Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hang on to Your Firefox

newsonaut.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 551 posts

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#111

Post by cubefox »

The big problem for Firefox/Mozilla is that the browser is currently primarily sponsored by Google, but due to an extremely stupid antitrust ruling, Google will no longer be allowed to do this after 2026. Then Mozilla could run out of money, which would imply layoffs and Firefox likely shelving its rendering engine, with the browser becoming just another Chrome reskin. The situation is quite dire I fear.

And it was all the fault of a judge seeing an alleged Google search monopoly despite the fact that countless users were already using ChatGPT rather than Google.

With killing off one of the last remaining web rendering engines, the ruling would instead create a Blink/Webkit (Chrome/Safari) duopoly.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#112

Post by nickthegreek »

kova12 wrote: post #34
soperj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were competing with the biggest advertiser in the world who put an ad about their own browser on the front page of the biggest search engine in the world. Not sure it was entirely their own doing.

Wasn't something in their new ToS that turned many of us against them? I don't think advertisement was the issue

That turned off a fraction of a fraction of users. And I believe i was largely misunderstood. There are also Firefox forks of somehow that was a bridge too far. I don’t understand how the answer would be to jump to chrome as if they have a better ToS.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#113

Post by senfiaj »

cyberax wrote: post #37
senfiaj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and when you think about the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent engine, we are very unlikely to see a new browser engine: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-... . This means that not only we are unlikely to see browsers with new engines but also that the existing browser engine diversity might even shrink i…

Servo exists, and it's making steady progress: https://servo.org/

How old is Servo? 14? I just opened waspdev.com and the UI was quite broken. It can't even render a basic blog normally.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#115

Post by broodbucket »

kova12 wrote: post #34
soperj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were competing with the biggest advertiser in the world who put an ad about their own browser on the front page of the biggest search engine in the world. Not sure it was entirely their own doing.

Wasn't something in their new ToS that turned many of us against them? I don't think advertisement was the issue

It's not "us" that matters, assuming that means very on-the-pulse power user types. We're a tiny fraction of users. Over 99% of users have probably never even spared a thought for the ToS.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#116

Post by nickthegreek »

sssilver wrote: post #12
palata wrote: post #2

People just don't care. They are happy with monopolies and surveillance capitalism. Once in a while someone talks about digital sovereignty, but much like climate change, nothing will be done (successfully) about it. That's how it is, I've come to terms with it.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. Do people care? What signs of this are there? Does it matter to the average person that the society is marching further and further down the road of digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism? My impression certainly is that the percentage of people who care about this is so small that it might as well be a rounding error, while on the other side I see tremendous momentum…

The userbase of Firefox existing is obvious signs of caring. You really got to go out of your way to not use chromium. The userbase grows when people help others understand these issues, or ideally just install firefox for their non techie friends and set them up with ubo. be the change you want to see.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#117

Post by david_shaw »

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.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#120

Post by HaloZero »

thebiblelover7 wrote: post #21

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. https://ladybird.org/

What’s the real selling point? Yeah non profit but is it gonna be faster and better than WebKit? The reason I switched to chrome a long time ago was tab isolation, how much faster it was than Firefox, and built it better developer tools. What’s ladybug got going for it?
Post reply on HN