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

What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

neilzone.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 149 posts

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#81

Post by heresie-dabord »

DrinkyBird wrote: post #15

I decided to just stay with Firefox and disable any rubbish that Mozilla adds as it comes. I tried Librewolf, but the unstable RPM repository was very annoying, because zypper disallows system updates if even one repository fails to refresh. I also had some weird issues keeping it pinned to my desktop environment's dock. It also didn't want to save its window geometry (very annoying for me), and the only way to trans…

> mainly, I'm still dependant on Mozilla no matter where I go. They are the ones actually doing the hard work of developing the browser engine

You are being reasonable. Firefox is an essential application in my day. I support Mozilla directly -- in a small way, this helps to ensure that Firefox is available to me and others.

Consider --

    Browser Market Share Worldwide - February 2025
    Chrome  66.29%
    Safari  18.01%
    Edge 5.33%
    Firefox 2.63%
    Samsung Internet 2.3%
    Opera 2.09%
That's three Webkit browsers with 90% market domination. GOOG, MSFT, and APPL don't need my pennies.

No software is perfect and no browser is free as in beer and free as in zero risk. There is no browser that is perfectly respectful of privacy (i.e. zero data leakage, zero surveillance). The WWW monstrosity is now tooled for surveillance.

In addition to the actual coding that makes Firefox possible, Firefox has support for uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, and the excellent Multi-Account Containers extension. These alone make me happy to support Mozilla.

I don't like all the features and services that Mozilla has added or tested, but it is interesting to design and test new features. And if the TOS about sharing data must change, that's where we are in 2025.

GOOG dropped the slogan "Don't Be Evil" -- I cordially invite all relaxing frogs to speculate about future increases to the water temperature.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#83

Post by HayBale »

everdrive wrote: post #74
roenxi wrote: post #18

I'm not sold that avoiding Chromium is any sort of win. It seems to be BSD licensed. The code comes from a long and storied OSS tradition. It is unclear why that having multiple different browser engines is strategically important. As far as I know we've long left behind the world where a hobbyist project could reasonably expect to implement modern JavaScript. Brave's existence and success suggests that competitors b…

This is something I'm confused about. When people "build browsers" it's largely just Chromium with a couple of features tacked on top. I'm not sure why no one is trying to keep only the rendering engine and building their own, much better browser on top of it.

There are people doing that, Qutebrowser, Nyxt does that for WebKit(and they are moving to chromium engine). The main issue why others are not doing that is the issue with cutting yourself from extensions.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#84

Post by DavideNL »

I don't see Floorp [1] mentioned a lot here i think... i quite like it, might be a good alternative for now, until something better comes along.

Also there's Arkenfox [2] of course, if you want to fine-tune privacy settings.

[1] https://floorp.app/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floorp

[2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#85

Post by kalaksi »

roenxi wrote: post #59
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "other web companies"? Everyone has an app or an app store.

Whoever. Whatever. OSS is a system for finding the most capable entity in the world at developing a software capability and letting them get on with it. It'll find someone to pick up the slack if Google starts doing a terrible job. In this world of 8 billion humans and however many thousands of companies, there'll be one who knows how to put a web browser together. If I were going to guess today it'd be brave.com, bu…

I think that's a tad idealistic, though. You'd need the resources to keep fighting against the constant changes and ever diverging codebase the more Google goes it's own way. And already has been doing it slowly. Also, Mozilla and Apple have been important for keeping privacy relevant every time Google have tried to push for some privacy eroding web standards.

Edit: I agree with the sentiment though but I just trust the current situation more.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#86

Post by bradley_taunt »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #21

My needs are: - I like Safari as a browser and can live with it - at least on Mac and Safari. But goodness, its sync and almost anything it does with iCloud is atrocious. Now, Apple being Apple they definitely wouldn’t let anyone else fix that. - I also need to use Android where I use Safari. I would happily ditch Safari and Firefox if I can use a browser (without crypto shenanigans, edgy UI) all I need are: - robust…

The Orion browser has been great for me on MacOS and iOS. It won’t help you with your Android requirement, but every other point is covered! (Allows for Firefox / Chrome extensions too)

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#87

Post by 63stack »

roenxi wrote: post #59
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "other web companies"? Everyone has an app or an app store.

Whoever. Whatever. OSS is a system for finding the most capable entity in the world at developing a software capability and letting them get on with it. It'll find someone to pick up the slack if Google starts doing a terrible job. In this world of 8 billion humans and however many thousands of companies, there'll be one who knows how to put a web browser together. If I were going to guess today it'd be brave.com, bu…

This is very handwave-y and idealistic. Sure, 8 billion humans, and thousands of companies on a cosmic timeline will lift the "most capable entity" to the top, but the road there is going to be extremely long if you just "nah they'll get it" and not do anything else.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#88

Post by sunshine-o »

I feel like we just went back 20-30 years but MS Windows has become the modern Web browser.

- It is totally controlled by big corporations.

- It is very expensive to reimplement.

- You kind of need it to take part in the world: open and edit an Office doc correctly (but you can also be a freak and use LaTeX if want)

- Using a Webkit/Blink based browser is like a dual boot or VM running Windows. Firefox is our Wine/Crossweaver

Whatever you think about what happened to Mozilla recently, it is gonna go downhill from there. At some point their engineering is gonna start to really suffer and the quality / security will become a concern. Maybe Librewolf will make some patches, IDK.

I am starting to find the Web really boring (to use and develop for). I am tired of proving that I am human by clicking for 2 minutes on images of buses and bicycles. I hope something cool like this [0] happens soon because I am pretty sure all the cool kids will rush to it.

- [0] https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/WASM_Wayland_Web_WWW/

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#90

Post by cosmic_cheese »

everdrive wrote: post #78
mr_sturd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Chromium is that it's controlled by Google. Given they control the engine in the majority of browsers, they get to call the shots on the direction of the web as a whole.

Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really asking. Whether or not Webkit can be thought of as disjoint from Chromium is really the question here.

WebKit is substantially disjointed from Blink at this point, a natural result of differing priorities from their developers.

WebKit remains highly embeddable for example, so if you drop a WebKit webview into your Cocoa/GTK/whatever toolkit app you’ve got a mostly-complete multiprocess browser and just need to build your UI around it. Blink on the other hand is hard-coupled with Chromium for things like multiprocess support, which leaves no practical alternative to forking the whole browser (which as an aside, is why Electron drags around the full heft of Chromium instead of just Blink).

That’s moot though because Google has no qualms with pushing through Chromium-only “standards” that make non-Chromium browsers less viable since sites that use these “standards” simply don’t work in anything but Chromium. It’s like the situation with Internet Explorer and its collection of IE-isms all over again.

One could argue that Mozilla and Apple should just follow Google and implement these “standards” themselves, but that lands us right back where we started in that this effectively gives Google full unbridled power to steer the direction of the web as it pleases, which is a massive conflict of interest.

Post reply on HN