10 ms·
The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money. No, it wi
by nialv7 10mo ago
The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money.
No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
- p-e-w 10mo agoFirefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
- sharken 10mo agoGiven the current state of the Chrome family of browsers and the anti adblocker stance from Google, i'd think that alone would guarantee Firefox a steady user base. Not sure how users cope with Chrome-based browsers and intrusive ads.
- lifthrasiir 10mo agoThat's just a wishful thinking. Too many ordinary users accept ads as inevitable annoyances and don't even know about the very existence of adblockers.
- yupyupyups 10mo agoMaybe because they don't know any better.
- lifthrasiir 10mo agoOf course, but how would you convince them to switch? Not just your friends, but as a whole.
- computerfriend 10mo agoIf only they could see ads for ad blockers.
- yupyupyups 10mo agoYou could suggest installing Firefox next to Chrome and install uBlock Origin on it. Open YouTube and show them that there are zero ads. They will likely see a contrast.
- purplehat_ 10mo agoI've tried a few times to convince people in my life who would self describe as "bad with computers" to download an adblocker, but they usually find the friction too high. Adding extensions is unfamiliar for most, and even if it seems very basic for us, the non-tech people I know don't really want to deal with the risk of unknown unknowns from that, let alone switching to a healthier browser. (Perhaps reasonable since it feels like these days half the extensions on the Chrome Web Store are spyware or adware behind the scenes.) I also suspect that those who lived through the days of frequent Windows errors and Chrome running out of memory all the time often expect software to fail in weird and unexpected ways, and a lot of people adopt a "don't fix it if it isn't broken" mindset. Still, uBlock Lite and Brave browser are definitely easy wins and I'm glad to see more random people in my life using them than I would have expected. :)
- kgwxd 10mo agoThe last time uBlock Origin caused me any pain was a on a toys r us rewards management site.
- purplehat_ 10mo agoThat's really funny. Yes, in case it wasn't clear for others reading this and thinking about installing these, it's almost certain that uBlock Origin and Brave browser will not cause you any problems and if you're using stock Chrome I really encourage you improve your situation dramatically for ~5 minutes worth of effort.
- yummypaint 10mo agoIf it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software. I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.
- graemep 10mo ago> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. I cannot remember the last time I came across one myself.
- p-e-w 10mo agoIt very strongly depends on which country you live in.
- darkwater 10mo agoIn which country are you seeing that? For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.
- rbits 10mo agoI live in Australia and I can't log into government services using my myGov account on Firefox. Works fine on Chromium.
- someNameIG 10mo agoJust to test I just logged into myGov then through Firefox and it worked fine.
- b112 10mo agoWow. Force-Supporting the same company they're battling daily, on multiple issues.
- graemep 10mo ago
- tda 10mo agoI use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm
- sysguest 10mo agowell I use it because it can handle 2000 tabs on my m1 macbook air (16gb ram) ... damn do I have adhd?????
- CodesInChaos 10mo agoGet the OneTab extension. It'll save and close all those tabs. That way you won't have Firefox crashing during startup once you exceed the number of tabs it can handle (a few thousand).
- b112 10mo agoI have 117 thousand tabs, and it starts up fine. Just adjust your shm ratio. (I'm kidding)
- fl0id 10mo agoYou can also just do tab groups in ffx
- lxgr 10mo agoDoesn't Firefox natively unload tabs these days?
- Tarq0n 10mo agoI've had it function just fine around 9000 tabs.
- versteegen 10mo agoTip: the crashing is caused by certain extensions such as OneTab and All Tabs Helper which for some reason seem to cause all the tabs to load, just when restoring a session. Temporarily disable these extensions before restoring, then you can reenable.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoWhen they say "don't support it anymore", does that mean they're back to the IE era of using Chrome specific technologies so it doesn't work in any browser, do they use user-agent sniffing and show a big popup, or is it just that they're not testing it in FF anymore? The latter shouldn't be an issue as long as they use standards, the only thing they would run into in this day and age is browser specific bugs - but Safari seems to have that the most.
- p-e-w 10mo agoNo, they mostly just show a popup telling you to use Chrome. Websites work fine if you switch the user agent.
- OkayPhysicist 10mo agoIt's exclusively UA sniffing. IMO, Firefox should take the nuclear option and just start reporting the Chrome UA.
- walrus01 10mo ago> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page". I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.
- CoastalCoder 10mo agoAre you sure they're all lazy? Another pretty common experience for developers is wanting to do things "the right way", but being overridden by management.
- OkayPhysicist 10mo agoYes, because in this case "the right way" is to do nothing.
- iso1631 10mo agoWikimedia stats from last year put it at 15% of desktop browsers, ahead of Safari and Edge.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoYeah, every website has different stats about user-agents, depends a lot on the types of users you attract. I bet HN has Firefox usage ratio above 15% for sure, while sites like Instagram probably has way below the global average. Global browser marketshare never made much sense. You need to figure out what your users use, then aim to be compatible for most of those, and ignore any global stats.
- Timwi 10mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if there's a correlation between people frequenting Wikimedia websites and people using Firefox. It would be nice to know.
- kemayo 10mo agoIf people are curious, all the stats for Wikimedia properties are here: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop-site-by-browser https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop... As of December 7th, Firefox is 10.3% of traffic there. This makes it the #2 browser, after Chrome (at 62.2%) -- a spot it has been dueling with Edge over for the last year or so. I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" is a fairly representative sample of "normal users", overall.
- ted_dunning 10mo agoI'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" skews heavily towards "people who like facts" which is distinctly not a normal web viewer.
- mosquitobiten 10mo agothat 3% is of total users including mobile which chrome is king because it's basically force fed to users. this is important because there is no choice with browsers for the common mobile user, most of them don't know what is a browser even if they used it every day. also in the 2000s IE was king because guess what? that was what came preinstalled with winxp
- glenstein 10mo agoExactly! I keep banging this drum but I'm fascinated by the possibility of Android being required to have a pop-up where people can choose different browsers, as a potential remedy to Google's monopoly. Because engineering a path dependency on Google search, from mobile hardware, to software, to default browsers, to default search on the browser, I think is part of how they've enforced their monopoly. There's been a legal judgment that they are, in fact a monopoly, but I don't think any remedy has been decided on yet. And there's a lot of historical precedent for a pop-up to select a default as a remedy to software monopolies. Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.
- ojosilva 10mo ago3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world. Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
- csin 10mo agoThis 3% number is deceptive. The whole desktop market is cratering. I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile. Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs. So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.
- abenga 10mo agoI can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.
- csin 10mo agoI'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition? You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile. Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
- OvervCW 10mo agoYou can install uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile; it's the only reason I use it.
- timeon 10mo agoHave not used Chrome-based browsers 3+ years and never had problem with Firefox. Sometimes Safari was not working 100% - but nothing serious. Maybe it is because, only page from google I use is Youtube; however Firefox has best experience there, even better than Chrome - thanks to proper uBlock Origin.
- yread 10mo agoMy software stopped working because its drawing on canvas in a way that causes firefox to glitch with hw acceleration enabled. Not one of my customers/users complained
- moron4hire 10mo agoThe only reasons I've ever put effort into Firefox support in my software was A) I find it helps push me to write towards standards better if I include multiple browser engines, which makes it more likely I'll support Safari without extra effort, which is difficult for me to test on because I don't daily drive any Apple devices (works about 80% of the time), and B) to avoid the shit-fit I would receive if I ever posted it as a "Show HN." It has never come up as an actual user requirement.
- OkayPhysicist 10mo agoMost of those sites are doing a little move called "lying". I occasionally (once every couple of months) run into a site claiming to not support Firefox. I can't recall a single site that wasn't a tech demo of some bleeding edge feature of Chrome that didn't magically start working when I turned on my Chrome UserAgent. (Hey, if you work at Snapchat: fix your shit. Your desktop site is by far the most mainstream website I've come across that lies like this)
- J_Shelby_J 10mo ago> Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Funny, because chrome has always been the browser for laptops users, while Firefox has always been the browser of power users.
- seanhunter 10mo agoThis is completely untrue in my experience. I use firfox exclusively on my personal laptop and have done exclusively for years. I don’t even have chromium installed. I can’t remember the last time a website was unusable on firefox. It’s certainly not common.
- guenthert 10mo agoIs it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.
- dspillett 10mo agoI think it is him. Chrome making blocking harder is one of the issues that has been pushing some users away (and a good portion of those in the direction of FF). If FF is not better is that regard then those moving away for that reason will go elsewhere, and those who are there already at least in part for that reason will move away. If this happened it would be the final straw for me, if I wasn't already looking to change because of them confirming the plan to further descend into the great “AI” cult.
- b112 10mo agoNot sure what your point is? It doesn't matter the number of users, because the GP's point is that those users are going to immediately bail, for a browser thsy supports ad block. So that extra money will never materialize. And usage numbers will again crater. This is the point. (You can disagree with that assessment, but that has nothing to do with telemetry, which cannot gauge users hanging around with blocked .. adblockers)
- animuchan 10mo agoYep, and that's how he arrived at the $number. If a small number of people were using ad blockers, the cited sum would approach $0 since disabling ad blockers would affect very few page views, right?
- JoeJonathan 10mo agoLike many others, the ability to run uBO is the main reason I use Firefox. Otherwise I'd use Chrome or Safari.
- agumonkey 10mo agoand funnily enough uBO author didn't want any money even though he's making our lives a lot better
- immibis 10mo agoMost adblocker developers throughout history have routinely taken millions of dollars to weaken their adblockers, though. That's why we're all using uBO instead of uB.
- the_af 10mo agoNot the same author.
- soulofmischief 10mo agoIncorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard. Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris. Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatrix or uBO.
- neltnerb 10mo agoI love uMatrix, but all evidence is that they stopped developing it in 2021. https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix I don't know the implications of that, it's the only tool I've ever found that lets me feel in control of what programs my browser is executing.
- rat9988 10mo ago[flagged]
- stuartjohnson12 10mo agoI don't think HN comments have an irrational burning pit of hate for Mozilla. If Mozilla was shaped more like the Tor foundation in their words and actions I think a lot more people would be supportive.
- rat9988 10mo agoThere is no "HN comments". Each commenter has its own sensibilities. Some of them just saw the word Adblock from new ceo and went full defense mode without trying to understand that the guy was just talking about what he feels is good, and there is no need to come with the worst possible interpretation of each sentence.
- kakacik 10mo agoThis is academic discussion, where you think when X is said it means this, somebody (others here) think its that and so on. Grasping straws and all. I guess when around Christmas work churn slows down and some people spend more (too much?) time here.
- yxhuvud 10mo agoThe question is what happens if he thinks the browser will die without that money. Is it a hill to die on? For me as a user it is, but is it for him as a CEO?
- alex77456 10mo ago> The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is. We don't know what he really thinks. Maybe he knows it's a risk he wouldn't want to take but presents it as a goodwill
- beloch 10mo agoThe current pattern in software is, sadly: 1. Innovate 2. Dominate 3. Enshitify to cash in. You can't skip step #2. Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide. Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking. Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.
- logifail 10mo ago> Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre How do Mozilla's costs look?
- glenstein 10mo ago> Now that Google is yanking it Can you elaborate? Are they winding down their their participation in search licensing deals?
- beloch 10mo agoLooks like I was a little out of date. https://itsfoss.com/news/mozilla-lifeline-is-safe/ https://itsfoss.com/news/mozilla-lifeline-is-safe/ Google pays Mozilla, basically to make Google the default search engine for everything in Firefox. Previously, it looked like an antitrust case was going to force them to stop doing that, but it didn't turn out that way. Mozilla is still getting most of their money from Google and they shouldn't need to kneecap themselves to pay the rent. Still, you can't help but wonder what might happen if Firefox starts eating too much of Chrome's market share. Mozilla should be trying to branch out, but in a user friendly way.
- marcosdumay 10mo agoHe may have a bad model of the world, but at least he is somewhat aligned with the user base.
- glenstein 10mo ago[flagged]
- arjie 10mo agoIt's a common cognitive error called Moral Thought-Action Fusion. The idea is that thinking about an action implies a desire to perform the action. You will see these in other circumstances as well. One place it is commonly used is in describing non-religious moral systems that must form their moral bases without axioms from God. A non-religious person may form a considered position against murder, for instance, but the fact that they state the pros and cons before choosing against is considered evidence that they wanted to. The core reasoning system here is probably moral intuitionism: if you have an explanation for why something is bad, it is not something you consider intuitively bad and consequently you must be wanting to do it. I think I've seen it in online communities a lot more in the last couple of decades, and I suspect it's just a characteristic of the endless march of Eternal September.
- prmph 10mo agoDon't really agree here. The point against him is thinking in a very shallow way that stopping ad block means bringing in so much, which I guess is true in a certain basic level, but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet. And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?
- LordDragonfang 10mo ago> which I guess is true in a certain basic level... Which is the level he's acknowledging it on. Short term profit that cannibalises product value and user goodwill is all-too-common in the modern corporate climate, and he's acknowledging the elephant in the room. > ...but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet Presumably, that would be the reason "he considers it "off-mission"" While I agree that him phrasing his reason not to so weakly instead of "doing so would kill firefox" is a little concerning, a CEO probably doesn't want to be overly honest about the other, less investor-friendly elephant in the room, "the only reason anyone uses Firefox is for uBO". But also, we don't actually know how exactly he said it, since it's not a direct quote. For all we know, it was an offhanded remark, or he said it in a tone that meant he knew what a terrible idea it was. We're trying to read tea-leaves from a single paraphrased remark.
- unglaublich 10mo agoWho selects these CEOs? It almost seems like a caste system at this point. You can be a complete clown, but it's the best we have in our small caste so you're the one.
- eloisant 10mo agoThey're selected by the board. Meaning they select each other, because they're all on each other's board.
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- anon-3988 10mo ago> No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is. Believe me when I say this but 99.99999% of the human population does not give a shit what is Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, whatever. Their survival is completely detached from how "good" it is. As long as it runs, opens a page, opens picture, plays video. We all live in the tech bubble, to them its an "app" that is "annoying me with ads". And that if they know its an ad, not just part of the page. That is if they even know its a page, not just something my son told me to click if I want to go to "Facebook".
- jklinger410 10mo ago> he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money. It may kill the browser in a longer window, but before that, it would make them money. Most users do not donate anyway.