this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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I mean don't use anything besides Firefox, pretty obvious.
I actually wonder about that. So Firefox is seemingly becoming more corpo in their approach. Their home tab now has random adverts and suggested sites that I should visit. I guess the general vibe that I'm getting is "sleek, polished", which triggers some latent suspicion about the way they are headed. As many people, I keep returning to Firefox every year or so, just to see whether it can be transitioned to. Maybe that's why it's so jarring.
I am also worried that "Firefox is the only real alternative" is not a healthy state of things. We get Chromium flavors, high maintenance nonsense, and Firefox.
turn off the promoted shortcuts, remove the unwanted default pins. takes just a few seconds, and firefox will remember your choices, unlike some browsers.
Yup, first thing I did. But the fact that it was on by default gave me pause. I'm not naive, they need to make money, but it wasn't even a clearly communicated and justified option. This smells of "our greatest asset is the number of eyeballs we can attract" which is typical of products that are free in order to grow a user base which they then sell to the highest bidder. The Mozilla foundation does good work, but it's ultimately not about intentions or even organization policies - these can yield to pressures once the course is set in a particular direction. I'm going to fully switch to Firefox once that adblock Chrome policy comes into effect, but I wish there were more than a handful of options for me to choose.
You can use forks if you want, but you can also turn that stuff off altogether.
Most famously TOR is a Firefox fork.
Yes, Chromium flavours vs Firefox flavours is not healthy.
It's less unhealthy than a defacto Google monopoly though.
It's impossible to build a new web browser... At least until someone proves otherwise.
Andreas Kling is proving otherwise!
My estimate (source: sounds good in my head) is you'd need a dozen or so browser experts working full time for years to build a browser capable of rendering most modern "web-app" style websites.
The core specs have a lot of integration tests (one of the shittier ones written by yours truly!), and most of the specs are pretty readable for experts (I hate the CSS Device Adaptation Module Level 1 spec though).
There's just a lot of it and a lot of subtle interactions which is where the time would go.
If you were foolish enough to set many millions of dollars on fire* to do this you'd end up with a browser lacking in key non-core-spec areas too. Off the top of my head: print layout, security, JIT performance, HTTP2 / HTTP3, general browser performance, UI polish, PDF rendering, mobile version, plugins, and DRM "support" (good luck getting the DRM gatekeepers to let you bundle that stuff with your browser). Add some more years for all of that.
* and/or smart enough to make it an open source project and convince people to do it for free, see the other commenter's link to Ladybird below
This appears to be a good excuse to hate on CSS Device Adaptation Module Level 1, let me quote from it so you understand the great sorrow I had when I needed to understand it:
...
...
you know what the solution to this is. gotta reset the web from scratch.
Me and my mate had to come up with some fake policies for a fake Pirate Party and one of our policies was that the Irish government should commission a new internet browser. After all, the current bunch have a massive budget surplus that they want to get rid of before Sinn Féin get in.
I'll watch its career with great interest, thank you for the link!
Well, you do get Firefox flavours. There are a ton of forks available, many which are very privacy-centric, such as Fennec or Mull on mobile.
There have been a few bad signs over the years.
Most striking was the "Looking Glass" plugin. This was a Mr. Robot (popular TV show at the time) promotional plugin that would alter the behavior of a few tie-in websites as part of an ARG. Besides that it was "harmless", though had a vague description rather than saying what it was.
It was pushed by default to users using their user study framework. It was launched quietly enough and without going through the normal process. Even a lot of firefox devs didn't realize it until the press blew up.
And one of the responses to the push back was:
Despite Firefox leadership and marketing being the ones who were confused about the proper way to use their own user study framework, or avoid launching bad changes.
Aside: Mozilla also only just stopped accepting cryptocurrency donations in 2022, despite ostensibly caring about the environment and the internet.
Overall Firefox is still pretty good, despite being under-invested in by Mozilla, but if you use it you should recommend that at the end of the day there's a lot of corporate influence in it right now.
Vivaldi has been great the whole time
Except that it uses chromium which contributes to the Google dominance of web standards
But do they have to follow what Google is doing? Can't they have full control over their own chromium version?
Not really, chromium is mostly maintained by Google. They could fork it but that wouldn't solve what I'm concerned about here
Does this mean Vivaldi devs have to constantly deal with what Google devs are doing? I was under the impression it's a platform of their own.
Yes, not only is Vivaldi "just" patches on the Google chromium code, they are implicitly limited in what they can patch because they need to be able to port their patches to newer versions of Chromium in order to inherit all of the security features and continued compatibility with the chrome web store. The design and features of Vivaldi are necessarily heavily dictated by Google's decisions.
I've been using Vivaldi's features (like the mouse gestures and a few other things) since its release. Would it be hard to migrate it all to Firefox or is there a better alternative?
Possible, yes. Hard? Probably also yes. There's a lot of addons for Firefox but I don't use gestures so I have no idea.
🙄
Some websites don't work with Firefox. That's why I use Brave as a secondary browser.
I’ve been using FF for over 15 years at this point and I have never, not even once, ran into any issues with any site that I went to. Now, is the website you are talking about shareable by you? I don’t want it if it’s a bank or something that could some how be linked to you. I just really really want to see a website that doesn’t work on FF. I’m not trying to come off as a dick or anything, I am genuinely interested to see what it looks like and how it behaves.
https://www.pge.com/en/accessibility/supported-browsers.html#tabs-281f6d0cf8-item-5d2127a6b9-tab
Soon as I login, I cant do anything, always some invisible pop-up or something trying to load endlessly while I see my bill below, but cant click anything. Even got a notice the other day that my browser is not supported.
I have a net metering credit that covers my bill, so not a real issue for me, but still frustrating.
Not sure if it's still the case and replicateable without an account. But on enscape3d.com you can't submit tickets from FF for example
I'm in school right now and have to use the Cengage website. There are lab modules that don't work with Firefox.
Then these websites can go get fucked. I'm not using them, and when its my bank i walk my ass to my bank and cancel my bank account there.
If you require chromium, you make people use a less secure browser because your company sucks Google dong. Fuck that, fuck them fuck it all.
if its brave devs vs loan sharks I'd have to go with the loan sharks
Why not use Chromium w/ uBlock instead of Brave?
That's a long way of saying Vivaldi but you make a great point.
I use Firefox 99% of time, so I haven't really looked into alternatives.
I have the same experience. And sometimes it's not that they don't work, it's that they work very poorly. The second I switch to a chromium based browser it's fixed. I had huge issues with Google Earth on Firefox, even after I cleared my cookies and cache. Booted up ungoogled chromium and worked fine. Same with YouTube. Kept pausing and loading for absolutely no reason (1gig connection). Switch to chromium? Fine. Just my examples in the past couple days, I've had issues on non Google websites too.