6 ms·

I don't understand what is wrong with Firefox. It is open-source, highly configurable and reasonably secure (if you have the time to configure). Yes, it has sho

by nutrie 2y ago

I don't understand what is wrong with Firefox. It is open-source, highly configurable and reasonably secure (if you have the time to configure). Yes, it has shortcomings, but what doesn't.

manuelmoreale 2y ago
Nothing, it’s my default browser for dev work but it’s only alive because Google keeps paying them to exist basically so I’d love an alternative.
- Aachen 2y ago
  How's that alternative funded? Shouldn't Mozilla want to replace their Google payment with that instead? Or, failing that, wouldn't it be much lower budget to fork Firefox code instead? And then to do it in C++ when other browsers and kernels are flirting with things like Rust. How long will it take for people to trust this new C++ code? I applaud the effort but am worried it'll be in vain. Then again, with how many projects I start not because they make sense but because I enjoy them, perhaps I should see it more in that way
lupusreal 2y ago
Mozilla. I like and use Firefox but I find it increasingly hard to trust Mozilla and that makes me feel insecure about the future of Firefox.
lukan 2y ago
Not every open source software has spyware and ads activated by default, while marketing itself as privacy friendly. Yes, can all be deactivated, I also use FF, but I do not trust Mozilla anymore.
- garbagewoman 2y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by your claims of firefox having “spyware and ads activated by default”?
  - lukan 2y ago
    Install a new version of firefox, have a look in settings under "data" (or whatever they call it in english). There you will see "studies" as activated, which is cryptic talk for ad tracking. And more recently, literal tracking for a advertisement company. And as a bonus, those were added and activated as features via update, without telling. At least for me. (and paid ads you have on the home screen)
    - worksonmine 2y ago
      Studies are not ad tracking. It's worse and more like a backdoor for A/B testing of browser features. A few years back an update broke the Metamask extension and it was fixed by pushing via studies. At that point users weren't very aware the feature even existed and it caused some backlash since users realized there was a backdoor to push code into their browsers. The backlash resulted in studies being opt-in, and I thought it still was but I don't know, I use "policies.json" to setup my browsers.
      - bongobingo1 2y ago
        Am I being a total chud? These don't really seem egregious? I already accept (and expect) that Firefox receives background updates in the background. https://i.imgur.com/S7d4ZXg.png https://i.imgur.com/S7d4ZXg.png https://i.imgur.com/n2euIrQ.png https://i.imgur.com/n2euIrQ.png https://i.imgur.com/BUjukOy.png https://i.imgur.com/BUjukOy.png
        worksonmine 2y ago
        I don't mind the feature as opt-in, just like telemetry it can be useful. But depending on the threat model it can be a big problem. I still use Firefox as my main browser.
    - lawn 2y ago
      > And as a bonus, those were added and activated as features via update, without telling. At least for me. Ouch, they were new to me and also activated.
- miki123211 2y ago
  Firefox is open source, it would be far easier for the community to make a stripped down Firefox port with no telemetry, no ads and no upsells for Mozilla services. With that said, almost all of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, which might possibly influence what features they implement, their stance on various web standards etc.
  - maccard 2y ago
    > which might possibly influence what features they implement, their stance on various web standards etc. Unless you’ve got some examples to back this up, it’s FUD. Posting hypotheticals is how rumours start, and this is just stirring the pot.
    - Ginden 2y ago
      Conflict of interests is a real thing to worry about. I wouldn't trust scientist working in tobacco company on cigarette harm, even if I have no evidence of wrongdoing.
  - lukan 2y ago
    Yes and those forks exists and are a solution now. But long term, I would much rather see a truly independent open source browser engine.
  - wakeupcall 2y ago
    As pointed out, these do exist. I've been using several over the decades. And chrome forks too. They all tend to lag behind over time, until the fork is eventually too old and it's either abandoned, useful changes I was relying on are dropped, or becomes just too old compared to upstream to be fully compatible (and thus just annoying to use). Just the burden to upkeep the upstream changes, in either firefox or chrome forks, seems to be significant enough that I'm quite pessimistic on the lifespan of these projects. You might just as well do your own thing, and don't pretend to be a mainstream browser replacement altogether.
    - sharlos201068 2y ago
- nutrie 2y ago
  Sure, there are forks such as LibreWolf. I understand the reservations regarding Mozilla Foundation, although I generally like what they've been doing. Every org has people with stupid ideas. However, the way I see it, it's unlikely that the community will be able to produce a competitive browser in a broader sense (stability, performance, security, cross-platform...), meaning that the likelihood of Firefox being still around ten years from now is significantly higher than that we build and maintain a comparable browser ourselves. Then come the evolving web standards and lobbying power...
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    The way things are going at Mozilla currently, I wouldn't be surprised if Firefox is just another Chromium wrapper in 10 years. Technology doesn't seem to count as much as the C-suite filling their pockets at this "new" Mozilla.
- PrayagS 2y ago
  Ikr. They're up to some questionable decisions since long. - Acquire companies like Pocket, Anonym in multi-million dollar deals and also the millions in bonuses that the CEO likes to enjoy. - At the same time, no significant expenditure towards developing its core software. Firefox is still ridden with bugs. They even went as far as firing the people that used to work on Servo, Rust, WASM, etc. I think it's clear to them that there's not enough money to be made with small tricks like Pocket, VPN, Relay, etc. Firefox is still the only profitable product and contributes ~90% to Mozilla's revenue. Much of it coming from Google which is the one thing that people have been asking them to be less dependent on. And we shouldn't be surprised if they double down on making more money off of Google and also introduce ads. Acquiring Anonym, an ads company, implies that it might have already started.
  - lukan 2y ago
    "They even went as far as firing the people that used to work on Servo, Rust, WASM, etc." And at the same time greatly raising compensation for the CEO, despite shrinking numbers.
  - HeckFeck 2y ago
    Servo had so much potential as the flagship Rust project, a fast and memory safe browser engine. Such a loss to see it jettisoned and abandoned. Myopic decisions like these are filling the cloud of pessimism that now shrouds Mozilla.
    - yencabulator 2y ago
      FWIW Servo is seeing work as e.g. an Electron replacement. There is hope, even if one wishes the Mozilla Foundation CEO had used some $6M on developer salaries instead of pocketing it. Full browser feature set is hard, but an app that bundles its own webview can choose to not trigger the edge cases, so that's a realistic path forward.
  - antihero 2y ago
    Also they stopped developing Servo :(
- nullpilot 2y ago
  This about sums it up. Plus donating to Mozilla means your money goes to all sorts of things, but hardly if at all where you want it to.
- sebazzz 2y ago
  > Yes, can all be deactivated, I also use FF, but I do not trust Mozilla anymore. And so I feel much more at home with Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.
JimDabell 2y ago
Even Mozilla doesn’t seem to care about Firefox; why should anybody else? The primary value in Firefox existing right now is that the web standards process becomes dysfunctional when there are only two major browser rendering engines, but that is fading away with Firefox’s market share. Hopefully Ladybird can gain enough momentum to matter there because it doesn’t seem like Gecko can maintain its relevance.
- viraptor 2y ago
  We're in the current situation because Google could spend enough money on promoting Chrome. That's it. A different, or even better browser won't change that. Google can put a chrome ad everywhere again for a few months.
  - bmacho 2y ago
    I feel firefox market share is mostly because they actively enshittificate their browser, and not because of google ads, or chrome being better.
    - The_Colonel 2y ago
      Doubt it. Things tech people complain about (like integration of Pocket) are completely irrelevant to the masses. On the other hand, things like performance improved drastically, and it is now competitive with Chrome. Firefox the product is in the best shape it ever was.
    - bwat49 2y ago
      I disagree, IMO the main reason they lost so much marketshare to chrome was because for a long time, chrome just was much faster and much more stable. Performance, stability, and compatibility is all that matters to most users. Firefox (mostly) caught up with quantum and process isolation on the desktop, but by then I think it was too late. And the android version still has horrible performance, stability, and compatibility compared to Chromium browsers. Mozilla just doesn't have the same engineering resources to poor into the browser that google does, so I'm not sure there's any way they can really maintain pace with google outside of becoming yet another chromium browser.
hippich 2y ago
I think the problem is that chrome and firefox are developed for general usage, and as a result, have to deal with general usage constraints. For example, spectre and process isolation mentioned in another blog post here in the comments. I had a project in the past where I needed a browser with good JS support, but that does not make any http requests to any resources not in address bar or in the page rendered at that address. I did not find single browser based on firefox/chrome that fulfilled that requirement. Even the most privacy-focused projects still made continious requests to some mozilla resources (if i remember correctly, it was something about tls or maybe something else). So seeing someone creating an engine from scratch gives me hope that such browser might exist one day if I ever will need one again.
- viraptor 2y ago
  There's a difference between privacy and stealth. Modern browsers need to do things like captive portal sensing, ocsp checks, etc. If you want to disable all requests, you'll need to spend time cutting legitimate features. Or run it in an external sandbox which removes all networking access?
gwervc 2y ago
Around Firefox 4 it became a shitshow of questionable UI redesign every version. And performances where not up to Chrome. Also Chromium is open-source, and Firefox is mainly funded by Google so it not like Firefox has a real proposition value or independence.
safety1st 2y ago
Well to put it bluntly, Firefox is Google's bitch. If we want the web to be a multi-vendor platform based on open, multi-vendor standards, as it has been for parts of its history, how much does Firefox really buy us? Do we really think that Firefox will take a hard stand against Google if their survival depends on not doing so? I use Firefox, but I think it's no longer true to its original mission in a lot of ways, Safari's global 18% share goes a lot farther toward making the web a duopolized rather than monopolized platform than Firefox's tiny sliver does. The less -opolized it is the better for society, or need I remind you that Google is presently mired in court for its conduct in its other web-adjacent monopolies such as web search and web advertising?
- dralley 2y ago
  What are you talking about? Mozilla repeatedly stands up to Google on big ticket items. Flock being probably the biggest in recent history, but you can throw Manifest v2 on the pile as well and about half a dozen others.
  - SahAssar 2y ago
    > Flock For the benefit of those not in the know: FLoC https://wicg.github.io/floc/ https://wicg.github.io/floc/
  - safety1st 2y ago
    By coincidence, jwz just blogged on this https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozillas-original-sin/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozillas-original-sin/
einpoklum 2y ago
From my limited experience of Firefox-as-a-project, coming from the side of Thunderbird: * Firefox is effectively not a community project. It seems to be ruled with an iron fist by the commercial side of the operation. * Firefox broke its extensibility - which was the whole rationale of the Mozilla project to begin with. * Lots of telemetry and call-home mechanisms, so much so that it is difficult to opt out even if you want to - in Thunderbird, and I believe also in Firefox; see : https://superuser.com/q/1672309/122798 https://superuser.com/q/1672309/122798 (but correct me if I'm wrong and it's an app-specific thing).
voytec 2y ago
> I don't understand what is wrong with Firefox. It's developed by Mozilla, Google's controlled opposition. I submitted a link[0] on ads coming to Firefox but HN shadowed it almost immediately (present on /newest when logged in, nowhere to be found when logged out). [0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-company-now/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-c...
- gjm11 2y ago
  That might be because Jamie Zawinski's website, which that link links to, does something ... special ... when it sees HN in the "Referer" field, so anyone actually following that link from here would (unless they take special measures) get IIRC a famous obscene image rather than the actual post you were hoping to link to. (JWZ is not a fan of Hacker News and its community.)
  - voytec 2y ago
    Ok, didn't knew that. Still a dick move on HN's part. Shadowing should be restricted to abusers.
    - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
      Wouldn't the submission get user flagged anyway? Because when people clicked it, they'd see something NSFW and devoid of interesting content.
      - voytec 2y ago
        Flagged for what? In this case user - me - was unaware that submitted content gets replaced when requested with Referer header mentioning HN. There should be a 'you cannot post this' warning instead of hidden post creation. I only noticed shadowban by accident: switched to logged-in browser to submit and went back to logged-out for browsing.
        Wowfunhappy 2y ago
squarefoot 2y ago
Technically nothing; the problem lies entirely in the Mozilla Foundation which takes about $500B each year from Google. Officially the motivation is to keep Google as preferred search engine, but seriously the Firefox user base is so small that I don't even think Google would be interested for much less if there weren't strings attached that very likely create a huge conflict of interest if Mozilla become dependent on that money for their own survival. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
- beardyw 2y ago
  > $500B I think you may have made a typo. Possibly $500M?
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    Whoops, apologies, you're right. I completely missed it and now it's too late to correct.
- hollowturtle 2y ago
  *million not billion
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by nutrie 2y ago

I don't understand what is wrong with Firefox. It is open-source, highly configurable and reasonably secure (if you have the time to configure). Yes, it has shortcomings, but what doesn't.

manuelmoreale 2y ago

Nothing, it’s my default browser for dev work but it’s only alive because Google keeps paying them to exist basically so I’d love an alternative.

Aachen 2y ago
How's that alternative funded? Shouldn't Mozilla want to replace their Google payment with that instead? Or, failing that, wouldn't it be much lower budget to fork Firefox code instead? And then to do it in C++ when other browsers and kernels are flirting with things like Rust. How long will it take for people to trust this new C++ code? I applaud the effort but am worried it'll be in vain. Then again, with how many projects I start not because they make sense but because I enjoy them, perhaps I should see it more in that way

lupusreal 2y ago

Mozilla. I like and use Firefox but I find it increasingly hard to trust Mozilla and that makes me feel insecure about the future of Firefox.

lukan 2y ago

Not every open source software has spyware and ads activated by default, while marketing itself as privacy friendly. Yes, can all be deactivated, I also use FF, but I do not trust Mozilla anymore.

garbagewoman 2y ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by your claims of firefox having “spyware and ads activated by default”?
- lukan 2y ago
  Install a new version of firefox, have a look in settings under "data" (or whatever they call it in english). There you will see "studies" as activated, which is cryptic talk for ad tracking. And more recently, literal tracking for a advertisement company. And as a bonus, those were added and activated as features via update, without telling. At least for me. (and paid ads you have on the home screen)
  - worksonmine 2y ago
    Studies are not ad tracking. It's worse and more like a backdoor for A/B testing of browser features. A few years back an update broke the Metamask extension and it was fixed by pushing via studies. At that point users weren't very aware the feature even existed and it caused some backlash since users realized there was a backdoor to push code into their browsers. The backlash resulted in studies being opt-in, and I thought it still was but I don't know, I use "policies.json" to setup my browsers.
    - bongobingo1 2y ago
      Am I being a total chud? These don't really seem egregious? I already accept (and expect) that Firefox receives background updates in the background. https://i.imgur.com/S7d4ZXg.png https://i.imgur.com/S7d4ZXg.png https://i.imgur.com/n2euIrQ.png https://i.imgur.com/n2euIrQ.png https://i.imgur.com/BUjukOy.png https://i.imgur.com/BUjukOy.png
      - worksonmine 2y ago
        I don't mind the feature as opt-in, just like telemetry it can be useful. But depending on the threat model it can be a big problem. I still use Firefox as my main browser.
  - lawn 2y ago
    > And as a bonus, those were added and activated as features via update, without telling. At least for me. Ouch, they were new to me and also activated.
miki123211 2y ago
Firefox is open source, it would be far easier for the community to make a stripped down Firefox port with no telemetry, no ads and no upsells for Mozilla services. With that said, almost all of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, which might possibly influence what features they implement, their stance on various web standards etc.
- maccard 2y ago
  > which might possibly influence what features they implement, their stance on various web standards etc. Unless you’ve got some examples to back this up, it’s FUD. Posting hypotheticals is how rumours start, and this is just stirring the pot.
  - Ginden 2y ago
    Conflict of interests is a real thing to worry about. I wouldn't trust scientist working in tobacco company on cigarette harm, even if I have no evidence of wrongdoing.
- lukan 2y ago
  Yes and those forks exists and are a solution now. But long term, I would much rather see a truly independent open source browser engine.
- wakeupcall 2y ago
  As pointed out, these do exist. I've been using several over the decades. And chrome forks too. They all tend to lag behind over time, until the fork is eventually too old and it's either abandoned, useful changes I was relying on are dropped, or becomes just too old compared to upstream to be fully compatible (and thus just annoying to use). Just the burden to upkeep the upstream changes, in either firefox or chrome forks, seems to be significant enough that I'm quite pessimistic on the lifespan of these projects. You might just as well do your own thing, and don't pretend to be a mainstream browser replacement altogether.
  - sharlos201068 2y ago
nutrie 2y ago
Sure, there are forks such as LibreWolf. I understand the reservations regarding Mozilla Foundation, although I generally like what they've been doing. Every org has people with stupid ideas. However, the way I see it, it's unlikely that the community will be able to produce a competitive browser in a broader sense (stability, performance, security, cross-platform...), meaning that the likelihood of Firefox being still around ten years from now is significantly higher than that we build and maintain a comparable browser ourselves. Then come the evolving web standards and lobbying power...
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  The way things are going at Mozilla currently, I wouldn't be surprised if Firefox is just another Chromium wrapper in 10 years. Technology doesn't seem to count as much as the C-suite filling their pockets at this "new" Mozilla.
PrayagS 2y ago
Ikr. They're up to some questionable decisions since long. - Acquire companies like Pocket, Anonym in multi-million dollar deals and also the millions in bonuses that the CEO likes to enjoy. - At the same time, no significant expenditure towards developing its core software. Firefox is still ridden with bugs. They even went as far as firing the people that used to work on Servo, Rust, WASM, etc. I think it's clear to them that there's not enough money to be made with small tricks like Pocket, VPN, Relay, etc. Firefox is still the only profitable product and contributes ~90% to Mozilla's revenue. Much of it coming from Google which is the one thing that people have been asking them to be less dependent on. And we shouldn't be surprised if they double down on making more money off of Google and also introduce ads. Acquiring Anonym, an ads company, implies that it might have already started.
- lukan 2y ago
  "They even went as far as firing the people that used to work on Servo, Rust, WASM, etc." And at the same time greatly raising compensation for the CEO, despite shrinking numbers.
- HeckFeck 2y ago
  Servo had so much potential as the flagship Rust project, a fast and memory safe browser engine. Such a loss to see it jettisoned and abandoned. Myopic decisions like these are filling the cloud of pessimism that now shrouds Mozilla.
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    FWIW Servo is seeing work as e.g. an Electron replacement. There is hope, even if one wishes the Mozilla Foundation CEO had used some $6M on developer salaries instead of pocketing it. Full browser feature set is hard, but an app that bundles its own webview can choose to not trigger the edge cases, so that's a realistic path forward.
- antihero 2y ago
  Also they stopped developing Servo :(
nullpilot 2y ago
This about sums it up. Plus donating to Mozilla means your money goes to all sorts of things, but hardly if at all where you want it to.
sebazzz 2y ago
> Yes, can all be deactivated, I also use FF, but I do not trust Mozilla anymore. And so I feel much more at home with Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

JimDabell 2y ago

Even Mozilla doesn’t seem to care about Firefox; why should anybody else? The primary value in Firefox existing right now is that the web standards process becomes dysfunctional when there are only two major browser rendering engines, but that is fading away with Firefox’s market share. Hopefully Ladybird can gain enough momentum to matter there because it doesn’t seem like Gecko can maintain its relevance.

viraptor 2y ago
We're in the current situation because Google could spend enough money on promoting Chrome. That's it. A different, or even better browser won't change that. Google can put a chrome ad everywhere again for a few months.
- bmacho 2y ago
  I feel firefox market share is mostly because they actively enshittificate their browser, and not because of google ads, or chrome being better.
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    Doubt it. Things tech people complain about (like integration of Pocket) are completely irrelevant to the masses. On the other hand, things like performance improved drastically, and it is now competitive with Chrome. Firefox the product is in the best shape it ever was.
  - bwat49 2y ago
    I disagree, IMO the main reason they lost so much marketshare to chrome was because for a long time, chrome just was much faster and much more stable. Performance, stability, and compatibility is all that matters to most users. Firefox (mostly) caught up with quantum and process isolation on the desktop, but by then I think it was too late. And the android version still has horrible performance, stability, and compatibility compared to Chromium browsers. Mozilla just doesn't have the same engineering resources to poor into the browser that google does, so I'm not sure there's any way they can really maintain pace with google outside of becoming yet another chromium browser.

hippich 2y ago

I think the problem is that chrome and firefox are developed for general usage, and as a result, have to deal with general usage constraints. For example, spectre and process isolation mentioned in another blog post here in the comments. I had a project in the past where I needed a browser with good JS support, but that does not make any http requests to any resources not in address bar or in the page rendered at that address. I did not find single browser based on firefox/chrome that fulfilled that requirement. Even the most privacy-focused projects still made continious requests to some mozilla resources (if i remember correctly, it was something about tls or maybe something else). So seeing someone creating an engine from scratch gives me hope that such browser might exist one day if I ever will need one again.

viraptor 2y ago
There's a difference between privacy and stealth. Modern browsers need to do things like captive portal sensing, ocsp checks, etc. If you want to disable all requests, you'll need to spend time cutting legitimate features. Or run it in an external sandbox which removes all networking access?

gwervc 2y ago

Around Firefox 4 it became a shitshow of questionable UI redesign every version. And performances where not up to Chrome. Also Chromium is open-source, and Firefox is mainly funded by Google so it not like Firefox has a real proposition value or independence.

safety1st 2y ago

Well to put it bluntly, Firefox is Google's bitch. If we want the web to be a multi-vendor platform based on open, multi-vendor standards, as it has been for parts of its history, how much does Firefox really buy us? Do we really think that Firefox will take a hard stand against Google if their survival depends on not doing so? I use Firefox, but I think it's no longer true to its original mission in a lot of ways, Safari's global 18% share goes a lot farther toward making the web a duopolized rather than monopolized platform than Firefox's tiny sliver does. The less -opolized it is the better for society, or need I remind you that Google is presently mired in court for its conduct in its other web-adjacent monopolies such as web search and web advertising?

dralley 2y ago
What are you talking about? Mozilla repeatedly stands up to Google on big ticket items. Flock being probably the biggest in recent history, but you can throw Manifest v2 on the pile as well and about half a dozen others.
- SahAssar 2y ago
  > Flock For the benefit of those not in the know: FLoC https://wicg.github.io/floc/ https://wicg.github.io/floc/
- safety1st 2y ago
  By coincidence, jwz just blogged on this https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozillas-original-sin/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozillas-original-sin/

einpoklum 2y ago

From my limited experience of Firefox-as-a-project, coming from the side of Thunderbird: * Firefox is effectively not a community project. It seems to be ruled with an iron fist by the commercial side of the operation. * Firefox broke its extensibility - which was the whole rationale of the Mozilla project to begin with. * Lots of telemetry and call-home mechanisms, so much so that it is difficult to opt out even if you want to - in Thunderbird, and I believe also in Firefox; see : https://superuser.com/q/1672309/122798 https://superuser.com/q/1672309/122798 (but correct me if I'm wrong and it's an app-specific thing).

voytec 2y ago

> I don't understand what is wrong with Firefox. It's developed by Mozilla, Google's controlled opposition. I submitted a link[0] on ads coming to Firefox but HN shadowed it almost immediately (present on /newest when logged in, nowhere to be found when logged out). [0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-company-now/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-c...

gjm11 2y ago
That might be because Jamie Zawinski's website, which that link links to, does something ... special ... when it sees HN in the "Referer" field, so anyone actually following that link from here would (unless they take special measures) get IIRC a famous obscene image rather than the actual post you were hoping to link to. (JWZ is not a fan of Hacker News and its community.)
- voytec 2y ago
  Ok, didn't knew that. Still a dick move on HN's part. Shadowing should be restricted to abusers.
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    Wouldn't the submission get user flagged anyway? Because when people clicked it, they'd see something NSFW and devoid of interesting content.
    - voytec 2y ago
      Flagged for what? In this case user - me - was unaware that submitted content gets replaced when requested with Referer header mentioning HN. There should be a 'you cannot post this' warning instead of hidden post creation. I only noticed shadowban by accident: switched to logged-in browser to submit and went back to logged-out for browsing.
      - Wowfunhappy 2y ago

squarefoot 2y ago

Technically nothing; the problem lies entirely in the Mozilla Foundation which takes about $500B each year from Google. Officially the motivation is to keep Google as preferred search engine, but seriously the Firefox user base is so small that I don't even think Google would be interested for much less if there weren't strings attached that very likely create a huge conflict of interest if Mozilla become dependent on that money for their own survival. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

beardyw 2y ago
> $500B I think you may have made a typo. Possibly $500M?
- squarefoot 2y ago
  Whoops, apologies, you're right. I completely missed it and now it's too late to correct.
hollowturtle 2y ago
*million not billion

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]