12 ms·

Does anyone else feel like the "Trust" angle is the only card they have left to play? Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. Edge has better OS integra

by Fiveplus 10mo ago

Does anyone else feel like the "Trust" angle is the only card they have left to play? Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. Edge has better OS integration on Windows and comes by default. Safari wins on battery life on Mac. Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud, they dilute their only true differentiator.

alex1138 10mo ago
It's interesting because I've heard Manifest 3 was an effort to not make extensions quite have full trust capability and isn't as odious as it sounds but it's also Google, so...
- deaddodo 10mo ago
  Have you tried using Manifest V3 adblockers on Chrome? They're not nearly as capable or useful as the old ones.
- transcriptase 10mo ago
  Ah Manifest 3: Will still happily allow an extension to silently transmit all of your browsing and AI chat history to data brokers to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder. While conveniently and regrettably unavoidably nerfing ad blockers :( For your safety of course.
perlgeek 10mo ago
They also have the "extensions that can do real ad blocking" angle.
- bamboozled 10mo ago
  Have you tried Brave?
  - EbNar 10mo ago
    Been running it since 2021. The adblocker is simply great. A d keeps getting better.
    - EbNar 10mo ago
      and*
  - Larrikin 10mo ago
    It's good enough when some terrible lazy web designer only tested on Chrome. It does nothing to protect against the future when Google decides they are sick of people trying to get around their Ad Block ban and change the license because no one has any real alternatives anymore. Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with something like Ad Nauseum
    - coffeebeqn 10mo ago
      What’s the current licensing mode? Can they fork their own version at that point in time and develop it open source ?
      - cpeterso 10mo ago
        Chromium uses the BSD license. Google could take Chromium closed source tomorrow without needing to change the license.
      - pseudalopex 10mo ago
        No Chromium fork developer not called Microsoft have the resources to maintain a web browser engine. But focus on the license overlooks a more important threat. Google made Web Environment Integrity so services could require approved devices, operating systems, and browsers. Resistance led Google to remove it from desktop for now. But they kept something like it in Android. And they will try again.
  - lurk2 10mo ago
    A few years ago. Crashed constantly and didn’t support tagging bookmarks.
- aleph4 10mo ago
  Yes, although they can't go all in on that because it doesn't help monetization...
- WawaFin 10mo ago
  I've been using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite and not even once I found a case when this version of uBlock was behaving differently (as less efficient) than the "full" uBlock Origin Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh
  - 0x3f 10mo ago
    Does it not still suck at blocking YouTube video ads? As in, you get a delay before videos start playing.
    - whywhywhywhy 10mo ago
      That's not sucking at blocking thats YouTube intentionally adding a delay to make it seem like their experience is degraded when it isn't. If you turn the slider up to full it only happens very rarely. I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is impossible.
      - 0x3f 10mo ago
        I'm not really sure of the actual mechanism, but on Firefox with a fully updated block list the delay doesn't seem to happen for me. Whereas I could never quite get rid of it on Chrome. This was a while ago, though, when they first introduced it.
        embedding-shape 10mo ago
        I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on Linux, and it seems like that delay happens maybe on 30% of the YouTube videos for me, with no rhyme or reason to which ones. And reloading the same video multiple times show consistent behavior if it loads fast/slow, not sure what's going on.
    - wilkystyle 10mo ago
      I don't even have this issue with uBlock Origin Lite on mobile Safari. I'm fully browser-based on mobile for YouTube these days. No ads, no delay.
- freedomben 10mo ago
  Indeed, manifest v2 support alone is a killer feature that will keep me on FF as long as they support it. It definitely helps that it's also a great (though imperfect) browser.
  - netdevphoenix 10mo ago
    The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.
    - SoftTalker 10mo ago
      Fines aren't a way to just buy your way out of obeying the law. At some point if they persist in monopolistic activities then they will get broken up.
      - WorldPeas 10mo ago
        I don't think the FTC prioritizes that right now
        DaSHacka 10mo ago
        I don't think they've prioritized that ever in recent memory, or they would have already been broken up a long time ago.
      - netdevphoenix 10mo ago
        The last time that happened was almost half a century ago afaik. I highly doubt Big Tech entities will get broken up in our lifetime
    - lelanthran 10mo ago
      There's penalties other than fines for abusive monopolies. Fines are only the slightest punishment.
- dig1 10mo ago
  chromium-ungoogled works perfectly fine with "extensions that can do real ad blocking" ;)
  - DaSHacka 10mo ago
    Ungoogled Chromium is maintaining Manifest V2 support in the fork?
    - dig1 10mo ago
      AFAIK Manifest v2 is still part of the chromium codebase, and there is an intention to continue supporting it, depending on how difficult that turns out to be.
kryllic 10mo ago
It's the only realistic alternative to a chromium-based browser if someone wants to make their own fork. I use the Zen browser, and it strips out some stuff I'm not a huge fan of in baseline Firefox. Manifest v3 not rearing its ugly head is also a huge plus, as a competent adblocker is essential these days.
CivBase 10mo ago
Extension (adblock) support on mobile is worth more to me than anything you just listed off.
tcauduro 10mo ago
Looking at their strategy doc, it doesn't seem like they hear their users at all. It's riddled with AI. In fact their aspiration is "doing for AI what we did for the web." Oh boy! https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025/11/Mozilla-Summary-Portfolio-Strategy.pdf https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...
- 4gotunameagain 10mo ago
  I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla, what an absolute disgrace. How incompetent can they be, how out of touch with their core (and arguably only) product ? Nobody wants AI in firefox.
  - wejick 10mo ago
    I want a good AI integration with Firefox. The current chatgpt shim is horrible, something more refined would be nice.
    - thesuitonym 10mo ago
      Why though?
    - koolala 10mo ago
      Would you pay $20 a month for it? Like Cursor but for your browser?
  - F3nd0 10mo ago
    Do we know for a fact that 'nobody wants AI in Firefox'?
    - mossTechnician 10mo ago
      We know for a fact that whenever Mozilla solicits feedback for AI additions, it heavily leans negative. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/m-p/109922/ https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...
fidotron 10mo ago
As a semi Rust hater, but Firefox user, I believe Mozilla should go absolutely all-in on Rust, for a mixture of direct and indirect effects. That and/or launch an open source e-Reader development project. No MBA type is going to be able to do anything of the sort.
- cies 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - le_stoph 10mo ago
    Obviously through pagan rituals
  - alexjplant 10mo ago
    What sort? Inquiring minds and all that... like a "Good Witch of the North"? Or a Hermione Granger type? Or the kind that own crystal shops that serve tea from renewed storefronts in quaint coastal towns?
    - homebrewer 10mo ago
      https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/holly_million_gnome/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/holly_million_gnome/
      - embedding-shape 10mo ago
        Not sure who or how, but someone somewhere confused Gnome for Mozilla/Firefox. The claim was that Mozilla has had an "literal witch as CEO" but that article is about Gnome.
  - tristor 10mo ago
    I can only assume you're referring to Mitchell Baker? Mitchell Baker has gotten a /lot/ of negative comments on HN, and some for good reason, but the constant ask of "how she won the position" and the like just shows the ignorance of the commenters... Mitchell Baker co-founded Mozilla, and was the legal mind that structured both the split from Netscape that salvaged the code and wrote the majority of the Mozilla Public License and the legal/philosophical stance of the organization. She's an attorney with a specific background in intellectual property law, and without her contributions the entire world would be poorer for it. Mozilla, long before Firefox, was instrumental in the early parts of the open-source movement helping to define what it even meant to being open-source and creating a more rigorous and legally tested framework. I am not a huge fan of Mitchell, so I understand and agree with much of the criticism, but it stinks of sexism or some other ulterior motive when people "wonderingly" suppose "how she won the position". Is anyone curious how Mark Zuckerberg became CEO of Meta, even though he's mostly blown through billions of dollars on boondoggles and acted in unethical ways? No, not at all, because he's the (co-)founder. So why is a different standard applied for Mitchell? Is it only because she's a woman, or is there some other reason?
afavour 10mo ago
Mozilla (in its previous form) has long been doomed. Mobile cemented it, I think. Browsers are part of the operating system and getting users to switch from the default is an incredible uphill climb. Especially when browsers are essentially utilities, there are so few unique compelling features. That lack of connection to tech giants is a strength in the trust angle. And I think they’re right to be thinking about AI: people are using it and there does need to be an alternative to tech giants/VC funded monsters Will they be successful? The odds are stacked against them. But if they’re not going to even try then what purpose will they serve any more?
- aleph4 10mo ago
  Exactly. Unfortunately, we live in a time when anti-trust regulations mean nothing. The fact that it's difficult to separate Chrome from Android dooms most competitors, which is bad for everyone.
- glenstein 10mo ago
  Right. The myth that keeps getting confidently repeated in HN comment sections is that Mozilla supposedly lost market share due to a series of strategic missteps. But it basically was about the pivot to mobile, and the monopoly lock-in of Google. Actually think one fantastic remedy for Google's search monopoly might be allowing the use of alternative browsers on Android via a pop-up rather than preloading and privileging Chrome. Because browsers and mobile are part of the strategy of creating a path dependency tied to Google search. But to your point, I think the simple reality is that LLMs are increasingly taking the place of search and so having all your funding based on search licensing might be risky when it's at least possible that we're going to be in a new paradigm sooner than later. I honestly think AI in the browser right now is generally very half-baked and doesn't have any well thought out applications, and raises all kinds of trust issues. I can think of good applications (eg browse the Kindle unlimited store for critically acclaimed hard sci-fi books), but there might be better ones that I'm not thinking of. It just might make sense to be involved so you went caught flat-footed by some new application that quickly progresses into something people expect. And of course because HN commenters are famously self-contradictory in response to literally everything Mozilla does, it's a damned if they do damned if they don't situation: if they load AI into the browser it's pointless feature bloat. If they don't then they were sitting on their thumbs while the world moved on when they should have been reinventing themselves and finding new paths to revenue.
aleph4 10mo ago
Well, that's kind of their whole point-- can AI be done in a way that guards privacy. It's not impossible even with cloud processing. And "Trust" should be a big deal-- unfortunately most people don't care and Chrome has a much bigger marketing budget (and monopoly on Android).
- 112233 10mo ago
  Confidential compute (intel, amd and nvidia) already is a thing and has nothing to do with mozilla. Without such drastic measures, no, it IS impossible with regular cloud processing.
mikkupikku 10mo ago
What does "faster JS" actually get me? Youtube is probably the most heavy site I and I think most people use, I'm certainly not trying to do heavy scientific computation in my browser, so what difference does it really make? Anyway, Firefox's killer feature is still extensions, despite everything that's happened on that front. There's nothing like Tree Style Tabs for Chrome (not usably implemented anyway) and while I think maybe Brave has it, Firefox has uMatrix which is better than anything Brave uses (Brave may share lists or even code with that, but the uMatrix UI is where its at.)
mossTechnician 10mo ago
"Trust" is just community goodwill, and Mozilla has steadily been chipping away at that goodwill by pivoting to AI and ad businesses, and occasionally implying that it's the community that wants things like AI, and it's the community's fault for misunderstanding their poorly written license agreement.
ksec 10mo ago
>Technically..... Since its birth, Firefox is still the only browser that manage multiple ( hundreds or in some cases, thousands! [1] ) tabs better than any browser. And in my view in the past 12 - 24 months Firefox has managed to be as fast as chrome. While Chrome also improved on its multiple Tab browsing experience. Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years. Mozilla could have played the trust angle when they have the good will and money. They could have invested into SaaS that provides better revenue generations other than getting it from Google. They could also have partnered with Wikipedia before they got rotten. But now I am not even sure if they still have the "trust" card anymore. Gekco is still hard to be embedded, XULRunner could have been Electron. They will need to get into survival mode and think about what is next. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/software/mozilla-firefox/firefox-user-loses-7470-opened-tabs-saved-over-two-years-after-they-cant-restore-browsing-session https://www.tomshardware.com/software/mozilla-firefox/firefo...
- dijit 10mo ago
  > Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years. I mean, observably, this is still the case. Now, luckily the M-series laptops have such insane battery life that it barely matters compared to before... but I can still observe about an hour of battery life difference between Safari and Chrome on an M2 Macbook Air (running Sequoia). Now, my battery life is still in the region of 7.5 hours, so even if it's a large difference it's not impacting my workday yet (though the battery is at 90% max design capacity from wear). I know this, because there are days where I only use chrome, and days where I only use Safari, and I do roughly the same work on each of those days.
  - wilkystyle 10mo ago
    I suspect that the people making these claims that Safari is no longer the most battery efficient are not Apple users. It's quite easy to empirically validate which browsers are most efficient by looking at the average energy impact in Activity Monitor. Safari is the winner, Chrome/Brave are not far behind, and Firefox is the clear loser.
1718627440 10mo ago
They are still the only browser I know, which has actual useful chrome like changing the stylesheet, is CUA compliant and behaves and feel like a native GTK+ app (now-a-days only after restoring the OS window bar and enabling the menubar). They also have useful keyboard behaviour and provide both a search and a URL bar, which makes it effortless to search locally and perform additional refinery searches while hunting down something, because you can change the search term without returning to the search website. Searching via the search engines portal is also often slower than via the search bar on crappy connections. Their search provider integration is also great (not sure how other browsers are in this regard) which makes opening a Wikipedia or MDN page about a specific topic a single action, without needing to look at a search result list. There Profile Manager is also a breeze (not the new crap), it allows to open any URL in any Profile by clicking on any link in another program. The extension system and the advanced configuration is also quite good.
- eviks 10mo ago
  > They also have useful keyboard behaviour Like not being able to change the default shortcuts?
  - padenot 10mo ago
    We're implementing it though: about:keyboard in a Nightly build does what you expect, this is tracked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2000731 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2000731 and dependencies.
    - eviks 10mo ago
      No, it doesn't do what I expect, the list of the default rebindable keybinds is small, can't bind multiple shortcuts to a single function, can't bind without modifiers- if I recall correctly after trying it out a while ago.
    - uzerfcwn 10mo ago
      Thanks for sharing this! Went and changed some keybinds right away.
fyrn_ 10mo ago
Fitefox has faster WASM and WebGPU at least. Kind of doesn't matter since Chrome has bloated the standard so much that many websites only work in chrome
- glenstein 10mo ago
  And, a different way of stating the same thing, they're actually way ahead of everybody in shipping production Rust code in the browser, which is a big part of the efficiency gains in recent years.
- MaxBarraclough 10mo ago
  > faster WASM and WebGPU Regarding WASM at least, it seems to depend. https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/
unethical_ban 10mo ago
>Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." That's a big selling point. Along with "still allows ad-blocking extensions". Besides being able to turn off all online AI features, and the fact that forks like Librewolf will inevitably strip it out, I am stunned by how HN readers think "Translate this for me immediately and accurately" and related functions are not desirable to the average person.
hosteur 10mo ago
Firefox is the only browser that actually blocks all ads effectively using ublock origin. Even youtube, etc.
munificent 10mo ago
I find that any performance benefits Chrome and Safari have are more than offset by the performance benefits Firefox gets by being massively better at blocking ads and the huge amount of JS and tracking garbage that comes with them. Firefox always feels snappier to me, and I think most of that comes from less time downloading a bunch of ad shit I don't want anyway.
lelanthran 10mo ago
> Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. I'm not browsing benchmarks :-/ When I do then chrome will have an advantage. Meanwhile, in the real world, a JS engine can be half the speed of the Chrome one and the browser can still be faster, because blocking ads is what gives you the biggest speed up. All the performance advantages in the world fail to matter if you're still loading ads.
- g947o 10mo ago
  On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and consistently) faster than Firefox. And I wasn't using a stopwatch. I am literally making a sacrifice to use Firefox.
  - lelanthran 10mo ago
    > On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and consistently) faster than Firefox. How fast a page opens is irrelevant if that page contains ads.
  - gizzlon 10mo ago
    Not my experience. They feel similar, even with 16 tabs in Firefox and 1 in Chrome
robinhood 10mo ago
To me, Firefox has way better dev tools than Chrome. I don't even mention Safari here - who can stand their horrible dev tools? Firefox has a fantastic add on marketplace which competes with Chrome's. Firefox without too many addons actually do not drain battery life on MacOS. Firefox has "native" profile management with real separation of cookies. JS benchmarks provide no value to me, since I try to avoid heavy-JS web apps anyway. I don't know. As a dev and user, Firefox wins on every single aspect for me. I understand that every user is different. But I'm glad it exists.
iberator 10mo ago
Why do you need THAT fast js for? Firefox is amazing speed even if second in the benchmarks.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
t23414321 10mo ago
Yes, there is no more: plugins, XBL, original extensions, and XSLT is removed not from Chrome but from the web standards ! Anything left ?
dabockster 10mo ago
> Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." The fact that they haven't moved away from apparently needing 90%+ of their money to come from Google, after more than a decade of that being an issue, means that claim is a moot point. This "AI first" move was probably heavily influenced by Google behind the scenes too.
Klonoar 10mo ago
They also still lack significant security improvements that Chrome has.
AnonC 10mo ago
> If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud Where are you getting the “often in the cloud” from? So far Firefox has some local models for certain features. Using a specific cloud based AI is a conscious decision by the user within the sidebar.
runiq 10mo ago
It is the angle that is important to ME, a European user. I would happily throw moneydollars at the browser project but the Mozilla suits won't allow me to, for whatever-the-fuck reason.

alex1138 10mo ago

It's interesting because I've heard Manifest 3 was an effort to not make extensions quite have full trust capability and isn't as odious as it sounds but it's also Google, so...

deaddodo 10mo ago
Have you tried using Manifest V3 adblockers on Chrome? They're not nearly as capable or useful as the old ones.
transcriptase 10mo ago
Ah Manifest 3: Will still happily allow an extension to silently transmit all of your browsing and AI chat history to data brokers to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder. While conveniently and regrettably unavoidably nerfing ad blockers :( For your safety of course.

perlgeek 10mo ago

They also have the "extensions that can do real ad blocking" angle.

bamboozled 10mo ago
Have you tried Brave?
- EbNar 10mo ago
  Been running it since 2021. The adblocker is simply great. A d keeps getting better.
  - EbNar 10mo ago
    and*
- Larrikin 10mo ago
  It's good enough when some terrible lazy web designer only tested on Chrome. It does nothing to protect against the future when Google decides they are sick of people trying to get around their Ad Block ban and change the license because no one has any real alternatives anymore. Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with something like Ad Nauseum
  - coffeebeqn 10mo ago
    What’s the current licensing mode? Can they fork their own version at that point in time and develop it open source ?
    - cpeterso 10mo ago
      Chromium uses the BSD license. Google could take Chromium closed source tomorrow without needing to change the license.
    - pseudalopex 10mo ago
      No Chromium fork developer not called Microsoft have the resources to maintain a web browser engine. But focus on the license overlooks a more important threat. Google made Web Environment Integrity so services could require approved devices, operating systems, and browsers. Resistance led Google to remove it from desktop for now. But they kept something like it in Android. And they will try again.
- lurk2 10mo ago
  A few years ago. Crashed constantly and didn’t support tagging bookmarks.
aleph4 10mo ago
Yes, although they can't go all in on that because it doesn't help monetization...
WawaFin 10mo ago
I've been using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite and not even once I found a case when this version of uBlock was behaving differently (as less efficient) than the "full" uBlock Origin Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh
- 0x3f 10mo ago
  Does it not still suck at blocking YouTube video ads? As in, you get a delay before videos start playing.
  - whywhywhywhy 10mo ago
    That's not sucking at blocking thats YouTube intentionally adding a delay to make it seem like their experience is degraded when it isn't. If you turn the slider up to full it only happens very rarely. I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is impossible.
    - 0x3f 10mo ago
      I'm not really sure of the actual mechanism, but on Firefox with a fully updated block list the delay doesn't seem to happen for me. Whereas I could never quite get rid of it on Chrome. This was a while ago, though, when they first introduced it.
      - embedding-shape 10mo ago
        I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on Linux, and it seems like that delay happens maybe on 30% of the YouTube videos for me, with no rhyme or reason to which ones. And reloading the same video multiple times show consistent behavior if it loads fast/slow, not sure what's going on.
  - wilkystyle 10mo ago
    I don't even have this issue with uBlock Origin Lite on mobile Safari. I'm fully browser-based on mobile for YouTube these days. No ads, no delay.
freedomben 10mo ago
Indeed, manifest v2 support alone is a killer feature that will keep me on FF as long as they support it. It definitely helps that it's also a great (though imperfect) browser.
- netdevphoenix 10mo ago
  The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.
  - SoftTalker 10mo ago
    Fines aren't a way to just buy your way out of obeying the law. At some point if they persist in monopolistic activities then they will get broken up.
    - WorldPeas 10mo ago
      I don't think the FTC prioritizes that right now
      - DaSHacka 10mo ago
        I don't think they've prioritized that ever in recent memory, or they would have already been broken up a long time ago.
    - netdevphoenix 10mo ago
      The last time that happened was almost half a century ago afaik. I highly doubt Big Tech entities will get broken up in our lifetime
  - lelanthran 10mo ago
    There's penalties other than fines for abusive monopolies. Fines are only the slightest punishment.
dig1 10mo ago
chromium-ungoogled works perfectly fine with "extensions that can do real ad blocking" ;)
- DaSHacka 10mo ago
  Ungoogled Chromium is maintaining Manifest V2 support in the fork?
  - dig1 10mo ago
    AFAIK Manifest v2 is still part of the chromium codebase, and there is an intention to continue supporting it, depending on how difficult that turns out to be.

kryllic 10mo ago

It's the only realistic alternative to a chromium-based browser if someone wants to make their own fork. I use the Zen browser, and it strips out some stuff I'm not a huge fan of in baseline Firefox. Manifest v3 not rearing its ugly head is also a huge plus, as a competent adblocker is essential these days.

CivBase 10mo ago

Extension (adblock) support on mobile is worth more to me than anything you just listed off.

tcauduro 10mo ago

Looking at their strategy doc, it doesn't seem like they hear their users at all. It's riddled with AI. In fact their aspiration is "doing for AI what we did for the web." Oh boy! https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025/11/Mozilla-Summary-Portfolio-Strategy.pdf https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025...

4gotunameagain 10mo ago
I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla, what an absolute disgrace. How incompetent can they be, how out of touch with their core (and arguably only) product ? Nobody wants AI in firefox.
- wejick 10mo ago
  I want a good AI integration with Firefox. The current chatgpt shim is horrible, something more refined would be nice.
  - thesuitonym 10mo ago
    Why though?
  - koolala 10mo ago
    Would you pay $20 a month for it? Like Cursor but for your browser?
- F3nd0 10mo ago
  Do we know for a fact that 'nobody wants AI in Firefox'?
  - mossTechnician 10mo ago
    We know for a fact that whenever Mozilla solicits feedback for AI additions, it heavily leans negative. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/m-p/109922/ https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...

fidotron 10mo ago

As a semi Rust hater, but Firefox user, I believe Mozilla should go absolutely all-in on Rust, for a mixture of direct and indirect effects. That and/or launch an open source e-Reader development project. No MBA type is going to be able to do anything of the sort.

cies 10mo ago
[flagged]
- le_stoph 10mo ago
  Obviously through pagan rituals
- alexjplant 10mo ago
  What sort? Inquiring minds and all that... like a "Good Witch of the North"? Or a Hermione Granger type? Or the kind that own crystal shops that serve tea from renewed storefronts in quaint coastal towns?
  - homebrewer 10mo ago
    https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/holly_million_gnome/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/holly_million_gnome/
    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      Not sure who or how, but someone somewhere confused Gnome for Mozilla/Firefox. The claim was that Mozilla has had an "literal witch as CEO" but that article is about Gnome.
- tristor 10mo ago
  I can only assume you're referring to Mitchell Baker? Mitchell Baker has gotten a /lot/ of negative comments on HN, and some for good reason, but the constant ask of "how she won the position" and the like just shows the ignorance of the commenters... Mitchell Baker co-founded Mozilla, and was the legal mind that structured both the split from Netscape that salvaged the code and wrote the majority of the Mozilla Public License and the legal/philosophical stance of the organization. She's an attorney with a specific background in intellectual property law, and without her contributions the entire world would be poorer for it. Mozilla, long before Firefox, was instrumental in the early parts of the open-source movement helping to define what it even meant to being open-source and creating a more rigorous and legally tested framework. I am not a huge fan of Mitchell, so I understand and agree with much of the criticism, but it stinks of sexism or some other ulterior motive when people "wonderingly" suppose "how she won the position". Is anyone curious how Mark Zuckerberg became CEO of Meta, even though he's mostly blown through billions of dollars on boondoggles and acted in unethical ways? No, not at all, because he's the (co-)founder. So why is a different standard applied for Mitchell? Is it only because she's a woman, or is there some other reason?

afavour 10mo ago

Mozilla (in its previous form) has long been doomed. Mobile cemented it, I think. Browsers are part of the operating system and getting users to switch from the default is an incredible uphill climb. Especially when browsers are essentially utilities, there are so few unique compelling features. That lack of connection to tech giants is a strength in the trust angle. And I think they’re right to be thinking about AI: people are using it and there does need to be an alternative to tech giants/VC funded monsters Will they be successful? The odds are stacked against them. But if they’re not going to even try then what purpose will they serve any more?

aleph4 10mo ago
Exactly. Unfortunately, we live in a time when anti-trust regulations mean nothing. The fact that it's difficult to separate Chrome from Android dooms most competitors, which is bad for everyone.
glenstein 10mo ago
Right. The myth that keeps getting confidently repeated in HN comment sections is that Mozilla supposedly lost market share due to a series of strategic missteps. But it basically was about the pivot to mobile, and the monopoly lock-in of Google. Actually think one fantastic remedy for Google's search monopoly might be allowing the use of alternative browsers on Android via a pop-up rather than preloading and privileging Chrome. Because browsers and mobile are part of the strategy of creating a path dependency tied to Google search. But to your point, I think the simple reality is that LLMs are increasingly taking the place of search and so having all your funding based on search licensing might be risky when it's at least possible that we're going to be in a new paradigm sooner than later. I honestly think AI in the browser right now is generally very half-baked and doesn't have any well thought out applications, and raises all kinds of trust issues. I can think of good applications (eg browse the Kindle unlimited store for critically acclaimed hard sci-fi books), but there might be better ones that I'm not thinking of. It just might make sense to be involved so you went caught flat-footed by some new application that quickly progresses into something people expect. And of course because HN commenters are famously self-contradictory in response to literally everything Mozilla does, it's a damned if they do damned if they don't situation: if they load AI into the browser it's pointless feature bloat. If they don't then they were sitting on their thumbs while the world moved on when they should have been reinventing themselves and finding new paths to revenue.

aleph4 10mo ago

Well, that's kind of their whole point-- can AI be done in a way that guards privacy. It's not impossible even with cloud processing. And "Trust" should be a big deal-- unfortunately most people don't care and Chrome has a much bigger marketing budget (and monopoly on Android).

112233 10mo ago
Confidential compute (intel, amd and nvidia) already is a thing and has nothing to do with mozilla. Without such drastic measures, no, it IS impossible with regular cloud processing.

mikkupikku 10mo ago

What does "faster JS" actually get me? Youtube is probably the most heavy site I and I think most people use, I'm certainly not trying to do heavy scientific computation in my browser, so what difference does it really make? Anyway, Firefox's killer feature is still extensions, despite everything that's happened on that front. There's nothing like Tree Style Tabs for Chrome (not usably implemented anyway) and while I think maybe Brave has it, Firefox has uMatrix which is better than anything Brave uses (Brave may share lists or even code with that, but the uMatrix UI is where its at.)

mossTechnician 10mo ago

"Trust" is just community goodwill, and Mozilla has steadily been chipping away at that goodwill by pivoting to AI and ad businesses, and occasionally implying that it's the community that wants things like AI, and it's the community's fault for misunderstanding their poorly written license agreement.

ksec 10mo ago

>Technically..... Since its birth, Firefox is still the only browser that manage multiple ( hundreds or in some cases, thousands! [1] ) tabs better than any browser. And in my view in the past 12 - 24 months Firefox has managed to be as fast as chrome. While Chrome also improved on its multiple Tab browsing experience. Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years. Mozilla could have played the trust angle when they have the good will and money. They could have invested into SaaS that provides better revenue generations other than getting it from Google. They could also have partnered with Wikipedia before they got rotten. But now I am not even sure if they still have the "trust" card anymore. Gekco is still hard to be embedded, XULRunner could have been Electron. They will need to get into survival mode and think about what is next. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/software/mozilla-firefox/firefox-user-loses-7470-opened-tabs-saved-over-two-years-after-they-cant-restore-browsing-session https://www.tomshardware.com/software/mozilla-firefox/firefo...

dijit 10mo ago
> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years. I mean, observably, this is still the case. Now, luckily the M-series laptops have such insane battery life that it barely matters compared to before... but I can still observe about an hour of battery life difference between Safari and Chrome on an M2 Macbook Air (running Sequoia). Now, my battery life is still in the region of 7.5 hours, so even if it's a large difference it's not impacting my workday yet (though the battery is at 90% max design capacity from wear). I know this, because there are days where I only use chrome, and days where I only use Safari, and I do roughly the same work on each of those days.
- wilkystyle 10mo ago
  I suspect that the people making these claims that Safari is no longer the most battery efficient are not Apple users. It's quite easy to empirically validate which browsers are most efficient by looking at the average energy impact in Activity Monitor. Safari is the winner, Chrome/Brave are not far behind, and Firefox is the clear loser.

1718627440 10mo ago

They are still the only browser I know, which has actual useful chrome like changing the stylesheet, is CUA compliant and behaves and feel like a native GTK+ app (now-a-days only after restoring the OS window bar and enabling the menubar). They also have useful keyboard behaviour and provide both a search and a URL bar, which makes it effortless to search locally and perform additional refinery searches while hunting down something, because you can change the search term without returning to the search website. Searching via the search engines portal is also often slower than via the search bar on crappy connections. Their search provider integration is also great (not sure how other browsers are in this regard) which makes opening a Wikipedia or MDN page about a specific topic a single action, without needing to look at a search result list. There Profile Manager is also a breeze (not the new crap), it allows to open any URL in any Profile by clicking on any link in another program. The extension system and the advanced configuration is also quite good.

eviks 10mo ago
> They also have useful keyboard behaviour Like not being able to change the default shortcuts?
- padenot 10mo ago
  We're implementing it though: about:keyboard in a Nightly build does what you expect, this is tracked in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2000731 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2000731 and dependencies.
  - eviks 10mo ago
    No, it doesn't do what I expect, the list of the default rebindable keybinds is small, can't bind multiple shortcuts to a single function, can't bind without modifiers- if I recall correctly after trying it out a while ago.
  - uzerfcwn 10mo ago
    Thanks for sharing this! Went and changed some keybinds right away.

fyrn_ 10mo ago

Fitefox has faster WASM and WebGPU at least. Kind of doesn't matter since Chrome has bloated the standard so much that many websites only work in chrome

glenstein 10mo ago
And, a different way of stating the same thing, they're actually way ahead of everybody in shipping production Rust code in the browser, which is a big part of the efficiency gains in recent years.
MaxBarraclough 10mo ago
> faster WASM and WebGPU Regarding WASM at least, it seems to depend. https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/

unethical_ban 10mo ago

>Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." That's a big selling point. Along with "still allows ad-blocking extensions". Besides being able to turn off all online AI features, and the fact that forks like Librewolf will inevitably strip it out, I am stunned by how HN readers think "Translate this for me immediately and accurately" and related functions are not desirable to the average person.

hosteur 10mo ago

Firefox is the only browser that actually blocks all ads effectively using ublock origin. Even youtube, etc.

munificent 10mo ago

I find that any performance benefits Chrome and Safari have are more than offset by the performance benefits Firefox gets by being massively better at blocking ads and the huge amount of JS and tracking garbage that comes with them. Firefox always feels snappier to me, and I think most of that comes from less time downloading a bunch of ad shit I don't want anyway.

lelanthran 10mo ago

> Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. I'm not browsing benchmarks :-/ When I do then chrome will have an advantage. Meanwhile, in the real world, a JS engine can be half the speed of the Chrome one and the browser can still be faster, because blocking ads is what gives you the biggest speed up. All the performance advantages in the world fail to matter if you're still loading ads.

g947o 10mo ago
On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and consistently) faster than Firefox. And I wasn't using a stopwatch. I am literally making a sacrifice to use Firefox.
- lelanthran 10mo ago
  > On my Android phone, Chrome opens web pages noticeably (and consistently) faster than Firefox. How fast a page opens is irrelevant if that page contains ads.
- gizzlon 10mo ago
  Not my experience. They feel similar, even with 16 tabs in Firefox and 1 in Chrome

robinhood 10mo ago

To me, Firefox has way better dev tools than Chrome. I don't even mention Safari here - who can stand their horrible dev tools? Firefox has a fantastic add on marketplace which competes with Chrome's. Firefox without too many addons actually do not drain battery life on MacOS. Firefox has "native" profile management with real separation of cookies. JS benchmarks provide no value to me, since I try to avoid heavy-JS web apps anyway. I don't know. As a dev and user, Firefox wins on every single aspect for me. I understand that every user is different. But I'm glad it exists.

iberator 10mo ago

Why do you need THAT fast js for? Firefox is amazing speed even if second in the benchmarks.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

t23414321 10mo ago

Yes, there is no more: plugins, XBL, original extensions, and XSLT is removed not from Chrome but from the web standards ! Anything left ?

dabockster 10mo ago

> Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." The fact that they haven't moved away from apparently needing 90%+ of their money to come from Google, after more than a decade of that being an issue, means that claim is a moot point. This "AI first" move was probably heavily influenced by Google behind the scenes too.

Klonoar 10mo ago

They also still lack significant security improvements that Chrome has.

AnonC 10mo ago

> If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud Where are you getting the “often in the cloud” from? So far Firefox has some local models for certain features. Using a specific cloud based AI is a conscious decision by the user within the sidebar.

runiq 10mo ago

It is the angle that is important to ME, a European user. I would happily throw moneydollars at the browser project but the Mozilla suits won't allow me to, for whatever-the-fuck reason.