I like to think of it like this:
Now that solar panels have been shown increase the risk of people falling off rooftops, is coal the only option?
Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
#22One thing that bothers me is that, when smaller projects and companies get boycotted, the winners seem to always be US Big Tech companies that are far worse, and boycotts don't work against them either.
For what is worth, I still use Firefox.
If you fear Mozilla's telemetry going forward, you could pick a fork that disables it. E.g., Mullvad or Zen seem pretty good.
But on the other hand, if you really want to get off the Firefox bandwagon, yes, Chromium-based browsers are a viable alternative. Although, in my view, there are only 2 Chromium-based browsers that are fairly trustworthy (i.e., well updated, not insecure) and that are not full-on spyware: Vivaldi and Brave.
Regardless, the “forks” are good only for disabling features that you don't want. But keep in mind that the hard work is still done by Mozilla, Google or Apple, it costs a shit ton of money to maintain a browser engine and all of them are financed by ad-tech (Google's ad-tech to be more specific).
Re: Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
#23I have been out of the loop, what happened with Firefox?
added new terms of use which are very questionable: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b... https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...
Including: "Mozilla can suspend or end anyone’s access to Firefox at any time for ANY reason, including if Mozilla decides not to offer Firefox anymore." Emphasis mine.
Holy smokes. Mozilla is slowly tightening their grip on Firefox. We're looking at another SourceForge/StackOverflow/Reddit type of private equity takeover, I'm sure.
Edit. Forgot: StackOverflow and Trello on that list.
Re: Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
#24So many people don't seem to know the difference between Chrome and Chromium.
Re: Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
added new terms of use which are very questionable: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b... https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...
I think the conclusion was that they had to remove that for legal reasons, since technically they were already doing something that could be considered selling data.
So. Maybe they should stop doing that thing?
Re: Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
#26I have been out of the loop, what happened with Firefox?
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Re: Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
#27I like chrome, I don't like google. I mean: I am so used to chrome devtools, I don't even know how to switch to firefox. I gave it a try and it was frustrating that I didn't know where to find my shit. Felt like 10x performance loss for my web development activities. Is there any way to make firefox devtools look and feel like chromes?
Surely there's more similarities than differences. We inspect HTML, we mess with CSS, we debug javascript, we look at headers, responses, warnings and errors. All that stuff is the same in both browsers. So what exactly about your shit is different?
Re: Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
#28Libra Wolf - early fork of Firefox maintained separately - supports FF addons
Re: Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
#29It's funny how Mozilla is being vilified non-stop this past week when nothing's really changed (only their legal wording). Whereas Google are literally personal information vampires; they make the web a worse place for people and their freedoms.
I will continue supporting Mozilla and using Firefox.
Re: Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option?
#30The rhetoric around Firefox is so exhausting. They change some wording while having made no actual technical changes to the browser and the internet is on fire for days calling them the devil incarnate, meanwhile Chrome gutted uBlock and other extensions a week ago and there was barely any noise about it. What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than…
> What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than the other players?
Hm, my lived experience is the inverse, and both seem sort of important to talk about.
We've been hearing about Chrome implementing the same privacy protections as Safari as a transgression for years, years, and years, as it was delayed again and again.
It was ex-Mozilla people who brought to my attention that they were deeply alarmed by the privacy-concious-Do-Not-Track people making this pivot and that it was a really bad sign.
Generally, I try to avoid loaded questions phrased like "why is X considered as A while Y is considered as B?" because it suffers from high failure rates
(likelihood you're the first person to realize the truth; likelihood these things ended up sorted neatly into opposing binaries; undecidability of 'how come everyone believes the wrong thing?'; uncomfortable conversation when someone starts from 'how come everyone believes the wrong thing?' and you have to sort of lead them gently to 'is it possible you are missing something, not everyone else?' without making it obvious)