381–390 of 455 posts
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https://waterfox.net/ is what you're looking for, I believe.
FWIW, Waterfox is now owned by System1, an ad company.
[1]: https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/
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Because it took lots of fights to get the Brave team to 1) allow disabling ads and 2) allow disabling Brave Rewards, neither of which anyone wanted and went against the whole concept of "Brave, the ad-free browser" to begin with.
There was no fighting—Brave's Ads were (and are) off by default. The New Tab Page's Sponsored Images (a later addition) is on by default, but only appears on every 4th new tab, and can be turned off with 2 clicks. This type of advertising doesn't go against any of Brave's principles. The user is in control. Trackers and their ads are blocked by default as these harvest user data and more. Brave's alternative, privacy…
I was never referring to ads that Brave blocks.
I'm talking about the new tab ads. Those shouldn't exist. Period.
> This type of advertising doesn't go against any of Brave's principles
No but it goes against the notion of "ad free browsing" that Brave kind of marketed. Perhaps they toed the line with exactly what they consider "ads" but at the end of the day users installed brave wanting ZERO ads.
Replacing someone else's ad for your own is not what I'd call "ad free" nor "ethical", regardless of the use (or lack thereof) of trackers.
> Brave's alternative, privacy-preserving advertising model is based on user-control and consent.
I never consented to ads. Period.
> The user decides whether or not they will participate, and to what degree
And I never decided that I wanted ads in my browser, yet here we are.
> And, the user's data is never sent off-device; users are rewarded (with 70% of the associated ad revenue) for their attention rather than their data or actions.
And what if I don't want a browser that has all of this fancy mining crap in it? Braves stance is "it's okay to add bloat as long as we preserve privacy". Nobody seems to see the problem with this.
It's such a middle finger to users, in my opinion.
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... and replaces them with more ads directly in the user interface (e.g. the new tab screen).
You can turn all that stuff off. I'll never understand people complaining about free stuff that is useful to them, especially when it is minor stuff.
Firefox lost because they couldn't keep up and there was little justification for why do you need to use it unless you have sophisticated needs. And the fewer users they had, the less money (coming from the deal with Google) they had to spend on development. This feedback look is what killed Firefox and left it a niche project.
Mozilla's management is also to blame. They expanded into a whole plethora of projects that all have been killed, they bought Pocket and did nothing with it. Yes, it's a non-profit, but there have been discussions on their salaries and bonuses that weren't exactly tied to the one and only metric that mattered – Firefox's share of the total market.
When I first started using Firefox it was Firefox 1.5. Back then it was literally useless without addons and you'd build it yourself, basically. And that made sense because the alternative was to use IE 6 (or Opera). But Google managed to produce a browser that was good enough and every tech person installed it at their parents' computers.
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I'd say other way around is true. HN crowd won't like this but it's very hard to continuously update a product for the core userbase that Firefox has. (small sample size but I maintain a small privacy focused app and from my experience, most of the reviews I get are how it's missing features which competitors have or how it's unusable because it can't handle stuff without jeopardizing privacy focused nature of the ap…
People are dumb, specially the tech community. I've been watching for at least 10 years how everyone switched to chrome because it's faster. Now we have one mega corporation in charge of both most of the search and most of the browser usage. That's literally controlling the internet. And you made it happen by your choices.
Stuff like AMP was mostly brought throughs search alone.
There's a theory in the Free Software community that BigTech sponsorship of Mozilla was intended to bring about the current state of affairs. The idea is that MS, Google, and others really have no reason to donate to a direct competitor. Perhaps they did so because they knew it would give them control. That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foun…
The fact Mozilla squandered those "free" money is their management's fault.
There's a theory in the Free Software community that BigTech sponsorship of Mozilla was intended to bring about the current state of affairs. The idea is that MS, Google, and others really have no reason to donate to a direct competitor. Perhaps they did so because they knew it would give them control. That control was exercised over the years and now Mozilla is more a social justice advocacy organization than a foun…
> The sorry state of FF was the inevitable result. What sorry state? The thing I don't get about this narrative is that Firefox works and works very well for me and so when I see people saying things like this it doesn't jive with reality.
All these complaints are true, and there’s many similar ones. Firefox (née Mozilla) is a terribly mismanaged company. Instead of focusing on their core business, making a great browser, they keep launching weird also-ran side projects that inevitably fail, to name a few: Firefox VPN, Firefox Notes, Firefox Lockwise, Firefox Monitor, Firefox Send, Firefox Hello, Firefox OS, Mozilla Persona, etc. It’s one thing to frit…
Chrome just recently turned itself into a password manager on iOS. Agree about all the other projects though.
Idk about 12 years but I know about last two years - many companies and workers had to switch to WFH. So that means using some sort of chat&video&audio software/website. What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? That should've been the highest priority. Instead, it took them years to get at least the GPOs right, autoupdate is the same story... so many things in corprote env were or still are PITA…
That's the vicious circle: 1. Google basically controls the web. 2. Whenever a new Web API shows up, browser vendors have to decide between implementing the standard and copying the bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions that are implemented in Chromium. 3. Websites are tested on Chromium, so they start to rely on Chromium's bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions. 4. When a website breaks in Firefox (or Safari), people…