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
Sandboxes get better, yeah, but this is akin to leaving your door open in a neighborhood with violent crime and then saying I built this awesome laser guided Kevlar chamber that scans introducers upon entry instead.
Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime.
If my government tries to regulate, tax, or otherwise annoy one of these corporations, their billionaire owner will deposit a few million into the right campaign fund and the Big Cheeto will tariff us, threaten to invade us, swear at us, send us ambassadors who swear at us, or start trying to rename bodies of water. (He'll probably do that anyways.) In general, it's bad enough for our business that we usually just let these companies do what they want and hope that, someday, the U.S. will regulate them properly. That's unlikely to happen anytime soon. (Note: Even Democrats get nasty when their campaign funding is threatened.)
In the meantime, look out for the people you care about and support anything that pries your data out of American fingers.
It's not just malicious software ads, they also sell ads to entities mitming every government service.
If you're asking technically, well, google made over 400 billion dollars last year, they can spend some of that to figure it out.
Or stop serving ads. Just because it's difficult to do safely doesn't mean you get to just do it anyways because there's profit involved.
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.
> If you take money for it, you should be responsible for it.
If they don't want to take responsibility then they should guarantee that the responsible party have provided valid credentials that can result in their being held responsible.
That would clear up the quagmire that is internet advertising pretty darn quick.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Broadcasting_Network
On the other hand, enabling my Verizon eSIM is a surefire way to receive hourly "Potential Spam" calls, despite giving nobody outside of direct family my US phone number. Thankfully, I've convinced enough of my family to use Signal and we call/text through there instead.
Nowadays, I only turn on the Verizon line if I have to receive an SMS one-time code or call my broker.
Don't think the U.S. will ever solve this problem; people will just say something about privacy, the country's "too big" to combat spam at scale, etc. It's also too easy to get a phone number anonymously. A frequent phenomenon I've witnessed is that when someone blocks a phone number, the same caller contacts them again from a different number with the same area code.
Sorry, no solution for spam calls/texts.
it's like ... "when my vacuum cleaner takes pictures of my wife naked, it should use HTTPS when uploading the pictures to the cloud"
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.
Percentage of global gross revenue like the EU's GDPR does seems to work effectively enough for a scare tactic.
Every landlord should be directly accountable for all crimes committed by their tenants.
Every telco should be directly accountable for all crimes committed by their customers.
Meta should pay damages when their users stalk and harass people.
You wouldn't hold a landlord accountable if it was a surprise that a crime took place, but if they were aware that some of their tenants were committing crimes and just "choosing not to ask about it," they could reasonably be called "accountable."
Telcos are regularly asked to give up information regarding crimes committed by their customers, see the Patriot Act for details - in some sense, we as a country have decided to hold them accountable for this (though, not spam).
Meta have been involved in a whole list of litigation that is at minimum adjacent to stalking/harassment, if not directly involving those things. I would need to look up to be more specific, though.
This is the crux of it.
If they can't block scammers from their own platform then they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place. The profit they make should easily cover it - unless they like profiting from promoting scams, in which case they should be fined out of having the platform in the first place.
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.
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.
What existed in 1993 was a cultural blip, it's never coming back, so let it go.
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.
I've been using the internet since the 80s. This has always been the case. Even before graphical browsers.
Bitcoin provided both a financial use for stolen compute and a bankless online international payment system for ransoms.
That's what turned the script kiddies into professionals. Malice and lulz were replaced with dollars and cents.
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.
Software, OSs, and the internet at large were comically unsafe from a safety perspective. There was also a very high barrier of entry in terms of the skills required to take advantage of that, and very little incentive to do so compared to today or even 20 years ago.
They must pay the best because so many old forums that are/were near and dear to my heart use them to pay for servers, hopefully because they only saw the profit number and didn't consider the consequences, but you never know.
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.
As far as I can tell its a national company with an overseas call center, the scam is that it looks like a local company - at least they can sell a lead gen to someone that can open my lock.
The only thing that should come up is actual local locksmiths.
I've heard worse happening in other cases where they drill locks and then quote much higher than $200 after they do it, it's sadly common.
What do you mean it has to be numbers? I can read it right here, it says abcd efgh.
Ad-blocking is a safety issue, but luckily you can still block them just fine.[1]
The only thing this heavily neuters is tracking blocking, but no one admits that because they know, deep down, that ~0% of the non-tech crowd cares, so it's not as good at stirring up outrage as being dishonest is.
[1] If anything gorhill is to blame for the safety issue, since he refused to update his extension in-place, so any distant relatives will have the adblockers you installed for them removed, instead of updating to the fully functional Mv3 version.
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 your 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.
I don’t understand how it has any market share. It’s like finding out that 80% of people voluntarily install browser toolbars that force penis pill ads down your throat, and then there are a bunch of HN fanboys saying that all other alternatives are worse.
Will Google employees who used UBO now vomit over their own corp decisions and reverse?
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?
⸻
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.
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.
So, if I may change my opinion, early YouTube was better, despite being owned by Google. I feel like the platform has been atrocious in the last decade or more. Constant clickbait, a new NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends ad every 15 minutes, politics being injected into every other video, creators trying to game the algorithm to escape the rat race, the obnoxious algorithm itself, and now I am getting an absurd amount of LLM generated videos.
I would not dare claim there is not great content though. I am listening to a YouTube video as I type this. Though, I have been listening this particular creator since 2006, if that tells you anything.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel YouTube is just getting the slow squeeze of death -- like everything Google wraps its tentacles around.
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.
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
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.
You just explicitly claimed that Chrome has definitively a viable business model as a stand-alone company ("Short answer? Yes. Long answer? Definitely."). Now you claim the opposite...
Is the argument also as strong for the other cases?
The original question was:
> Would Chrome, Android, and YouTube be viable companies without the money-printing engine that is Google’s ad business?
Please take note of the absence of the word "standalone" in that quote.
My response to the response to my response (henceforth responses['bogwog'][1]) was thus:
> Why does 'Chrome' need to survive as a standalone company? ...
Please note the truthiness of `'standlone' in responses['bogwog'][1]`
From this evidence we can surmise that my point was 'Chrome' the non-business can't survive as an independent business, because Chrome is not a business. Likewise, the 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' you get on an airplane can't survive as an independent business were we to break up the airline, as 'Complimentary Cheez-Its' isn't a business.
But can Chrome the project survive without Google? I say yes, just like Cheez-Its can survive without being complimentary additions to overpriced flights. For why I think that, please refer to my other comment in this thread.
Thank you.
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.
I've met so many people in the tech industry who use Zen Browser. Not even because of some ideological point, but just because it is cooler.
So no, I don't believe it'll be gone. I believe firefox and ff-based browsers will actually make a comeback.
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.
At $1M per year (equivalent to a good startup exit, but zero risk), that’s 70 engineers; probably senior to principal phd’s with 10 yr+ experience.
If that’s not enough to maintain a web browser, then pay them to simplify the damn thing.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I created an automation tool recently for taking screenshots (for SOC2 reporting, hopefully tptacek is proud), and getting it working with FF on the CLI was very painful (but necessary since I needed my cookies!)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.
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
This indicates there was actually a lot of technical merit in it and the problem was with the GTM and leadership.
Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
Chrome was the first browser to be immune to all of those functions.
Mozilla really screwed the pooch not long after. Their biggest single misstep was forcing automatic updates in corporate networks. At the time, they still had pretty good adoption in the kinds of environments that had a couple of people somewhere deciding what everyone was allowed to run on the company computers. Chrome had already moved to forced updates, so these environments went to Firefox. When Firefox decided to follow Chrome, they no longer had that differentiation, and corporate IT had to choose between two browsers that both had automatic updates, but one of them had frequent memory and performance problems.
I've happily returned to Firefox a few years ago and don't have Chrome installed on any device I control.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Turns out, it's bypassable. They just check the User Agent and Sec-CH headers, so I built a small browser extension for Chrome that allows to modify those headers.
On top of that I built chromium-profiles [1], my tool for managing those isolated sandboxes so that I can tweak/change them based on the stupid policies per O365 tenant I have to work with.
So I use 3 different profiles for 3 different customers with 3 different security policies set for their organization... For being allowed to use a freaking web app.
That, for me, is the only reason I still have to have chromium installed. Microsoft stupidity.
I wish Firefox would focus on this sort of use case, like the "--pwa" and "--user-data" CLI flags and preinstallable extensions for those profiles. But it can't be done due to how they manage extensions with their own signing cert, how dev mode extensions are always cleared etc. Well, apart from Microsoft intentionally making webapps unusable in Firefox.
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 Chrome 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, and DNR makes some very nice features possible in uBO lite that were not possible in uBO.
For example, did you know that you can change your User-Agent with uBO lite? Go to the Custom DNR rules tab, and enter something like this to pretend to be Lynx on whatever.com:
id: 5
priority: 100
action:
type: modifyHeaders
requestHeaders:
- header: User-Agent
operation: set
value: Lynx/2.9.2 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/3.5.7
condition:
requestDomains:
- whatever.com
resourceTypes:
- main_frame
That said,
> Chromium design decision that extensions cannot block browser initialization
It's not "browser initialization" that was blocked, it was blocking network requests for pages until they were processed by all components in the chain. Notably, this could never apply applied to the browser or its internal pages itself.
> It was also true with MV2.
With MV2 you used the blocking version of https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/w... which no longer works with MV3 extensions in Chrome and then the request had to wait until it was given to and processed by the blocker.
Firefox is a great example about all of the above points: MV3 still supports blockingWebRequest there, so it gets the best of both worlds.
> did you know that you can change your User-Agent with uBO lite?
With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders. I'm not sure uBO ever bothered with this before uBO Lite, but it's a bit of a double standard to say "MV2 didn't offer blocking requests, that was a different API which happ
Despite the name, the requests were not blocked until the extension had initialized. The browser could make network requests before that happened with MV2. With MV3, static rulesets and persistent DNR rules are enforced immediately.
> With MV2 you'd use blocking webRequest and chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHenders
Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.
There were several workarounds like suspendTabsUntilReady which helped greatly in this half of the problem. Then it would solidly stay permanently registered too. I'm pretty sure none of these work in Chrome anymore though, it was obvious they never intended these sorts of things to work that way.
Nevertheless, MV3's ability to offer limited filtering on startup does not seem like such a blessing when the other option was to just guarantee full filtering on startup as seen in this change https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1447551
> Of course an extensions could do this, I said uBO lite. DNR made exposing this powerful functionality fast and easy. My point is that MV3 uBO lite has useful features that MV2 uBO does not.
Your point would hold a lot more weight if the reason it was missing before had something to do with the difficulty. uMatrix had it for a while and Gorhill regretted it because it didn't change things like the user agent JS would report and such. The above filter has the same problems. Great if you just want a normal quality user agent switcher, that it's normal quality is why it was never in the original though until it was just included with DNRs.
"The Apple app store is not a monopoly because Apple has no competitors on their platform."
Google is just doing what they need to do to stop being a monopoly....by becoming a monopoly, because of a ruling that the internet actually celebrated. Which we can trace back to Epic not being happy that sideloading on Android wasn't perfectly frictionless.
(Note: Epic also sued Apple, but lost, because the Apple app store is not a monopoly.)
The Android/iPhone duopoly is nearly impossible to break because very few people want to carry two personal phones, and it takes only one app that they can't do without being only available on Android/iPhone to make it impossible to choose anything else. The app providers likewise have no incentive to support anything else because everyone has one of these two.
Bank apps are the prime example here that's unlikely to start supporting other systems. Public transit (and in some places parking) is another potential problem where even the unhinged "well just change banks to the one that does support your favorite phone" argument fails. ID apps (either governmental or de facto standards like the Swedish BankID) are coming too.
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).
If I can’t install an ad/malware blocker, I’m not using your browser.
* 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'.
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.
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.
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.
If users are made aware that what Chromium is doing, they can make a better decision, but it has to be called out in every post about Chromium (preferably mentioning a few safer choices), otherwise it will disappear in the noise.
Hoping my browser gets some love in the near future
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.
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.
"For security and privacy"
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.
That's it in a nut shell. Take a few minutes and go solve all your browser problems.
Also all the crap in the toolbar.
Also on the sides now...
Yes they will. Also I predict that MV2 is going to be a major boon for firefox.
It has taken a long time to prove the value of firefox to the masses and I believe mv2 extensions in particular ublock origin will be what keeps people coming back to it
I've not touched chrome in decades. Firefox stands strong. I would donate but in EU that comes with tax issues.
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.
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?
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
In all other cases Firefox, I'd assume.
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.