alt Hacker NewsAnd I won't even notice. Firefox is probably the most divisive topic on this website. Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive. I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else. I'm a big fan of critique, critiquing the scaffolding of our lives is the best thing we can do. That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars and if we do it we will be worse for it.
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I'm a big fan of WaterFox! I switched when Firefox decided to add a ton of AI crap without providing a "turn this crap off" button (you could force it, but I don't want to fight my tools). Really good experience, been recommending it to all my friends.
Librewolf is also good, and I use that on one of my other machines. I like Waterfox a bit more, but that's probably just personal taste. Both are solid and both cut the mold off the tasty cheese that is Firefox
Well, you see Firefox isn't entirely perfect, so I'll just continue using the worst web browser out there until someone finally makes the perfect one...
"Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed, but they keep the open internet alive."
That "keep the web open" nonsense is a myth, spread by Mozilla press releases
People who use Firefox, not all of them, "keep open internet [read: www] alive"
If Firefox exists and does the job for them, then they'll use it. These users write the add-ons to do "ad blocking", not Mozilla
If Mozilla closes the door on "ad blockers" then these users will move to another solution, maybe a Firefox fork, maybe a non-browser method, who knows
Mozilla gets ripped because ultimately they are "in it for the money", not Firefox users, and the money, they believe, is in online ad services. Mozilla advocates for having all www content supported by ads. Effectively they advocate for companies like Google
By pure coincidence I'm sure, Mozilla relies on dollars from Google to line their own (management's) pockets. Without an ad services company like Google to partner with, Mozilla's business, sending search queries and possibly other data about Firefox users to Google, cannot survive
But Mozilla communications reframes this operation as something like "we take money from advertising services companies like Google to keep the web open"
Except they will not mention the money from Google part
Then they will lead off press releases with some bizarre assumption like "a healthy online ads ecosystem is essential for the www to exist"
This might make sense to Mozilla but it makes no sense for www users who don't like ads
The nice thing about using Firefox is that Zen is by far the best browser I have ever used. So you get all the pros of Firefox in an amazing package.
Firefox already lost the browser wars. It's about 2%. Saying "you can use uBlock Origin instead of uBlock Origin Lite!" won't change this.
Once again I have to let people know about glide[0], fork of Firefox. I know a lot of people here like keyboard-driven and scriptable software, and glide shines at both. Keyboard control in it is so so much better than the extensions for Chrome or Firefox, and I'm quite happy how easily the API allows me do my own customizations. (as an example when I open HN in new tab with my bind ,sn , if I already have HN front page open it will refresh it, focus it and move it to the tab index where new tab would otherwise have opened. Really simple stuff in glide, not so much in others)
And there's LibreWolf, for people who want to use Firefox without Mozilla.
Hear, hear!
Mozilla seems to have a string of bad leadership but when compared to Alphabet, I don't see how there can be any choice. Use Firefox or one of the niche privacy focused forks.
My uBlock Origin works perfectly well.
I prefer ungoogled-chromium: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
>Mozilla gets ripped to shreds any time they're discussed,
Funny how people always blame Mozilla's good faith critics, but they never engage into hearing them out on why so many people rip mozilla to shreds in the first place. With a "stop being mean to my favorite billion dollar corporation" attitude.
Gee, maybe there's valid reasons on why so many people dunk on Mozilla. Hear them out before you snarkily dish on them. And it's Mozilla who should hear them out the most, if they actually cared about FF's market share, but they don't because those Google cheques keep clearing.
>That said...... we have nearly lost the browser wars
And where has the EU been all these years on this topic? Where is it now?
They could just easily have blocked google from pushing MV3 on anti consumer and anti competitive grounds alone. End of story. But they didn't.
white hat firefox, black hat brave?
I prefer an ad (and porn, gambling, social media) blocking host file myself.
>I don't see how any self-respecting Hacker could choose anything else
Brave and Vivaldi strike me as being at least not worse.
There is a reason Mozilla is getting ripped to shreds.
I’m using Brave and I’d rather people support a degoogled fork of chromium that supports ublock origin, than keeping Mozilla on life support.
And if you don’t like Brave just fork it again.
Because Mozilla allocates far too much of their budget to executive compensation, which has led to the layoff of many Firefox maintainers, including the entire Servo team.
A self-respecting hacker would choose a piece of tech that is well-maintained, not one that only recently added profile support after all these years, or one that still offers an ancient bookmark and history UI.
I'm going to advocate for Zen here. https://zen-browser.app/ I've been using it for the past year or so and love using it so far. There's some bugs here and there but nothing that occurs often or breaks my workflow. And it's based on Firefox :)