Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing. Then I'll get called over when the computer starts acting screwy. If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services, maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation. They didn't do that and probably never will.
If my parents get a new machine, the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.. On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it. I just try to make sure they use a browser that isn't horribly unsafe.
We should all do this for people we care about. Don't ask them what browser they prefer. Odds are they don't know or care. Don't try to convince them to install Firefox themselves. They won't. Just do it for them. Think of it like picking up a rusty nail that's on their lawn. Sooner or later they're going to step on that thing if you don't.
My favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks on her toolbar in Safari had gone missing (presumably she accidentally deleted it). After I added it back and she clicked it to see that it opened properly, she was satisfied that I had fixed the internet. To her, when she opened Safari, it was all just "the internet"; she didn't differentiate between the local browser UI and the web, let alone different elements on a single webpage being from different sources.
It was even worse in the 90s/00s - on Windows, the IE browser icon was literally labeled “The Internet”
iirc there was a story in The Onion about someone who “accidentally deleted The Internet” on their Windows system and the whole Internet stopped working. They were so sorry, maybe it was in the Recycle Bin, there was still hope for the world, lol
Low resolution conflation of things is a very understandable outcome. It’s a lot of vocabulary to absorb to speak precisely about UI in general. I’m glad your grandmother has someone like you in her life.
The better thing would be to hold Google directly accountable for every malicious ad they allow through their network. If they cannot do that, they should not be in business selling ads then.
Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.
This. There should be no intermediary liability protections for any paid or monetised content: as soon as a platform is either charging for placement or paying the creator, they should be treated as a publisher and held responsible.
Not just the networks (although preferably also the networks) but also the publishers.
If a newspaper took money to advertise blatant, obvious scams, I assume a judge would consider them at least partially responsible for restitution, if not an accessory to the crime. Looking away really hard (and delegating the task of looking away really hard) shouldn't get you out of this.
Hold the publisher responsible, they can then hold the platform responsible, thus creating a market for platforms that actually fight scams. Right now, there is limited incentive to fight scams, as the scams still drive revenue. If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
But they don’t. Google and others do vet ads, but when they don’t host them, the ads can change based on who is looking (clean ads for Google! Not for you!).
Google didn’t have this issue until they bought DoubleClick (text ads and they hosted). And they had pretty good privacy as they didn’t want to share shit.
Define "validate". App Review is really only good at catching things that make Apple uncomfortable for financial reasons, or make their attorneys worried (trademarks, copyright, etc.) The sandboxing is what makes the App Store pretty unsuitable for distributing actual malware (the kind that can do stuff to your device without you knowing).
Well if they cannot technically differentiate malicious, then they should drop that business niche. They receive money for that, similar as selling stolen goods.
How would one hold Google accountable? By fining them $1bn? $10bn? $100bn? To them it is just the cost of doing business.
We're beyond holding huge companies accountable. The only way they could be held accountable is if there was personal risk involved for the CEOs. There isn't.
At this point, breaking them up into smaller companies. Then start fining the individual companies so the balance sheets feel the fine more. Increase the fines exponentially for each violation.
If a scam ad is found, at the very least, require them to disclose business records to show how much money the scam ad made (revenue, not profit), and make them repay it. Leave it up to the platform whether to recoup the paid-out share from the publisher or not.
If they are caught doing it repeatedly without taking adequate measures to stop it, treat them as an accessory to the crime.
A problem is that the platform owners argue that this kind of stuff is why they need to put up a security gate that prevents you from installing whatever you want on your own device while also allowing you to install the malware from the ads (... maybe because they want to control what you can install more than they care about the malware?)
> On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use.
I did the same with my mom, but then her broker and doctor's websites started complaining that they will only run on a supported browser, i.e., Chrome.
I've gotten her to still use Firefox for most other things, but it's not easy.
It's off by default and has to be turned on per site, but will automatically stay on for subsequent visits. Test the site with it to be sure it works for your mom. Most sites that insist on enforcing Chrome-only user-agents run just fine on Firefox. I've encountered a few that run even better on Firefox than they do on Chrome.
You can try Brave, it's Chromium under the hood so it's usually accepted and has built in ad blocking, and a one click way to turn it off for a specific site if you have an issue.
It's not just elderly parents. I've sat in on many an incident where skilled people in accounts or HR similarly saw and ad and thought "I have to do this thing", leading to compromise.
The problem is, Microsoft and Google themselves are doing shady things. A full screen advertising for using OneDrive on Windows and a full screen random request to use Google App when doing a Google search on Safari comes to mind. Apple is no different, when I press my Bluetooth button, it opens Music on macOS.
I’m sure we can find rather strange things going on Ubuntu too and bending the definitions a bit, there are several pleads for donation like on Gnome, Vim and Wikipedia that are a bit questionable.
Evidently whenever money and safety are opposed, money wins every time.
Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.
> It's not just Google, the Internet stops existing.
Uh? No?
The internet existed before being overrun by corporate presence. It still does.
Advertising pays a lot, but take the ad money away and let it scale accordingly.
>Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.
I've been using the internet since the 80s. This has always been the case. Even before graphical browsers.
Nonsense. Before the advent of those first “you’re the 1000th visitor” banners or relatively harmless “worms” spready by literal .exe files sent by email in the early 2000s… most of the internet could be trusted by default.
And at that point the blast radius was so hilariously small, some rando compromising your computer was a nuisance versus a threat to your financial wellbeing.
Viruses were common on FTP sites and BBSs. They weren't all benign. DOS in particular had zero protections against damaging code. Bot armies hadn't been developed yet so malicious destruction was just as likely an outcome.
Tangentially related, but has anyone else noticed a big increase in fraud attempts over the last year or two? I hardly remember any a while back, but I've gotten probably a dozen calls this year that go "hey this is AmEx please confirm your credit card number" or some such.
It's partially a product of the widespread availability of LLMs. Criminal organizations that would previously have been limited by the language fluency, scale, or technical competence of the labor available to them can now use LLMs to supplement their operations. It's also helping them target new populations that you're more likely to be in alongside traditional victims like the elderly, the desperate, previous victims, etc. They're pretty slow to adopt new technologies, so scam usage is still ramping up.
Phone call scams seem to ebb and flow depending on which 'sucker lists' you're on. Online scams appear to be persistently on the rise, both against consumers and organizations (businesses, non-profits, and governments). I suspect that LLM-AI will be a boon for scammers of all sorts, but particularly for phone and video-call scammers.
Every now and then I hear advice to the effect that saying even a single word to a robocaller will get your number flagged for more, so you should just answer silently and hang-up. Whenever I follow that advice, I get more and more calls. Then I start engaging with callers to waste their time and resources. I press numbers, try to get to speak to a human, and then generally mess with them if I do get a human. That usually takes care of the calls for a while.
> the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.
Does this run the risk of reverting with OS updates? History is full of OS vendors resetting defaults, whether that was maliciously intentional or inadvertently doesn't matter. If you set up Firefox as default browser yet the OS resets to using Edge, would you parents even notice?
Raspberry pi + adguard + tailscale could be a good solution for you. Browser agnostic, you get an admin dashboard to manage the white/blacklists, see logs of the attempts and other goodies. Bonus, this combination works on mobile too. The only nit I have is that after restarting the phone, tailscale may not auto-start.
A few days ago, my mother asked me to fix her YouTube because she kept getting something telling her to update. I looked at YouTube on her iPhone and saw an autoplaying video ad that displayed an animated fake system style pop-up button, designed to look like an important iPhone OS security update. The ad even showed an animation of the button appearing on the screen, making it look even more like a real system notification.
> If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing.
This has been solved on iOS. It’s not an ads problem.
Or maybe there are more things using the same tactics / scammer's reach keeps increasing.
My parents "fell" for fundamentalism early (as kids - raised in it), for televangelists in their 40s, and Fox News in their 70s/80s. Fox News so recently only because they didn't get it very often until about 10 years ago when they moved into a retirement home (didn't have cable before that).
There’s a long way between perfectly functioning and dementia. I want to say that I hope you never find out, but the twilight of life is tough either way.
I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
> I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone.
Market share appears to be hovering around 4%, which sounds small but that is still a massive amount of people, over 200 million users. It is even more impressive considering it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users, people overwhelmingly just use what is already installed. That's a huge number of users earned rather than inherited.
We had a glimpse of that antitrust future on the horizon with the previous admin. This spooked all the big tech weirdos so much that they put their weight behind the other guy and, well, they won. Antitrust is dead for another generation. Yay.
I couldn't agree more with your point. But also, precisely because I agree with you, I'm flashing back to Proton CEO Andy Yen claiming that Trump would be great on tech anti trust and an improvement on what came before, which was ridiculous from the moment he said it but symptomatic of a certain kind of tech bro mindset.
Well, the current cronies that run the USA may seem to have won for the time being, but sooner or later the population in the USA will realise how much fudged up the orange clown is. Only about 30% approval rating - that will continue to dwindle.
There’s a partisan floor¹ that’s in the neighborhood of 25–30% where people will vote for their party no matter what. The 2004 Illinois Senate election was a good test case where when the Republican nominee went down in self-inflicted flames and was hurriedly replaced with Alan Keyes, who had no in-state constituency and, being Black (which, no doubt was the cynical reason for his recruitment), eliminated the racist choice. He gained a mere 27% of the vote which is likely the floor for a major party candidate in a contested broad-population election (smaller-level partisan elections, whether for single congressional seats or in small states, generally have demographically skewed populations which can result in wider margins).
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1. Although as I think about it, this may only be valid on the right side of the spectrum given the data points.
The Democrats already tried out the idea that Trumpism would blow over and everything would go back to "normal" with Biden's 2020 campaign, but it didn't really turn out that way. Right-wing reactionary politics has been overrepresented in the US since its founding due to state based representation, and I expect that this will continue to be the case for as long as the US exists in its current form.
They'll immediately fall for the next such guy. Republican voters aren't actually reconsidering their views. Corporations and oligarchs have known no major blowbacks in decades and keep winning on every front, further eroding the Republic and its institutions little by little. And they won't stop until all that's left of America is an empty shell, a dead state like Russia, a sandbox for the Epstein class.
Humans have figured out an easy medicine to reduce weight, which is the number 1 causal factor in morbidity/mortality.
There are also novel cancer immunotherapy medicines that are drastically increasing quality and quantity of life for cancer patients, like keytruda and blinatumomab.
If only the DNC was interested in promoting candidates that work for the people and aren't just interested in lip service while mostly maintaining the status quo. Things could have been different. Imagine what 8 years of Bernie and a functioning Congress might have accomplished.
I didn't make that claim, you misread what I said. I explicitly mentioned a functioning Congress because that's a necessity, a functioning executive branch is not enough. We are in agreement.
Agreed. But on the topic of antitrust specifically, Lina Khan was absolutely doing the work, and Biden 100% deserves credit for appointing her. He could've chosen some do-nothing loser like everyone before him did, but he chose Khan.
However, it's generally hard for me to give Biden much credit for anything, however, given his own and his party's general complicity with decades of genocide and apartheid in Palestine. Same for Harris.
That and oversight of many more atrocities also carried forth by his predecessors really puts a damper on any good deed and make it hard to buy into any narrative of authenticity when it comes to politics that benefit human beings.
I also generally think Bernie would have played hardball on antitrust and given what we got with Biden, I'd prefer to have seen what Bernie could have done with the time.
Terrible narrative. Lina Khan under Biden was more than willing to go after big companies. She was forced out because the American people voted Trump into office.
Eight years of Sanders would have left us with a far more gridlocked country. The man has virtually no political talent.
I love Lina Khan as much as the next guy. But as you've already pointed out, it's kind of pointless if the fundamental problem is a malfunctioning executive branch (and a federal government with far too much power). But I'm going to need receipts on your claims about eight years of Sanders.
More unique individual people donated to his primary efforts than any other candidate in history. Wouldn't this be indicative of some large amount of political talent?
I think people grossly underestimate "money is speech" that is spent by corporate interests. PACs and SuperPACs are something I've just never understood how their donations are not just bribes
I think there's a remarkably clear precedent at least for browsers, which is having Android users pick from a list of browsers instead of having Chrome as the pre installed default. That's already been done previously with Microsoft and I believe with search on Apple, andI think it would reverse the Mozilla market share trend overnight.
I don't think Chrome being spun off as a company leaves them with a realistic path to revenue unless, ironically, they do something like what Mozilla does, and strike a search licensing agreement albeit a much bigger one proportionate to their share of users.
I also don't think it should just be Alphabet/Google because at full strength they are an important check against the power of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and arguably Facebook. Weakening Alphabet while leaving them unchecked could have the net effect of increasing monopoly power of the other giants. I think the order of operations would go something like (1) Amazon (online retail), (2) Google (search and web), (3) Facebook (social media). Microsoft and Apple are giants but I don't think they are strategically cornering any particular tech markets right now (though I could be wrong).
And I think international competition is complicating the picture of how close to monopolies they really are, though Google at least is clearly abusing its position in the browser and web standards space.
That's so long ago I honestly can't see that being true. It used to be a funny home video hosting platform in those days. The quality of content you can get on youtube these days is incredible.
Really? I don't remember it from back then, but right now must be better in terms of the content available, the player (not the shorts one; that's awful), automatically generated subtitles with transcripts that can be searched, automated translation, dubbing, etc.
We've done this in the past. AT&T was broken up into the regional baby bells. Eventually, the baby bells started to get absorbed back into the monolith AT&T again. Nobody stopped it. I assume that the fact that few people use landlines and there are more than one provider of communication services where the AT&T voltron is no longer a monopoly.
The point? Not really sure, but as much as I'm all for breaking up Alphabet, I'm not convinced it will work. I'm willing to give it a go though
This type of populist message seems like such an easy path to popularity for an aspiring politician. You don't have to be a leftist like Bernie Sanders to be a trust buster. Just acknowledge that almost every large corporation has seemingly made it their mission to make life worse for the citizenry in the name of profit and vow to fight it.
Anyone running with that type of message will be squashed by said "every large corporation". They will finance their opponent(s). They will run deep fakes against them. Until "every large corporation" is prevented from spending unlimited money, things will not change.
What would limiting corporations from contributing more than the total of max donation per employee? I've never seen numbers from that, but I've heard people discuss it.
Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business? I’m for less consolidation in the tech industry, but I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
Bonus: they might not be able to fund the anti-user behavior like sunsetting MV2, all of the "anonymous audience tracking" that prevents any other advertiser from identifying you (but Google's scale still can), aggressively pushing 'sign in with Google', retracting their stance on blocking third party cookies, continually removing settings that drive user control, and more.
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Short answer? Yes.
Long answer? Definitely.
> I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
I see you have an unconventional definition of the word "great". I'll take that to mean you're an outside-the-box thinker, so you're in a good position to understand that a break up of Google would radically change all the markets they're dominant in.
If Android 'dies' post-breakup, that would leave a gaping hole in the economy. iOS might fill it, but regulators would need to break them up too. Say iOS 'dies' too, would we all collectively just stop using smartphones? Obviously not. Entrepreneurs who can see opportunity will raise money and hire the right people to build a new OS, foundations will apply for grants to maintain Android or iOS forks, industry standards will form to improve interop and reduce development costs, etc. The sky's the limit!
Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? It never had a business model besides "support Google's monopolies", so it shouldn't survive (IMO). Lots of browser vendors already use Chrome's open source codebase, so those orgs can fork it, or they can collectively come together to fund development, or apply for government grants or something.
I think that Chrome development team members will have plenty of new job and business opportunities available to them if this ever happens. New markets will open up for browser tech that didn't exist before, and I think everyone will come out winning in the end, even users who would never even consider paying money for a web browser.
No one is paying for browsers. Maybe there is a market for enterprise support contracts for it, but this is not going to replace the money spigot of Google Ads. If I were to guess, Chrome "as its own business" would go bust very fast, with the staff being picked up by Microsoft (to support Edge, which basically is a Chrome fork) and Apple (to make Safari decent).
Android I'd say could survive, at least as long as it is bundled in the same entity that handles Play Store, that thing is a money printer. Without it... I'd say Samsung won't care, they already have their own marketplace and mess around in AOSP to an unholy degree, and everyone else will either attempt to fork Android like some Chinese brands did, go for Graphene or go bust like HTC.
Youtube... they probably got enough Premium subscribers now to keep the lights on, the problems are going to start when they have to separate their infrastructure. Bandwidth is still insanely expensive and at the moment they benefit a lot from Google being the top dog, able to tell even the largest ISPs "peer with us for free, or else". Without that leverage, with their own infra, bandwidth costs are going to eat them alive.
This won't ever happen, the US and the US government can't afford to weaken its corporations and risk impact their data collection, social control, influence and profitability world-wide.
The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe.
In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world.
I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
Why are these two points, countering China and keeping Europe safe, the framing for this? Who is needed to counter the US and keep foreign countries, like Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and so on, safe from the US? And who needs to be strong to counter the US's state-sponsored terrorism via Israel?
One could argue that it’s all the centralization and monopolistic behavior which hinders tech development in the usa. So a breakup might have short term stutters but long term gains.
Why would you be "torn" on this? Competition breeds innovation, and monopolies are literally the opposite of competition. A break up of big tech doesn't destroy anything or reduce economic activity, it can only accelerate it.
America is totally fucked if we keep betting it all on these monopolies. China figured out that competition is the key to winning, and is why their AI companies have been able to catch up so quickly despite all the sanctions.
> I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you placing degenerate bets on HN threads? Also the second sentence is unrelated, so now I'm wondering if you're a bot.
Actually the opposite monopolist (and oligopoles etc.) tend to sooner or later stop innovating (they don't need to, they win by default) and decay into customer abusive absurdity. And to some degree we are already seeing this with alphabet.
What such concentration of money also means, is a concentration of power under the hand of a few people, wich then can use that power to e.g. undermine or outright destroy democracy, force countries to make really bad decisions (including economic ones), destroy industries "on a whim" etc. Worst huge economic crisis tend to long term make the richest of the rich even more wealthy and more important tends to open doors for even more power/abuse, exceptions in laws, state subsidization etc. So you can't even rely on them not intentionally fucking up their countries economy because "that would be bad". Not for them, at least not long term. And tbh. at the net worth we are speaking about "it being bad" still means they can live in luxury for the not just the rest of their lives and have multiple millions left to inherit to their children.
> know (academic) international relations Realism.
or you not knowing less about economics then you think
> to counter China and keep Europe safe.
eh, the financial support of right US milliadaries of right radical political groups which want to both dismantle the EU (and overthrow democracy) in combination with US mono/-oligopols in combination with corruption & US political pressure, is effectively killing most efforts for local EU competition. Honestly this is likely doing far more harm in how much EU is "able to resist" China then any "safekeeping" the US does (mostly indirectly by protecting their own interests).
The US just added a colony in Venezuela in cooperation with their local Reichskommissar and is looking to secure its oil. American perception of their country is quite something.
The realpolitik is not lost on American HN readers. It's like you say - there's a balance between maintaining a competitive economy and a fair one.
In this instance, should we let AdSense persist as a platform? It does turn out lots of revenue, but it does so by creating a closed ad space economy that Alphabet manages. This not only gives Google and YouTube unfair advantages on their own ad service, but it also creates a blind auction for businesses that don't know what their advertisements are worth. The entire system is deliberately and artificially segregated from competitors to AdSense.
We see this throughout America's economy, with Apple and Microsoft too. It undoubtedly incurs fiscal damage to legitimate competitors that should be given fair ground to offer a better service. But since the US federal government encourages consolidation, all of America's services get described as "enshittified" by their customers while China innovates.
Hahaha, today I learned that we need to keep Google's advertising income intact (~75% of their revenue) so that the US economy doesn't fall apart. We can't stop projecting these ads onto people's eyeballs, or literally the entire world goes to shit! AHAHAHAHA
I've been using Firefox as my main browser since I switched from Windows to Linux.
No real complaints so far, haven't really noticed any difference from Chrome to be honest which is about as good a recommendation as I could give. It does chew up memory but so did Chrome I guess, I haven't done a head-to-head comparison.
They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.
The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.
> They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari)
They don't need to. Chrome does extremely well on Windows without "owning the OS".
> nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome
Very few people go to that page anyway.
> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
> They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
QFT. The biggest impediment to Firefox's success is the Mozilla Org, which sees it as a cash cow to fund a zillion projects no one wants (sacrificing the future of the browser everyone wants).
Silly take. Chrome does extremely well on Windows because every Google site, from search to Youtube to Gmail to Docs nudges people to install it. Without that 99% of people would just stay on Edge.
Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
This is a consequence of browser monopolies, established by Microsoft in the 90s: everyone should have to pay for a browser and make a deliberate choice in vendor. The fact that they're free and subsidized by large businesses in other markets, rather than being a product you choose to buy, is a concrete example of monopolistic market distortion.
Doesn't Mozilla foundation have millions of dollars, including paid for by Google? "Linux" is better capitalized, "Wikipedia" is sort of open source, what else ranks above Mozilla?
Firefox works everywhere I point it to, for now. "Let the user modify their own software" does not cost extra.
Being beholden to Google who might decide that the risk of antitrust is lower than the price they are paying for that search box is a pretty precarious place to be in.
The series of own goals is a bigger problem. They should spend their $ on FF and allow direct donations that only go to FF and not to their hobby projects.
I've been using Firefox since the beginning and will continue using it. I only use Chrome for occasional testing, but close to 100% of the time, everything works in Firefox unless an overzealous add-on breaks a page and then I simply disable it to get going again.
I'm always so shocked to see so many ads when I see people using Chrome or I have to use it for something myself.
To a degree, sure, but is it really 'MITM' if the site you are trying to visit has chosen to add cloudflare into the middle?
You may as well say all load-balancers are MITM because you might connect to a different host on each attempt and there's a man in the middle influencing your connection.
What makes it any different if the website executed the same logic cloudflare is on their own box?
I switched to Firefox like 6 months ago. I’m happy with it even though Chromium is a better engine imo. What Google is doing with Chrome is unacceptable.
Yeah, consider the insane complexity of Web standards, and the fact that even Microsoft failed to create a browser with an independent 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 if an existing browser becomes underfunded and / or loses a critical number of users / web developers.
I feel the opposite, the more chrome abuse their dominance the closer they move to a tipping point where enough people become browser interested to return to browser wars. It's likely one of those things where it has to go to far, then change will happen fairly quickly.
Such a wonderful take on Firefox. The only thing it is really missing to make it perfect for everyone is proper sync not just on one computer but across systems.
Without wanting to sound rude: you're talking about browsers – serious business. Most hackers – I feel – need a bit more than 'I strongly suggest it' to even consider switching to a nascent browser :D
The main issue is security. The browser is the most sensitive piece of of software you can run on a machine. It’s susceptible to both supply chain and JS attacks and a huge target for both of them.
it’s a firefox fork. ‘most hackers’ would research it no matter what was typed on a msg board prior to installing. the first step is knowingg about it. personally, im a big fan and daily drive it on my personal systems. but I do find their tab groups implementations to be a bit subpar.
I know it's more infrastructure, but just use pi-hole and then it doesn't really matter what browser you use, if we're just talking about pop ups and malicious ads.
I use firefox on all devices, but there are two notches against it in my book:
Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.
Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:
>Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.
Vanadium is a good browser but I wish it had Firefox's Private Mode toggle, for permanent private mode *
It's fiddly to even manually wipe history in Vanadium as it defaults to the '15 mins' option, and then it tries to suggest a subset of sites it thinks you want to retain data for **
* (Yes I know about the suboptimal workaround of the intent shortcut)
I stopped using Firefox when it had massive performance issues (CPU and memory) to the point it was unusable. Chrome in comparison was lightning fast and since then I somehow cannot get myself to use Firefox though I know they likely have fixed those issues long time ago. I have Firefox installed but never open it.
There was a period in time, few years ago, when I was going back and forth between Firefox and Chrome, driven by alternate paranoia about privacy vs performance. These days I don't really have to. Firefox on Android, at least for the phones I regularly used, like several OnePlus from 7T up and now razr ultra, has been very stable. Only blip was the one month I was on Pixel 10- turns out they have special hardware optimization for Chrome that cripples Firefox on Pixel 10 otherwise. All the more reason to (return the phone and) stick to Firefox.
Same. I found Firefox was fast on Windows at the time, but on Mac it was so slow (compared to Chrome), and had weird non-native scrolling for the longest time. As a Mac user it felt like they developed for Windows, and occasionally do some work on the Mac app too.
I also was a Firefox user, but Mozilla killed Firefox many years ago. I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio in order to watch videos (well, hear audio) on youtube. Chrome worked fine. At that moment in time I knew mozilla no longer cared about the users. (I use thorium though, so actually I can still use ublock origin fine. But I am sad that I ended up with the evil Google empire. There is no real competition against it anymore, sadly enough.)
> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Indeed. Hopefully more and more people realise this. Google has underestimated The People here.
> I noticed this when a mozilla dev said I must use systemd+pulseaudio
I am 99% sure Firefox will run just fine without systemd, or OpenRC half of Gentoo would be with pitchforks and torches.
It isn't correct, either, that it requires PulseAudio; I'm running FF with PipeWire, for example. But perhaps let's steelman that to "does not work with ALSA". I'm not sure what the objection to PA would be. It appears you can run FF under an adapter that will backport FF's PA output to ALSA — so it is possible to do —, I'm just not fathoming what the objection to Pulse is. (Or for that matter, its successor, PipeWire.)
Um.... If I learned anything from Apple, the best and brightest don't matter. Capitalism forces the best and brightest to make apps for the walled prison because the masses saw someone dancing with colorful backgrounds.
I do know a few perpetually single people working in academia using some obscure Linux distro(btw my company is 90%+ Fedora).
I am completely over thinking HN nerds can cause an uprising. Somehow the aristocrats have almost no power in democracy and capitalism. Power is held in 0.1%ers and the masses.
Firefox is a terrible browser. The engine is alright, and good just because it's not the monoculture. The browser is terrible. When you open it up in a fresh profile, it starts asking you to sign up for things and spend money.
I feel like with the advent of vibe coding, the bar to making your own browser is gradually lowering. People are already making all sorts of useful "houseplant programming" to serve their own pain points. Sooner or later, agentic coding will actually become really good and people will be able to just vibe code a whole browser in Rust or something that addresses the exact pain points that power users have.
The core will have to still be a solid battle tested thing. Imagine having to worry about if your vibed browser is quietly dropping some elements. Firefox and Chromium browsers are valuable because they are the targets, if a site doesn't render properly in them, it can be said that the site is wrong.
If everyone runs a vibe coded browser engine that evaporates and you might as well just have sites serve a bunch of markdown for LLMs to render in whatever inconsistent way they choose.
Vibe coding is obviously not quite there yet right now. But in the future it will be. The output of agents will be just as correct and rock solid as the software from the most experienced software developers. We'll also have the additional advantage of there being existing browsers to use as an oracle to test against to ensure that nothing regresses.
I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to use it.
Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.
I remember Google buying Chrome market share by tricking users into installing Chrome when they didn't pay attention while clicking next through the installers for more popular software.
Your memory seems to be broken, since what really happened was that Chrome was just stupidly faster and nicer to use than IE and Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox.
Rewriting history is wrong - Firefox was kind of a dog for a long time.
Etc. This stuff was very real and is a ten second search away, maybe try that before accusing parent of having a faulty memory because it doesn’t agree with yours.
I disagree, if you opened enough tabs back then Chrome was unusable.
But if that is your view, you should switch to Brave. 44% less memory use, (1/3) longer battery life, no telemetry and if you block undesirables it is obviously much much faster.
> AnandTech tested median page load time across one hundred top-trafficked websites in WebPageTest using a 50 Mbps cable connection. Brave 1.69 loaded the median page in 2.1 seconds, while Chrome 147 took 6.7 seconds. The 3.2x difference is not engine speed, it is Brave Shields aborting requests for ad networks, analytics SDKs, and third-party fingerprinting scripts
No it really wasn't. It took Firefox multiple years of catching up, releasing multiprocess architecture, 64-bit binaries (!), ... It took until Firefox 58 (2018) until they finally cought up. There was this huge period of nothingness around 2014 when they focussed on other weird stuff like FirefoxOS that everyone saw from miles away that it will flop.
Fun fact - FirefoxOS only flopped in Mozilla, it went on to be the insanely successful KaiOS based on the source code. KaiOS has over 100M active users.
This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
It was just less of everything than Chrome. First install experience for an average user was much better in terms of speed and snappiness. That was one of the keys to its success.
No need to be revisionist. Chrome brought amazing work to the table. The multiprocess, sandboxed system was incredible - it's not to say that Chrome was the first (IE did it earlier) but it was certainly way ahead of Firefox for a long time. Chrome is the reason we have Seccomp V2 on Linux. Chrome made "software is always up to date" the standard. Before Chrome, Blackhole and PoisonIvy absolutely ruined people's computers - click to play Java, click to play and sandboxed Flash, etc, were massive improvements to every day user security, probably some of the biggest security improvements to computers in my lifetime.
Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
I remember for a while that Firefox had a single process architecture for all tabs. This often frustrated me as one bad tab could just crash the whole browser while Chrome used separate processes for each tab, prompting me to switch to Chrome for a bit. Firefox caught up ages after chrome, and now I went back to them over the manifest v2 stuff.
Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead.
Back when Chrome was new, you could run Firefox with a decent selection of add-ons to get security benefits of similar magnitude through different mechanisms. The NoScript extension was at the forefront, providing a lot of functionality way beyond just blocking JavaScript per domain. And Firefox with extensions always had better privacy controls.
I doubt there are many things in this universe that are unambiguously good, but Chrome's sandboxing is certainly as close as anything.
You can make your arguments about noscript if you'd like (I have a great respect for the project) but I think it was essentially irrelevant to user security at the time, real users were really harmed by malware that exploited Firefox, Java, and Flash, and Chrome killed every one of those attack paths in virtually no time at all.
Computers were far more dangerous before Chrome. You watch old TV shows and it's a joke that people would visit a site and get hacked - that's unrecognizable today, it simply doesn't happen. It used to, Chrome changed that.
I agree that on a large scale, Chrome made browsing safer for the general public at the time. But for me it made things slower, use more RAM, waste more bandwidth on ads, didn't provide meaningful security improvements, and was a big downgrade in privacy. The only time I've been successfully attacked through a browser was when a Chrome extension sold out and became adware. And Google is now deciding for a frighteningly large part of the public exactly how much security and privacy they should get.
> Chrome's multiprocess sandboxing wasn't unambiguously good. It carried a steep cost in overhead.
This is true, but this is why we create faster and faster PCs, so our software can do more. The cost was because you were getting new safety features. Want the app to be fast, able to show you lots of tabs with no delay? That takes RAM and CPU. The CPU and RAM are there to be used for features the user wants. It's actually 100% ok if a computer has to work really hard to run an app as long as that app is designed well, it means the user is making it do lots of useful work. That's what the computer is there for.
The "Just buy a new computer" excuse doesn't actually make the tradeoff no longer a tradeoff. The cost is still real, you're just putting a price tag on it (then ignoring the price, along with any alternative tradeoffs).
It is especially true for projects like Firefox which have access to massive funding since these attract the sort of people who consider those funds 'wasted' because they can be used to do so much for 'the common good'. Mitchell Baker - the utterly incompetent CEO - considered Firefox an afterthought because what the world needed was more NGO activism and what she needed was 400% more money for herself [1].
Wikipedia/Wikimedia is another example of a project with massive funding with similar problems even though the latter has a (not so) BDFL.
Wikimedia might be not perfect, but Wikipedia is still one of the most visited websites in the world and source of a lot of humanity knowledge in general.
Firefox on other hand is just something only nerds like us care about and only alive because Alphabet / Google is scared of antitrust legal action possibility.
And wikipedia runs off a tiny tiny fraction of what they raise. Almost all of the good on wikipedia comes in-spite of the organisation that owns it. Without the community pouring hundreds of thousands of hours into the project (unpaid) a year, wikipedia would be dead immediately. And if there was ever a time in its life that the project needed good leadership and innovative thinking, it would be now when AI is seriously threatening its survival. If people stop going to the site and instead go to the chat bots that scrape the site, there will be less and less incentive for the power users to continue maintaining wikipedia.
Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".
Were you a Mac/Windows or Linux user? Personally I was an early adopter of Firefox and it worked great on Windows, but on Mac for a long stretch of time it was significantly slower than other Mac first browsers.
Firefox also has this weird non-standard (for Mac) scrolling for the longest time, and the UI was dated.
Most of these things were not true on the Windows side. At least not to the same degree.
In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!
It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.
Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.
When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.
If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...
It's only strange because you interpreted "Chrome made the web so much better for everyone" as "Chrome had a webRequest API", which is probably not what the original poster meant.
The article we're discussing is about how extensions that didn't upgrade to Manifest v3, including uBlock Origin, are now being removed from the Chrome web store.
uBlock Origin didn't migrate to v3 because they use the webRequest API and didn't want to switch to the less-powerful replacement, declarativeNetRequest (uBlock Origin Lite uses the new API and is available in the store).
Based on this context, it seems reasonable to assume that one of the reasons the person I replied to believes Chrome isn't making the web better any more is due to the removal of uBlock Origin. And this is due to the removal of the webRequest API.
Few years ago when google announced their MV2 plan I moved to Firefox. I don't think in all this time I ever missed Chrome for anything in particular outside of maybe 1 or 2 websites that didn't have proper support.
Firefox is genuinely quite a good option. There are some Google-driven web proposals that they've refused to implement[0] (I'm sure I disagreed with some of them, though I forget which), but overall I've found that I've never really had to think about the browser: it's just a medium for the web.
They do offer some integrated services (which some would denote as bloat), though unlike Chrome, they do let you actually turn things off, which I'm very appreciative of -- they don't seem to be nearly as forceful as Google, who recently added a 4GB download to every Chrome install[0].
As I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more appreciative of platforms which don't try to redefine the problem scope, and instead just provide a platform for other things. GrapheneOS does this perfectly too.
I would question if those sites only worked with Chrome or just had some user agent filtering in place. There are Chrome only websites, but thankfully most things I encounter are just requiring a blessed id, which can be easily faked.
I’m irrationally angry with Mozilla for the way they’ve handled Firefox over the past few years. Clearly we need an independent, safe browser and there are no major alternatives for the common folk. Just let me pay a monthly fee to keep Firefox lean and fast instead of jamming AI tools and 3rd party integrations.
I'm fairly happy with uBlock Origin Lite. Sure the original was better but this one does the job as well. uBlock Origin Lite is a MV3 extension, by the same author.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... has a few of the more practical concrete examples. Namely content can load without the blocker being ready to filter, CNAME cloaking can't be handled properly (in Chrom* at least), and the filter rules aren't as flexible.
Interestingly, the rule count limits themselves do not (currently) seem to be much an issue despite it being one of the more common concerns on the original MV3 announcement.
> content can load without the blocker being ready to filter
This isn't an MV3 issue, it's a Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization. It was also true with MV2. In fact, MV3 has improved the situation because DNR rules are enforced immediately.
You could certainly argue that Chrome should allow extensions to block browser initialization, or that it should be user configurable - but it seems like an entirely defensible decision. Regardless, it's nothing to do with MV3.
The companies that don't want you using the lite version are waiting for full version to completely go away before blocking the lite one. No sense driving you to that. So, check back in a couple months and see if it's all still good.
I've seen some ads slip through the cracks nowadays, like I think Wikia ads for some TV shows I go to now have ads on them. They gave up on blocking Meta.
I believe the main things are that block lists have to be updated through the Chrome Web Store and there is an upper limit for things that can be blocked.
When you make your money selling ads, you're not going to want your users to block ads. It's as simple as that. Google should not be allowed to both sell web ads and control a browser platform.
There's never been a better time to switch to Firefox. Hopefully soon we'll have another player in this space with Ladybird but for now, Firefox is almost necessary to use the internet unimpeded.
There are also some good Firefox forks out there, and I have been daily driving Zen for nearly a year. However, Librewolf and Floorp are both good options if you don't like Firefox's defaults or their push for more AI features (which you can turn off, to be fair).
I’ve had quite a few issues with Firefox crashing or otherwise behaving poorly in recent years.
Switched over to Brave and have had perhaps a day or two of failed ad blocking on YT. Otherwise it’s been a rock solid experience and the built in Tor is nice when I need to quickly test geo rules.
Reintroducing pen and paper to your note-taking repertoire might not be such a bad idea, anyway -- it's a much more creative medium than most digital, textual forms.
I suppose it's harder to cross-reference and find things, though I suspect you could utilize some sort of organizational system to mostly overcome that.
I really do think pen and paper will slowly regain prominence; I personally find that it can be much more liberating than digital media.
It's great to be able to use the page as a canvas, writing wherever you want, without having to meet the constraints of a text editor or the likes. Doodles help to visualize and understand problems, too.
Tangent for macOS is my current go-to for note-taking, and it works quite well: it's mostly just a Markdown editor, a tree structure of folders (which is really just a normal folder), and the ability to cross-reference and embed images.
I suppose the primary problem of note-taking apps is that they sort of have to be opinionated in some way to be useful (that's been my experience, anyway.) Markdown files are also guilty of this: they constrain you to a certain layout, which can either be a negative or a positive. Anything too complicated can be off-putting, whilst anything too simplistic can also be limiting.
It's a surprisingly complex field, and it could explain why there's so many different apps for it.
That is up to you but I don't see why. Just ignore whatever these entities do, run you free OS with your free software when and how you want it and 'your kit' is yours without interference by hostile entities. You won't be able to access much of what those entities put out there but that doesn't matter once you realise their offerings aren't worth their cost.
The 'net is a big place with a lot of things going on. Drop the hostile actors and it is still a big place with a lot of things going on. The only problem you might encounter is once created by authorities which insist on you interacting with them through those hostile entities. I have thus far managed to use their applications - Swedish BankID and Dutch DigiD being the main ones - without needing to resort to any hostile entities - no Google accounts or Google services on my devices yet everything still works once I get rid of the nag screens telling me things won't work without the aforementioned.
In short, drop hostile entities and keep 'your kit'.
There is a very easy solution to this problem, it's called FireFox. Now if only Mozilla would stop messing with it and instead would turn it into a class example of speed and memory efficiency I'd be even happier. But it's pretty good and I'm running it routinely with way too many tabs open (in the 100's, on a 32G laptop). I do have to be careful about unloading stuff. So, kick the Chrome habit.
Been using FF since they announced this. The only disadvantage I've found is that I think it consumes more memory compared against chromium based browsers.
Hoping my browser gets some love in the near future
I'm pretty sure it is just a matter of time before the first (open source?) extensions marketplace for Chromium fork extensions will hit the net.
A party like Helium or Brave might even already be working on it. Because while Google might not like it at all, a huge chunk of people love extensions like uBO and ease of use a little bit too much.
The reality is that Chrome users still have sufficient ad blocking so as to not be impacted by this. What will be interesting is if it stops being sufficient, at which point I think people will migrate. But until then, why would they? Most people don't really care if their extension is MV2 or MV3, they just want their youtube video to play faster.
Ironically, this is a fantastic time to use Firefox with UBO. I made the switch back when Chrome first threatened to block UBO and it was clear they were just kicking the can. What I've come to find is most of the things with ads won't take the time to 'block' UBO on Firefox. Perhaps it is not a big enough segment to justify anti adblocking coding. Youtube seems to have given up trying to fight it. Most things just work. It has been a long time since I've needed to fire up Chrome for anything.
I can imagine business reviews within Google that are seeing precipitous drops in Ad revenue given the uptake of AI Mode, which needs to be balanced out. And this becomes an easy tap that they can open, in the pretext of 'security', so Ad Words campaigns weren't getting rendered previously start showing up. If they'd only look at cracking down on malicious Ads rendered through their systems, it would be applause worthy, but I guess we're asking too much.
Same here, not using firefox because of worse compatibility (maybe not their fault, many devs only test in chrome) and weaker security (maybe not their fault, they don't have as much money). I appreciate the people who do and help diversify the ecosystem though.
What Google means to say is that MV3 will allow them to more closely control what you’re able to do with your time, since this was done primarily to target ad blocking software.
Not that this matters much anymore as Google is now more an AI than it is a search engine, and an unreliable one at that.
I think the new features in MV3 are great, and UBO lite is great. The initial versions of UBOl worked, but definitely lost some power user features. Those are basically all back, it now has full scriptlet support, custom dynamic filters work, element zapper is back and you can now have custom dnr rules. That's a very powerful feature that doesn't exist in UBO.
The big loss for me with the mv2 deprecation was uMatrix, so I made my own replacement. It's a prototype, but you can try it if you like: https://github.com/taviso/matrix3
I think the real question is how have Edge and Mozilla shipped WebExtension support on Android, but Google hasn't. If other competent vendors can ship it then there can't be a technical reason, it must be a policy decision. I'm more open to hearing conspiracy theories about that than MV3 :)
I made a conscious attempt to try to switch to Zen (built on Gecko/Firefox), but ended up switching back to Chromium-based browsers because pages just feel like they load faster with Chromium. :(
I recently switched to Zen with Ublock Origin and it does seem like some sites are slower than before. It's got me suspicious that site owners are increasingly throttling users with adblockers. YouTube absolutely does.
Zen is my favorite browser experience by far, and I've been using the web since Netscape in 1994. But the slowdowns do put a damper on things. Also some of the streaming platforms don't seem to play nice with it.
Pick my mother-in-law phone, is full of apps that pushes mensages every second, ad block is a way to prevent web to become IE with that toolbars, remember?
If I remember correctly, ~10 years ago one of Waterfox's main points was 64-bit + Intel compiler with aggressive optimization flags. At that time Firefox was 32-bit only on Windows, at least the stable version. From my experience, it didn't feel faster. Actually, it felt slightly more sluggish, I guess pointers and some data structures become larger, so the browser used more memory and put more pressure on CPU caches. It's probably no longer relevant as all major browsers are 64-bit by default.
Brave does what it says on the tin: It's another Blink based browser that is now rather mature and trouble free. It's supported by very responsive developers that provide a fully integrated ad blocking engine that is superior to every browser add-on/extension solution ever created.
That's it in a nut shell. Take a few minutes and go solve all your browser problems.
I like Brave, and I know and respect many of the technical team there. I looked into the various stories about the browser that led to it being unpopular in some key communities, and I really couldn't find anything some misunderstandings, common business practices (which you can legitimately disapprove of), and a wish to register opposition to their connection to cryptocurrency/web3.
I think many people would choose not to use Brave because of its association with Brendan Eich (details at Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... ), which stands as separate from the browser itself, or the actions of the company.
Avoid Brave. It is basically Chromium, with commercial shitware slapped on, and an ad-blocker which performs worse than UBlock Origin on Firefox. Brave Inc. (a for-profit company) is openly hostile to forks and independent builds, and expects you to run and trust their binaries. It also wants to charge you a one-time fee for a build free of crapware, i.e. something you can get for free from Chromium.
I've been using Brave for years and its great. Having JS off by default (i.e. shields) is excellent for security. They provide MV2 versions of AdGuard and uBlock Origin that you can enable directly from the browser settings. Those are also both excellent for security since the main threat is malicious scripts served up by ad networks.
People fall for "think of the children!" so let's also try "think of the elderly!". We're a society that ruthlessly opposes individual responsibility and individual outcomes.
Switched the family to Firefox. I use Libre but I understand it’s a hard sell. FF is much easier and the regular user can’t tell the difference anyway since they don’t spelunk into the details.
I know people don't like apple and safari here, but I like safari. It works good enough for me. And when an experience is off, it helps me develop my web developer hat by better understanding webkit and why safari has a different experience or frontend like behavior.
I'm with you. I've been riding with Safari for almost 20 years now. It's been nothing but great for me. I cannot think of a time I have used a website that did not function properly in Safari.
Prior to the reintroduction of UBO (lite), I feel like Safari helped me reduce my trash content consumption. Page with tons of ads? Not worth visiting. Youtube keeps playing ads? My frustration is a sign I need to get off YouTube and do something else. I do not need nor want to mange tens of plugins. I like to keep things simple and slim. So, perhaps that is one dealbreaker for some?
Even if I believe Apple hung the Moon, I still seriously recommend Safari to anyone using Apple devices.
They moved over to a new extension platform for legitimate development reasons. I agree there was pain but it wasn't a self interested flexing of power to remove ad blocking extensions.
However, this paper[1] suggests that uBO Lite (MV3) which is still supported in the latest Chrome/chromium browsers, works at least as well for almost all users as the original (MV2) uBO, and, in some cases even better than before... so it's really no cause for alarm IMO.
This (whether MV3 blocking is sufficient) is the right question to ask, but also a premature answer.
Because here's the future: Google is already promoting that sites have their tag management (including ad network JS) resolve at the CDN level, with randomized custom-built URLs baked into your page source as served.
In this context, the only thing that can sufficiently block ads as this is more broadly adopted, is dynamic code whose definitions and behaviors can be updated regularly. Because ad networks, including Google, will become increasingly creative (especially with the ability to use AI) in having a near-infinite set of embedding techniques.
And Google sits as both the beneficiary of unblockable ads, and (with MV3) the gatekeeper of timing for executable code updates for ad blocking extensions. Core to the MV3 model is that any use of dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension (and subject to a mandatory review period for every update) is forbidden.
Google doesn't need to do something as drastic as disallow uBO and other extensions; they simply need to "boil the frog" over the course of years as more and more of their clients move to Tag Gateway and similar approaches, and give their ad implementation an increasing "head start" by delaying approval of uBO code updates that are trying to keep pace.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of permanent absence.
> dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension
How could that be enforced on open source browsers like chromium which can always sideload extensions and/or be modified/forked to not have such limitations?
I am a webdev and sometimes I have issues with ungoogled-chromium so I switched to firefox. One time I had to debug a push notification issue and realized ungoogled-chromium simply doesn't support it (but never displayed information about that when registering the service worker). That was years ago, situation might be different now.
Hopefully more and more people wake up as to what this adMonster has become.
If we want a real open world wide in the future, we need to do something about Google. UBO is not the only one killed by Google here. They will continue on their wicked path. (And, while it may be great that Ladybird exists, I have some doubts that this will really be a contender. We should not become lazy and think that Google will just comply with the demands of The People here - its business is based on controlling influx of adMoney via its Evil Empire, and it secures this by de-facto controlling the browser stack. Just look how many people in % use the chrome-codebase now. That IS effectively a monopoly powered by greed.)
Serious question: why do people use non-OS browsers?
Most devs I know are on Mac. Why not just use Safari? Works in most cases, helps you catch issues earlier on, looks beautiful and is super customizable, still supports UBlock, has vertical tabs, syncs profiles to your focus, is way more memory efficient, etc.
I've daily driven Safari for ~3y after Arc got sunset and the only site that gives me issues is Hulu (but not Disney+ weirdly). Similarly drive Edge on Windows, I can't think why I'd ever reach for Chrome.
You mean OS as in "operating system", not "open source", which made me question how you'd suggest Safari and Edge before I realized what was going on.
I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better? Who cares? All that matters for me is what features it has and that performance isn't horrible, and if I cannot have vertical tree-style tabs in it and hide the tab-bar, then I personally have no use for it. So stuck with Firefox I am, and been for decades.
Besides, if my OS is Arch Linux, what browser is my "OS-browser" anyway?
The UBO on Safari has the same issue as chrome except that it has been that way for several years longer. They brought back the lite form of UBO only recently as, presumably, the developer saw the writing on the wall and mv3 and Safari carry the same limitations.
I think safari is largely fine but there are a lot of web APIs that it doesn’t support, rightly or not. A lot of devices are configurable through serial connections using the Web Serial APO thats only available in chromium browsers.
As a primary browser it really comes down to ergonomics. Things on top of the engine that make someone prefer one browser over the other.
Firefox's extension support is far superior to Safari's, cross-platform support, and I really don't want to use Edge for the same reasons I don't want to use Chrome.
If you use more than one operating system, you can't use the operating system browser if you want sync or the same experience. For example, I use a Windows desktop and a MacBook.
Using Mac is a no-go. For me, they became insufferably power-user hostile over the years.
Second,
God the safari rendering was so horrible for so many years. As a web developer, you have to target your greatest demographic, and Safari just broke everything more often than not.
Finally, even using Mac on enterprise, Chrome use is required because of the profile controls that can be exerted. And items #1/2 don’t help
No this one specifically for me, but same idea. I want to use safari, especially for battery life, but there are too many behaviors about Safari that I can't change.
yes, for example they have Ecosia but not Qwant (they are said to share their index but for my searches, I often flip over to Qwant when Ecosia results for the same query are not adequate.) I understand why Safari went with a search engine whitelist but I wish there was a way to make exceptions.
I use Safari for nearly everything and it's my favorite browser. It has some oddities, but I find just as many Chrome and Firefox bugs as I do Safari bugs. I use Firefox on everything else though.
The inspector is a nightmare if you're doing web dev (imo; it always felt clunky). If they replaced that with a Chromium-style inspector, I'd probably jump over.
I use Safari, but don’t really like it. I don’t want to use Chrome or Chromium derivatives and Firefox doesn’t support AppleScript (that’s essential for me), so all that’s left is Safari. Or Orion, I guess, but it’s not good enough to offset Safari’s iCloud Private Relay.
Things I dislike about Safari include not being able to setup alternative search bar engines other than the awful default choice; not being able to disable JavaScript by default and enable it selectively; not being able to have it auto-delete site data on close except for defined domains; iCloud tab sync is finicky and doesn’t always work.
Some of those can be solved with extensions, but then the system to allow or deny extensions is atrocious: You can’t easily say “allow extensions everywhere except these domains”. You have to open each domain in tabs, then deny each domain individually in each extension. It’s also not kept in sync with iOS, where it’s even worse because you have to accept an extension on a domain before you get the option to deny it.
I'm a dev and use windows (sadly have to), android and linux, and would never use edge, because why? when it randomly opens because of a wrong file association or whatnot, I only see a bucket of ms nags and dark patterns. It's disgusting.
Firefox allows me to share stuff across devices, block anything I want to and does not get in my way.
One data point: I’ve been building Web GIS applications for the past 15ish years and Firefox has one and off been a real pain in the neck, suffering from canvas API quirks and performance issues. I think the current state at work is that Firefox is palpably slower than Chrome and I need to find time to go figure out why.
Another point: I’m not sure if Safari’s dev tools are worse but I feel friction any time I have to use them. It’s probably partly just that I don’t want to learn the quirks of both sets. Firefox’s is much closer to Chrome’s. I bet they’re both inspired by Firebug.
If my parents get a new machine, the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.. On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it. I just try to make sure they use a browser that isn't horribly unsafe.
We should all do this for people we care about. Don't ask them what browser they prefer. Odds are they don't know or care. Don't try to convince them to install Firefox themselves. They won't. Just do it for them. Think of it like picking up a rusty nail that's on their lawn. Sooner or later they're going to step on that thing if you don't.
iirc there was a story in The Onion about someone who “accidentally deleted The Internet” on their Windows system and the whole Internet stopped working. They were so sorry, maybe it was in the Recycle Bin, there was still hope for the world, lol
Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.
It's not just malicious software ads, they also sell ads to entities mitming every government service.
If a newspaper took money to advertise blatant, obvious scams, I assume a judge would consider them at least partially responsible for restitution, if not an accessory to the crime. Looking away really hard (and delegating the task of looking away really hard) shouldn't get you out of this.
Hold the publisher responsible, they can then hold the platform responsible, thus creating a market for platforms that actually fight scams. Right now, there is limited incentive to fight scams, as the scams still drive revenue. If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
Sorry, no solution for spam calls/texts.
Google didn’t have this issue until they bought DoubleClick (text ads and they hosted). And they had pretty good privacy as they didn’t want to share shit.
After DC it all went to hell.
We're beyond holding huge companies accountable. The only way they could be held accountable is if there was personal risk involved for the CEOs. There isn't.
If they are caught doing it repeatedly without taking adequate measures to stop it, treat them as an accessory to the crime.
Not with this attitude.
Percentage of global gross revenue like the EU's GDPR does seems to work effectively enough for a scare tactic.
I did the same with my mom, but then her broker and doctor's websites started complaining that they will only run on a supported browser, i.e., Chrome.
I've gotten her to still use Firefox for most other things, but it's not easy.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/
It's off by default and has to be turned on per site, but will automatically stay on for subsequent visits. Test the site with it to be sure it works for your mom. Most sites that insist on enforcing Chrome-only user-agents run just fine on Firefox. I've encountered a few that run even better on Firefox than they do on Chrome.
It's worse than that. Google turned their exploit delivery platform into Google Tag Manager so they can be employed on more than just ads.
I’m sure we can find rather strange things going on Ubuntu too and bending the definitions a bit, there are several pleads for donation like on Gnome, Vim and Wikipedia that are a bit questionable.
Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.
I know people have rosy eyes for a BBS/IRC comeback, but that will never happen.
By and large, people don't care about having to look at tide and Toyota ads to watch YouTube.
Uh? No?
The internet existed before being overrun by corporate presence. It still does. Advertising pays a lot, but take the ad money away and let it scale accordingly.
I've been using the internet since the 80s. This has always been the case. Even before graphical browsers.
And at that point the blast radius was so hilariously small, some rando compromising your computer was a nuisance versus a threat to your financial wellbeing.
What do you mean it has to be numbers? I can read it right here, it says abcd efgh.
Does this run the risk of reverting with OS updates? History is full of OS vendors resetting defaults, whether that was maliciously intentional or inadvertently doesn't matter. If you set up Firefox as default browser yet the OS resets to using Edge, would you parents even notice?
You could even extend that to OS as well.
This needs to stop.
This has been solved on iOS. It’s not an ads problem.
If they're falling for things that they didn't used to fall for, that's sounds more like dementia than age.
My parents "fell" for fundamentalism early (as kids - raised in it), for televangelists in their 40s, and Fox News in their 70s/80s. Fox News so recently only because they didn't get it very often until about 10 years ago when they moved into a retirement home (didn't have cable before that).
But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Market share appears to be hovering around 4%, which sounds small but that is still a massive amount of people, over 200 million users. It is even more impressive considering it doesn't have an OS with a large market share feeding it users, people overwhelmingly just use what is already installed. That's a huge number of users earned rather than inherited.
⸻
1. Although as I think about it, this may only be valid on the right side of the spectrum given the data points.
Nobody is working on solving death/aging.
You have to pay rent, go to work, companies have average Joe’s shilling for them.
The entire society is death marching toward - well - death! And nobody notices or cares in the slightest.
The vast majority of people think they will live for all of eternity “in heaven” and many others just don’t even think about it.
The shortness and pointlessness of their lives doesn’t even cross their minds - worse - they think the point is feelings!
And so it’s a war of who can have the best feelings for ~80 years and that’s it.
Doesn’t get any more idiotic than present day wealth inequality and total lack and void of real intellectual pursuits
Humans have figured out an easy medicine to reduce weight, which is the number 1 causal factor in morbidity/mortality.
There are also novel cancer immunotherapy medicines that are drastically increasing quality and quantity of life for cancer patients, like keytruda and blinatumomab.
However, it's generally hard for me to give Biden much credit for anything, however, given his own and his party's general complicity with decades of genocide and apartheid in Palestine. Same for Harris.
That and oversight of many more atrocities also carried forth by his predecessors really puts a damper on any good deed and make it hard to buy into any narrative of authenticity when it comes to politics that benefit human beings.
I also generally think Bernie would have played hardball on antitrust and given what we got with Biden, I'd prefer to have seen what Bernie could have done with the time.
Eight years of Sanders would have left us with a far more gridlocked country. The man has virtually no political talent.
More unique individual people donated to his primary efforts than any other candidate in history. Wouldn't this be indicative of some large amount of political talent?
I don't think Chrome being spun off as a company leaves them with a realistic path to revenue unless, ironically, they do something like what Mozilla does, and strike a search licensing agreement albeit a much bigger one proportionate to their share of users.
I also don't think it should just be Alphabet/Google because at full strength they are an important check against the power of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and arguably Facebook. Weakening Alphabet while leaving them unchecked could have the net effect of increasing monopoly power of the other giants. I think the order of operations would go something like (1) Amazon (online retail), (2) Google (search and web), (3) Facebook (social media). Microsoft and Apple are giants but I don't think they are strategically cornering any particular tech markets right now (though I could be wrong).
And I think international competition is complicating the picture of how close to monopolies they really are, though Google at least is clearly abusing its position in the browser and web standards space.
It's an old American Tradition in need of revival
As well as youtube, and the combination of google drive/docs.
The point? Not really sure, but as much as I'm all for breaking up Alphabet, I'm not convinced it will work. I'm willing to give it a go though
What would limiting corporations from contributing more than the total of max donation per employee? I've never seen numbers from that, but I've heard people discuss it.
Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely.
> I wonder whether a good balance could be struck between great services like these versus how they actually make money.
I see you have an unconventional definition of the word "great". I'll take that to mean you're an outside-the-box thinker, so you're in a good position to understand that a break up of Google would radically change all the markets they're dominant in.
If Android 'dies' post-breakup, that would leave a gaping hole in the economy. iOS might fill it, but regulators would need to break them up too. Say iOS 'dies' too, would we all collectively just stop using smartphones? Obviously not. Entrepreneurs who can see opportunity will raise money and hire the right people to build a new OS, foundations will apply for grants to maintain Android or iOS forks, industry standards will form to improve interop and reduce development costs, etc. The sky's the limit!
If they charged users directly, everyone would just switch back to Firefox.
I think that Chrome development team members will have plenty of new job and business opportunities available to them if this ever happens. New markets will open up for browser tech that didn't exist before, and I think everyone will come out winning in the end, even users who would never even consider paying money for a web browser.
No one is paying for browsers. Maybe there is a market for enterprise support contracts for it, but this is not going to replace the money spigot of Google Ads. If I were to guess, Chrome "as its own business" would go bust very fast, with the staff being picked up by Microsoft (to support Edge, which basically is a Chrome fork) and Apple (to make Safari decent).
Android I'd say could survive, at least as long as it is bundled in the same entity that handles Play Store, that thing is a money printer. Without it... I'd say Samsung won't care, they already have their own marketplace and mess around in AOSP to an unholy degree, and everyone else will either attempt to fork Android like some Chinese brands did, go for Graphene or go bust like HTC.
Youtube... they probably got enough Premium subscribers now to keep the lights on, the problems are going to start when they have to separate their infrastructure. Bandwidth is still insanely expensive and at the moment they benefit a lot from Google being the top dog, able to tell even the largest ISPs "peer with us for free, or else". Without that leverage, with their own infra, bandwidth costs are going to eat them alive.
The United States needs a strong economy to counter China and keep Europe safe.
In the short term, this might be nice, but in the medium term these moves might cause significant disruption to what makes the United States the highest gdp in the world.
I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
That hinders development.
America is totally fucked if we keep betting it all on these monopolies. China figured out that competition is the key to winning, and is why their AI companies have been able to catch up so quickly despite all the sanctions.
> I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you placing degenerate bets on HN threads? Also the second sentence is unrelated, so now I'm wondering if you're a bot.
Actually the opposite monopolist (and oligopoles etc.) tend to sooner or later stop innovating (they don't need to, they win by default) and decay into customer abusive absurdity. And to some degree we are already seeing this with alphabet.
What such concentration of money also means, is a concentration of power under the hand of a few people, wich then can use that power to e.g. undermine or outright destroy democracy, force countries to make really bad decisions (including economic ones), destroy industries "on a whim" etc. Worst huge economic crisis tend to long term make the richest of the rich even more wealthy and more important tends to open doors for even more power/abuse, exceptions in laws, state subsidization etc. So you can't even rely on them not intentionally fucking up their countries economy because "that would be bad". Not for them, at least not long term. And tbh. at the net worth we are speaking about "it being bad" still means they can live in luxury for the not just the rest of their lives and have multiple millions left to inherit to their children.
> know (academic) international relations Realism.
or you not knowing less about economics then you think
> to counter China and keep Europe safe.
eh, the financial support of right US milliadaries of right radical political groups which want to both dismantle the EU (and overthrow democracy) in combination with US mono/-oligopols in combination with corruption & US political pressure, is effectively killing most efforts for local EU competition. Honestly this is likely doing far more harm in how much EU is "able to resist" China then any "safekeeping" the US does (mostly indirectly by protecting their own interests).
In this instance, should we let AdSense persist as a platform? It does turn out lots of revenue, but it does so by creating a closed ad space economy that Alphabet manages. This not only gives Google and YouTube unfair advantages on their own ad service, but it also creates a blind auction for businesses that don't know what their advertisements are worth. The entire system is deliberately and artificially segregated from competitors to AdSense.
We see this throughout America's economy, with Apple and Microsoft too. It undoubtedly incurs fiscal damage to legitimate competitors that should be given fair ground to offer a better service. But since the US federal government encourages consolidation, all of America's services get described as "enshittified" by their customers while China innovates.
We've been here before with Windows and IE dominance!
IE peaked at ~95% market share, and windows peaked at ~97%.
Broadly it seems to me that Google is behaving much like MS did.
But who knows, everything is the same and different this time around.
No real complaints so far, haven't really noticed any difference from Chrome to be honest which is about as good a recommendation as I could give. It does chew up memory but so did Chrome I guess, I haven't done a head-to-head comparison.
They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.
The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.
They don't need to. Chrome does extremely well on Windows without "owning the OS".
> nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome
Very few people go to that page anyway.
> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
They already get half a billion dollars a year from Google for very little in exchange. They just need to spend that money on the website browser and not nonsense.
QFT. The biggest impediment to Firefox's success is the Mozilla Org, which sees it as a cash cow to fund a zillion projects no one wants (sacrificing the future of the browser everyone wants).
Most "internet users" are mobile. The ones using windows are doing it from work laptops that are locked down and use edge (chrome).
If windows was a growing market MS would not be so far down the extraction path they have gone with the OS.
Firefox as "just a browser" that is entirely dependent on funding from its main competitor just isn't a future-proof solution. That's why they keep on trying to come up with new revenue streams.
I would not mind to pay for the browser, but they will not let me.
If they stop paying tens of millions to their management, they could easily afford paying devs in perpetuity just from investing that money.
I'd gladly do the same for firefox, but they have not given the opportunity.
If I had the cash back then I'd do the same for B2G/firefoxOS.
Firefox works everywhere I point it to, for now. "Let the user modify their own software" does not cost extra.
I'm always so shocked to see so many ads when I see people using Chrome or I have to use it for something myself.
Cloudflare with their "checking if the site connection is secure" (while being MITM) is another example.
You may as well say all load-balancers are MITM because you might connect to a different host on each attempt and there's a man in the middle influencing your connection.
What makes it any different if the website executed the same logic cloudflare is on their own box?
I am convinced all their metrics saying they reduce bot traffic are mistaken for the fact that they reduce all traffic by annoying users away.
I think both are kind of equivalent nowadays but I find that the Firefox one has a better design and looks more polished
Genuine curiosity: what's it lacking?
Joke: it doesn't have 80% market share.
But also with AI, the most I'm doing is hitting inspect and sending problem elements. Maybe screen resizing for mobile.
The entire point was that it was a browser built by a warm and friendly community, and not corporate interests.
I have no hope that they will keep their other values if they’ve already been so quick to let this one go.
I use chrome and those sites are miserable.
Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.
Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:
>Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.
It starts to lag after a while on some sites but force-stopping occasionally fixes it for me.
It's fiddly to even manually wipe history in Vanadium as it defaults to the '15 mins' option, and then it tries to suggest a subset of sites it thinks you want to retain data for **
* (Yes I know about the suboptimal workaround of the intent shortcut)
** (Yes I know this is upstream behaviour.)
> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
Indeed. Hopefully more and more people realise this. Google has underestimated The People here.
I am 99% sure Firefox will run just fine without systemd, or OpenRC half of Gentoo would be with pitchforks and torches.
It isn't correct, either, that it requires PulseAudio; I'm running FF with PipeWire, for example. But perhaps let's steelman that to "does not work with ALSA". I'm not sure what the objection to PA would be. It appears you can run FF under an adapter that will backport FF's PA output to ALSA — so it is possible to do —, I'm just not fathoming what the objection to Pulse is. (Or for that matter, its successor, PipeWire.)
I do know a few perpetually single people working in academia using some obscure Linux distro(btw my company is 90%+ Fedora).
I am completely over thinking HN nerds can cause an uprising. Somehow the aristocrats have almost no power in democracy and capitalism. Power is held in 0.1%ers and the masses.
If everyone runs a vibe coded browser engine that evaporates and you might as well just have sites serve a bunch of markdown for LLMs to render in whatever inconsistent way they choose.
Now that mv2 is going away, I switch back to firefox, and it still has memory leak issues after all these years, it is really disappointing.
Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.
Rewriting history is wrong - Firefox was kind of a dog for a long time.
https://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pa...
https://community.adobe.com/questions-638/adobe-flash-instal...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/filesubmission
https://www.findmysoft.com/news/google-gets-pushy-with-chrom...
Etc. This stuff was very real and is a ten second search away, maybe try that before accusing parent of having a faulty memory because it doesn’t agree with yours.
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/528214/browser_speed_compari...
[2] https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-chrome-bund...
But if that is your view, you should switch to Brave. 44% less memory use, (1/3) longer battery life, no telemetry and if you block undesirables it is obviously much much faster.
> AnandTech tested median page load time across one hundred top-trafficked websites in WebPageTest using a 50 Mbps cable connection. Brave 1.69 loaded the median page in 2.1 seconds, while Chrome 147 took 6.7 seconds. The 3.2x difference is not engine speed, it is Brave Shields aborting requests for ad networks, analytics SDKs, and third-party fingerprinting scripts
Rewriting history is wrong
This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
This is insane. As a power FF user, I don't think Chrome ever "got ahead". There were 2 reasons for its success (in order):
1. Made by a respected company that was killing everything in those days.
2. It was occasionally faster, and more stable.
Feature-wise - it was always worse.
That is ahead for the majority of people.
Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
Back when Chrome was new, you could run Firefox with a decent selection of add-ons to get security benefits of similar magnitude through different mechanisms. The NoScript extension was at the forefront, providing a lot of functionality way beyond just blocking JavaScript per domain. And Firefox with extensions always had better privacy controls.
You can make your arguments about noscript if you'd like (I have a great respect for the project) but I think it was essentially irrelevant to user security at the time, real users were really harmed by malware that exploited Firefox, Java, and Flash, and Chrome killed every one of those attack paths in virtually no time at all.
Computers were far more dangerous before Chrome. You watch old TV shows and it's a joke that people would visit a site and get hacked - that's unrecognizable today, it simply doesn't happen. It used to, Chrome changed that.
This is true, but this is why we create faster and faster PCs, so our software can do more. The cost was because you were getting new safety features. Want the app to be fast, able to show you lots of tabs with no delay? That takes RAM and CPU. The CPU and RAM are there to be used for features the user wants. It's actually 100% ok if a computer has to work really hard to run an app as long as that app is designed well, it means the user is making it do lots of useful work. That's what the computer is there for.
This is basically whole history of Mozilla and to be honest most of open source projects that dont have BDFL type of leadership.
Wikipedia/Wikimedia is another example of a project with massive funding with similar problems even though the latter has a (not so) BDFL.
[1] https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
Firefox on other hand is just something only nerds like us care about and only alive because Alphabet / Google is scared of antitrust legal action possibility.
Most of these things were not true on the Windows side. At least not to the same degree.
Hasn't been the case since at least 2017.
Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.
In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!
It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837
Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.
When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.
If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...
A - Billions
B - not Billions
All of the things that made Chrome great for the web in 2010 are still there.
It's strange how we can kind of misremember things to fit whatever narrative we currently believe.
Something that was great in 2010 may not look great in 2026.
It's been 16 years. The Internet has moved on. Blocking ads is the norm now, and they are removing that functionality.
uBlock Origin didn't migrate to v3 because they use the webRequest API and didn't want to switch to the less-powerful replacement, declarativeNetRequest (uBlock Origin Lite uses the new API and is available in the store).
Based on this context, it seems reasonable to assume that one of the reasons the person I replied to believes Chrome isn't making the web better any more is due to the removal of uBlock Origin. And this is due to the removal of the webRequest API.
Switch to Firefox if you haven't already really.
They do offer some integrated services (which some would denote as bloat), though unlike Chrome, they do let you actually turn things off, which I'm very appreciative of -- they don't seem to be nearly as forceful as Google, who recently added a 4GB download to every Chrome install[0].
As I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more appreciative of platforms which don't try to redefine the problem scope, and instead just provide a platform for other things. GrapheneOS does this perfectly too.
[0]: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ [1]: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/05/google-chrome...
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
> Towards the end of 2023 [...] we’ll decide on an appropriate timeframe to deprecate MV2.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manif...
> Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future.
Seems they changed their mind in 2024.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-manifest-v3-adbl...
Interestingly, the rule count limits themselves do not (currently) seem to be much an issue despite it being one of the more common concerns on the original MV3 announcement.
This isn't an MV3 issue, it's a Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization. It was also true with MV2. In fact, MV3 has improved the situation because DNR rules are enforced immediately.
You could certainly argue that Chrome should allow extensions to block browser initialization, or that it should be user configurable - but it seems like an entirely defensible decision. Regardless, it's nothing to do with MV3.
> the filter rules aren't as flexible.
That's true, but they are still very flexible.
There are also some good Firefox forks out there, and I have been daily driving Zen for nearly a year. However, Librewolf and Floorp are both good options if you don't like Firefox's defaults or their push for more AI features (which you can turn off, to be fair).
Switched over to Brave and have had perhaps a day or two of failed ad blocking on YT. Otherwise it’s been a rock solid experience and the built in Tor is nice when I need to quickly test geo rules.
* Android * All websites hosted on Google Cloud, Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure * All websites using React * Github
Life is tough. Good luck.
I don't know why you didn't include Apple on the list and why you use Meta's old company name.
Apple is not that evil in my opinion compared to the rest. If I don't use Apple then they don't bother me.
I don't care about Facebook's rebranding. I'm allowed to call them what they are.
I really do think pen and paper will slowly regain prominence; I personally find that it can be much more liberating than digital media.
It's great to be able to use the page as a canvas, writing wherever you want, without having to meet the constraints of a text editor or the likes. Doodles help to visualize and understand problems, too.
Tangent for macOS is my current go-to for note-taking, and it works quite well: it's mostly just a Markdown editor, a tree structure of folders (which is really just a normal folder), and the ability to cross-reference and embed images.
I suppose the primary problem of note-taking apps is that they sort of have to be opinionated in some way to be useful (that's been my experience, anyway.) Markdown files are also guilty of this: they constrain you to a certain layout, which can either be a negative or a positive. Anything too complicated can be off-putting, whilst anything too simplistic can also be limiting.
It's a surprisingly complex field, and it could explain why there's so many different apps for it.
The 'net is a big place with a lot of things going on. Drop the hostile actors and it is still a big place with a lot of things going on. The only problem you might encounter is once created by authorities which insist on you interacting with them through those hostile entities. I have thus far managed to use their applications - Swedish BankID and Dutch DigiD being the main ones - without needing to resort to any hostile entities - no Google accounts or Google services on my devices yet everything still works once I get rid of the nag screens telling me things won't work without the aforementioned.
In short, drop hostile entities and keep 'your kit'.
It was such a big hit to my online life to lose my email like that.
Their appeal system is fully automated, impossible to get a human to look at your case.
This is warning to any reader of this comment, do not depend on your google account to be forever.
We really need independence from Google in the browser landscape if we want the open web to survive.
Hoping my browser gets some love in the near future
A party like Helium or Brave might even already be working on it. Because while Google might not like it at all, a huge chunk of people love extensions like uBO and ease of use a little bit too much.
Not that this matters much anymore as Google is now more an AI than it is a search engine, and an unreliable one at that.
The big loss for me with the mv2 deprecation was uMatrix, so I made my own replacement. It's a prototype, but you can try it if you like: https://github.com/taviso/matrix3
I think the real question is how have Edge and Mozilla shipped WebExtension support on Android, but Google hasn't. If other competent vendors can ship it then there can't be a technical reason, it must be a policy decision. I'm more open to hearing conspiracy theories about that than MV3 :)
Zen is my favorite browser experience by far, and I've been using the web since Netscape in 1994. But the slowdowns do put a damper on things. Also some of the streaming platforms don't seem to play nice with it.
"For security and privacy"
That's it in a nut shell. Take a few minutes and go solve all your browser problems.
I think many people would choose not to use Brave because of its association with Brendan Eich (details at Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE... ), which stands as separate from the browser itself, or the actions of the company.
Prior to the reintroduction of UBO (lite), I feel like Safari helped me reduce my trash content consumption. Page with tons of ads? Not worth visiting. Youtube keeps playing ads? My frustration is a sign I need to get off YouTube and do something else. I do not need nor want to mange tens of plugins. I like to keep things simple and slim. So, perhaps that is one dealbreaker for some?
Even if I believe Apple hung the Moon, I still seriously recommend Safari to anyone using Apple devices.
It was mostly painless. Bookmarks were automatic. I had some extensions to reconfigure and some passwords to migrate to a different password manager.
I wished I'd gotten it over with sooner.
However, this paper[1] suggests that uBO Lite (MV3) which is still supported in the latest Chrome/chromium browsers, works at least as well for almost all users as the original (MV2) uBO, and, in some cases even better than before... so it's really no cause for alarm IMO.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01000
Because here's the future: Google is already promoting that sites have their tag management (including ad network JS) resolve at the CDN level, with randomized custom-built URLs baked into your page source as served.
https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/gatew...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/google-tag-gateway-for-advertise...
In this context, the only thing that can sufficiently block ads as this is more broadly adopted, is dynamic code whose definitions and behaviors can be updated regularly. Because ad networks, including Google, will become increasingly creative (especially with the ability to use AI) in having a near-infinite set of embedding techniques.
And Google sits as both the beneficiary of unblockable ads, and (with MV3) the gatekeeper of timing for executable code updates for ad blocking extensions. Core to the MV3 model is that any use of dynamically loaded code not bundled with the extension (and subject to a mandatory review period for every update) is forbidden.
Google doesn't need to do something as drastic as disallow uBO and other extensions; they simply need to "boil the frog" over the course of years as more and more of their clients move to Tag Gateway and similar approaches, and give their ad implementation an increasing "head start" by delaying approval of uBO code updates that are trying to keep pace.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of permanent absence.
How could that be enforced on open source browsers like chromium which can always sideload extensions and/or be modified/forked to not have such limitations?
Next front in the ad-blocking war will be AI-based instead of simple heuristics anyway.
Hopefully more and more people wake up as to what this adMonster has become.
If we want a real open world wide in the future, we need to do something about Google. UBO is not the only one killed by Google here. They will continue on their wicked path. (And, while it may be great that Ladybird exists, I have some doubts that this will really be a contender. We should not become lazy and think that Google will just comply with the demands of The People here - its business is based on controlling influx of adMoney via its Evil Empire, and it secures this by de-facto controlling the browser stack. Just look how many people in % use the chrome-codebase now. That IS effectively a monopoly powered by greed.)
Most devs I know are on Mac. Why not just use Safari? Works in most cases, helps you catch issues earlier on, looks beautiful and is super customizable, still supports UBlock, has vertical tabs, syncs profiles to your focus, is way more memory efficient, etc.
I've daily driven Safari for ~3y after Arc got sunset and the only site that gives me issues is Hulu (but not Disney+ weirdly). Similarly drive Edge on Windows, I can't think why I'd ever reach for Chrome.
I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better? Who cares? All that matters for me is what features it has and that performance isn't horrible, and if I cannot have vertical tree-style tabs in it and hide the tab-bar, then I personally have no use for it. So stuck with Firefox I am, and been for decades.
Besides, if my OS is Arch Linux, what browser is my "OS-browser" anyway?
What acronym are you thinking of?
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html
Are being ignorant on purpose now?
Apple's Safari has integration with Apple's Password app which firefox does not. Edge automatically connects with your Microsoft account.
Both browsers sync tabs, bookmarks and so on across your Microsoft/Apple account connected devices.
For a lot of 'average' users this is already extremely convenient.
On top of that, Safari is still the most 'energy efficient' browser you could use on macOS.
I think safari is largely fine but there are a lot of web APIs that it doesn’t support, rightly or not. A lot of devices are configurable through serial connections using the Web Serial APO thats only available in chromium browsers.
As a primary browser it really comes down to ergonomics. Things on top of the engine that make someone prefer one browser over the other.
I use Firefox when I want disposable tabs / containers.
then majority of stuff - Safari. private window work stuff set to chrome - since I can resume the session unlike safari.
Using Mac is a no-go. For me, they became insufferably power-user hostile over the years.
Second,
God the safari rendering was so horrible for so many years. As a web developer, you have to target your greatest demographic, and Safari just broke everything more often than not.
Finally, even using Mac on enterprise, Chrome use is required because of the profile controls that can be exerted. And items #1/2 don’t help
I've worked at some places where they restrict to Chrome because they have a corporate extension
In all other cases Firefox, I'd assume.
:r !curl?
I prefer Firefox on mobile for supporting ublock personally and I don't see why I would use a different browser on my desktop.
I'm thinking of switching to Zen which is a Firefox based clone of Arc
Because Edge sucks, and FF is better than Safari.
It's not. It's barely functional, slower than Chrome, and always trails it in feature compatibility.
I use Safari, but don’t really like it. I don’t want to use Chrome or Chromium derivatives and Firefox doesn’t support AppleScript (that’s essential for me), so all that’s left is Safari. Or Orion, I guess, but it’s not good enough to offset Safari’s iCloud Private Relay.
Things I dislike about Safari include not being able to setup alternative search bar engines other than the awful default choice; not being able to disable JavaScript by default and enable it selectively; not being able to have it auto-delete site data on close except for defined domains; iCloud tab sync is finicky and doesn’t always work.
Some of those can be solved with extensions, but then the system to allow or deny extensions is atrocious: You can’t easily say “allow extensions everywhere except these domains”. You have to open each domain in tabs, then deny each domain individually in each extension. It’s also not kept in sync with iOS, where it’s even worse because you have to accept an extension on a domain before you get the option to deny it.
Firefox allows me to share stuff across devices, block anything I want to and does not get in my way.
Another point: I’m not sure if Safari’s dev tools are worse but I feel friction any time I have to use them. It’s probably partly just that I don’t want to learn the quirks of both sets. Firefox’s is much closer to Chrome’s. I bet they’re both inspired by Firebug.