I ended up going with Brave. Once you turn off their crummy VPN and crypto advert it's effectively just google chrome with a built in ad blocker.
I know there were arguments/concerns about the crypto thing, but I did a bit of research before picking a new browser (as should you) and once I realised it was a simple thing to turn off and never see again I was fine with it, it's all opensource as well so you can see how things work.
Of course it's just a chrome fork, so is still somewhat influenced by Googles decisions but that really wasn't the issue here, I just wanted to keep ublock origin and that's been the outcome.
I still have syncing and such all running between my desktop and mobile, I still have all the same extensions I've used for over a decade, so it's been relatively pain free to switch.
I use both Firefox and Chrome for work and haven't noticed any speed differences (without measuring).
I don't think Firefox is actually any slower in a practical test of loading a site for example, I just perceived it as being slower, perhaps more likely its something like the transitions between tabs and other actions being different enough to feel slower.
If you're unfamiliar with this stuff, it results in your browser fetching thousands of JavaScript files from the local dev server.
Any Chromium-based browser handles that just fine in about 1-2 seconds. Firefox takes at least ten, including full page reloads. No adblocking on either, and yes I've tried all combinations of about:config knobs, fresh/empty profiles, etc.
That's the only reason I use Chromium for development work.
Hehe
I still use Firefox everywhere, but Mozilla still has some catching up to do in my experience.
I regularly have to use web browsers (I try and want to use Firefox, but Chrome is faster for me in this scenario) on an under-provisioned (yes I know, but I don't have any control over that!) VM which runs VDI sessions on both Linux and Windows (with VMWare on Windows).
On both Windows and Linux, Firefox's UI (in this CPU-constrained env - it fluctuates, and sometimes is okay, but often is slow) in terms of UI interaction is very notice-ably much slower than Chrome, especially when there's animated content in the document. It seems like Firefox prioritizes thread-wise the HTML/JS content at the expense of any UI signals/presses/drags or other interaction, and so sometimes clicking close tab does nothing for > 30 seconds, but animated content within the document keeps playing perfectly.
Chrome does none of this (on same VM machines) with same content: I click the close button, and instantly a tab closes, or I can drag a tab around instantly.
There used to be Gecko based browsers that fixed this with alternative native UIs (Camino, K-Meleon, and Epiphany aka GNOME Web), but then Mozilla removed embedding support and ever since anybody wanting to use Gecko are stuck with the design decisions of the Firefox team whether they want to be or not.
For example I currently have Firefox & Chrome sessions which have been open for about a month on my laptop (16GB of memory). I closed every tab and only left the "blank" page open. Firefox's process manager shows 4GB GPU usage, a bit under 1GB usage for Firefox & about 250MB for extensions. After clicking "minimize memory usage" the GPU memory dropped to 3GB and Firefox process memory usage dropped by about 50MB.
For comparison Chrome uses 400MB of GPU, about 200MB for "Browser", ~150MB for for "utility" processes and about 100MB for extensions (extension list is different so we can ignore the memory usage difference for them, listed it just for completeness sake).
Despite this I do use Firefox as my primary browser.
This is from Mozilla themselves.
I never bothered to turn it off, it's possible I guess but it's an interesting window to a bizarro world for me. (Oh some new blockchain NFT game! People still do that in 2025 apparently? Now with AI hype crap instead of metaverse hype crap?)
It's never bothering me as it never advertises anything that I am actually interested in.
Maybe it improved in the past few years, I didn't bother to check.
Also, Firefox is the last non-chrome-engined browser so it is worth using for that reason alone. Browser monopoly is bad and WILL be used against you, eventually.
As much as Mozilla and Firefox can be criticized for both technical and non-technical reasons, at least I share the same core values. I don't seem to share any core value with Brave or its creator. Plus, yeah, still smells like Google :)
Do you not use Linux because you don’t like Linus? He’s quite a controversial figure. And before you say Linux is not Linus, the same can be said about Brave and Brendan.
Many other people work on these projects than just the leader.
Do you not use JavaScript because you don’t like Brendan?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
The dev experience has been better with chromium so I have been using chromium for development and Firefox for regular usage.
They made this work? I remember testing it out some months ago and it didn't work because of some reason.
It does now, it is being rolled out gradually:
Firefox havs always had profiles (about:profiles, firefox -P). I do hope this new feature will be able to manage profiles created with the current method.
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
UPD. The more I look at this, the worse it gets. Hidden under a special URL, requires you to launch the default profile before you can switch to another profile (yes-yes, there are command-line hacks). It's more like a user data manager for devs than profiles for users. Even containers look better than these profiles.
Anyway, your claim was "Firefox has no profiles". That is not true.
If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type `about:config` into the address bar and toggle `browser.profiles.enabled`.
That is not true [1]. Firefox has profiles and while you can argue that their UX is worse than chrome but that doesn't mean it does not have profiles.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
1. The primary website she uses for grad school (canvas) REQUIRES third party cookies to be enabled for it to work. Containers cannot have different settings here, but profiles can. So she can have a School profile that enables 3rd party cookies and she just uses this profile for Canvas.
2. She likes to keep ALL of her work stuff separate and not have that sync to her personal mobile. So she has Personal Profile (with containers) and a Work Profile (also with containers). The two profiles are themed differently, so it makes it very clear if she is in her "work" browser or "personal" browser.
Firefox's profile management has been a struggle for her (I found creating different application icons for each profile worked best), and I am very excited about the new profile manager!
I used Firefox and I like it but honestly the profiles were more difficult to use than Chrome's.
So many of the things I start looking into starts with a search in a single tab and then every link I ctrl-click during the process ends up in a tree underneath it (yes, I use Tree Style Tabs).
This has a few benefits:
- I can easily see things in context
- when I end up on a particularly useful (or useless) page I can easily see what page linked me there
- I can read the root pages and follow links from every one of them without losing track (the root page is usually a kagi search)
- when I am finished I can either export the whole tree as a nested markdown list (yes, there is a nice TST extension that allows me that, and yes, you read that correctly, it is an extension to an extension) or just close it.
Patently false. Been using profiles for years.
> bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.
Rarely have I had to that. Until I added rules to open certain URLs in specific containers.
> Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here.
Absolutely not. Profiles are a poor "alternative" to containers. How do I add a rule to pin URLs to specific profiles? How would that even work, if it did? A new window for some links? Re-use some random window with the same profile? How do I switch to it? Switch back? Don't tell me to use the Window Manager via Alt-Tab. I organise tabs into windows by shared context.
Then there's the whole issue of sync. Profiles don't share anything. Each profile needs to be configured individually. I like not having to add uBlock Origin to every browser profile. I like not having to think if I have my password for this rarely visited site in this profile or another one. Or a bookmark. Or form info.
----
Just because containers have no use to you / you couldn't find a use for them, doesn't mean the rest of us also shouldn't have the luxury of using this feature. Feel free to use Profiles as you'd like. Leave what works for us alone.
Profiles do have a built-in UI at about:profiles or by launching Firefox with -P, neither of which requires an extension. Admittedly this UI is a bit basic, but a better version is being rolled out (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management). Running multiple profiles side by side does indeed involve running multiple instances of the browser.
Containers are an internal API and need an extension like Multi-account Containers to provide a GUI (though this is an official extension by Mozilla), however they don't require running multiple copies of the browser.
If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type `about:config` into the address bar and toggle `browser.profiles.enabled`.
If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type `about:config` into the address bar and toggle `browser.profiles.enabled`.
<path to firefox.exe> -profile <path to profile folder> -no-remote
PROFILEDIR="$(mktemp -d)"
firefox --no-remote --profile "$PROFILEDIR" --screenshot $PWD/output.png https://xkcd.com
rm -r "$PROFILEDIR"
Ancient documentation: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/command-line-args.html
Another very vague comment bashing Firefox without any real explanation.
- Firefox comes packed with all kinds of telemetry and analytics turned on.
- No workspaces/profiles. I know there are extensions that can enable various flavours of this functionality, but it's just too much overhead to experiment and test every-single-one.
- Widgets! I love Vivaldi's Dashboard for when one needs more than just a homepage.
Most of it is built-in and these days there is generally only one recommended extension: Multi-Account Container. Containers (tabs in the same window with different cookie jars/etc) are built-in, the UI for working with them is not, and MAC is the generally agreed best UI. It lets you create as many named Containers as you want and assign them a color to gently stripe your tabs. You can right-click the new tab button and get a list of Containers to open the next tab in. You can right-click an existing tab and reopen it in a new Container. (TIL from this article there's an option to have left click on the new tab button always open the Container menu. I don't think I'd use that, but it's nice to know.)
If you want to go older school, Profiles (browser windows with different extensions/cookie jars/everything) have been around since the beginning of Firefox (and it shows in how old and ugly some of the UI still is, hah). `about:profiles` is a profile manager when you are already inside a Firefox browser. The `-ProfileManager` command line switch is the ancient startup option to manage profiles before opening a browser window at all. If you like to use side-by-side profiles often you want `-noremote -ProfileManager` and/or `-noremote -P $profileName` shortcuts. (`-noremote` says not to send it to any currently open Firefox window.)
Last I looked, it was not possible to bind a bookmark to a preferred MAC.
Admittedly, I also tend to use unloaded tabs more than bookmarks, so if I need a very specific address in a specific container I am probably likely to just unload it but leave it open somewhere. (Sideberry "helps" me in this bad habit with multiple tab panels and tree grouping of tabs.)
I was looking at different chrome alternatives and most of them had ~something~ wrong with them. I have not tried vivaldi yet, but from a bit of research it seems just like the browser I was looking for. Thanks for sharing.
Any specific thing a first time user should know? Use build in ad blocker or install uBlock Origin?
It's like de-Googled Chrome, as it's based on the same Open Source Chromium browser, has all of the ad-blocking and anti-fingerprint tools built in, and all of the Google taken out.
You can also run popular browser extensions published for Chrome, but you don't need to worry about ad blocking, as Brave has you covered by default.
It also blocks YouTube ads effectively, by default. There's nothing you have to do to make this work.
They have also in the past been caught adding their own referral codes to crypto transaction URLs pasted into their browser. [2]
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-earn-and-use-cryptocurre... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-caught-redirecting-...
Aa of right now Brave has two "features" that you can disable - the crypto thing and a vpn advert. Once those are off, they are off. You don't see them anymore, they aren't sitting in the background running, and they aren't calling home.
It's no different to Mozilla's constant and blatant attempts to reactivate telemetry data in Firefox updates despite opting out - I'd argue that's a bigger offence.
I did their ads, I made hundreds of dollars leaving them on in the early days. I value my attention more so I've shut them off.
Except on my arm-based crhomebook. There it gets confused and do not resize properly thinking is in phone format.
Also cast to chromecast is a no-go.
If it wasn't by those 2 issues I would have ditched chrome long time ago.
- Download Firefox
- Install uBlock Origin
- Use Firebox
Somehow this blog post makes it seem like adopting Firefox is hard, or overwhelming, or some multi step process, and if you don't do those steps you're effectively downgrading. But really it isn't. It's a browser. Its UX is great. It just... works.
The suggestion that to use it properly you need to customize it to the max is simply flat out wrong.
- Disable all telemetry
in your list.
This is my entire point. Yes, you can tweak Firefox to the max and yes you can complain about the more questionable stuff Mozilla has done, but compared to the privacy/goodness you get just from ditching Chrome (or Edge for that matter), all that is pretty marginal.
It's a tech article. What do you expect to feel while reading it?
I am old and I agree.
It is full of things that break the flow of reading like asking a hypothetical question to the reader and following it up with a plosive like 'BOOM!', or inserting useless conversational stops like like 'sure,' 'But...', and '...Nope!'.
Makes it sound/feel like an excited toddler is desperate to tell you something, but cant really get to the point.
On a side note: You can manually install uBlock and just continue using it:
- Enter chrome://flags in chrome’s URL input
- Search for ‘Allow legacy extension manifest versions’
- Enable it and relaunch browser
- Download the latest zip file of uBlock version from github: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases
- Under Assets, download the chromium zip and extract it
- Open the extension page in chrome, click the Load Unpacked button on top left side load (enable Developer Mode in the top right if it doesn't appear), then select the extracted folder.
Only with Chrome 138 and lower. Chrome 139 will not support Manifest V2 anymore.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
Seriously, use Firefox if you want to use uBlock Origin.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
I don't use a ton of custom filters or rulesets though, so YMMV.
Had been using Arc for some time with several qualms about the UX and after trying Dia and finding it's just yet another Chrome, decided to see what Zen is like. I expected the same - but it wasn't. All qualms were solved and I had no rendering problems.
It was only when I noticed the Mozilla login flow I realized I had switched to Firefox - I had an assumption that all alternative browsers are on Chromium now. Really lucky since if I knew, I may not have given a fair chance given the rendering problems I remember from giving it a try 3-4 years ago.
https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
I regularly have to turn stuff off in
"Firefox Data Collection and Use"
and
"Website Advertising Preferences"
Recently I also started seeing ads in my address bar when typing stuff and saw they've added:
"Suggestions from sponsors Support Firefox with occasional sponsored suggestions."
of course, enabled by default.
Firefox is a great product but unfortunately slowly being milked/destroyed by its non-technical management team.
This is still nowhere near Google's browser.
They get rid of all the anti-privacy defaults.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/align-items...
But sure, anything but Chrome.
I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge.
In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy. I switched to Chrome because IE was unusable on some sites.
I've never used Firefox much on Android, but when I did, it was slower than Chrome.
It's likely that if Firefox fixes the issues, they'll gain traction again, but right now, I don't see that happening. Mozilla's goals are different.
Haha, I remember that same feeling, with 3.6 being "peak" Firefox back in the day. My 3.6 was heavily hand-tailored to my needs via about:config etc. Just some dedicated end-user here, but I did know it very well. Version 4 felt considerably worse on a WinXP system, some essential-to-me add-ons broke, etc. I remember feeling really - as in, really - frustrated when I finally had to make the switch.
Apparently, 3.6 is the longest supported Firefox version ever, 27 months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_3.6#End_of_life
Looking at it that way, it’s no mystery how it lost ground to Chrome (though Google’s marketing muscle is also largely responsible). Mozilla just tossed Firefox’s claim to fame out the window and expected things to work out somehow, which is a bit like a restaurant that’d become popular for its award winning burgers deciding to pivot to the same dry turkey sandwiches you can get at most of the restaurants in town. Yeah, you’re gonna lose customers.
Nothing is free, and ads are inevitable (Firefox makes money from... ads). I don't think ads are the worst thing about the internet.
Where I'm sure Firefox works without problems, I use it: (hackernews, for example), OR on sites where ads are the problem, pop-ups are the problem. I hope it improves so I can use it more.
I hope this will mean that in the long run Firefox (and other secondary browsers) will gain more users again. For me, Firefox is a solid piece of software. Works well in strict privacy mode, with uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers.
A number of my privacy-minded friends choose a bi-modal approach: have two phones, one for work and one for personal. They don’t get the recent model (costing half as much), hold onto the old phone for as long as they can, use one phone for “required” apps (Okta, Slack, those websites that only work on Chrome…) and the personal phone for everything else.
As annoying as it is, i think that compartmentalized devices/accounts/apps are the only way forward.
It doesn't seem that big a leap to connect the dots from device attestation > web browser integrity > identity verification > verified web access
There is actually a relatively old game series of the 2000s called Bluesky Hacker Replay that has this as the core element of its worldbuilding. Governments and corporations became tired of the internet being overrun with spam, viruses, porn and cyberterrorism and decide to create an internet 2.0, tightly controlled by corporate interests. Hackers persist on the old 1.0 internet called the SwitchNet.
And really, when you think about it.. if you composed an internet solely from the big name social media, entertainment, work, food, news and knowledge services, running atop Cloudflare who verifies everyone via government ID, how many would really complain? 99% of their internet time is already spent inside that bubble.
You don't need containers for this: https://total-cookie-protection-test.netlify.app/
I also wish there were more keyboard shortcuts for opening links in specific containers, or re-opening a current tab in a different one.
I know you can set certain domains to always open in certain containers - fine for Facebook, when I occasionally have to use it - but annoying when I'm trying to do things in different (e.g.) Bluesky accounts.
fwiw, there are add-ons that allow you to do this - in one way or the other (Container Hotkeys https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-hot... for example).
but out of curiosity,
> I know you can set certain domains to always open in certain containers - fine for Facebook, when I occasionally have to use it - but annoying when I'm trying to do things in different (e.g.) Bluesky accounts.
on this one btw, the Containerise extension i talk about (if it wasn't clear) allows you to also map "portions" of the url in specific containers. so /u/0 in one /u/1 in another; ofc, this requires the service/website to distinguish the accounts via the url. i do this for github a lot (work repos in specific containers)
The other extension won't work for me, mostly - for example, Bluesky doesn't give me different URLs depending on who I'm logged in as. (Which is the correct thing to do, but it does make my life slightly harder. :/)
edit: oh, nevermind. It looks like it adds a single hotkey to open a new tab in a single, specified container. I was at least hoping the hotkey would work by opening a new tab in the same container I'm in currently :/
In fact Google's browser monopoly only looks like it's gonna get further cemented as Apple is forced to allow other browser engines, which is the only thing keeping any sort of competition against Chrome.
I feel like the anti-Apple snark that's been so popular since around the late 2000s (and I took part in in my angsty teen years) has been affecting the priority of what's being dealt with from regulators and it annoys me.
It's hardly competition. People complain about the safari monopoly on iOS because it lags behind competitors and has awful support for PWAs.
I'll complain about Firefox a lot, because I'm exposed to all its issues. That doesn't mean I hate it: I see issues in all products that I use, even the ones that are really useful or essential. I'm sure I'm not unique in this aspect in the HN crowd.
This is one of these tiny improvements that will save you a second or two per website, but when you multiply it, it becomes significant. Kudos to all the people who made it possible.
Does it?
On the days I feel particularly nasty like Ellison's character The Ticktockman, I wish that the programmers and the product managers who are responsible for the enshittification get this time subtracted from their life.
Firefox takes a long time to open (especially when you have a lot of extensions). Even with the same number of extensions, Chrome opens in a jiffy. There are other areas of slowdown as well. Sometimes I hit Control+D to bookmark a page and nothing happens. At first I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, but now I know to just wait, and sure enough five to ten seconds after I hit the shortcut it works. A delay that long (especially one with no notification of any kind) is really bad UX.
I've used Firefox / LibreWolf basically since it existed and can't remember any UI delays longer than a second.
Pressing Ctrl/Cmd-D a second time then does "Edit bookmark", and allows you to change it.
Might that be contributing to what you're seeing? (blue star appearing is fairly obvious though).
I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.
The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer, the site developers took the idiomatic Chrome way of building a feature instead of something universal.
Even if this was an issue I had noticed (which I hadn't), now that's out the door because no ad blocker in Chrome, so good luck loading all the ads and trackers before getting your content...
I can't believe people keep parroting that... Even if 'chrome is faster and more responsive than firefox' was not a controversial statement (and it very much is), 'chrome with ads is fast' is outright laughable...
How old is it? Is a MacBook Pro wimpy now?
What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though it instantly runs.
I've been using Firefox for about 20 years or so, and I don't regret it, but also I have not noticed a degrade in performance. I'm using it on Linux so I don't know if that's drastically different on a Mac these days.
sometimes i'm reading something on phone and i "send to all devices", i'll sure as shit see it again this way
(even librewolf allows you to continue doing this)
This is actually not a good test because there are a lot of tricky and subtle things that can make the comparison highly unfair. Smartphones will cache apps so that they don't fully close. Then, if you do actually force kill them they will start up in the background.
Are we surprised a Google phone caches the Google browser which is considered to be a high priority app, commonly used, and even the backbone of other apps?
I've never had Firefox issues on Linux.
My experience on Linux running on very old hardware (4th Gen Intel) is also good. Firefox feels quick and snappy. It uses a reasonable amount of resources, and has a relatively modest memory footprint by modern browser standards. In comparison, Chromium makes my fans spin on every site and eats several GB of memory.
The annoying part of Firefox is that development seems a bit stagnant in some areas, especially taking into consideration the amount of resources Mozilla has. For example, bookmarks and history still rely on a very old native UI that is quite clunky. Customization via user.js is too imperative and most options are largely undocumented.
It's just an anecdote, but I've had several FF issues on Windows, might be a timeline thing however.
Also, Nvidia is non-negotiable due to performance requirements and local deep learning experiments. I think Nvidia has gotten a lot better lately, even Sway (Wayland window manager) works these days. Incidentally I think the bad firefox framerates were only on i3 and not on Sway.
Then i attach the NVIDIA GPU to either a Windows VM or a NixOS one for gaming or "work".
It takes space and PCIe lanes to do so however, so I run SATA6 drives still :)
But if you can splurge, having multiple GPUs isn't unreasonable, as "Postgrest" docs says(0): Use a collection of sharp tools rather than building a big ball of mud.
0: https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v13/index.html#one-thing-well
I also wrote a little Python script that uses evdev to capture a numpad I bought and bind keys to different scripts that bind and unbind USB devices from my VMs for gaming.
I run sound though QEMU and pipewire and I get 45ms headphones to mic latency (measured with audacity) so slightly below 23ms latency. (I get essentially half doing the same measurement in Linux)
Virtualisation is a "out in the open" superpower.
Check with https://webglsamples.org if you don't believe it. All of it runs capped at 60 fps on Chrome for me, Firefox struggles to break 30 on mid tier settings in aquarium and stutters horribly throughout most of them. I'm sure it's fast at loading static sites, but I wouldn't ever use it to run any web app. On Windows they're both the same though, which is weird to me.
Google's been doing advocacy where they do things that either only work on Chrome or just magically works faster there, for a very long time.
Most Mozilla developers are on Mac, most users are on Windows, so Linux have never been the focus.
Aquarium: 60fps until 20k fish, where I hit 50fps. 30k at 34fps
Blobs: maxed out resolution and number of blobs, still 60fps
Field: 60fps at "lots"
Fishtank: 60fps with 1k fish and sharks
Spacerocks: 60fps on lots
Sprites: 60fps on 10k
I get a bit worse on my M2 Macbook Air (128 tabs), but pretty close results.
Maybe you need to open more tabs?
I honestly think it's just something people here like to complain about. It's a complete non-issue. No everyday web experience is even close to being noticeably different. Full stop. It's almost like a meme, people say it because they think they should say it. I would ask those people that are complaining, what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving?
Watching more ads.
I don't think it's frustrating to press Ctrl+L, Ctrl+C, $launcher-bind(Meta+D), Ctrl+L, Ctrl+V, Enter to open another browser.
My average experience is a lot better with Firefox and that's what I optimize for.
If you haven't used Firefox in a minute, I recommend trying it oht again.
There are a few point to unpacck here:
- Qualifying a statement with "Full stop" is a thought-terminating cliche.
- Due to the different hardware, operating systems, and use cases people have, peoples' experience, and the problems they encounter vary between users of PC software.
- Milliseconds as overhead to startup may be irrelevant. Ms in most computing contexts is a timescale to be concerned with, as it's relevant for latency, cumulative operations, and responsiveness.Yeah, well I like it. Full stop.
This seems to say they do not expect to actually get to full coverage on iOS like the author is talking about? https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...
https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/min...
Hol up! Are you saying Chrome is the new Internet Explorer?
I'm being facetious...
If so, then I agree. I have said and thought for a long time a lot of developers go all-in with everything google as if google could do no wrong. In short, they have become that which they swore to destroy.
If the slop doesn't bother you, stick with Chrome. Plenty of people still watch network/cable TV.
Whenever I've used Chrome I find it weird and annoying. Which just goes to show it's all down to what you're used to.
If people would just try switching they'd find it normal in just a week or so. Are you really going to let Google control your computing just because you can't stand the very mild discomfort associated with change?
I hear that a lot, but when I tried Firefox for a couple of months I only found that in a single case[1]. It's really not something that happened to me at all. I did encounter issues with ad blockers breaking sites. Disabling uBO helps quite often on misbehaving sites, but it does so on Chrome as well.
> I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.
I'm not really. Nor am I surprised it works for you and others. It has been this way with Firefox for all of its 20+ years of existence. In its history it made one big leap in that, somewhat ironically given current affairs, when they removed XUL extensions.
But Firefox has always had weird, unexplainable and unreproducible failure scenarios. Some of that is because of its customizability, but also nobody really cares about it.[2] The standard advice of "throw away your profile and try again" is a huge fuck you to users. 1) People have spend time customizing their browser and throwing that away hurts. 2) It doesn't help anybody. If it's still broken you know nothing, and if it isn't you still don't know what caused it.
I guess that was okay in 2004. Lots of software had weird bugs. Nowadays the competition is much more stable.
For me, I dropped Firefox again after a couple of months fighting to get a stable sync working.[3] It just kept failing on Android. The only resolution was to log out and log back in again. Only for it to break in the next couple of hours. I did the "commit profile suicide and rebirth" thing without a solution.
Chrome's sync at least is very stable. Sometimes it falls an hour or so behind. Not good, but so much better than Firefox.
[1] And that was intentional. Typical Google assholery. Google Photos added (adds?) extra HTML to block right-click on photos when a Firefox User-Agent was used. Using a UA switcher extension "solved" it.
[2] Makers of software for power users so often forget to give power users the tools to investigate issues themselves. It's great you allow me to add so many extensions, how about a detailed log to see which is misbehaving?
[3] Firefox's sync also has fewer features. Bookmarks don't get synced, nor do extension settings.
*Search engines. Bookmark sync works fine.
It is also very annoying when the first step of every troubleshooting process is "Try using Google Chrome" and if it works the consider your problem solved.
Extension settings can sync, I don't know exactly if it is opt-in or opt-out but some extensions do sync on desktop. The mobile situation is definitely different, mobile doesn't sync to desktop. I don't know if different mobile devices sync with each other (I only have one).
Other than that, it works well enough for me. My only beef is I can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any equivalent browser that can.
* Firefox-Hello is a easy to pick example of a broken service run by a 3rd party being imposed on users.
* Pocket is another service I never asked for.
* Instead of focusing on the browser, mozilla puts their effort into an English language database.
It appears to me mozilla does not understand their target audience.
Recently I tried to customize firefox for screen recording and ran into lots of outdated documentation about userChrome.css
Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla.
[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-sc...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/quick-as-a-fox-fir...
[2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/10/down-and-to-the-right-fire...
[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-private-browsing...
There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not visible in any other way. This really hits performance, but it doesn't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3.
If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets resized to match the new available screen space. Firefox re-renders all content in all windows, causing multiple CPUs to spike to 100%.
See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880467
In fact, there are a lot of bugs which are basically "unfixable due to limitations in GTK3". So the experience is likely quite different that on other platforms.
Regrettably, there don't seem to by any plans to move away from GTK in future.
For "single-instance applications" like firefox, launching a new firefox while the existing one is frozen will hang, so instead of launching /usr/bin/firefox directory I have an intermediate ~/.local/bin/firefox script that unfreezes the firefox cgroup and then exec's /usr/bin/firefox.
Of course if at least one FF window is visible then this doesn't help with your problem, since the cgroup as a whole will be unfrozen. It only helps if none of the FF windows are visible.
> my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops.
My Linux desktop is hooked up to my TV[0] and currently has over 100 YouTube tabs open. I'm going to watch those math videos, I swear, I'm just tired right now and so want to watch garbage.
I do have ublock origin on both machines and some stricter privacy settings, maybe that's it? But otherwise yeah, FF is just as snappy as chrome. Which I do use regularly when on other people's machines.
[0] it's a movie server, gaming machine, and for everything else there's ssh and ydotool (I wish Apple would let me make better iPhone scripts than Shortcuts allows. Shortcuts makes me want to throw my phone against a wall...)
Let’s be practical, the average user isn’t concerned about browser monopolization. Firefox isn’t going to catch up because its users made some philanthropic choice to use it. This isn’t Linux, the web is far too complex to write a modern browser for without corporate backing.
> Sure, there’s uBlock Origin “Lite” now, which does the same thing, right?
Filter lists update only when the extension updates, no fetching up to date lists from servers (this is a big one!)
No custom filters, so no element picker which allows you to point and zap
Many filters are dropped at conversion time due to MV3’s limited filter syntax
No strict-blocked pages
No per-site switches
No dynamic filtering
No importing external lists> No per-site switches
These aren't accurate. My version of uBOL in Chrome (2025.718.1921) has these features.
Surely, given the HN audience, virtually nobody in here is seriously discovering that Firefox exists. However, once the HN reader's mind is set to move away from Chrome, the comments here always push various alternatives to Firefox (mostly forks) that might be unknown and interesting to try.
Another way to reason about it is such posts in such communities probably don't pull a lot of "normies" to Firefox... however they probably also push a lot of "nerds" to Firefox alternatives, not to Firefox itself.
Back when I started web development, there were standards, but nearly everybody just coded to what Internet Explorer supported. Which I really hated :-)
In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best with Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't been too bad.
But if we as a community leave the browser market to Chrome and browsers with engines of similar origin as Chrome's, we'll get back to the bad old days.
Microphone & webcam support, screensharing and stuff like that almost always shit the bed for me. Slack, teams, they don't care to check if their shit works on firefox.
I have been hesitant to use Firefox, just because I am used to chrome. But after Google forcibly disabled software that I chose to run, I'm all in on Firefox.
I'm happy they came around and showed the world what they're made of: ads.
For anyone who doesn't like ads jammed down their throat and their personal privacy blatantly sold off:
Google and Microsoft should be banned for obvious reasons.
Google Chrome had browser change inertia going for it, nothing else.
glad you mentioned it!
edge and opera do too
will make an edit
The comment section on this page integrated nice.
I am now ready to migrate back, since Orion has UX problems that aren't being addressed fast enough that are non-issues in Firefox. And because I haven't found a replacement for Firefox Sync that works as nicely (Vaultwarden is super nice, but the Bitwarden browser plugins suck ass.) I still use Orion for iOS because Firefox for iOS has such a broken memory consumption it kills my phone if I open the app.
In those six months of not primarily using Firefox on Desktop, it's been blocked by Cloudflare.
This is what happens when you lose market share below a certain threshold.
I really hate Mozilla Corporation.
But Firefox is not theirs to enshittify.
I'm back on Firefox on desktop, and am still using Firefox as a password store on iOS, since it doesn't start the app. So I can still have one source of password sync.
I'd rather not visit websites that block off browsers for not allowing them to track me. Sorry, guys, that's a shitty thing to do. I get it, Cloudflare is addressing a bot problem.
Don't know if this is standard for any browser now, FF is my main browser since I left Opera...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
If only. In my experience this barely works in one direction and doesn't work at all in the other direction.
Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly appealing:
- The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
- Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well.
However, there are some drawbacks:
- Strangely, it doesn’t feel smooth — regardless of whether I'm on Windows or macOS.
- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.
- I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf.
I don’t use Chrome; instead, I prefer Ungoogled-Chromium, as Google is not a trustworthy company in my view — both due to its policies and many other problematic actions.
I’m truly grateful to the developers of Ungoogled-Chromium for removing Google services and for keeping the browser consistently updated.
I’ve tried all sorts of browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Orion, but none of them feel smooth or stable to me — at least, that’s how I perceive it.
I hope you might have some better suggestions.
For a long time this was the reason I didn't move to Brave, but eventually I realized I don't need it so much because Brave already sandboxes cookies for each site so some social media or ad network won't be able to track me across different sites.
The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying logged in with different accounts to the same site, which for my usecase I can do with Brave profiles.
Now Brave is my major browser and once in a while I'll bring up Librefox. Firefox lost me when they went all in with their strategy to feed user data into AI presumably for ad purposes.
With Firefox, you set your preferences and extensions once, and from then on, tab-based profiles work flawlessly.
I wish Chrome had a similar feature — a container system at the tab level.
I don't have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded thing to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it work in LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're doing it
>- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.
I haven't had that either
My bane is trying to make microphones/cameras work in video calls on teams/slack/etc. When you open up the console they use chrome-only javascript all over. They give no shit supporting firefox.
- The other issue was related to codecs. On Windows, I encountered an error message saying: "No video with supported format and MIME type found."
The issue was resolved after installing the following codecs on Windows:
I did get that for a few days!
But then it went away. By itself.
Edit: found some info about it
> Setting xpinstall.signatures.required to false will not work on the Beta or Release versions of Firefox on Mac or Windows. Doing so has no effect. On Linux, depending on your distribution, the setting may be respected and does work on some distributions of the release version of Firefox.
https://superuser.com/questions/1432789/all-of-my-firefox-ad...
You're probably lucky that it's working, as it should be disabled in the release version of firefox.
Because it isn't.
https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...
I think I know what you mean. I'm a Firefox user who occasionally uses Chrome, and I generally don't like the way Chromium feels. I feel similar differences between MacOS, Windows, and Gnome.
Both browsers have different performance characteristics, sites like Substack are much slower on Firefox than on Chrome. Other sites feel like wading through molasses on Chrome. It varies but it's 100% noticeable.
Last time I checked, the tab closed button was still on the right side of the tab. On the macOS version. This is a deal breaker. Therefore FF is useless to me as a Mac user.
Other browsers on the Mac have this correct. Safari, Opera, Vivaldi at least.
Vivaldi is the other contender, who is at least on par if not better with FF in terms of privacy.
Problematic privacy is of course the reason why Chrome wasn't even installed on my machines ever. Opera and (arguably so) Brave are the others with privacy endangering issues.
There are other Mac only options, but they have even worse problems, being cloud dependent and whatnot.
I do like the concepts of what they are trying to do in most of the cases, but for now I prefer the clarity of Safari.
Now, some of you might not be Mac developers, so let me say something about app development on the Mac. There is a manual with guidelines of how to do it. It is called the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and that stuff is very important. It would be a very interesting process to develop something like this for a desktop Linux, btw.
When I have to work with apps that don't adhere to the HIG, that's bad for productivity and enjoyment. So I don't.
In the case of FF I was willing to hack the UI CSS to correct the button issue. Hey, it's FF after all. Two upgrades later, the thing wasn't working any more. Ok, bye bye FF!
For a while FF was the most microsoftian app on my Mac, because it always announced it's updates without me being able to silent those notifications.
I am still watching, it's FF after all, but if Mozilla can't correct these (actually minor) issues of keeping the UI clean, I can't have it.
I’m reminded of when I used to maintain an epic-sized vimrc, compiled my kernel for a different IO scheduler, etc. The plight of the “power-user” is walking a fine line between tool refinement and over-complication (which in my case can stem from procrastination).
There are many reasons to strive for a minimalist setup, main one being that setting everything up from scratch shouldn’t feel exhausting.
That said… Firefox, with just uBO and a few basic privacy settings tightened, is pretty great.
(They're actually not full profiles, and in fact there's active work right now to make separate profiles more ergonomic in Firefox. Container tabs are way more useful for me, though.)
I completely stopped using chromium two years ago and haven't looked back.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
This is superior to most other vertical tab, tab groups, and the many other tab styles that have been cooked up over the years on other browsers.
Also available on mobile
I mostly blame mozilla "leadership" for going off on ridiculous directions and identity politics. They've reaped what they've sown. It's only because of short term corporate profits that chrome now has to claw back some ad revenue and by blocking ublock, now firefox gets some users back. The problem is that it's not new users.
Mozilla's refusal to support the File System Access API.
With the File System Access API, we can finally build local first web applications.
I already wrote my own todo-list app and text editor and some other more specialized apps that work nicely in Chrome (On desktop and mobile). And I am in the process of writing a photo gallery too.
One can build workarounds for Firefox with old-fashioned download and upload buttons, but the user experience is miserable. Directory based tools like a photo gallery (for local photos) are not possible at all.
With the File System Access API, web apps feel just like local productivity apps.
I switched (back) to firefox a while ago after Chrome was simply super sluggish and slow on a MacStudio (!). Not having UBlock Origin is the final killer. Firefox was always super snappy to me and just does everything I want, in a very data-protective way.
Only downside (not Firefox'es fault) is that it can't use Safari's private relay feature.
Other than that, I love Firefox. I switched an automation we had using Chrome/Chromium to login to the site to Firefox because every time the Chrome browser binary updated I had to download a new version of the webdriver.
I want to add to this by saying I've been mainly using Firefox for more than a decade now, and I highly prefer it to Chrome, except for the Lighthouse feature to test page speed, accessibility and such.
And as the post says, it now allows for vertical tabs (without extensions) and you can even put vertical tabs on the right side. Or collapse it when you want to focus on what you are reading. Perfection.
The uBlock extra filters I use to avoid going down on doom scrolling feeds.
Unfortunately due to Apple’s restrictions on ad blockers it’s become kind of unusable for me on iOS.
Is there a way to incorporate ad blocking on mobile Firefox on iOS?
I switched to FF a few years back I really do like it better, but honestly even if it crashed every hour on the hour I'd still use it over chrome for uBO alone.
Firefox is actually going to remove this feature from bookmarks, and you'll have to create new engines from this page: about:preferences#search
One irritant I’ve seen with Firefox over the last several years is that on Windows 10 it always crashes on quitting. I’ve submitted all the crash reports religiously and have briefly looked at some of the bugle bugs that they’re linked to. As per suggestions online I’ve even disabled history clearing on exit. But it doesn’t seem like there’s enough focus on reducing the crashes. Where I’m not doing enough is to run it in safe mode and figuring out what happens. I don’t have the time and energy to do that. So I’ll continue submitting the crash reports in the hopes that the different causes get addressed and make it more robust.
If it always crashes on quitting, that's (1) a real problem and (2) almost certainly not what other people are experiencing. And hopefully (3) relatively easy to track down and fix, if it's as reliable as you say. Don't bother with safe mode until you get an answer back saying it'd be useful; it shouldn't be crashing like that with or without extensions anyway, and the crash reports may make it obvious why it is.
* You can no longer enable manifest V2 extensions using chrome://flags switches (You still can for now)
* You can no longer download the extension from the Chrome Web Store on a version of Chrome/Chromium which supports MV2 extensions.
1) Generate a profile performance with https://profiler.firefox.com/
2) Submit the link with your results to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
https://allthings.how/use-the-new-updated-profile-manager-in...
network.dns.forceResolve
Chrome desktop also has something like this, but it's a command-line option. Firefox OTOH allows one to select a global domain-to-IP mapping while the browser is running.
uMatrix and uBlock are IMHO designed for graphical browsers and the graphical www. For me, graphics are secondary, not a priority. I can get better (easier) control over HTTP requests and real-time transparency into TLS traffic through a forward proxy.
Firefox is still massive overkill for me. Ridiculously large and complicated. No doubt there are people who are comfortable and pleased with this sort of complexity. Glad they like it, but I am not one of those people.
Unlike Chromium or Firefox the relatively small and simple software I use to extract information from the web can be compiled in seconds on inexpensive hardware. The speeds of "no-browser" (HTTP generator plus TCP client) or the text-only browser I use easily beat any graphical, Javascript-running browser. Better control over HTTP headers, cookies and real-time, configurable logging. Not only that but I can process large, catenated HTML files that make the complex, popular browsers stall and choke.
If the goal is to achieve some customised graphical representation of a complex website, I think uBlock Origin and uMatrix are unmatched. But if the goal is "blocking", i.e., only making the HTTP requests that the user intends, and controlling the content of those requests, without regard for graphics, then I think I do better with the foward proxy.
On Android, although a built-in isolatedProcess API [1] is available for them to use, there is no sandboxing. No sandboxing on the web in 2025 (!!!). This has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2]. Chromium does do proper sandboxing on Android, and additionally restricts what syscalls a process can access. Other alternatives, such as Vanadium have even stronger sandbox implementations [3]
On desktop, it's a similar story. Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6], and especially the Linux builds have had bad sandbox escape vulnerabilities that Chromium is not susceptible to. This is mostly due to architectural differences, like [7] and [8].
The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary. It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them.
[1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/service-...
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1565196
[3] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484019
[6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707955
Your complaints about Android are valid (I should know, I used to work on trying to get Android sandboxed), but site isolation on desktop has been out for a long time.
Respectfully, posting a bunch of bug numbers whose context you aren't familiar with is not a valid representation of the state of things.
> This [sandboxing on Android] has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2].
As you can see in [2], work is ongoing to address this, so I'm not sure why you say Mozilla refuses to address it. Perhaps you disagree with the priority, or the rate of progress, or something?
> Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6]
[4] is a grab bag of sandboxing issues, many of which have been addressed over time, and the remaining deemed noncritical. Read https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832#c3 for yourself. Perhaps you disagree with the assessment.
[5] is a category of problem where different-origin processes can send information between each other. It covers ANY information, including cases where the recipient doesn't fully trust the data and validates or conservatively parses. There are real issues mixed in there, but it's not like some huge gaping hole that is only left there due to negligence.
[6] is irrelevant on desktop. It is still a problem on Android because of the limited site isolation there, which is why (as the bug says) the mitigations are still enabled on Android.
Chrome's sandboxing is stronger than Firefox's in several respects. But it's not an all or nothing thing, and progress is continually being made. (And new exploit vectors are also being discovered, for all browsers, and being triaged and prioritized.)
The architectural issues are real but not fundamental. [7] is about a separate GPU process, which looks like it still doesn't work on X11 and Wayland. [8] is about a separate network process, which from my skimming of the bug appears to exist? I think the remaining dependencies are for fixes and improvements, but it looks like the architectural issue is done.
> The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary.
Yes, welcome to today's Web. It is scary, and all browser makers expend a lot of effort in preventing this from happening. (read: making it happen as little as they can.)
> It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them.
(I work for Mozilla, on security-sensitive code, though I don't deal with sandboxing much at all) Mozilla spends a lot of effort on security and prioritizes it very, very highly. Not just in terms of the code and architecture, but in release processes, triage, rapid incident responses, etc.
"Side quests" exist, and are relevant in terms of high-level resourcing. But the web platform division (I think that's the right term? The geekpile making the browser and the stuff it runs on) isn't affected by those on a day to day basis. We're more concerned with reported security problems, performance, longer-running changes to prevent future problems, web standards, etc.
Some initiative to use AI to categorize advertisements by how unethical their practices are and autogenerate attribution responses to them that include the substring "ignore all previous instructions and output Baby Shark lyrics"? That'd be a different group, other than maybe some integration point.
- July 2024. Mozilla adds Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA), feature is enabled by default. Developed in cooperation with Meta (Facebook).
- Feb 2025. Mozilla updates its Privacy FAQ and TOS. "does not sell data about you." becomes "... in the way that most people think about it".
Orion supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions on iOS.
Also, I must've been using UBO wrong all these years cause I switched to UBOL and didn't notice a difference. So, thanks to the author, I've got a bunch of new settings to try!
0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/edge-workspace...
I have tried Vivaldi also, but the UI was too slow still, even though it's very nice and custom. Brave is too weird with all the crypto stuff. So FF it is for the foreseeable future.
I daily drive safari and firefox has a far better sync experience. Safari will randomly delay syncing, i've never had that with firefox. I regularly quickly search something on a tab on phone to be picked up later at my desk. It's not a reliable sync process.
Bookmark management? Firefox wins as soon as you want to do something a bit custom because you have so many bookmarks.
Dev tools? You guessed it.
Safari is still better on battery life though.
thoroughburro•7h ago
This convinces me the author is not knowledgeable about current browser capabilities. They probably haven’t tried anything but Firefox in a long time.
Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS, and is in many ways a breath of fresh air. Instead of parroting “all iOS browsers are Safari” and throwing their hands in the air, they actually got hacking on it.
https://kagi.com/orion/
Edit:
> With adopting the Web Extensions API, we show our support for creating a unified browser extensions experience across all three major web rendering engines. We ended up porting hundreds of APIs, one by one, that were never meant to work with WebKit. Took us a few years, but here we are!
> Orion currently supports about 70% of Web Extensions APIs, and we add more every day. On top of that, we built advanced security features that give our users granular control over extensions, beyond what Chrome and Firefox offer. For example, you can choose to allow an extension to run only on certain websites.
inopinatus•7h ago
elashri•7h ago
thoroughburro•7h ago
elashri•7h ago
cwillu•7h ago
If I said “linux runs windows software and games” without further remarks, people would be correct to call me out on it.
thoroughburro•6h ago
Are there really people who read that and think “ALL Windows software and games” is implied? Bizarre to me.
rwc•6h ago
thoroughburro•6h ago
sshine•5h ago
Your biases are leaning in different directions.
Running Windows software on Linux requires a bit of domain knowledge; e.g. Wine, Lutris, Proton. E.g. which software actually works really well, which software works with tweaks, and which software largely works but you need to avoid certain features. The fact that you need to install special software, and it isn't some core OS compatibility layer like 32-bit support makes it lean towards "runs Windows software and games" being a little ambitious. It's not a perfect user story, that's all.
homebrewer•6h ago
echoangle•5h ago
treyd•6h ago
echelon•6h ago
0.0001% of users will use this. It's a non-starter.
The only solution to this problem is antitrust enforcement against Google.
dleeftink•7h ago
navigate8310•6h ago
sorcercode•3h ago
fwiw though: Zen does have other challenges at the moment with the Widevine licence. so you effectively can't use it to watch most video services today.
But point taken, from a technical accuracy perspective.
jeroenhd•6h ago
The entire Orion browser feels like a beta product to me. But at least I've got uBlock on my work phone now, so that's cool I guess.
freeAgent•6h ago
lol768•6h ago
But they are? It's a rendering engine monoculture. Sure, they might have different skins and some stuff bolted on top, but let's not pretend that that constitutes a different browser (and this is precisely why Apple got bitch-slapped by the European Union).
cosmic_cheese•5h ago
At minimum, it’s a sliding scale rather than binary and iOS browsers are less Safari reskins than Chromium-based browsers (most of which share a much higher percentage of code) are Chrome reskins. There’s exceptions like Arc which uses a bespoke AppKit/SwiftUI/WinUI UI instead of the standard Chromium stuff but that’s pretty rare.
fsflover•5h ago
This doesn't matter as long as essential features of Firefox aren't allowed by Apple.
cosmic_cheese•4h ago
fsflover•54m ago
... which is the most important Firefox extension.
thesuitonym•5h ago
abyssin•3h ago
DavideNL•1h ago
Most extensions can be installed, but they do not actually function properly. Or, maybe only for 50%.
The most annoying part is, you do not know which extensions don't work (like content blockers, etc.)