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I agree (apart from the popular hate on Firefox). Ladybird is promising and has a much bigger chance to make an impact than SerenityOS. But it's a bit disappoi

• 1GZ0 2y ago
  Have to admit the Firefox hate is mostly irrelevant. its from a place of disappointment with Mozilla more than hate really. I agree that the amount of work and competition LadyBird is facing from Chrome alone is staggering, but at the same time, I'll always root for the little guy in tech, since imo thats where real innovation comes from.
• hurutparittya 2y ago
  I think the Firefox hate is completely justified. At this point the only positive thing about Firefox is that "at least it's not Chrome".
  • nacs 2y ago
    As a Firefox user, this exactly. The amount of things that now need to be toggled off on a new install are approaching Windows “telemetry” levels: disable sponsored shortcuts on homepage, disable experimental “Studies”, sponsored suggestions in search bar, “suggested extensions”, Pocket, and the list goes on. I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..
    • worble 2y ago
      I don't use it myself, but Librewolf is a pretty popular fork that attempts to be private out of the box and is usually updated pretty quickly.
      • Propelloni 2y ago
        Yes, or Waterfox [1]. [1] https://www.waterfox.net/ https://www.waterfox.net/
      • nacs 2y ago
        Thanks. Finally got around to installing Librewolf and it works great. Sensible defaults as Firefox should be.
      • EasyMark 2y ago
        I will definitely second this. I moved over to librewolf last year and love it. I’m glad Mozilla is staying in business though. I know not every organization has my beliefs and I can live with that
    • HeckFeck 2y ago
      > I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF.. I'd love to make the jump too, just that I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices. The other forks look to be desktop only.
      • metasaval 2y ago
        FYI, you can use a desktop fork and mobile Firefox with Firefox sync. source: I do that with floorp and Firefox for android.
        • metasaval 2y ago
          also just realized that waterfox does have an android version [1], if you want you use the same fork on desktop and android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.waterfox.android.release https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.waterfox.a...
        • MrAlex94 2y ago
          Not to hang around like a bad smell every time they come up, but just think it’s worth noting they are not open source anymore, instead being “source available”. Really gives me the old school “greenwashing” vibes Microsoft used to do with their Shared Source licenses. Poor showing considering they used others work to get to where they are, then shut the door when others started doing the same. I would say feel free to give Waterfox a try - I’ve tried to strike the balance of useable web and privacy, with the added enhancement of Oblivious DNS enabled by default.
          • metasaval 2y ago
            In this case I had completely missed the bad smell, so I appreciate the comment cause it prompted me to look up the whole situation. yikes. I was already planning on moving to another fork soon since I wasn't using most of floorp's power features, so this just expedited that. Also from your language it sounds like you're a Waterfox dev? If so thanks for all your hard work on open source software! I haven't tried waterfox in years, I will definitely give it a go after uninstalling floorp.
    • skeaker 2y ago
      This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is the recommended extensions but that's tucked at the bottom of a page nobody uses anyways (everyone just googles the extension they want and grabs it from the web), but even that takes like 15 seconds once you know what setting it is in about:config. I actually don't even disable the two telemetry checkboxes because they're transparent about the data they take and what they do with it, so I'm happy to share it. You can easily do all of this in one or two minutes and it won't roll itself back. With Windows you would be lucky to even have a supported method to disable their telemetry, and if you do get one it will probably be through an obscure series of registry edits that will ultimately get rolled back during a system update.
      • Aurornis 2y ago
        > This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is It’s wild to me that this is being presented as if it’s not a big deal. Shows how far the goalposts have moved in this conversation.
        • skeaker 2y ago
          It's not a big deal. They're easy to disable and easier to just ignore. It just doesn't matter in the way that you want me to panic over.
        • shiroiushi 2y ago
          How big a deal it is depends on what you're comparing to. Yeah, at first, when I read his post, I was wondering if it was a joke or something, with so many checkboxes in different places. Then I got to the point about Windows and realized he's right: compared to Windows, all those steps in Firefox actually aren't that bad, and actually stay unchecked unlike Windows which happily changes things back.
  • intelVISA 2y ago
    Agree, hopefully King Andreas can carry the torch ignited by Old Mozilla that was lost a few years back.
• bambax 2y ago
  On recent hardware, how much "performance" do we really need? Wouldn't almost any compliant browser be basically good enough?
  • spookie 2y ago
    One would think so, but some browsers do not handle well repaints or do it prematurely. I've been testing a fediverse platform against a plethora of browsers, and I'm always surprised at the differences. It's not terrible, but some do take their time.
  • The_Colonel 2y ago
    LadyBird author posted a couple of days ago a demo of twitter and he himself admitted that it's painfully slow.
    • shiroiushi 2y ago
      That sounds like a feature, not a bug.
    • account42 2y ago
      To be fair, Twitter is painfully slow on other browsers as well due to only fetching and rendering the content after the page and javascript have loaded.
  • Kiro 2y ago
    As someone developing web games, my answer is no.
    • account42 2y ago
      Web games are squarely outside "what do we really need" territory.
      • Kiro 2y ago
        That's not up to you to decide.
• bgribble 2y ago
  > But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. I don't know much about this project and I have never used it. But in my experience as a developer and user of software I couldn't disagree more. The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee. Big communities are great when a project is in its maturity and mostly needs tending and slow evolution. They mitigate the risk of a single developer getting bored and walking away, or turning into a murderous wacko, or attempting to monetize the project to death. Not naming any names. But when something is being built from scratch? Give me a single developer with a fat internet connection, alone in a cabin in the woods with a shed out back full of Red Bull :)
  • The_Colonel 2y ago
    > The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee. One person can get surprisingly far, but there's a limit beyond which no single human will scale. Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. You might be OK with a browser which has a noticeably subpar performance, but it will likely stifle mainstream adoption (which again, might be OK for you and that's fine).
    • tredre3 2y ago
      > Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. There's no doubt in my mind that Andreas could achieve that by himself. He's worked professionally on webkit, and implemented a JS interpreter, a JS bytecode interpreter, and a JS JIT all by himself after all. Also let's not forget that V8 is open-source, all their optimizations are available for others to see and implement. But to be clear this isn't a one man project, he hired a few contributors to work full time on it. Sure, it's a small team, but as said in sibling comments a small team has much more velocity.
      • The_Colonel 2y ago
        Seems like Andreas doesn't have the same delusions of ridiculing the army of (pretty smart) Chrome/V8 devs by doing the same job just on his own. His own goal is to achieve the performance of non-JITed JavaScriptCore - i.e. an optimizing interpreter.
• bachmeier 2y ago
  > The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great. We're long past the time that we should be using one type of app for text plus a bit of Javascript and another for running apps that are hosted on a remote server. I would definitely use a fast, lightweight, privacy-oriented browser for sites like HN or viewing local HTML files.
• kelnos 2y ago
  I don't think that was intended to be hate on Firefox itself, but hate on the general mismanagement of the project by Mozilla. Firefox itself may not be in the corner sniffing glue, but it often feels like much of the decision-making at Mozilla is glue-sniffing-fueled. (Happy Firefox user here; I still don't understand why anyone who cares even the tiniest bit about privacy or an open web is using Chrome.)
  • nextaccountic 2y ago
    Yeah, Firefox is expert on shooting its own foot, but Chrome is just sociopathic. I will take the glue sniffing kid over a bully any time.