141–150 of 480 posts
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> Firefox haven't caved in so far. Why do u think it might in future? Because pretty much all their revenue comes from Google.
I think Google will try to annoy Firefox users into using Chrome instead via things like needless captchas.
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For me the two reasons I can't live without are 1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents 2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a he…
> 2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them I normally have 5-50 tabs open (so perhaps on the lower end), but I can't recall the last time I crashed a tab in the last 3 years. I also use persistent/pinned tabs and never noticed issues.
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For me the two reasons I can't live without are 1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents 2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a he…
Do these Firefox extensions help? I haven't used this, as I didn't know it was a feature I needed until you mentioned it. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/find-in-page-... Tab Session Manager allows you to dump tabs to groups for restoration later, with auto-save at regular intervals. Works quite well! - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...
You know what else is a security concern? Ads. The amount of mental gymnastics is insane. It's honestly insulting.
This change is good for the majority of users, but is actually bad for large enterprise customers and highly-regulated customers. It puts more control and onus of responsibility on to Google, rather than the end-user. So, we will expect to see better enforcement of controls from Google for the lowest-hanging-fruit that some aspects of MV2 exposed.
What's that, you say? MV2 changes? Well there's 3 things.
1. Remote code execution. The ability for someone to just yeet commands into your browser. A little harder to do directly.. Still very possible, just with extra steps.
2. Removing the ability for extensions to access network requests directly, which is what adblockers often relied on. It also means malicious extensions could snoop on your requests. They still can, just with extra steps.
3. Background persistence, an extension could stay alive, maintain state, run timers, keep connections open, and coordinate across tabs. So this shuts off the "background persistence" piece -- but helps with ensuring better isolation. Still possible, but now requires yeeting your data to an external provider instead of keeping the state contained locally.
Those 3 changes are incredibly powerful, and will impact many, many Enterprise security tools. Tools that now instead will result in products like "Island Browser", and "Enterprise Chrome" being rolled out to supplement the functionality that MV2 gave us.
This change goes against the US and Australian government's hardening advice, and reduces the overall efficacy of security controls we're able to implement within our web browsers natively.
CISA's own guidance on this is pretty straightforward (aptly named Securing Web Browsers and Defending Against Malvertising for Federal Agencies): https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/CISA%20CEG%...
Here's the Australian Government's control relating to it:
> Control: ISM-1485; Revision: 1; Updated: Sep-21; Applicable: NC, OS, P, S, TS; Essential 8: ML1, ML2, ML3 > Web browsers do not process web advertisements from the internet.
And if you're wondering about what incentives there are that led to this change, you can read this letter written to the Chairman of the FTC by a US Senator back in 2020. This letter is linked to from the same CISA document I shared earlier.
You should read it in full, and consider what incentives the Senator was referring to -- and how they also apply in this scenario.
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/011420%20Wyden%20...
Those Enterprise Chrome products I mentioned earlier? Chrome's change has now put some of this functionality which was previously possible with an extension, behind the Enterprise Chrome Premium SKU: https://chromeenterprise.google/products/chrome-enterprise-p...
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> the ad money kept rolling in Why "ad money"? That's a very uncharitable interpretation and for anyone not aware of the situation it's misleading. They're not paid for ads or by ads, they're paid by Google to continue being a viable alternative to Chrome. Is every Google employee getting "ad money" every month, or a salary? The payment is more accurately described as a protection tax.
Technically yes
Wouldn't it be technically no because Google's revenue isn't 100% from ads? They're making almost $120bn from cloud, subscriptions and devices for example. It could be cloud money. And if Google gets ad money so whatever it pays becomes ad money, then it's ad money all the way down.
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> the ad money kept rolling in Why "ad money"? That's a very uncharitable interpretation and for anyone not aware of the situation it's misleading. They're not paid for ads or by ads, they're paid by Google to continue being a viable alternative to Chrome. Is every Google employee getting "ad money" every month, or a salary? The payment is more accurately described as a protection tax.
In this particular context there really isn't any difference. Technically Mozilla isn't in the business of delivering ads, but their revenue is mostly supported by ad money from Google, and Google, being an ad giant, can simply cut that stream off. The common sentiment seems to be that this would spell a life and death situation for the company and for the browser as a whole, which essentially makes Firefox a hostage…
Isn't Google also a cloud giant?
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How is it half of HN is convinced Firefox can compete with Chrome in its entirety and the other half is convinced nobody can possibly maintain a single additional API version on Chromium?
It's about the tech stack, IMO. Chromium is a moving target to maintain compatibility with, which is difficult for a team that doesn't have much C++ experience. As a counter example, Brave is heavily invested in C++ and Rust, and I believe they could handle that work much better.
uBo is the only reason I find browsing the web at all tolerable anymore. As a test I turned it off to view this article and almost crashed my browser with a dozen auto play video ads This would mean I would find the energy to get over anything that is holding me on chrome, like saved passwords etc.
Agree. The web is literally unusable without uBlock Origin. It should be a standard browser feature at this point, like popup blockers.