it, too, by imposing your own requirements on the technology, introducing an adtech gatekeeping system.
YouTube or any of the others could simply put up a login gate, and then nobody could access any of the content unless they're logged in, and have agreed to additional terms of use.
As it stands, all the content is free and public. In legal terms, as per the Supreme Court of the US, the gate is up, and they are not entitled to impose additional restrictions except where allowed or required by law, such as age restriction, moderation, or copyright situations.
You are entitled to get those videos for free unless or until YouTube decides to lower the gate. That's how the internet works, and it's a wonderful, good thing.
Fuck ads. Block them all. Eventually they're going to be regulated and companies will be forced to stop mass commercial surveillance under threat of fines and hopefully prison time. Absent surveillance and mass data harvesting, adtech becomes much less lucrative, and maybe we'll see markets develop that compete on product quality, and value to the consumer, instead of the endless cycle of enshittified garbage and attempts to derail the open and free public internet.
> If your internet server serves content, I'm entitled to connect to it.
Nope
As far as I can tell, this case went nowhere:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Department_of_Element...
I'm curious if you know of any court cases that back up your position. I've connected to a lot of servers today and downloaded all the information they sent me.
I think that's a different issue. I can serve content behind a paywall, that doesn't make you entitled to it.
The OP explicitly called out logins. Are you being intentionally misleading or just dense or what?
The issue is about preventing users from watching if they block ads. Talking about logins is being intentionally misleading.
No, talking about logins is the fucking point. The internet works a particular way, with technical requirements and protocols and conventions. It exists in the real world where laws govern our behaviors and rights and those with the biggest stick or bank account don't get to dictate terms. According to the technical protocols and the legal regimes in and by which the internet exists, if you serve or broadcast or publish information without restriction, it's considered Gate Up, meaning the public is entitled to interact with it, because that's essentially what you're announcing to the world.
Connecting to the Public Internet, serving content to any and every connection, without login, means you are effectively broadcasting your content and have no legal basis to impose terms. This is why scraping is legal; the only defense against scraping is to put up a login wall - Gate Down. If the gate is down, you can impose your own conditions and agreements with the binding legal force of a contract.
"By continuing to use this site you're agreeing to blah blah blah" is cute fiction and has no legal bearing in the US. The internet works the way it does because it's empowered and protected by law and convention.
I have the right to manage traffic to and from a device I own. If your server sends me traffic, it's communicating something. If it sends me content on request without my having entered into a contract, then the default case is that I'm entitled to that content, full stop. It's up to you, the provider, to decide and manage how your content gets served, and whether you want to participate in the default mode of public access. By not incorporating a login on a server you connect to the internet, you are choosing, defacto, to participate in the public access mode of content serving, and are responsible for doing so. You are expressly granting anyone connected to the internet permission to download that content, making them entitled to it by the mere fact of connecting to the world wide web, in the same way that projecting a photograph on a public wall is expressly granting the public permission to view said projection, or by speaking in public, thereby granting the public the right to hear what you say, and so on, and so forth.
I'd hazard that a vast majority of users of the internet are completely ignorant about what servers and clients are doing, and the laws and systems which govern them. I can choose to block signals from ad servers, and i can choose to access content from a server over protocols which it's prepared to serve. Youtube does this; it's too valuable for them to remain gate up, thereby leaving third party clients and other methods of access on the table. It's perfectly legal, respectable, ethical, and moral to skip ads. I'd even go so far as to say it's immoral to participate in adtech, so by avoiding it, you're actively making the world a better place, even if it's only yourself.
You can gate it behind watching ads.
What if you serve it to me from behind the paywall without me paying?
My client: "Hey, I didn't pay, but can I have that data?"
Your server: "Sure! Here it is!"
Or we could just let you and other people like you subsidize it.
I've used Pocket Cast for a little over a year and a half. Just manually skipping through ads when I have my phone handy and they come on, the app reports I've apparently saved 14 hours of wasted time.
I've been blocking ads in Firefox for nearly 20 years and have been helping friends and family do it for nearly as long. I'm not going back because I should feel bad for some company with billions of dollars in profits that doesn't care about me or any of my privacy. I go the extra step further and use the banned from Chrome store extension, Ad Nauseum, to click on nearly every single blocked ad.
I'm not saying you anyone should feel bad. If you have a principled objection to the status quo you should support companies with business models you prefer, and try to persuade others to do the same. Otherwise your just taking advantage of a loop hole, and shouldn't complain if/when the company tries to block it.
>it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them.
I don't think its "almost like", I think it "actually is", and that its intentional.
There is a perspective that is now prevalent in tech and business that users are good only as far as you can monetize them. Any concepts of respect or value outside of that have been discarded.
There used to be a sense that you needed to continue improving a product to keep charging the same or more for it. Now companies expect you to pay more every year while products are stagnating or being enshittified to extract higher profit margins on top of the increased prices they are charging.
Tech is now run by Business/Sales people, and every user is a statistic in a spreadsheet they are trying to extract the most money from for the least amount of investment.
Data collection and behaviour tracking is one side of the coin, but we really don't talk about why companies are willing to pay so much for that data or what they do with it... that's a conversation I think needs to be focused on.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers
Is this actually a thing? As far as I'm aware all degradations in non-Chromium browsers have been unintentional bugs, either caused by a YouTube bug or a non-YouTube bug (i.e. in the browser or an extension) (note I'm specifically not commenting on the last portion of your comment regarding "for people using adblockers").
I unintentionally burned down a dozen houses because I was too incompetent to properly test the propane systems I was hooking up to houses, but only the ones built by competing contractors that didn't quite fit my way of doing things. How can you call that anything but unintentional and how can you possibly hold me accountable?
If you have a lot of technical churn, and only test perf on Chromium, then you could certainly claim that the result is "unintentional", but it's almost guaranteed based on that circumstance.
> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube.
Can you explain this more? I don't understand what this means.
Google has a habit of intentionally delivering degraded versions of their services to not Chromium based browsers, particularly non-Chrome versions of their browsers (determined by User Agent).
There's a pretty famous example of Google deploying a specific variations of Youtube to Microsoft Edge browsers (back when Edge had it's own engine) and that specific variation would cause Edge's hardware acceleration to break. If you overrode the user agent to present as google chrome, the problematic invisible parts of the page disappeared and everything worked as intended. And what the specific problem HTML was would change just as fast as the MS team could roll out fixes. In effect they were playing a game of "break the browser" against their competitors to force them to apply temporary fixes that would then later have to be removed resulting in unnecessary code churn in their competitors' code bases.
Youtube intentionally degrades the user experience if you use Firefox, at least if you are using a proper ad blocker. And there really isn't much reason to use Firefox if you aren't also using uBlock. So by targeting the users of uBlock+Firefox, YouTube is aggressively degrading the experience of Firefox users. Things I've noticed include:
1. Every video defaults to the absolute lowest resolution (240 or 320) until I manually switch it to a higher setting.
2. Occasional (but fairly frequent) 30-second delay before a page loads (loads enough to show a black page, then just freezes for a while. During this delay, refreshing the page gives the same result.
3. Rarely, interstitial notice pages threatening vague consequences if I continue to use an ad blocker.I'm only an occasional YT user, but I don't have any of those issues and use uBlock+Firefox and NextDNS.
I wonder if using DNS level ad blocking would prevent this.
I avoid YouTube as much as possible anyway as they force me to login.
They may actually be implementing something on the server side to degrade the performance of connections because they have me flagged as a ublock user.
A while back nobody would believe that Google's search dominance could be disturbed... and now many have either switched away or stopped using search altogether. It takes me two clicks to set a search to DDG, Kagi or other and Google has lost this customer (often a family) forever.
So let them be arrogant and loose their YouTube customers over time too.
Google still has close to 90% market share with DDG being a little more than a half percent.
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo...
Edit:Wrong year - that was 2020 this is 2024
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo...
You've linked to 2020.
2024 is at https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo..., but the numbers seem to be identical.
Change is sometimes slow. Let’s see how Google does as a century old company.
In the grand scheme of things, they’re still a fairly young giant.
The thing is I see it everywhere around me. People don't care looking for a better search engine. Worse I am pretty sure that most people do not know they can choose their search engine and can define whatever is used when searching in the url bar.
Sure, today. Right now.
That’s what I’m saying. Search engines are still a part young technology in the grand scheme of things.
No reason to believe this is the end state.
From what I see, people don't even care to search anymore. They mostly go direct to an app.
I didn’t realize I was looking at the 2020 stats. But the 2024 stats are the same
Defining the market correctly is always an important first step. Those numbers don't include LLMs.
While I’ve been using ChatGPT with web search for almost two years as a paid user, the majority of people don’t and that has just gone free in the last few months.
But when I just want a simple search, I still use Google first out of habit.
freetube is a superior experience for consuming youtube content in every way, including not running google’s javascript so they cannot mess with the users in the same way. it has adblock and sponsorblock built in.
that said, firefox has been my browser of choice as a web dev for most of my career. (im old enough to have used netscape before that).
i remember having super powers compared to other devs with the help of firebug :-)
about youtube being totally unusable on firefox: is it just youtube/google being evil as is customary or also firefox having loads of memory leaks, as its usual too? (plenty of mem leak bugs with video/audio reported over the years, many very recent and still open)
I was about to write that YouTube works flawlessly for me in Firefox on Mac, but I just upgraded to a monster of a M4 MBP, so it's probably just overcoming these issues (malicious or otherwise) via brute force.
I watch youtube on a 10 years old macbook air 11, and it works flawlessly with firefox and ublock origin.
Firefox+uBO on Fedora/W11 here, with Firefox being my primary browser for close to 8 years. I only run in to an issues maybe once a year, where I have to pop open Edge/Chrome for some random edge cases to work. I've used Firefox on dodgy, overly burdened and hacked together systems with no issues that were memorable.
The only problem I really remember is at one point Firefox having issues under linux when NVIDIA was swapping their main driver over to the "open-sourced" version, there was some performance issues with decoding, not unusable - but it was resolved within a week.
But, this is just my experience.
I've used firefox for a very long time and have never had an issue with youtube...
Firefox + ublock origin seems to be the combo allowing me the best user experience with youtube. I have no idea what the previous poster is talking about really.
Yes
YouTube works perfectly on Firefox if you pay for YouTube Premium. Haven't noticed any bugs, if it leaks memory or something it's not noticeable on my machine.
That's how Chrome started. I remember it showing a banner with itself on /. which froze a page on scrolling over it for a few seconds. In all browsers except Chrome. Never understood this Chrome-go-go mob mentality that everyone had back then. It was literally an ads-network prodived crappy browser with just tabs and urlbar. It was fast, because it did nothing and had no cpu pressure from the banners. I wouldn't be surprised if it was "fast" all this time only due to special treatment from google, youtube and the corresponding ads/tracking scripts.
"Precedent", yeah.
It was fast because in 2008 it used V8 [0] and other browsers didn't.
Eventually competitors caught up.
And that was fast because google pushed on megabytes of javascript and tight loops in it. Regular ajax (now known as htmx) webpages worked absolutely fine in other browsers. I regularly scrolled through a whole freebsd single-html handbook and it never lagged in e.g. presto.
Websites aren't expensive to run even on a slow interpreter. Even medium-complexity apps don't do much and could be written in python or ruby back then.
The only source of website lag is ads networks.
Nah, I remember Firefox in 2008 being a miserably bloated and slow experience. Guess it was because of no Electrolysis and any other refinements in the last two decades.
Yep, same. Firefox now is decent, but back in the day it was awful. I remember trying it out early on and immediately going back to IE because Firefox was significantly slower. Chrome was a marked improvement over both IE and Firefox, so it won.
> these engineers seem to be focused
Managers.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
It's also crazy that we've let ad companies tell us that using a non-Google browser is the same thing as using an adblocker. It is not the same and it never was.
I use Firefox with no adblocker installed. I don't mind ads to an extent. I do mind tracking and find micro-targeting disgusting and creepy and evil, so I use Firefox, and I use its Enhanced Tracking Protection, and I only log in to the major Ad Companies like Google/YouTube, Amazon, Meta, others in dedicated containers that only are for their sites themselves. It's sad and annoying how many ad networks accuse me of having an adblocker just for using Firefox (or Safari) with relatively cleaner than average cookies.
Show me the old school of ads, the "Superbowl" broadest audience ads, the stuff that advertising companies "knew" for centuries of their existence as "common sense" that was the most useful way to make and sell ads before tech companies got involved and decided that user privacy was up for auction to the highest bidder. The way I see it: If an ad network can't do that and sees this as "adblocking", it deserves to die and something better needs to step up and eat their lunch. That includes Google and Meta's ad networks. That includes "Admiral" and any other network that buys ads from creepy "Temu".
The firehose of cash is ads and user tracking, not serving better video.
It's such an unprecedented amount of money that it corrupts everything else and distorts the market.
You used LLMs to write this comment.
Using an ad blocker (and not paying for a subscription in the case of YouTube) isn't the "user making their own choices", it's stealing content.
If a creator puts up ads or a paywall, it's because they want to be compensated. You should either respect their wish or simply not view their content.
I understand this perspective, but I disagree with it.
If someone wants to use a public space (i.e., the Internet), then they have accept that technological solutions to annoyances are also part of that.
Block it with a subscription if you don't accept this reality. But getting the benefits of a free, global audience doesn't entitle the artist to any means of revenue they choose, including what annoys and harms people.
It's like saying you have to walk the long way around to your exhibit through the concessions hall before seeing my display, when someone can just take a shortcut and skip that, and blaming them for doing so.
> But getting the benefits of a free, global audience
The benefit of the audience is literally the ad views (or Premium views).
A restaurant is also a public space. But you can't eat for free or behave as you wish there.
If the restaurant puts food on the public sidewalk I'm free to pick it up. The internet is not inside of someone's business, they are inside of it. It is a public space and if they publish without a paywall, I'm free to consume that how ever I like. Your analogy is ridiculous and makes you come across as a simp for Big Advertising.
Sigh. Why can't you write three sentences without resorting to insults? Usually people behave like that when they know they are wrong.
> If the restaurant puts food on the public sidewalk I'm free to pick it up.
If someone leaves their purse on the sidewalk and you just take it, you're committing a crime. Consuming a restaurant's food without paying for it is also a crime. It being on the sidewalk doesn't make it not their property (or the property of whoever paid for it).
> The internet is not inside of someone's business, they are inside of it. It is a public space and if they publish without a paywall, I'm free to consume that how ever I like.
There's already many court precedents that no, you can't consume it "however" you like. For example, all copyright laws apply.
Ad blockers are a grey area in that yes, they're not disallowed, but that also means that companies are allowed to mess with you more or less however they want (YouTube for example throttles browsers with active ad blockers).
using an ad blocker is the ONLY option to avoid adds. You can pay evilcorp for a subscription/premium account/whatever and they'll still try to force you to watch 10 minutes of adds for a 1 minute video. Fuck them. We own them nothing.
Banksy said it better:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
> using an ad blocker is the ONLY option to avoid adds. You can pay evilcorp for a subscription/premium account/whatever and they'll still try to force you to watch 10 minutes of adds for a 1 minute video. Fuck them. We own them nothing.
On YouTube? No. I pay for Premium, there's no ads.
I pay for YouTube Premium. I'm thankful that it exists. I still get sponsored segments in the middle of my videos (from the content creators themselves). I haven't (yet) installed SponsorBlock -- currently, I have no plans to, but I do fast-forward to skip those commercials in the middle of the videos.
I pay for Amazon Prime, and they've started showing me preroll ads on my streaming content. I also still get sponsored product recommendations in my search list.
I pay for Kagi search. Thankfully, this area is still relatively clean.
Most of the creators I watch don't have sponsored segments.
I do agree, Prime is annoying with their ads, it definitely affects how much I watch on their platform.
There is still embedded ads or promotional content or whatever that you can only block with sponsorblock
Accessing a web page using standard protocols with no authentication and filtering what I want to see of it on my computer is not stealing content.
YT might want me to do something else, but I am not bound by their wishes.
> it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads,
A local cafe I go to has a "pay what you can" business model. One of the smartest decisions I ever made was to go there and not pay. I seriously don't have to pay for one or sometimes two meals a day. Usually just a free coffee and bagel though. I recommend others to try it too. You can just not pay and they still give you food.
I cannot figure out why people still pay them. If they understood their customers, the food would just be free to everyone. But whatever, in the meantime I will eat free.
You forgot to tell another half of this story where this cafe used all sorts of tactics to kill competition and uses semi-related businesses to ensure its dominance. Then they nicely suggested everyone to pay what they can, or else. It's not an innocent local cafe as you paint it. It is a corporate network monster whose win strategy is "leave no survivors".
And rather than stop going to this evil cafe, people just go and don't pay.
So as long as you make out your flavor of the month business as "greedy and evil" you can paint yourself a moral crusader by going there and taking things for free. How convenient, eh?
"This coffee shop is a terrible place, therefore I will eat there for free everyday in protest!"
The network effect kinda prevents you from finding coffee at an honest place.
(The content is on YouTube and nowhere else)
Until this changes and one can choose to go somewhere else, I wouldn't worry too much about the terrible cafe's income, because it is one of the richest entities in the world, it already shouldn't be that rich and powerful, and if it disappeared, it would finally let one go find coffee somewhere else.
The other possibility is to stop drinking coffee, of course. Though you can't really do this with everything.
YouTube is hardly the only website on the Internet. And besides that, YouTube splits ad revenue 40/60 yt/creator anyway. So I suppose those creators are all in on the scheme too?
> YouTube is hardly the only website on the Internet
Indeed, but it's the video hosting platform. Initiatives like PeerTube try to fix this, but most videos can be only found on YouTube.
> So I suppose those creators are all in on the scheme too?
Mostly yes. Creators today rely on:
- sponsors
- youtube ads
- donations
- merch
- other revenues, for instance if they have a business and their videos bring customers
At least you can often donate if you skip the ads and the sponsors, so there is a way to pay the metaphorical coffee.
But the service is free. So I will watch (without ads) until it becomes paid. And then, it depends on whether the value is still there.
So is the coffee at my local "pay what you please" cafe.
If that cafe was part of a megacorp that was doing shady business and driving small business in the ground, as well as exploiting others, I’d drink that free coffee every day!
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. If one really does believe the place to be evil (and not merely bad at what it does), then actions that cripple it financially and make it more likely to go out of business are commendable if anything.
Of course, better yet is to take it up a notch and advocate for other people to also use ad blockers and to help install and configure them. Thankfully, with how invasive ads are, the advertisers are basically doing all the agitprop; all you need to convince someone to use an adblocker today is to show them how websites look with and without it.
And rather than blocking me access, like in “please pay to watch it”, they squiggle and babble incomprehensibly. Note that I’m not freeloading Nebula etc.
Your analogy was shallow from the start. Continuing it makes little sense.
Part of the problem is a lack of a feedback channel that pushes back against the worst tranche of ads. It is one of these situations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model
where you have no "Voice".
At home we were talking about food ads on Youtube. Sure, once in a while you see an ad for a meal box that is actual food but I see a lot of ads for things like Huel which float in this strange space where it's not "I used to eat bread and meat and vegetables and now I drink all my meals" but where it's normal to drink your meals (they pose as if they were trying to persuade you to switch from some other meal replacement), where you have to work just as hard taking supplements every day as you would work lifting weights or not eating junk food -- there's McDonald's and there are ultra-processed foods, but this is ridiculous.
(A friend of mine received a huge quantity of 4Patriots dried food from his mom who was sucked in by some ad that claimed it was on sale because they made too much. We got some and the smell when my son made it turned my stomach.)
In terms of sponsorships there was the "Established Titles" scandal; I am a big fan of Ryan Szymanski who's a world authority on battleships. One day he got bribed to make a video about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapa_Flow
which was a good reason to talk about battleships and Scotland. Pretty soon he's adding a cringy pitch to all his videos and unfortunately it is so hard to give somebody like the right kind of "tough love" which will set him straight, although after the scandal popped most of the people involved went back to remove the junk.
Years ago, when it was the dominant player, Ad-Block Plus sought to strike a truce with advertisers, where they would dial back the invasiveness of ads, and ABP would sign off on these and whitelist them.
This quickly led to a revolt from ABP users, and the ultimate collapse of the plugin. That is when uBlock was born and become the king.
What we have is a positive feedback cycle where creators are forced to resort to worse and worse ads to cover the cost of the ever increasing number of ad-block users. It's just plainly true that every revenue generating ad you block (not necessarily profit generating ad) is an ad that must be fed to someone else to view for you.
Bad ads just aren't just on the web.
I've had a longtime gym habit which sometimes has me in front of the TV around noon where the ads are all for products for people who don't have any money. I remember seeing a series of ads where my first thought was "anybody except a TV executive or a politician would look at that and say it it's a medicare scam" and watching the ads for a decade before it got in the news that it really was a scam and people are going to jail.
Those ads win an auction to get there, they might be the optimal ads for that slot, but if you want to know why people have low trust in the media and low trust in the government, start there.
I watched Tubi a lot last summer, which is in a wonderful honeymoon period, and was watching saturation advertising for P&G products that featured upbeat black people cleaning up (their own messes) with Dawn and Tide. Great, I say. They've got some awareness that they shouldn't run ads that drive viewers away. Maybe targeted ads will be good for television but the specter of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
haunts the industry.
"I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to...
Where is the article titled
"I don't know how to explain that ads (and the "suckers" who view them) are what keep the internet running"
Ads are what make the internet a bloated mess. Ads are why there are a thousand different results for “roasted broccoli recipe”, because they are all trying to get me to pick them so I can see ads. Its why each one is 5 pages of crap before you get to the actual recipe, so they can shove in more ads. Everything is stretched, duplicative, and needless complex, so you will move through as many ads as humanly possible.
Sure, I don't mind the ads. The pervasive tracking and data collection and profile building is where I draw the line. Tons and tons of JS churning my browser to sell me stuff. If my adblock eventually causes some sort of economic disaster, so be it.
The Internet worked fine without ads though.
Imagine your local cafe notices and starts feeding you poisoned food instead of asking to pay.
>> it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads,
Yet hackers would be outside shouting and banging the doors, demanding to be let in to have the free poison, writing five hundred miles of comments about why they should not pay.
You are the exact type of person who ruins everything good in our society and burns out everyone who tries to do good for others because of your bottomless selfishness.
And no, this is not a personal attack. This is an evaluation of your character as stated in your own comment. You and people like you are everything wrong with the modern world. People like you are why we have the most productive economy in human history and still have people starving to death next to grocery stores full of food. People like you are why people work 60 hours per week and still can barely afford to live. People like you built this awful, inhumane system that we're all forced to live under that exploits us at every single turn because there is no law against doing so, and so you do it. You put the screws to every last thing in your life to get maximum value returned for minimum effort.
I genuinely do not use the word hate lightly, but I would use it here.
The free coffee story is clearly just an analogy to the adblock thing.
That's possible, but it doesn't sound like an analogy to me, and I've known enough selfish assholes in my life to absolutely be able to picture this as a real thing that's currently happening.
gestures towards the masses of shameless ad-blocking internet users
Even here on HN, the first thing people do when a paywalled article is posted is provide the archive.ph bypass.
> it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads
AKA depriving content creators of their revenue. If you're saying their content isn't good enough to pay for directly, and isn't good enough to endure ads in order to engage, then why are you trying to consume it? Look elsewhere.
> or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them
I agree with this depending on what you mean by "surveillance." There's a minimum amount of "surveillance" required to measure ad penetration and effectiveness and essentially provide assurance to advertisers that they aren't getting scammed. There's a whole other level of "surveillance" where the ad network (usually Google) is building a dossier on all your interests and every site you've ever visited. Some of that information enables targeted advertising, but you should always retain the right to opt-out, and see all the data that's been collected on you and edit it. You should also be able to opt-in to that data being sold and getting a cut of the proceeds, should you so desire. I wouldn't, but I could imagine some people would.
Bottom line - people gotta make money to eat and oftentimes they're not giving away content for free. If you don't want to pay for it - that's your choice as a user: pay and consume or don't pay and move on. Calling on hackers to figure out a way to steal it may not have a future that works out to your liking.
Then put it behind a goddamned login. If you don't, it's mine to consume and filter how I want.
Then you should be locked up behind bars. You're a thief, pure and simple.
It's the closest we have to a browser not controlled by the corporate giants. Sometimes Mozilla makes unpopular choices and people raise a stink about it, but we do that because we hold them to a higher standard. With Microsoft and Google, we just expect them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good and will complain loudly when they fail to uphold our principles, and we recommend Firefox because we feel like it is possible to expect Good from them.
More like "we'll complain all the time regardless of what they do by repeating the same talking points over and over again".
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
> ...and that's why I stick to this Chromium fork with its own digital advertising service and its own cryptocurrency, but you can easily switch it off!
Of all the ways to critique Brave, consider Mozilla's exploration of "other funding options" has recently been digital advertising. They purchased two advertising companies - Anonym[0] and FakeSpot - and have integrated FakeSpot directly into Firefox. Mozilla has an ad sales division [1]. Mozilla even added extra telemetry just for advertisers[2].
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/formats/
[2] https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-di...
You know parent made a good point when comments come in attacking points parent didn't even mention or brought up.
I almost never use Chrome-based browsers, but recently was forced because debug points were simply not working on Firefox. You can strawman all you want, there are unfortunately technical points where Google is abusing its position to force its standards, but the primary architects of Firefox downfall is Mozilla.
For the record, I used a Firefox phone for many years (and yes it did cause me a lot of problems), and remember vividly when they announced a luxury Firefox phone about one week before killing the project.
So weird to paint consistency as a vice.
"Talking points" is from the same land as "gotcha questions." "Talking points" are the points that people are talking about that you'd prefer not to talk about because you don't have good answers for. So you pretend like repeating an unanswered question is an dirty underhanded plot.
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
This isn't a quote. Don't make up quotes. This is you putting words in people's mouths, and choosing the ones that allow you to reply with something about Brave. At the same time, you're excusing Firefox for doing things because Brave does similar things. The people switching to for-profit Brave from Firefox would have prefer a non-profit, user-focused Firefox, but have been pushed to the point where they don't see any moral difference between the two, so they might as well experiment. When Firefox was innovating, it was the founder of Brave that was running it.
Most Firefox haters use Firefox. They just wish that it wasn't so bad, that it wasn't so much torture to put it into a usable state, and that the developers weren't actively fighting the users to keep them from putting it in that state, rather than centering on the users. They largely blame this on the company, Google, who subsidizes Firefox while competing with it. And on the company, Mozilla, that sucks all of that subsidy up in salaries, while seemingly neglecting the browser.
Mozilla does plenty of really useful things! Super happy with Firefox as my primary browser. Shout-out to MDN as well for being an excellent reference on all things web: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
Yes, pretty much. While I don't concur with Mozilla 100% of the time, it is still the only major browser that I can have control (e.g.: by still having Manifest V2 extensions available). Also most of controversial choices in Firefox can be disabled or changed in `about:config`.
What about the choice not to optimize for battery efficiency on my Mac?
Safari have only 2 platforms (actually one since they share pretty much the same kernel and much of the user space code) to support vs Firefox needs to support 4 (macOS, Android, Linux and Windows). I would be surprised if Firefox was the most battery efficient browser on macOS.
Can you please elaborate on that?
Neither Firefox nor Chrome optimize for battery efficiency like Safari does on Macs or Edge does for Windows.
I’m not trying to be the “just Google it” guy without citations. But I couldn’t find a definitive citation - just general discussions and some YouTube videos including earlier discussions on HN.
I searched for “firefox vs safari battery mac” and the same for Edge on Windows.
Chrome doesn't optimize for battery efficiency like Safari on Macs. It optimizes better than Safari.
https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...
They may be referring to the fact that Firefox is probably the worst on battery of the 3 main browsers when used on macOS.
Safari does admittedly set a very high bar though, and only cares about 1-2 platforms at most.
You didn't say "like Safari does" and instead made the bullshit and unsupported claim that they chose not to optimize. That's some uninformed garbage if I've ever seen it.
I actually really like Safari… sometimes tabs sync across devices is buggy, reloads a lot. But other than that I’m quite content.
To continue GP's comment,
> With Microsoft and Google, we just expect them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good
And with Safari, a loathsome browser that's intent on recreating the IE6 conditions of yore, we give it a free pass.
> ...the IE6 conditions of yore...
I'm sorry, but comparing modern Safari to the worst software ever widely used is just not remotely reasonable.
IMO Netscap on Linux was worse. Maybe it was already Firefox by that point? I don't remember. But I do remember the crashes. It crashed so cleanly too. One second you had a browser and the next you didn't.
I don't know if I am rewriting history but when Chrome came out it felt like Google went "hold my beer" and in 6 months developed the first decent browser.
I tried switching to Safari 2-3 years back after getting a new M1 Air . After using it for a few hours, websites would just stop working and only fix was to restart the browser. After a few times, I gave up and went back to Firefox.
I find Safari on iOS to be nice, and Safari on macOS to be horrifically slow and inadequate, even on the newest M-series processors. It's like two different worlds, you can really tell that all of the engineering time is going into iOS because that's where all the money is at.
In my quest to move away from Chrome I tried to daily drive Safari on my new work supplied M4 MBP. I really tried, but it was just too slow in daily use. At first I thought something was wrong with my networking or Internet connection, or possibly all the web apps I use were having a bad week. However, booting up Firefox (or rather Zen browser) immediately solved all of my performance problems on all of my web apps.
There were some other problems with Safari as well; profiles didn't work quite the way I needed them to, limited extensions (no uBlock Origin!), etc. I probably could have worked around them but I didn't need to; Firefox was almost perfect.
I heard someone recently describe Apple as a great hardware company with a few software people. Rings true!
Most of the iOS / MacOS software issues are things that more bodies could fix.
Indeed, although most of the real work on the hardware side is done by TSMC on the processors, and Apple just does a good job wrapping that piece of silicon into a shiny glass and metal body. Apple's real superpower is getting people to spend money inside their ecosystem. They've essentially turned into a finance corporation pretending to be a tech company.
I'd strongly disagree.
Apple designs their own processors (now), specs/sources their components (e.g. screens), and then does all the integration engineering.
That's the bulk of device work.
Which isn't to say that semi manufacturing isn't hard, but is to say there's a lot of effort between a chip and a device.
Sure, that design work and firmware development is probably a miniscule part of their business in comparison to the scale of their App Store and other service revenues though. And Apple does no manufacturing at all, the screens come from Samsung and the phones are assembled by Foxconn.
TSMC builds the chips, according to Apple's designs. Foxconn assembles the phones, according to Apple's designs.
I don't think you realize how much work goes into building and cerifying a working, mass market device.
I use Safari on macOS and don’t find it particularly slow
I like it too. I use the Add to Dock feature a lot! E.g. for slack, which does not have a native app, I use the website instead.
I find the UI atrocious and primitive. The extensions are ManifestV3 alike and worse yet, pollute /Applications (why?!). I don't particular find Safari fast, it uses just as much memory as any other browser, and all the claims about power efficiency are never backed by any numbers, just like /r/macos parroting "macOS good cus UNIX" while not understanding there have been plenty of shit UNIX distributions.
Plus the incompatibility with various sites... Just sticking with FF. I can certainly appreciate an OS-integrated browser, though. It makes life simpler for users and if you have the full Apple ecosystem, the tab sync is useful.
I find that incompatibilities are less of an issue with Safari than FF simply because Safari actually gets tested. Too many people with iPhones to ignore it, at least in US.
[flagged]
I do web dev and prefer safari. It’s less power hungry on a laptop. If you develop for the lowest common denominator, every other browser just works.
There’s something to be said for adding _less_ features to web browsers. A simple web is a web where open source solutions can compete with chrome. It helps avoid a browser monoculture.
Yeah but we’re not in a simple web. Safari isn’t trying to make it simple for you, they just use it to keep you in their walled garden.
PWAs are a great example of this. The general idea was even a product of the Jobs era of Apple, before the App Store.
Safari and iOS’s poor support of PWAs is exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store.
Choosing safari is choosing a more closed web, where missing standards means that you, as a safari user, are unable to access certain features or apps that Apple doesn’t want you to access.
I get that Apple shouldn't be allowed to dictate which features belong on the web, but you're just letting Google to it instead if you opt to use Chrome.
Maybe I don't care about PWAs (which I don't), maybe I don't feel like the majority of APIs introduced lately belongs in the browser. There's very little of what you should be able to do on the web that you could not do 10 years ago. Yes, flexbox is awesome, let's have that, so is the dialog tag. WebGL, Blutooth, USB, device memory, battery status... No, the browser doesn't need to support that.
Out of curiosity, what's bad about Safari's PWA support? I use it for a bunch of things from Plex to my NAS, and never ran into any issues. In fact, it works better than Windows, in that Safari will open external links in PWAs in my default browser (on Windows, if you use Edge for PWAs, it will insist on opening itself for external links as well).
> exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store
Nah, it's because PWAs were a standard created by Google, with Google being the primary market driver, solely with the interest of advancing Google's own interests (both in undermining Apple, and making lower-end devices more usable in developing markets). Don't think Google invented PWAs, or heavily pushed them, out of some charity. Notice also that as the ultra-cheap phones (~$100) have become more powerful, and as Apple refused to take the bait, that Google's efforts behind PWA have mostly ended.
The same goes for RCS, even though it was initially made by a neutral vendor forum. Google became the heavy pusher of RCS, not just for the sake of Android, but because they had carrier deals to use Google's own infrastructure (Jibe) for RCS, and forcing Apple to accept and integrate with their own infrastructure is a better position to be in.
This is also, let's be clear, not the first time that Google has tried an "open" standard to advance their interests and bludgeon competition. AMP is what happens when the standard catastrophically fails.
Missing standards like Manifest V3 that everyone was crying out for?
Probably depends on how you do web development. I don't like Chrome for web development, but others claim it's better than Firefox and Safari. I normally use Firefox, but would probably pick Safari over Chrome, if nothing else to avoid having to install yet another browser.
We all know that the best web development tools ever to be created was those that shipped with Opera when they still used Presto.
That I do in Chrome I admit :) but for my personal browsing I use safari
Most of HN: We hold Mozilla to a higher standard so we've abandon them for the corporations we don't have any expectations from.
Good job. Smart tactics.
> Sometimes Mozilla makes unpopular choices
Sometimes? They tend to hit the mark of bad decisions more often than not
People just remember the shitty decisions more vividly and for longer than people remember the dozens of good decisions made in between.
Most good decisions don't get a full press cycle (because they are boring).
Mozilla's brand identity is tethered to specific moral prescriptions[0] that their products are supposed to abide by. People sold on that identity are bound to care.
This seems unrelated to whether or not Mozilla makes bad decisions more often than not.
I'm talking about frequency, you're talking about severity. People don't remember the 1000 times you did something correctly.
Icecat it's far more free than Firefox.
Icecat is Firefox.
Most of Firefox’s revenue comes from Google….
I have been using mozilla for _years_ it got shit, then better, then shit, and now its close enough.
The thing I _Love_ is container tabs. I can isolate empires by using container tabs to sandbox cookies and other web state. This means that ebay doesn't change my adverts to the last thing I searched on every site, and autoplay embedded youtube doesn't fuck up my video recommendations.
It means I can hide my work gmail from my home, and separate search histories (although thats less relevant now with AI.)
lastly, being able to scroll left and right on my tabs, rather than new ones being unaccesable is great.
And for those who do actually feel they want to separate their extensions and passwords and such as well, there's a Profiles revamp coming up that's looking really good in Nightly: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
But yes, people should learn about Multi-Account Containers if they haven't, yet. It's a killer feature that no other browser has. This is the extension to enable the UI for it: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
> there's a Profiles revamp coming up that's looking really good in Nightly
Oh wow! I totally missed this. Thank for sharing!
I've been using multiple browsers for as long as I can remember. But always liked Firefox ocer the others. Especially now with container tabs.
And the only thing I keep wishing for, has been a better experience with profile management, but also running the browser in different profiles.
I'm really looking forward for these updates
I've been using the silly hack of using two versions of Firefox side-by-side (so, multiple browsers but they are both Firefox today), one which is Default in the OS and focuses on a single profile and Container Tab management. The other launches into the ProfileManager at startup to choose a Profile and doesn't pick up random links because it isn't Default.
Better Profile Management tools may be nice to see. Maybe I won't need dueling builds of Firefox. Or maybe I'll keep it, we'll see.
Finally, it only took them 10 years to get around to updating that decades old UI. Wonder which other decade old UI parts are they gonna tackle next? ooh, will they finally do something about Library and the whole bookmarks/history menu/sidebar/window mess? It's a little insane how so much time has passed and so many versions were released, and some interface stuff still remains unpolished and disparate. Firefox simply can't get it together on that front.
For tab containers, maybe there's a "good reason" that no other browser has that feature, cause it is confusing both as a concept and in use, and doesn't separate the rest of the stuff (or even the stuff in intends to separate when it's cumbersome and peculiar to use). Like, shared history, or inability to have separate extensions, defeats many of the purposes people use profiles for - which is an actual complete separation of things.
As a consultant, switching between my many clients, testing, and home accounts is simply Alt+F+B+Arrow down ("Open new container tab"), all within the same UI, in the same window, with colored tabs, with the same extensions, and same password manager.
I've been in situations needing up to half a dozen different Microsoft accounts (multiple Teams clients in Firefox, for instance), other browsers haven't solved this daily use-case for me.
It's an easier account management tool.
"Shared everything", is exactly what's undesirable about container tabs and what makes them a non-starter. I'd like to keep work actually separate. I don't need work tabs, or work history, or work downloads polluting the "main" profile. I don't need work extensions to be active outside of work. (there's just no way to make some extensions to work with just specific containers, so that's a dud.) All of that stuff can be in it's own space, and it would also make switching a bit easier - open profile, resume tabs, close profile, things stay put and ready to pick up where you left off, without needing to juggle tabs within the same profile and having them be an eyesore, be it work stuff on a regular profile or vice versa.
Oh god please no. Chrome's history/bookmarks UI is awful.
So what browser do you use that solves this properly and allows full adblocking?
Safari has recently added Profiles which are very similar: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105100
OTOH Vivaldi guys said that much as they'd like to implement this, they're unable to due to some architectural issues with Blink. So basically no Blink browser will have that unless and until Google decides to do it in Chrome - which seems unlikely given their incentives.
Chrome supports multiple profiles
If I remember correctly, these are profiles in the same sense this term is used in Firefox - i.e. a global setting that can be switched, but applies to all active browser windows at the time. So you can't use it to (easily) browse different websites in different profiles side by side.
In Safari, "profiles" are a per-window thing, and there are facilities to open a website in a different profile etc, so effectively they work much more like Firefox containers (which are even more fine-grained tho: per-tab).
I'd been using Firefox for my work device for years but I only discovered containers and how awesome they are. My company was acquired and we still use microsoft accounts for different purposes. Jira works with this account, but sharepoint works with that account. Can't be logged in with the same azure account at the same time, but with containers, I can. It's great.
It is really useful to log on different aws account at the same time too.
If you haven't checked out the "AWS SSO Containers" extension they you are missing out! I recently found this beauty and it's literally changed the way I work. I couldn't be happier.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...
Yes I know about it but I try to limit the extensions I use to:
- the ones that are built by Mozilla
- the ones that are endorsed by Mozilla
- the ones I take time to read the code (and usually disable auto-updates)
I haven't had time to do the later for aws-sso-containers. Thanksfully I don't have that many account to work on at the same time these days so I didn't push it high in the priority list.
I live in the AWS console for work and am constantly switching between accounts. The "AWS SSO Containers" extension has been a godsend for me. I used to use Chrome profiles for this but it was very clunky and only allowed access to a limited number of accounts at a time. Firefox container tabs allow me to access simultaneously all of my AWS accounts, in one window, automatically. It literally made my work life better.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...
I have 4 Microsoft accounts I use regularly for work. I also do some consulting and often end up with credentials provisioned at a client (don't get me started on this).
It is so convenient to have container tabs. All my extensions are available in new containers, unlike multiple Chromium profiles (or Firefox profiles).
Container tabs also pair very well with Simple Tab Groups, which allow you to pin a container to a group, so that everything for one account ends up in one place.
Agree, container tabs are the killer app
I agree on the desktop version (Windows), but Android's getting crappier by the time.
Recently, many sites won't fix the viewport horizontally. Why such a major bug happens is baffling
Are autoplay YouTube embeds still a thing?
Not if you run uBlock Origin they aren't.
That said, it's telling that it's so difficult to disable auto-playing video entirely in Firefox. I'm not convinced that a profit motive is NOT the reason behind that (it is possible but requires a bunch of about:config changes; it's not exposed in the settings UI and that smells sinister)
Unfortunately at work I must use Chrome without an adblocker. It's pretty terrible.
My personal experience: I use Firefox because all its issues are fixable either via about:config or extensions. It's not slow or crashing.
- Embedded telemetry can be disabled via about:config - Running ublock origin in advanced mode blocks all third party domains, websites are often broken but easily fixable - Cookie Autodelete deletes a website cookie after the tab closes - Decentraleyes as a local CDN to avoid external requests for common libraries - Redirector to change request to alternative no tracking frontends for famous websites - Simple tab groups keep tabs organized by "job" - Bitwarden to manage passwords
I rarely encounter websites that are not working and I just switch to another website, and I use Vivaldi for things like meet where I want things to "just work".
I really want to switch to Firefox but cannot because it doesn't sync bookmark favicons.
My bookmarks bar is filled with bookmarks without names that I can recognize by the icons. I refuse to re-visit every bookmark when I login from a new PC, which is often.
This has been requested for 17 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378
Every other browser sync solution has this feature. Firefox insists on not implementing it because what, it's too much data to sync? I'd pay for it if it was a premium feature.
If anyone has a browser agnostic bookmark syncing solution that can sync the favicons, let me know.
I do this as well i.e delete the name of a bookmark using only it's favicon to identify it.
When you login to Firefox. Just right click your bookmarks and hit open all in new tabs. It will open all 500+ tabs. Leave it for a few minutes all all the favicons will be loaded.
Firefox's sync is broken in many ways. It doesn't sync search engines or extension settings either. It also frequently stops syncing from Android.
I rely on sync a lot, so that was a dealbreaker for me.
Extension settings can be synced, but the extension must explicitly call the storage.sync api https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
> I refuse to re-visit every bookmark when I login from a new PC, which is often.
Why not? How often?
This should take literally 5s using the bookmark manager, right click on "Bookmarks Toolbar", "Open All Bookmarks". Then some more to load the websites I guess.
Some links can only be accessed through a VPN.
I have thousands of bookmarks that also have names but I would still like to see the icons before clicking the link. Sometimes the name doesn't hint at what kind of resource the bookmark was at a glance. Is it a youtube video, is it an article?
I already have access to that information at the time of bookmarking. I don't want to lose it and then have to get it again.
> Some links can only be accessed through a VPN.
Step 1. Connect to VPN Step 2. Open all bookmarks
The thing is that Firefox has SO MANY papercuts in this category. They all seem minor but they all represent a deal breaker for one user or another. For me it's the address bar on the bottom on mobile (ludicrous decision, whoever came up with that should leave the industry and I mean that) and their refusal to auto fill credit cards on mobile even though I know it works on desktop and I know it works in other regions.
Firefox badly needs someone who gives a shit about user experience.
In the settings on Firefox mobile, under Customize, you can choose between address bar on the top or on the bottom of the screen.
Personally I keep it at the bottom, as it's much closer to my thumbs and also the keyboard, so I don't have to adjust my hands to type in a url or search query.
I think the address bar is on top by default now, and that has always been configurable. (Personally I do prefer it at the bottom.)
I switched from Brave to Vivaldi as my second browser on Android because it's still stuck in the 2010's with it's address bar at the top with no ability to change it. The most sold phones for the last half decade have all been 5-6 inches, and unless you have gigantic hands you need to reposition your hand in order to go from typing on the keyboard to the bottom to tapping the URL bar, so I'm on the other side of the fence, very glad that they default to the bottom URL bar and actually have the option to change it to the top for those that want it.
i am not sure if i understand this post, where else should the address bar be if not at your fingertips at the bottom?
This is indeed exactly the reason why it was placed there in Windows Phone 7 (which is where it first appeared, AFAIK).
Has anyone found a fix for this? It's very annoying, and has been around for years.
I personally use Checkmarks: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/checkmarks-we...
It just opens every bookmark to load the favicon. Brute force, but it works!
Sweet. After rereading OP and your post, I believe I misinterpreted it. But I will say I have that problem too...
Problem A: What OP and you are talking about: When you switch computers to one that doesn't have the bookmarks, you have to click through every one to get the icon to populate.
Problem B: Once FF has an icon, it will never update it. Even if you delete and re-add the the bookmark. I have no workaround for this.
You don't name your bookmarks?
I delete the name on purpose so I can utilize the horizontal space the bookmarks bar provides more effectively. I name the bookmarks that are not directly on the bar but live in other folders. However I would still not want to lose that bit of metadata. Icons hint at what site the resource is from at a glance.
Makes sense, I don't use the bookmarks bar because I try and keep the UI to a minimum.
Firefox on Android is a no-brainer because of the extension support. It was a bit rough experience few years ago but has been solid for a long time.
Best Android browser hands down, entirely because of the extension support.
I don't know how people use phones with ublock or leechblock. I guess "with less battery life" and "more".
Same experience. For a while I had to do chrome again because it became unusable on my aging phone and then they turned the ship around.
I am always stunned when I have to use anything else at how unusable some pages are without my extensions.
Kiwi Browser for me on Android with full extensions support and developer tools. Any reason to switch to Firefox on Android?
This seems like a good place to mention my favorite Firefox Addon for Android: https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play
Some days ago I was wondering how it works and was kinda surprised just now that this is from mozilla itself. Reading the project Readme makes this even straight up sound like a privacy addon. I wonder why this is not natively supported.
Wow, so the music stops when I do something else because the site developer wants me to download their app, so they detect a switch and turn off the video? Diabolical.
I'll have to try out that extension.
YouTube has been doing this exact thing for years. Background play is a YouTube Premium feature.
This is fantastic, thanks for sharing
Amazing, thanks for sharing!
I've been on Firefox Dev Edition for Mac for the last 4 years I think, and I can't remember more than 1 or 2 websites that didn't work correctly on it. It's been flawless, more battery and memory efficient than Chrome, less finicky and problematic than Safari, and with all the extensions that I need.
I seriously don't see any disadvantage in picking Firefox over Chrome. I still have Chrome around if any website requires it specifically, but I haven't launched it in ages.
There were a few Chrome extensions that weren't there on Firefox [1] [2] but I fixed that _easily_ by getting the crx file, unpacking it, then adding the https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill to the extension to make it cross-browser.
It's easy enough to make an extension work on both Firefox and Chrome, I've done it myself with SideHN (https://github.com/alin23/sidehn), but I guess Firefox is not really in the mind of Chrome extension devs.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/anchor-headings/lgg...
[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xpath-helper/hgimno...
> It's been flawless, more battery and memory efficient than Chrome
Is that actually true?
It was true for me, specifically for my workflow, the websites I use and how I leave some specific tabs in the background.
I’ve used Chrome for many years before Firefox and it was always prioritizing JS responsiveness even when the app was in the background and not needed, so it consumed CPU cycles and battery power needlessly. I see now that Chrome enables a Low Power mode by default on battery and it’s unusable as scrolling gets janky. I don’t know if the overall experience has gotten better in the last year on Chrome.
Not sure what’s different about memory though, but Chrome always appeared like a memory hog when I tested both browser side by side on the same set of websites and same few extensions. Could be that it just caches more and that’s benefitting responsiveness
Firefox is great and IMO it's important to have a browser that is open source and not controlled by Microsoft, Google or Apple. For that reason I would probably continue to use it even if the user experience was slightly worse, but thankfully it's not. When I switched from Chrome years ago I didn't notice any drop in performance and I've never really had any major issues since then. Every now and again I run into a website that is broken and think "ah, this must be what everyone is talking about online when they say Firefox sucks" but then I check the same page from a different browser and have the same problem. I hope it continues to survive and gets the support it needs from the community.
On my work laptop I use Chrome. There are a couple of things I sorely miss from Firefox
* The omnibar: I have a couple IPs I connect to frequently. One ends in 36, the other in 243. In Firefox I can just type 36 (or 243) + Tab + Enter. In Chrome I have to type the whole address. And why can't I search for the title of a page I know is in my history or even just a tab I already have opened directly from the search bar? I do that all the time in Firefox
* Ctrl+Tab to switch back and forth between tabs instead of cycling them in order (not the default in Firefox either, but at least it can be configured without having to install an extension and a native executable as I had to do in Chrome)
> Ctrl+Tab to switch back and forth between tabs instead of cycling them in order (not the default...
I recently started using Firefox, after giving up on Windows, and recently found out about this feature. It's a godsend for productivity, especially in a world where a lot of things are done in a browser.
> In Chrome I have to type the whole address. And why can't I search for the title of a page I know is in my history or even just a tab I already have opened directly from the search bar? I do that all the time in Firefox
You can't do that because that would lead to less people seeing the Google Search page, and therefore less ad impressions.
People been complaining about that for decades at this point, and Google just refuses to fix it, pretty clear why.
> And why can't I search for the title of a page I know is in my history
I sometimes use Edge as a fallback browser, and it suffers from this problem, too, and yeah, it is sooo annoying – much as I'm unhappy about various Firefox changes in the last years, I wouldn't switch to a different browser for that alone.
Interestingly, Edge (and probably Chrome, too, unless it's a strange Microsoft customisation) simultaneously suffers from the problem that on the rare occasion where an addressbar search actually delivers a locally history result, the autocomplete is often too precise, because it prefills the whole URL, not just the domain.
Omnibar is unsurpassed in browser usability. Some of my work involves project names in an obscure part of the URL (everything else is the same base/parameters).
FF handles this perfectly, no other browser I've tried comes close.
Firefox wins for me for multi container tabs that integrate with AWS SSO, so I can have multiple envs open in coloured tabs.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...
Same here but for work O365!
Recently I preventively migrated from Vivaldi, and Firefox lacked:
Gestures, "search with" context menu, "add active tab" in a bookmarks bar folder, autorenaming downloads, custom keybindings, tab squeezing (it keeps them wide and shows scroll buttons), last tab standing, proper double-click-drag selection and text editing in general. Probably a dozen more things that I cannot remember now. Also "sync" just doesn't work, something went wrong, try again.
For gestures I used Gesturefy - isn't a mess and has "rocker". For "search with" I just had to write my own extension with hardcoded searches. I'm autorenaming through AHK - external tool, non-general use case. Tab squeezing and last tab solved through about:config.
"Add active tab", custom keys, text editing still unsolved.
In general I'm sort of satisfied with the results, but it took quite a while to migrate. Firefox is sort of extensible but not hacker-ish. Extension store is not generic-developer-hacker spirited either. FF is almost as dumb as Chrome, with a few settings that can make it better if you know where to look and have time for that.
"Foxy Gestures" for gestures. "Context Search Origin" for a context menu search.
Thanks!
To be fair, Vivaldi is a pretty high bar given how much stuff they have in the browser itself (and the overall "super customizable kitchen sink" philosophy they carried over from Opera days that enables this).
Yeah I’m really happy I managed to migrate at all, ignoring these non-fatal losses. It was not the first time I tried.
Sadly Vivaldi also slowly breaks things, although I guess I’ll remember my words at the next Firefox “refresh”.
I've used Firefox on desktop since 2019. It's upsetting how often (it's not every day, but more often than it should) a website just doesn't work because of the devs didn't test on Firefox at all. I even ran into this on Vanguard, a firm that manages god knows how much in assets, on a page to download PDFs...
I used to get teased (all in good fun) at my last company for being the only dev that used Firefox. Then I'd be the only one to ever catch the Firefox only bugs in PRs.
I get it - it's got way less market share, and for a small company, you may be able to argue the value of the time vs the probability of a bug, but not having your website work on all browsers in the 2020s (aside from new browser features like WebGPU and file system access) is a let down.
Strange, been using it since inception, but since 2019 I can probably could on one hand the times I couldn't use firefox and had to crack open chrome/safari/whatever. It's usally been overly zealous ublock rules that have stopped me, but easily fixed and nothing to do with firefox.
Question for all you people who have used Firefox before 2022: how did you deal with its poor spell checking?
I used it for a few years, but sometime around the end of 2021 I switched to Chrome because I got tired of the Firefox spell checker marking correctly spelled words as incorrectly spelled.
Here's a list of words I reported in 2020 and 2021 on the open issue they keep in their bug tracker for this problem:
ad hominem, algorithmically, all-nighter, another's, auditable, automata, backlight, ballistically, blacksmithing, bubonic, cantina, chewable, coaxially, commenter, conferenced, counterintuitive, dominator, epicycle, ethicist, exonerations, ferrite, fineable, hatchling, impaction, implementer, implementor, inductor, initializer, intercellular, irrevocability, licensor, lifecycle, manticore, massless, measurer, meerkats, micropayments, mischaracterization, misclassification, misclassified, mistyped, mosquitos, partygoers, passthrough, per se, phosphine, plough, pre-programmed, preprogrammed, programmability, prosecutable, recertification, responder, retransmission, rotator, seatbelt, sensationalistic, shapeshifting, solvability, spectrogram, splitter, subparagraphs, subtractive, surveil, survivorship, synchronizer, tradable, tradeoffs, transactional, trichotomy, tunable, underspecified, untraceably, untyped, verifiability, verifier, webmail
It was kind of puzzling because Firefox actually uses the same open source spell check engine that Google, Apple, LibreOffice, and many others use, and all those others had no trouble with any of the words that Firefox got wrong. This suggests that it might just be a dictionary problem and Firefox could simply grab the dictionary that say LibreOffice uses.
I mentioned that on one of my comments in the bug tracker and a developer said they were going to look into it but I don't know if anything ever came from that. All the words I reported now work but I don't know if they just added those to their dictionary or switched to a better dictionary.
Maybe I'll try doing my HN commenting from Firefox for a while and see if is fixed.
On Firefox v134 with British English dictionary, I pasted your wordlist into a text box and I get only the following marked as misspelled:
hominem, implementor, plough, passthrough, seatbelt, underspecified, untraceably, untyped
The rest are all fine. (Plough is especially weird!)
I could never leave it — even in its worst times of version 4 onwards — for a simple reason of how autoscrolling works (i.e. scroll on middle click). The acceleration curve used by Chromium is awkward, and scrolling in nested containers causes the outer container to start scrolling when you run to the end of the nested one (which makes nested scrolling pretty much unusable if you value efficient interaction with the machine). Pretty minor thing overall, but has been surprisingly important for me.
I don't think that feature even works on linux by default. I have an extension installed in chromium specifically to add it back, and even then it clearly feels like a workaround when using it.
Never knew this was a chrome thing!
I switched to Firefox for privacy reasons, and it took a while to get used to it, but I'm completely enjoying Firefox.
There is some subtle tab / link click behavior that takes a bit to get used to, but after a while it just doesn't bother you any more because you're used to the behavior.
The best reason to use Firefox is to not empower Google's domination of yet another segment of the web. Everything else is chrome-based.
So there is no good reason since it's already empowered plenty
Not everything. There's also webkit.
My very old, and bad, laptop takes an extremely long time to start Firefox. However, forks like Floorp are a lot quicker to start. And since I'm pretty strict about using the same tools everywhere (no matter the OS) I'm now using Floorp on my main PC as well. But I'm not sure Floorp can be trusted... does anyone have anything to say about it?
Is it not the case of using Ubuntu with Snap? I have experienced similar things with Chrome and Firefox on Ubuntu starting extremely slowly when using the snap version. And Ubuntu does not offer deb packages for those anymore, you have to manually add the Mozilla repo to use that.
More about the Mozilla repo: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/4-reasons-to-try-mozill...
I've not used Ubuntu in many years. Laptop is running openSUSE Tumbleweed. Snaps and even Flatpak are a no-go on this laptop hehe.
This reads like one of those cases where simply buying a new laptop will be the easiest solution.
I barely ever use my laptop. It works fine 99% of the time, Firefox is like the 1% that's too slow to be usable with it. Floorp solves that.
Unfortunately, I have had to move in the opposite direction. I have been a Firefox user for more than a decade but after an upgrade to Linux Mint 22 I have had very regular crashes on Firefox which took the entire computer down and so now I am on Brave which seems to be so much faster.
If it crashes your whole computer, I would suspect hardware, since software should not crash the whole OS. Maybe try running some thorough RAM tests.
Have you tried a clean install of firefox? A separate profile even. A lot of people switching to another browser and finding it much more performant/stable is just them starting with a default browser with minimal addons.
Sometimes a clean install isn't even needed. I moved my ~/.mozilla directory across all my main PC installs (and different flavors such as Palemoon and Waterfox) for years and all I had to do was cleaning the cache and every now and then the years long history which can really slow down the browser at each startup (note: system disk on SSD, home on mechanical HD, so YMMV).
I have definitely looked back. And also gotten to a stable state with Firefox for most things and Vivaldi for most things needing Chrome since web standards when Chrome is around is not a respected thing.
Unfortunately, companies treat chrome like they treated IE. Hard to get rid of.
Today I tried to start Firefox on a file:// type of url. It said the file could not be reached while I was sure it was there, as md5sum could read it.
Then it turned out that because Firefox was installed using Snap, and the file was apparently on a mount point that was out of reach of Snap, the file could not be read.
I think Mozilla should refuse package managers that are clearly broken.
I think people should also stop using distributions that have been pushing this broken shit for years.
Yes. But I'm using an nVidia Jetson which vendor-forces me to use Ubuntu.
How are the Firefox dev tools these days? Every time I've tried in the past I end up missing the Chrome dev tools, and it's too much of a pain to have one browser for development and one for browsing. I would love to switch, though.
I actually have the exact opposite experience when I try out Chromium based browsers. I end up missing FF dev tools. I love the ability to edit and resend network requests. I'm sure I could figure out how do to so in Chrome devtools, but just not as intuitive (at least to me!)
For me it depends on what I'm doing. I too like the edit and resend ability in firefox dev tools but what I've found it lacking is the option to automatically open dev tools for pop ups, which is possible in chrome.
I'm the same. I can't stand Chrome's dev tools.
I can do everything in terms of debugging in firefox than I can in chrome. I've not found any issues thus far, including wrangling cookies and more esoteric auth stuff. Obviosuly every good webdev does multiple browser testing and sometimes firefox behaves differently to chrome so you have to jump in and see why. Never been an issue (to my work at least).
> and it's too much of a pain to have one browser for development and one for browsing.
Why? I am surprised as I use 3 browsers for different contexts: - ungoogled chromium for everything behind my company's SSO - firefox with an AWS theme with containers setup for each AWS account under another firefox account. - librewolf for everything else with containers syncronized under a personal firefox account
I could probably run everything under the same firefox or librewolf browser and different profiles but that way I didn't even had to setup separate launchers for the profiles. I also like that they are all visually different so I can spot them easily when switching windows.
I haven't used Firefox in a bit, but I thought their devtools were pretty good, but last time I used it I used their developer edition browser [1]. I think the devtools were particularly bad when you used to have to install Firebug as a seperate part of the browser which is no longer the case [2]. For a quick view of what the developer tools currently look like you can see here [3]
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
[2]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefo...
Depends on what you are used to. Since FF is my main, I try to use it for my pet projects. However, I always start a Chrome instance after several minutes because of two extremely jarring behaviors:
1. "Pause breakpoints" gets unchecked after app rebuilds and/or restarts.
2. The Ctrl+P hotkey only works on the sources tab, unlike Chrome. I just can't bear to always keep in mind what tab I'm on when using a hotkey.
I'd say the Chrome devtools are a tiny bit better, usually with more features or a bit better UX. But there are also things where I find Firefox devtools better. And the features missing are not a deal breaker for me.
Overall it's a pretty similar experience. Most difficult part is the habit changing of getting used to a different UI.
Dev tools are very decent. At this point it's almost indistinguishable from Chrome dev tools. The "Performance" tab might be the one exception, where it's a different flow for profiling. But otherwise it should feel very familiar.
Mostly on par with Chrome, at least for basic (95%) usage. Although for some cases I switch to Chromium.
If someone is missing the workspaces from chrome/Arc. You can try the zen browser [1] which is Firefox fork that will have it. So you get the best of two world. Containers and workspaces. It is very good and they keep up with upstream with frequent updates.
I've switched to Zen a few months ago. Apart from some very minor issues that usually get fixed in the next release, it's been working perfectly for me, and for me, the way the UI works is vastly superior to browser like Chrome or regular Firefox.
I have been a happy Firefox user for about 20 years now and never felt the need to switch. It's my standard browser on every device I have.
I started using Firefox when it was first released and have never used anything else since except to download Firefox.
Firefox is guilty of every single thing Chrome is accused of.
* It includes advertisements in the New Tab page without user consent https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
* It shared browsing history without user consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox
* It enabled a new tracking protocol for advertisers without user consent https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
* It blocked uBlock Lite from their store without notice https://www.pcworld.com/article/2474353/popular-ad-blocker-r...
* It's ~80% funded by Google https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
* Their main focus lately has been white-labelling dubious products https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-aft...
Mozilla is a tech company that stopped caring about tech and loves to portray itself as a victim.
Since they fired the entire Servo (& Rust) team, the project joined the Linux Foundation. Servo is now my best hope for a truly independent browser.
But until Servo is usable, Firefox is the only defensible choice.
> Firefox is guilty of every single thing Chrome is accused of
If you misrepresent what Chrome is "accused" of, sure. I have 0 attachment to Firefox as a permanent solution, but it's WAY better than Chrome on every issue, and the only thing Servo has over Firefox is it hasn't existed in a usable form long enough to push the same kind of updates.
If you disabled updating in Firefox today, you would have a more complete version of Servo that is just as private and secure. You may not like Mozilla as a company, but Firefox is the best tech option for open source web browsing and it's not even close. That's why browsers like Librewolf that just barely tweak Firefox are possible.
I have to address these issues, though, because your descriptions of them really bury the lede.
> It includes advertisements in the New Tab page without user consent
> It shared browsing history without user consent
> It enabled a new tracking protocol for advertisers without user consent
While the ad tracking is not great, everything you posted is opt-out. I know you take specific issue with being automatically included as "opt-in" on update, but you don't even have the option to opt-out of everything in Chrome.
> It blocked uBlock Lite from their store without notice
That was a mistake remedied very quickly. Contrast that with Chrome where Ublock is now broken. Raymond Hill is the person speaking in your link, and he still explicitly recommends Firefox in his releases.
> It's ~80% funded by Google
And? That Google has money to throw around (and most privacy zealots specifically won't fund anything) is not a mark against Firefox. There's nothing to indicate Firefox is controlled by Google, and you may be surprised to know a lot of these competitors fund each others OSS because some of the tech is critical infrastructure.
> Their main focus lately has been white-labelling dubious products
I have to ask, are you reading these links or getting them from a friend? This was also opt-out, and as soon as this information was discovered, Mozilla immediately dropped them. You make it sound like they knew about this and powered through. Should they drop their partnership with haveibeenpwned on the off-chance they might secretly own an ad company?
Librewolf is not barely tweaking Firefox, it's disabling all the ads and tracking, exactly like Chromium does.
Also uBlock Lite was not "remedied quickly", it took Mozilla a month to react, only after media pressure, gorhill describing their interactions as "hostile and absurd". He refused to reupload the extension to the store, where it is still missing to this day.
The last thing that separates Firefox from Chrome is uBlock Origin, which is a very thin line. Apart from that, the entire product and political strategy is the same than Google's. We need an alternative before it's too late.
I've been a Chrome user since literally the day it came out. On my iPhone 13 though I just noticed Chrome was getting slower and slower. At first I thought it was the phone, since I spend most of my time on the phone in the browser it was hard to tell the difference.
Then I switched to Firefox for iOS. It is SO MUCH FASTER. It's like getting a new phone. Idk what the Chrome team is doing but it's slow.
I use firefox for daily tasks. (I am an old user since firefox 3 from the age that firefox is truly customizable). But for frontend develop, I use edge. Firefox is basically unusable in current state. Not able to jump from profiler to debugger makes the whole thing completely useless. How on the earth do I lookup line column like `1:19995` by myself? You just can't. And it remain in this state for years already.
And about other stuff. The UX is also becoming more and more confusing recently. You now have 3 places to look for browser history. The menu, the standalone history window. the firefox view. And except for the menu. Thye all miss certain stuffs. The standalone window miss tabs from other devices and recent closed window. The firefox view don't have bookmark and recent closed window.
Has slashdot started showing ads in the last 48 hours for anyone else using Firefox and ublock on Android? It was a very weird experience to see an ad on my phone for the first time in over a decade. My brain kinda froze and took a second to process what it was seeing.
I'm using IceRaven, so it might be a bit different on Firefox.
I just get a white screen that says "Hello world. I'm a bubble" and flickers.
When I change to desktop site, I'm not getting any ads.
I used Firefox before Chrome took over, and then stuck with Chrome until about a year ago when I started using Brave.
Last week I switched to Edge. I know some people will turn up their nose at such a choice, but it turns out to actually be a very nice browser. I'm even using it on my phone now too.
Same experience. I've found Edge to be the smoothest-feeling browser I've used on Android. Brave may be objectively faster, but somehow Edge feels better. If Microsoft did this deliberately, I'd love to know how.
I had two issues, possibly due to my own perception, with Firefox. One is that it still froze in the same way Netscape did: the UI had no response whatsoever and a there was a hanging process in the process viewer. Granted, it didn't happen often, but it was noticeable enough that I got back my PTSD of using Netscape back. The other is somehow Firefox still feels less responsive than Chrome. This may well be just my unfounded perception, but pager loading, typing, and opening on a new tab somehow always felt a little delay, compared to using Chrome.
I switched to Firefox from Chrome a few years back and I've enjoyed the experience.
Firefox works fine and I like the privacy focus and general features. However, it still randomly causes the CPU usage to spike and makes the fans run full tilt (top shows 90-100% usage for god knows what), even when the same tabs are open doing the same things. I don't see this (atleast not as often) in Chrome, which I don't want to use, but end up using it until Google does one more privacy destroying thing, in a long line of such things, which makes me angry enough to go back to FF until the cycle repeats.
I guess I have resigned being like a ping-pong ball bouncing between these two browsers.
I have been a long time problems with videos on firefox, sometimes the browser broke, and it's not only on YouTube, but Twitch and Crunchyroll for example.
Even with issues I have using firefox and switching with brave/chrome.
For me it’s the cookie containers, always moving between (MS365) orgs, using different social (Google) accounts etc, just with a click in the containers plug-in.
One of the nice things about Firefox on mobile is that you can install extensions like uBlock Origin to block ads. Mobile Chrome doesn’t let you do that.
I know this is contrarian, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable installing many of the browser extensions offered on Firefox given that they can still be manifest v2.
After building a fairly involved browser extension this last year, I’ve become way more paranoid knowing just how insecure browser extensions can be; especially manifest v2 extensions. It’s not just about ad blockers unfortunately.
Been pretty happy with Firefox after changing some default settings, but I still have what I assume is a bug where add-ons keep getting disabled every time I start up the browser. Only solution I've seen so far is deleting all add-on files on my computer, but nuking all settings is a bit extreme with all the time that went into the configuration in the first place.
Also Mozilla is not completely white, they offer many services that could be seen like they siphon data.
Although to be fair, as long as it's done properly, it's fine, but I don't know if Mozilla communicates on those products.
I remember one security employee mentioning that monitoring chrome with wire shark showed an insane amount of unnecessary traffic that went to google and others.
I use both, but I wish FF had an easier to way setup "custom" searches, like:
bg3 foo => searches on the baldurs gate 3 wiki
r tragedeigh => goes to the reddit.com/r/tragedeigh subreddit ...
It can be done, but it's far too difficult. Containers are the absolute bomb though.
I'm back with Firefox after a short relationship with Brave. Still use Brave on iOS to block ads when needed though.
I'm using "Firefox" since Netscape Navigator 3.x times. As long as I'm using web at all.
Never used Chrome on desktop. Never had one installed.
Ok, as Windows user I have "Edge" installed inevitably, but never used it more than 1 time to download FireFox installer.
Using FireFox on Android from early betas, no problem.
Is it something worth to write article about?
Edit: grammar (maybe, not enough).
macOS user here. I know Firefox is great, and I'd love to use it (again), but Mozilla's decision to remove all user-facing, OS-level scripting capabilities from it (i.e., AppleScript) made me drop it a few years ago. Getting anything out of FF on macOS, locally, is a major pain in the ass, actually. Try to grab the current URL from the active tab…
Add to that the non-macOS text handling, macOS-unlike font rendering, its insistence to not use the system-wide spell checker provided by the OS etc. It feels a bit rude at times.
I think it's a super-solid browser that unfortunately doesn't give a shit about the platform it's running on. Irritatingly, it's fine with being a black box, so much more than the Chromiums are (for all their various faults).
I'm glad we have different options available. I personally use Chrome, but it's good that Firefox exists too.
If firefox worked with Chromecast audio I would be all set.
I have 2 of those hockey puck's audio dongles Google used to make to connect to your stereo. They only work with Chrome, SiriusXM, VLC, CalmRadio and Youtube, Chrombooks.
They don't work with Firefox.
Sad.
Maybe Mozilla should start IoT devices for Firefox.
Their font rendering always looks off to me. The only browser with proper font rendering on windows is Edge.
I have to fiddle the settings pretty much every time I move to a new copy of windows with firefox. Basically I think the two different font engines are fighting with each other and create a wobbly mess. Usually by the time I do it windows has moved where the settings are and firefox has too in some subtle way. Took me a couple of days playing with all of the settings until it 'looked right'.
I dislike that chrome still searches faster:
Type in skinflint (price comparison) page I often use, tab toward "search on this site". Then I press enter.
All non-Chromeengine browsers have - type website, enter - wait to load, use search bar on site
as a workflow.
Made me stay with Chrome way too long. Now, I use Firefox, but miss this.
I've done a round-trip through a few browsers in the latter half of last year, and now I'm back to Chrome.
It's usually sync that was too broken for me to use. Chrome's sync works nearly immediately. Firefox on Android would stop syncing open tabs so frequently that I barely remember it working at all. I had to log out and log back in from my Firefox account to get it to sync. But an hour or so later it wouldn't work anymore.
Vivaldi has better sync, but it seems to just randomly break a LOT. It would recover itself after a while, so in that sense it was superior to Firefox. (I liked Vivaldi's amazing configurability, but it's lack of bookmarklet support was breaking some of my workflows too, so in the end I abandoned it.)
I tried Opera too, but I think it had similar issues and I abandoned it quickly.
Syncing extension settings (the settings of an extension, e.g. custom filters in uBlock Origin) seems to only be supported on Chrome. Firefox doesn't have it.
vertical tabs + fully working adblock + containers, that's all i need in 2025
Are vertical tabs now in the main release of Firefox? I've been on Nightly for the vertical tabs and I love it. Fully agree - container tabs are awesome too.
I didn't see any announcements and I don't see it in the settings so I don't think so. With that said, I have customized version of tree style tabs, so I am not sure how would these visual customizations transfer.
I've been using Firefox for years personally and I love it. But it's cumbersome to try to use it for work, at least in a separate browser instance a la Chrome Profiles or Safari profiles. I wish they'd make that easier.
I also like (would like) Firefox, but on Mac, it constantly causes memory issues. It just eats up all the memory.
Same.
I use Firefox on all my devices. Actually, I am now experimenting with Zen Browser (FF-based fork prettier than Firefox, and even more privacy-focused). My wife and my kids get no say in it: it's Firefox in the whole household.
I really want to like FF, but it just feels so clunky and inefficient when compared to Chrome (for my usage patterns anyway). It's nice that we have choices (and competition to spur innovation).
I've got Firefox and Chrome and tend to use Chrome because some things like Google Lens are so handy, and translate works better. Containers are good in Firefox though.
I've been using Safari for a few years now and I love it. Snappy all the time. Syncs between devices flawlessly and doesn't eat up battery as fast as other browsers.
Best feature is how much I customize in about:config
I really hope they eventually support all the web APIs chrome does like web midi. Till then if you want to use those APIs you’re making Chrome apps.
Yes - I've been quite disappointed by this recently. I'm trying to make something that can interact with embedded devices and wanted to use the web serial JS API.
Unfortunately it seems that the powers that be at Firefox have no plans to support it on account of privacy and security - which I half get, but, it appears to be an established standard in Chrome. The discussion surrounding it kinda sucked and well.
Fwiw, someone created a webextension that provides the WebSerial API:
https://github.com/kuba2k2/firefox-webserial
I tried it a while back to configure my keyboard but it didn't seem to work at the time, I think it is a nice solution to Mozilla's problems with the API though
Firefox crashes constantly on my computer, and my previous Windows machines, too, never understood the way.
I use Firefox 90% of the time. The other 10% is a mix of Edge, Safari, Brave and Chrome.
The good of Firefox:
* the extensions ecosystem (KeepassXc, TamperMonkey, AdBlock, Disable Javascript, Youtube Audio, etc)
* the defaults in privacy and performance are good enough for me
The bad of Firefox:
* it is a minority web client engine so a few technologies and sites have problems with it. E.g: it is easy to debug WASM in Chrome, it isn't in Firefox
Hard to read this with all the ads cluttered in.
Ironically, Safari would render this cleanly with 1 click.
Same. It was in 2002.
Well, I guess it was still Phoenix then.
I use Pocket, and I love it. However, I would prefer if it wasn’t built into Firefox but instead remained as an extension. One thing that astonishes me is that, even as a built-in feature, every few weeks, when I click "Save," I find that I’ve been logged out. It shows me a login flow, and after completing it, the link isn’t even saved—I have to click "Save" again. That’s frustrating.
I occationally use chrome (not chromium) to get the cast functionality -- in order to bring a website to my tv.
i've noticed that google search can be slow af in firefox ever since they released the ai answer feature
This might be a hot take but Firefox has always been a bit heavy and sluggish for me. I've been using Brave the last 3 years or so and so far I love it.. Say what you want about using the chromium engine but it's solid.. And with continuing support for manifest v2 I can't complain.
Dumb question, but I couldn't live without some chrome extensions. Are they easy to port over to Firefox?
It depends on the extension, what are you using? Search in the Add-on store[0] If It's present there, then Firefox can even import them from Chrome for you if it matches certain criteria[1]
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-google...
It's generally pretty easy since FF uses the same WebExtension API.
seems ff has been relegated to strictly technical users now.
It's 90% of my personal browsing, and effectively the only option considering UBO is a requirement for the modern web. I've always loved the `user.js` configurability, extensions for actual tree-style tabs, etc.
I switched to Mozilla and never looked back. I switched to Opera and never looked back. I switched to Firefox and never looked back. I switched to Chrome and never looked back. I switched to Firefox and never looked back. I switched to Brave and never looked back. I switched to Tor and never looked back.
Problem for Android users like me is Chrome is the default on mobile, so all passwords bookmarks etc are there. Of course we can install Firefox but I find Chrome better on mobile. Just couldn't get used to FF on Android.
Moving to laptop it then makes sense to continue using it instead of installing Firefox over and above Edge anyway there plus Chrome.
So it gets crowded out.
Have you tried installing uBlock Origin on Firefox for Android? Feels like that would outweigh any pain of getting used to the UI, so worth a shot if you haven't tried that yet.
Agreed Chrome is good on mobile. But I can't stand browsing without uBlockOrigin or dark reader. Plus URL bar on the bottom in Firefox is brilliant.
Lol that was the hard part getting used to...thanks for suggestions I will try with uBlockOrigin.
Still, I need smooth page rendering and scrolling, similar to how Safari does on a Mac.
how is the webauthn story for FF? I recall that some hardware tokens could sometimes play weird with FF on Mac, I am not sure if Windows had the same thing. that was one practical advantage Chrome had.
i use yubikey every day on linux version of ff, after a year of going back and forth with microsoft works fine with ms365; github worked out of the box, ...
Page is full of ads
If you enjoy Firefox, try Zen browser. You’ll lever look back
Zen looks interesting thanks for sharing
Firefox has better UX than any other alternative.
Chrome feels too shallow.
What do you mean by shallow?
I've been back on Firefox for 2-3 years now since the Manifest v3 stuff was initially brewing. Still eagerly waiting for Fission/tab isolation to land on Android.
Every morning I open a bookmarks folder with my dailies (news/blogs/Wordle/XKCD etc) that includes https://mrotherguy.github.io/fx-nightly-changelog/, and CTRL+F hoping for Fission on Fenix :(
How is Apple handling all of this?
Sidebery/TST is the main reason I use FF but this article points out a lot of other reasons I forgot I liked so much: keyword searching, the Library window, and other browser customization... looking forward to the AI features when they come to the main release.
librewolf but basically #metoo
I'm on a Mac, so I use Safari, too, but were I on any other platform I can't imagine NOT using Firefox.
How did we get to a point where the dominant browser is designed to be hostile to user choice?
My experience has been very similar. I don't use the pocket feature though. But I'm loving the first class ad blocking and the container feature. I wish they would let you create container windows and not just tabs.
My only problem with Firefox is that getImageData does not return the actual encoded pixel values, but the values rendered to the screen after any sort of OS color profiles.
This makes it impossible to offer remote sensing processing tools that care about radiometric values to Firefox users. I specifically have to tell them to use a different browser if they want to use that toolset.
Mind you I haven’t checked this issue in almost a year so maybe they finally offer a way to make it behave like every other browser.
I switched to Arc and never looked back.
I did switch to links/lynx (could be netsurf), and I did never look back.
Well, I do try to grab pages using it here and there when reader mode fails. But now most of the time the amount of garbage around the text is so high that command line browser just can’t display anything.
links and netsurf are graphical (links has both a ncurses and x11 interface).
I use links to browse maps from openstreetmap servers.
Try Florb for that. It needs omake, but you can ditch opam/omake and the whole ocaml stack after the builds.
BTW, I use lynx/links too, among sacc and gemini browsers.
News/portal/translator and so over gopher: gopher://magical.fish
Blogs: gopher://sdf.org
Text wikipedia: gopher://gopherpedia.com
Graphical: I forgot the URL for Gemini
Weather: finger yourcity@graph.no
Weather over gopher, replace Madrid with your city: gopher://graph.no:79/0/madrid
Web decrapifier: gemini://gemi.dev (News Waffle)
Everyhing else: IRC, Usenet, Bitlbee, sxiv, mocp, mpv, mupdf.
Firefox still crashes for me. Multiple computers and laptops, PC’s and Macs - it always crashes. I test it every few years and the crashes still occur. It makes it an unusable browser. Instead I use Brave.
It crashes with per-tab thread isolation? When was the last time you tried it? I don't believe I've had a single crash in the past five years and it's my daily driver.
Ditto, the only time I use Chrome is when some old portals in work require it. I've never had a crash in the past 8 years, but then again, I keep my tabs clean and have uBlock Origin.
I tried Firefox but it was too slow
In 2015? Maybe.
Today? Not at all.
I'm glad the writer is enjoying Firefox, but posts like these make me realize we've forgotten how to use computers.
Built-in screenshot tool? "You don't need to install extensions"! Really? Dude just press Print Screen, it even works outside a browser, if one day you have to be put through the unspeakable torture of using a native application! Single-use burner emails are also nice and all, but why exactly does this have to be linked to my browser?
Of course switching browsers it's gonna be a big deal, when you actively walk out of your way to lock yourself to your browser's "ecosystem", but better Mozilla than Google I guess.
Firefox’s screenshot tool is a little more advanced than Print Screen. [0]
There are situations where it’s really useful to be able to capture the entire web page and not just the visible viewport.
[0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/how-to-capture-...
Moreover, Firefox makes it super easy to screenshot individual elements on a webpage, such as photos, by automatically determining the screenshot boundaries, which means I don't have to manually drag the screenshot area.
It seams to have a maximum length. If you try it on this page, it won't capture the whole page.
This is great. I wish I could add a clock to it somehow. This would be super useful for auditing purposes.
Fair point, but I highly doubt that this is how it's used most of the time. And taking 20 screenshots and compositing them in mspaint can be a meditative experience.
I would put money on it being the most common use case. It's certainly the reason I installed a screenshot extension for Chrome. I like the nod towards humour you've added at the end there, but it's probably time to cash out your chips and accept your losses.
I see what you mean, but that tool allows you to take a picture of the entire vertical length of the page. You can't easily (i.e.: with one click) do that with the print screen key.
I switched from Firefox and Never Looked Back
It seems like you looked back long enough to open this thread and make this comment :^)
I switched to firefox. Then went back to edge. Edge is just… better… once you remove the weird stuff
I switched to Firefox, and then back to Chrome and never looked back..