alt Hacker NewsHang on to Your Firefox
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There’s an old mantra from organizing: “no permanent enemies, no permanent allies.” You will never align with another group or person 100% on all things; the secret to making change is to build a coalition of those with whom you agree on an issue without holding it against them that you disagree on a different one.
I disagree with Mozilla about many things, but I agree with this article - I use Firefox because it’s the only browser out there that isn’t Chrome or WebKit, and that’s worth enough to me that I’m willing to disagree with them on other issues.
I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a selling point for everyone to switch to it?
Part of the blame for what's wrong with the web right now is on web developers:
- We "need" firefox or else everything's just chrome
- Forks of chrome don't count as different browsers because they all use the same engine
- Using the same engine makes you basically just chrome because you can't diverge from upstream
- You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
- You need to keep merging with upstream because upstream is implementing new web platform features
- You need those web platform features because if you don't add them then websites will stop working in your fork
- Websites will stop working in your fork because web developers don't support older browser versions
- Web developers don't support older browser versions because... they don't care?
If web developers had a culture of supporting, say, 10 years of previous browser versions, then chromium would lose a lot of the power it has to drag the forks (and firefox) behind it. I don't really see this happening without some sort of major culture shift, though. Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.
For those interested in how the alternative browsers are doing, I just put up an alternative to https://wpt.fyi (displays the WPT test results of each browser) which is IMO easier to navigate, and shows Servo / Ladybird by default:
The headline results are:
- Chrome 94.7% (1053647/1112582)
- Firefox 90.6% (1008073/1112582)
- Safari TP 88.7% ( 987377/1112582)
- Ladybird 84.2% ( 937019/1112582)
- Servo 74.4% ( 827216/1112582)
So Ladybird is catching up with the other pretty fast! Although it's worth noting that it still has a bunch of extra work to do with regard to performance.
(my engine Blitz whose website this is on scores 42.2% for specifically the `css` subset, compared to 50.3% for Servo and 72.3% Ladybird)
(the results above exclude the `encoding` suite, because that's 1 million test ~50% of the whole suite, that doesn't really measure rendering capability).
Firefox is the best of a bunch of bad options, but isn't above critique. It does suck when they do anticonsumer stuff and shove weird stuff like pocket in, but you can't leave which makes it similar to the democratic party where you can't really do anything, but they keep making really poor decisions.
Totally right.
On Earth, nothing is perfect, and nothing satisfies everyone.
Yeah, you can feel uncomfortable or disappointed, but Firefox is still the best option we have.
We should hold the line for Firefox.
I am using firefox, but it is pretty hard to keep using it. I don't want the whole world to converge on one browser engine, but I also want things to work, and Firefox does not make it easy.
Firefox on my laptop has a propensity for eating lots of RAM, and constant CPU usage, even if nothing is going on. Task manager is useless. Profiler just shows "GC collecting".
Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not. And don't even get me started on the "new tab" [age - it gives me 6 choices and all of them are "AI" ones which never show what I want. The only way to show a manually curated link list is "collections" and those do not get synced, and occasionally disappear for no reason.
Related: There's also Ladybird that is developing quickly and is aiming for an alpha release this year. It's a truly independent browser engine built from scratch.
Of my cohorts, I am probably the most loyal firefox fan. That said, I've broken up with it twice, and am currently in the second breakup b/c at work we're mandated to use the Island browser due to security reasons, and my work machine absolutely cannot handle two browsers running while I also have all of the work dependencies and IDEs and slack running.
I know much of this is subjective, but the chrome experience just feels better / faster. This is what precipitated the first breakup, and when I think about the situation now, it feels like this dynamic is probably long lasting. It does make me sad though. I'll come back to firefox later, perhaps when I get a laptop refresh and can be a little more cavalier with RAM.
It seems like the Browser Wars are going to converge on a singular point: "Do I need to access Big Tech services?"
As long as the business world is going to continue centrallizing on the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, any existing or future alternative browsers will either have to kowtow on the alter of compatibility or make the deliberate decision not to support "advanced features" that enable the next generation of proprietary webmail, social media, banking webpages, etc - tending towards a total revocation of privacy in exchange for KYC via a glut of metadata.
This will get even crappier as mechanisms used to filter out "suspicious" traffic (read: competing products) become standard. I imagine using Firefox in 2030 will be akin to using Tor in 2019 - web requests will be blocked, denied, or deemed "insecure".
Lynx revolution when?
I'm an avid Firefox user, but it seems that Firefox keeps getting worse. Pages forever load, when the issue does not happen in Chrome. History gets corrupted. Claude wouldn't load consistently if I had more than one tab of claude opened internal tools that used to work fine and we haven't updated struggle. I don't know if it's me but it's certainly maddening, especially when I go to Chrome on the same laptop and it just loads.
I use Zen (firefox under the hood) and I just don't understand all of the bitching people do about Firefox. Once I learned all about manifest v2 deprecation it was such an easy decision to move away from Chromium based browsers. The transition was one of the most painless things I've ever done in the software world.
Literally what is the issue?
I’ve always been a Firefox fan, and I used it exclusively for quite some time. However, I had to switch back to Brave after they blocked clipboard managers from seeing what you copy in private windows, and there was no way to turn it off. I know about profiles and containers, but this is something I need for my workflow. Now that Brave has proper containers, I’m running out of reasons to miss Firefox other than my ideals.
Aren't most of the complicated and useful parts of Chrome in Chromium?
Isn't that sufficiently divorced from most of what makes Chrome unpalatable to people who appreciate Firefox as an alternative?
Why then aren't there more forks of Chromium? I would think with the progression of SOTA LLMs it should not be long now before everyone can simply ride their own custom flavor of Chromium.
> The only holdout would be Apple Safari, hanging in there only because it’s the enforced default on iPhones.
This is one of the big reasons I'm against the EU trying to force Apple to open up the iPhone and allow other rendering engines. The market share of the iPhone is the only reason Google doesn't have 90+% marketshare, at which point no one will even bother testing in other browsers or worrying if features are Chrome-only. It will be Internet Explorer all over again.
I know some devs want this, because it will make their life easier, but you're assuming Google will keep doing what you want and like even after all the competition is gone. That's a bad bet.
I use Firefox, but Mozilla is increasingly eroding user trust and being primarily funded by Google to avoid a monopoly does not give me confidence either. When Google implement an anti-user feature, Mozilla have to begrudgingly implement it, and that is not a healthy ecosystem. There's a good chance that I'll move from Firefox when Ladybird reaches feature-parity, but they'll likely fall into the non-standard standards (Chrome-pushed features) trap all the same to avoid having sites break.
I don't know how we solve this, other than to hold Google accountable, but that in turn hurts Firefox. At least in that case we'll hopefully have Ladybird as a truly independent browser.
I am definitely hanging on my Firefox!
Personally I have the same view to things like Github, Google, and many companies/products that offer public services (largely) for free for mass.
Granted they have their own monetization scheme behind it, I don't feel I am entitled to used them, I feel grateful regardless.
The issue is building a browser is not profitable by itself.
You’d need to sell an annual subscription of 150$ to like 10 million people to get a browser that’s actually developed for users and not in some bizarre exploitive fashion.
I am hanging on! At home I only use Firefox. At work, unfortunately, I need Chrome for a few things that do not work well with Firefox (most Google products), but for everything else I use Firefox.
IMHO, that Firefox can only really stay free if it is supported by donations (i.e. people like us who use it). Anything else will lead to various things that either push people away or make less free - probably both.
Firefox used to be amazing, but they squandered their market share with bad decisions and stagnation. Maybe one day they'll see the light, but not likely, given their recent ai additions...
I've been using LibreWolf (FF based) for years now and I love this thing. There are many issues coming with anti-tracking, sometimes a pain in the ... but, whenever I ask myself "what if I had to switch to Brave or other" I always end up with the same firm "Nah, I'm good".
If LibreWolf would disappear, it would still be FF for me, with carefully selected and regularly reviewed privacy settings.
I'm holding on.. in a way. I've switched to Zen about a year ago after ~2 decades of Firefox. It's a fork of Firefox so I'm counting it as supporting Firefox anyway.
However, on my iPhone and iPad I've stuck with Safari. Because it's "good enough", I'm not a heavy phone user, and really any browser on iOS is just a reskin of Safari given they don't allow different web browser engines.
I switched to Firefox when chrome announced manifest v3, and I'm still happy with it. Not only I get a browser with a real adblock, now that I got used to multi-account containers, I can't go back to chrome since it has no good equivalent. And I'm also using it on mobile since it's one of the few mobile browsers with extensions too.
If you hate on Firefox because they're on X for outreach and marketing — like every other browser — you are certifiable. Your opinion is extreme and summarily discarded as noise.
somehow this little content made me to set default browser to Firefox on mac. I am so easy get convinced. I dont know what problems Firefox has, why firefox not improving developer experience, focusing on building new products, making it light weight and performant. But I am going to try again after 2 years. Its going to be amazing.
I use Firefox because it's a user agent. Chrome is a vendor agent.
Wait, is this a thing?
Why do people hate firefox? It's the only mainstream browser with an rcfile?
I gave Firefox a chance as my PDF reader as it has a pretty efficient engine. But that didn't work out as I don't need to read PDFs often so every time it launched, it ran an update that added 10s to reading the PDF... :/
My current main browser across desktop and mobile is Brave. Pretty happy with it. Overall more efficient and with a better UI than FF. I've used FF for many years, but I feel it's simply not as good as competitors anymore.
The problem is Mozilla, not Firefox.
I still use firefox when I'm on a proper unix desktop, like *BSD or Linux running x11. This is just force of habit from when I started using those in the '90s, with the old closed source Netscape 4.7 binaries, and eventually mozilla suite, and Firefox when that started out.
When I'm using windows or mac I use chrome. I've used chrome on x11 before. But somehow it never hooked me.
> Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition.
This isn't really true, and hasn't been for some time. It's just the only other browser engine with meaningful production users. Servo and Ladybird are both making great strides.
Firefox forever! On all the things! You can take it from my cold dead hands. Thank you Mozilla, for making the web a better place for humans.
Why isn't Firefox funded from the state as a utility and is instead left to rot in the hands of the "free" market?
If ff needs to turn a profit to survive how can it not follow the directives of the market?
I love firefox. I did the swap 20 years ago to Chrome, and then swapped again 10 years ago. Firefox is the goat.
I’ve been using nightly and it’s f’n awesome. The future of Firefox feels great.
Even switched the telemetry and reporting on to help them out.
What do people hate Chromium so much? I genuinely don't understand. AFAICS, it's one of the most decent C++ codebase.
I want to be able to recommend firefox to everybody, but after 15 years of chrome and going back to firefox, it still feels jank.
Web apps like twitter youtube discord that is left open for a few hours take up >2gb ram and is jittery. I have to shift+esc and close them to make them run smoothly again. Why hasn't stuff like this been fixed yet?
Why do I need to open about:profiles just to launch a new profile?
He seems to completely ignore Ladybird project for some reason.
I don't love FireFox. I love my uBlock Origin.
I'm good with my Safari, but thanks.
(Though, I do use FF on Windows).
What's the significance of being on X?
I think FF is in a difficult place.
The only community they have any penetration in is the developer one (in its prime non-technical people would tell me they used Firefox since IE was insecure. Their techy friends would tell them to use it and the message carried some actual weight back then).
Today they are a large organization that needs to make money to sustain itself, while facing declining usage, and less favorable terms for search engine integrations.
And our community (developers) is the least likely to take kindly to the increasing monetization slop (promoted articles, pestering about pocket and their VPN offering, continually requiring accepting new ToS, reminders to use new features, etc).
I mostly use FF, because I think we'll lose something if it disappears (for example, DRM will become intolerable, web inspectors will become more opaque, and generally future web standards may be much more controlled by a small set of large orgs with their own interests).
But I use FF with less enthusiasm every passing day
Firefox is my first browser, and I've been using it for over 10 years. I like its cross-platform sync and addons.
Firefox still works fine for me. Sometimes it gets greedy with some activities. I smack it around and it seems to respond. I worry that Mozilla is starving it compared to other activities.
The only real threat to firefox is ladybird, that's it, Brave and other chromium browsers are not it.
No sorry, I give Firefox a try about once a year and every time so far I have switched back because some random websites were unusable.
Maybe it works if you are de-googling your life at the same time and consciously choose to use apps over websites whenever possible.
Firefox is great, and I use and recommend it as daily driver, but the actions of Mozilla leadership are really hard to differentiate from deliberately managed decline. It will be interesting to see what happens as Ladybird matures.
Will Chrome go the way of Internet Explorer 6?
Microsoft killed off all competition. Then the only improvements were Microsoft proprietary.
I hate to change the subject to something so trivial -- because I have been an exclusive Firefox user for many, many years -- but the awful moving background of this website is literally nauseating.
I'm no designer, but I can't understand why someone would make a graphical choice like this. It absolutely detracts from the content, and in my case, will prevent me from reading it.
> Meanwhile, the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox every time the subject arises...Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition.
It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings in about:config and make edits to userChrome.css
It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into. Users who are seriously concerned about what Mozilla is prioritizing, and who are genuinely worried about what is at stake.
I hope people here never stop bitching about Firefox. Refusing to talk about Firefox's problems wont help make them go away. Keep discussing what you'd like to see in Firefox and what things you hope they'll focus on and prioritize. There are Firefox devs and mozilla employees around here. If we're lucky, a few of them might see and listen to some of what we say. It's the most tech savvy users who disable all the telemetry and data collection, so our feedback isn't really going to be seen any other way.