7 ms·

Maybe consider other browsers now. Yes speed is great and all and as much as I hate the idea of supporting the little guy just because he is a little guy; this

• zamadatix 5y ago
  Brave/Opera/Vivaldi all plan on continuing to support the blocking declarativeNetRequest API if you want options for a Chromium based browser.
• fastball 5y ago
  Switch to Brave. Great ad-blocking by default and chromium based.
  • scns 5y ago
    You can even install uBlock original on it.
  • dao- 5y ago
    > and chromium based. That may seem like a plus from a user's perspective when websites were only tested with / optimized for Chrome. From the perspective of someone who's concerned about Google's power as a monopoly, alternative browsers being Chromium-based is just part of the problem. Sure, you can fork Chromium in theory, but making changes that are incompatible with Google's vision is going to be a problem for you. So Google is still going to be in control as long as they ship the browser that dominates all others. Brave don't have the resources to maintain an engine by themselves anyway. Besides Mozilla, only Apple and Microsoft could do it, and Microsoft already gave up.
    • fastball 5y ago
      Is the engine really the thing you're worried about though? I'm more concerned with things like Manifest V3, which Brave certainly has the engineering capacity to fork around, and plans to.
      • kaba0 5y ago
        Do they really have the engineering capacity to support a fork for years after divergence? Also, I am personally not really okay with their shady crypto practice where content creators didn’t get their share made before their joining. Any reason to prefer it over Firefox?
        • fastball 5y ago
          I mean, everyone has more engineering capacity to fork Chromium than to build their own browser/engine from scratch, which is why I find a lot of this discussion so silly. With regards to the crypto donations, that was an early version of the system which they improved after receiving feedback. Hearing feedback that your product is misleading and then fixing it is exactly the type of behavior I want to see, not sure about anyone else. I prefer it to Firefox because of the best-in-class adblocking and because (for JS heavy workloads) I still find that V8 is far superior to SpiderMonkey. Also because I don't think Mozilla has been a great steward, and most of their revenue comes from Google, so if your goal is to de-google I think Firefox is a worse bet than Brave.
          • kaba0 5y ago
            > I mean, everyone has more engineering capacity to fork Chromium than to build their own browser/engine from scratch That doesn’t contradict my question. If google does go through with crippling ad blockers at a deep level of the engine, how long till forks will break under backporting every security update, etc. And that is without thinking of any sort of malice. If google deliberately builds heavily on top of these changes, they will pretty much cripple every fork, except for perhaps edge. And I do agree that V8 is a superior engine when it comes to performance, but for me the minimal performance gain is meaningless (especially with good ad blocking it is almost insignificant for the majority of websites) And just because it is a symbiosis where Google won’t face anti-monopolism lawsuits if Mozilla is around and Mozilla gets some money, I doubt it would shine negative light on Firefox.
• judge2020 5y ago
  > But I have learnt that Microsoft Edge is as bad as Google Chrome (for me) because they are mirroring Google Chrome with regards to Manifest V3. In case you don't know, Edge is built on Chrome's engine - using Edge is just as bad as using Chrome if you want the web to be more open with different vendors having a say in how it works.
  • stonemetal12 5y ago
    It is, but there is the question of how much effort MS puts into it. So far it seems to be that it is not so much "built on" as it is a low effort reskin.
    • nvrspyx 5y ago
      I don't know much about the internals of Chromium, but I'd say it's more than a "low effort reskin". Not including the UI changes like vertical tabs and collections, there's also a lot of underlying changes/improvements made like PlayReady support (for e.g. 4K Netflix playback), better scrolling support, tracking protection, Windows-specific improvements, memory/performance improvements, PDF annotation, web capture, etc. Granted, Microsoft are contributing most of these underlying improvements back upstream to the Chromium project, so the gap between them will remain small. Second to Google, Microsoft is the most prolific contributor to the Chromium project, so I think "low effort reskin" is a bit of an undermining to their efforts. With all of that said, Google is still the gatekeeper, Microsoft's contributions don't really solve the Chromium browser monopoly, and Microsoft is being really scummy with their push for Edge (i.e. Windows and Bing annoyances about it). I'd still prefer to have more independent browser options like Firefox.
    • PascLeRasc 5y ago
      It's so funny that Microsoft copied Chrome's left space between the edge of the screen the the first tab, but they didn't realize that Chrome still counts that as part of the tab (https://imgur.com/a/hI2XrcX https://imgur.com/a/hI2XrcX). So if you try to quickly mouse over to your leftmost tab on Edge, you'll end up clicking the menu section instead and un-fullscreening it.
  • 5y ago
• hliyan 5y ago
  I started using Firefox about two years ago. The only time I ever have to launch Chrome now is to specifically test Chrome compatibility. Other than that, I've never missed Chrome.
  • aceazzameen 5y ago
    This is me also. Even on my personal PC I recently built, I didn't even bother installing Chrome. I just use Edge if I need Chromium, which is extremely rare. Firefox and multi-account containers was a game changer the first time I used it.
  • pnelson 5y ago
    Same! I switched back to Firefox a few years ago when I discovered that logging into Gmail on Chromium (not Chrome!) crossed a hard boundary by also signing me into the browser account sync. I tested a few times to confirm before switching and I've never looked back.
  • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    I've done the opposite. I used Safari for more than a half decade, then jumped to Firefox when I decided to switch to weird operating system. But then Firefox dropped support for my weird OS a year ago (I can't blame them), and I was forced to switch to Chromium. I quickly became delighted at just how speedy everything was. It's not as if I'd never opened Chrome before, but the difference was much more noticeable after using it as my primary browser for a few days. Even on my weird platform where Chromium can't use graphics acceleration, the browser is just stupid fast at getting web pages on screen. I'm not, well, particularly happy about this. I think that browser diversity is super important, and I do still use Firefox on Windows and Safari on modern Apple platforms. But Chromium really does seem to provide the better experience.
    • otabdeveloper4 5y ago
      I've actually tested Firefox and Chromium side-by-side on my webapp. Firefox rendered the page quicker. (Chrome is more responsive while it's waiting for DOM manipulations to finish.)
• moron4hire 5y ago
  I call this the "eat your vegetables" strategy of browser promotion. Yes, browser engine hegemony is not a good thing. No, Firefox is not the solution. Mozilla has proven repeatedly that they are not up to the task of competing with Chrome. The market has steadily moved away from them ever since shortly after Chrome was released. They've not once, in the last 13 years, done anything to make a dent in that loss of market share. Firefox is now 19 years old. It has always ran on "webdevs just need to be better about testing in Firefox". When the only alternative was IE 6 and 7, that worked. But it's now been longer that that strategy has not worked than the period of time that it did work. I don't have a solution, but without massive upheaval within Mozilla, "just use Firefox" is also not a viable solution. People aren't going to "eat their vegetables". You need to come up with a more compelling, longer term strategy than backing a perennial loser. You're free to try to convince me that Mozilla has the capacity for change. That somehow, they are going to completely change their management corps and corporate culture enough to be able to get out of their quagmire. Extraordinary claims are going to require extraordinary evidence.
  • aljones 5y ago
    Chrome is heavily promoted on some of the most high traffic websites. Users of those websites are told they should use Chrome. So they do. There's nothing Mozilla can do about that. Mozilla doesn't enforce antitrust. No upheaval within Mozilla will change it.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    >Mozilla has proven repeatedly that they are not up to the task of competing with Chrome. Seriously? Mozilla has simply proven they can't compete with Google on ads: Chrome has been promoted everywhere from TV, Web banners on all major media websites, Adwords placements on all "browser" queries, even subway stations in all big cities... starting with the bundling with Google Earth more than a decade ago. Most people around me switched to Chrome because of all the popups on the Google homepage and because companies slowly replaced the "IE required" with "Chrome required" over the years. Mozilla also couldn't get Firefox to be preinstalled on billions of Android devices either. I wonder why.
• infinityplus1 5y ago
  You'll still need to use Chrome from time to time. You can even change the user agent of Chrome to Firefox to make sites see Firefox anyway.
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    >You'll still need to use Chrome from time to time Really? I've only used Firefox for over 5 years now, on Mac, Linux and Android. I don't need extensions to change my user agent either.
  • masklinn 5y ago
    > You'll still need to use Chrome from time to time. No? Unless you're a web dev and need to test under chrome, maybe. I have chrome on none of my personal devices.
    • infinityplus1 5y ago
      When some site doesn't work for any reason, I usually open them in different browsers one by one to see if it works. They act as fall backs. Also, I'm a web dev and I have to use Chrome just for its debugger because Firefox's debugger is slow and it hangs for some reason on our app.
      • masklinn 5y ago
        > When some site doesn't work for any reason When done site doesn’t work for some reason I go and use some other site. I’ve yet to encounter an essential chrome-only site.
        • infinityplus1 5y ago
          > When done site doesn’t work for some reason I go and use some other site." That may or may not be an option.
          • deleted 5y ago
• brobdingnagians 5y ago
  Totally agree. Using Chrome because it is faster, at this point, is like using C++ for everything instead of python or a good bash script just because C++ is faster. If you really need absolute cutting edge speed for a webapp, then maybe you should be using a desktop application or the webapp needs to cut some fat.
• mastax 5y ago
  I switched to Firefox from Chrome a few years ago (maybe 2017/2018). It required a tiny bit of willpower since making even minor changes to frequently used tools causes friction. I've experienced few issues since. About once a month I'll run into a website that doesn't work in Firefox. Mostly experimental things on HN. My doctor's virtual visit web software was Chrome only, but the audio didn't work in Chrome either. I used the Android App. Dish network's internet DVR streaming requires Chrome, but I don't watch a lot of TV and the quality is terrible. Otherwise I never think about it. At the time Firefox Android was a bit slow and would crash weekly or more, but I stuck with it for uBlock and Sync. After the Android app rewrite its been working well. I like having the navigation bar on the bottom (can Chrome do that yet?). The password autofill integration API took a while to get integrated since that happened during the app rewrite. At least with Bitwarden it's still a bit buggy when it decides to show the autofill prompt, but that seems to happen in other apps and in Chrome. It's annoying that most Google apps will ignore your system preferences and open things in Chrome where I don't have any sign-in cookies etc. Still like the Google search/assistant experience and haven't found an alternative so I live with it. Overall, a very mild sacrifice for the open web. Very easy slacktivism.
• muyuu 5y ago
  how about Brave? PS: agreed on the main sentiment of your post, it really doesn't matter which browser extracts your private data fastest
  • leppr 5y ago
    Brave is a Chromium fork which mostly just adds UI features. They don't appear to have the will/man-power to modify and develop fundamental browser features, so using Brave doesn't do much against preserving browser diversity.
    • muyuu 5y ago
      this subthread is not about browser diversity, it's about privacy -preserving features
      • leppr 5y ago
        Ok, that's not how I read GP though
• actinium226 5y ago
  Do you or does anyone else know if FF is better about blocking the "looks like you're using an ad blocker" "ads"?
  • zamadatix 5y ago
    uBlock Origin is in general able to do more faster with Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... but you'll still run into them occasionally. Make sure you enable all of the additional filter lists in uBlock's settings page (regardless of browser) as well. Well, except lists for languages you don't regularly use, those will just slow things down with no benefit to blocking.
  • neurostimulant 5y ago
    Not sure about that case, but on Firefox, uBlock Origin does have more features enabled, such as cname uncloaking to block trackers that use this sneaky trick.