Take a look at Firefox’s market share, or Brave’s etc.
Gecko, WebKit and—hopefully—Ladybird are the true alternatives. I used to think this was too extreme. But the ad vendor dragging ad blockers out of the engine flipped my view.
No idea if they will fight to keep UBlock Origin accessible or not.
I think and certainly hope that Helium will fight the good fight.
They said they could offer limited MV2 support even after it’s fully removed from the upstream Chromium codebase.[1]
> https://about.google/company-info/philosophy/
> 1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
> 6. You can make money without doing evil.
Their sunsetting of manifest v2 appears fast to me and updating some corporate philosophy has apparently no business impact.
> 6. You can make money without doing evil
implies that they're doing it for fun then I guess?
Sadly I don't think that's the general case, I've been on FF for decades but there isn't a universe where I use a browser without UBO at this point.
One wouldn't need to be loyal to UBO... a simple with-and-without comparison would be enough for anyone with a functioning brainstem.
Especially since they put no effort into removing even extensions they know are malicious (and who work very well within the MV3 restrictions): https://palant.info/2025/01/20/malicious-extensions-circumve...
[1] https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-update-vivaldi-is-futur...
Their tech stack is heavily JavaScript-focused, as their entire UI is written in JavaScript.
That usually means that whoever utters it was just looking for a sycophantic excuse to go with the bigger threat because it is more convenient to them (for now).
Just keep making a browser that isn’t shit. That’s your only job!
I do fear for a future were even Firefox ends up caving in. Ladybird browser might be our only hope until something legal comes along to block functionality.
Because pretty much all their revenue comes from Google.
Donate if you can!
With MV2, every request must be filtered with slow, JIT, garbage-collected JavaScript code. In MV3, filtering is handled by native browser code using the list provided by extensions. UserScripts could be used to modify the DOM, but that requires power users to manually enable it.
Popup blockers were also a differentiator, once.
In what way? I've never noticed a difference.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472424
[2] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.
smiling smugly from planet firefox
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
I use brave on my phone and I can't really tell the difference from desktop browser+UO, so I guess it works well enough.
but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites;
For a time, all those AI chat web pages were just very slow on Firefox even with very little context, whereas Chrome only gets laggy when there is a lot of context.
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Really hoping the uBlock will continue to work on that project...
Got a source for that, or is that just unfounded speculation?
And Firefox version of V3 supports browser.webRequest blocking (the part that adblockers need to work properly)
Source?
> Firefox won't, because mozilla banned that extension from store.
It's unbanned; the author chose to not put it back. https://www.ghacks.net/2024/10/01/mozillas-massive-lapse-in-...
It seems they spent so much of their budget on the CEO's salary that they couldn't afford an extension review team.
Quoting open-paren comment:
> As far as I can tell, there are maybe two reviewers that are based in Europe (Romania?). The turn around time is long when I am in the US, and it has been rife with this same kind of "simple mistake" that takes 2 weeks to resolve.
1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents
2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them
If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a heartbeat
I normally have 5-50 tabs open (so perhaps on the lower end), but I can't recall the last time I crashed a tab in the last 3 years. I also use persistent/pinned tabs and never noticed issues.
I haven't used this, as I didn't know it was a feature I needed until you mentioned it.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/find-in-page-...
Tab Session Manager allows you to dump tabs to groups for restoration later, with auto-save at regular intervals. Works quite well!
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...
It’s a bit like with Internet Explorer which back in its day was also needed for some stubborn sites.
But when your browser has a 2% market share worldwide, some developers won't bother to test on it. And if your setup is even more obscure (I use Firefox on Linux with an adblocker and third-party cookies blocked and DRM disabled and autoplaying video disabled and so on) making you rare even among that 2%, sometimes sites won't have tested with your specific configuration.
It's useful to have a second browser around, as a fallback when a site is broken. Uploading images when creating a listing on ebay is broken, but I don't have to figure out which element of my setup is breaking it, I can just switch to the other browser.
Since Chrome blocked ublock, I switched to Edge. Not sure where I will go next, but I dont think it will be Firefox since they are always years late.
Also, there are a few parts of Firefox that still look ancient, like the bookmarks and history managers, as well as the PDF viewer, where the buttons are too small to click easily. Unfortunately, those are unusable for a Gen Zer.
As such, if you want to be sure a website will work you use chrome.
Since chrome has such a market share, developers feel justified testing primarily for chrome.
Self-fulfilling cycle.
1. Chromium is significantly faster (maybe 5 to 10x faster on certain tasks mostly around canvas but anything that requires fast ui really). Every time I use Firefox it feels like it has some kind of serious problem. If chrome was this slow I would stop working and start investigating what part of my computer is broken. This experience hasn't changed over span of 10 years, 3 OSes and several computers.
2. Neverending caching issues on Firefox. It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?". On chrome when I change button color and I don't see it, I know I made a mistake. If I change button color on Firefox, my first thought is, is this Firefox caching issue? When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.
You can but well, it's more profitable the other way around....
https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...
I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.
Why would Google destroy the cover they have for keeping control over Chrome and 70% of internet users, just to squeeze a bit more ad revenue from what, 2% of users?
I'm not knocking Mozilla for taking money from Google, it was a smart move. Most users would use Google anyway, so Mozilla pocketing billions by making users preferred search engine the default didn't really hurt anyone. Some of that money should however have gone into a trust or some type of investment so that funding for browser development would be safe if the ad money ever dried up.
Maybe someone at Mozilla knows something I don't, but there doesn't seem to be much planning for the future.
Why "ad money"? That's a very uncharitable interpretation and for anyone not aware of the situation it's misleading. They're not paid for ads or by ads, they're paid by Google to continue being a viable alternative to Chrome. Is every Google employee getting "ad money" every month, or a salary?
The payment is more accurately described as a protection tax.
It would be a shame to lose the Mozilla foundation/Firefox but it wouldn’t be the end of the browser.
ggm•2h ago
eran-•1h ago
ggm•1h ago
pseudalopex•53m ago
ggm•16m ago
Perhaps good was overkill. Less bad?
charcircuit•40m ago