[HN Gopher] A look at Firefox forks
___________________________________________________________________
A look at Firefox forks
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 478 points
Date : 2025-03-14 12:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| Y_Y wrote:
| Fireforks
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Fireworks: Emphasis on colour, animation, bells, whistles and
| bangs.
|
| Liarfox: Even more corporate shitfuckery and deception.
|
| Firefux: Porn optimised browser.
|
| endless possibilities.....
| RVuRnvbM2e wrote:
| It is an indictment on the state of the web that regardless of
| Mozilla's missteps, Firefox remains the best choice for a secure,
| open-source web browser that isn't another chromium reskin.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I don't get the public "step down" that people are taking from
| using Firefox. How many users are actually switching? I doubt
| it's much. Many are audible about it, though.
|
| Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser... Firefox is not
| doing much worse than chromium browsers
| neurobashing wrote:
| the point is not that firefox is "not doing much worse than
| chromium browsers". the point is that they were founded upon
| principles of not doing that
| mfro wrote:
| I switched. I have been on the fence for some time now, what
| with the pocket nagware and the various 'sponsored' features
| showing up in FF. Very easy for me to start using librewolf.
| It even seems to be faster.
| sshine wrote:
| I switched on mobile and on MacOS. I intend to switch on
| Linux soon.
|
| > _Yes browsers share your data, it 's a browser..._
|
| No, my software does not betray me. If money could buy better
| software, I'd spend it. Unfortunately, commercial end-user
| software (and SaaSS) almost always has deep ties with
| advertising.
|
| I don't mind crash reporting.
|
| I don't mind opt-in telemetry for QA.
|
| There is no justification for telemetry by default, not
| informing of the extent, using it for advertisement, and
| selling your data as payment for use of software.
|
| Companies that figured out that a steady source of ad revenue
| beats subscription money will always compromise their
| customers.
|
| I don't want that. And Firefox is now in the category of
| software that cannot be trusted until a worthy steward of a
| fork steps up.
|
| In the meantime, I'm using Orion by Kagi until I have a non-
| WebKit alternative.
| chneu wrote:
| I switched after years of annoyances with mozilla.
| spudlyo wrote:
| I also switched from Firefox to LibreWolf, both on Linux and
| on macOS. I'll likely use the latest Chrome just for banking
| and other high security tasks, but for my normal browsing
| LibreWolf seems to work fine.
| mimasama wrote:
| > Yes browsers share your data, it's a browser...
|
| That's not the problem people have with Firefox. One of the
| issues right now is that there are people who have
| intentionally opted-in to sharing "technical data" to Mozilla
| for the sole purpose of improving the browser, when in fact,
| it's not just for that but also for improving ad-tech which
| was never an intent those power users had in mind:
| https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/03/12/mozilla-has-
| been-s...
| jimbob45 wrote:
| You can't get an OSS team to fix vulns in a meaningful amount
| of time, let alone research them. Waterfox/Palemoon stay months
| behind the official branch and are always vulnerable.
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| Waterfox is not months behind? We follow ESR releases fairly
| promptly.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Big corporations on the w3c board, and their control of the
| largest platforms, have contributed to the enshitification of
| the web by making web standards move just as fast as Windows
| APIs or Office formats. Making it much harder for open source
| volunteer driven projects to keep up.
|
| I compare an open source project trying to make a browser to an
| open source project trying to keep up with MS Office formats or
| Windows graphics APIs. It requires a lot of resources.
|
| And there is no global resolution to this as long as certain
| nations allow rampant unchecked capitalism and innovation under
| the sole supervision of the profit driven corporations
| themselves. Because they will forever keep inventing new
| standards that they launch on their platforms and become
| ubiquitous to end users.
| sshine wrote:
| Netscape / Firefox once broke the browser market.
|
| We need a hero.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Modern bad guys kill heroes in the womb.
|
| We need a safe harbor outside of the WWW for things that
| actually need nothing more than HTML 1.0. And be prepared
| to do without the wonderful services and contents that are
| "offered" by big corps "for free".
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Perhaps more an indictment of failed regulators who have
| allowed these mega corporations to entrench a single browser
| engine, steer web standards, and consolidate so many of the
| social destinations on the web.
| xnx wrote:
| Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought
| it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why
| doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for
| users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?
| vasachi wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't compete with Google.
| inglor wrote:
| Sure it does, it competes on many fronts like Office (vs
| docs), Sharepoint (vs Google Drive), Azure (vs GCP) and many
| others.
|
| Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge -
| for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc)
| comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to
| be downloaded like any other website by the user.
| notRobot wrote:
| > for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc)
| comes pre-bundled with Chrome
|
| This is not true
| xnx wrote:
| Doesn't a fresh Chrome install add those shortcuts to
| Windows' desktop?
| inglor wrote:
| Lol they just hide it very well - go to chrome://apps and
| check what's there :)
| andix wrote:
| Azure vs GCP
|
| Microsoft 365 (Office, Exchange) vs. Google Workspace (Gmail,
| Office Apps)
|
| Windows/Surface vs. ChromeOS/Chromebooks
|
| Bing vs Google Search
|
| ...?
| peppers-ghost wrote:
| Having one browser engine dominate the web is not a good thing.
| If there was ever a terrible zero day found everyone would be
| in trouble.
| rrgok wrote:
| Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec?
| I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own
| spec, but what is the purpose of having N different
| implementation of the same spec with their own
| idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the
| major browser engines is open-source anyway.
|
| Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my
| point still stays..
| Kichererbsen wrote:
| If I remember correctly, RFCs need at least two independent
| implementations to become standards. I think that would be
| a good idea for web stuff too. It's a way to make sure the
| spec isn't just blindly following the implementation.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Mozilla often disagrees with Google on what should get into
| web standards and the design of the spec, especially apis
| that give hardware access or seem to make privacy harder
| for the user. Having their own implementation is kinda
| crucial for that.
| palata wrote:
| I don't think that zero-day is really an argument, given
| that the vast majority of users are on Chromium. If there
| is a zero-day on Chromium, most people have it.
|
| > At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser
| engines is open-source anyway.
|
| Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls
| it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But
| Google controls both. It means that Google can push for
| what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user.
| E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does
| not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been
| shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google
| _not to care_ about something for it to impact Chromium
| /AOSP.
|
| That's the whole point of competition: you want _the users_
| to have _choice_ , so that it pushes the companies towards
| building a better product. Monopolies never serve the
| users.
|
| Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not
| happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to
| two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.
| mrweasel wrote:
| What if the developers of the dominate engine becomes
| complacent and decides that it's "good enough" and we get
| stuck in another IE6 situation where development stops for
| years and years?
|
| Yes, Chromium and Blink are open source, but they are
| effectively Googles open source project. If you're unhappy
| with their direction you'll need to fork it.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Exactly, the situation with Chrome is the exact same sort
| of benevolent dictator problem we had with Internet
| Explorer, except this time dressed up with an open source
| license.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Look at how llvm forced gcc to improve their error messages
| (among other things).
|
| Running a different compiler is also useful to find bugs in
| your project, and in the compiler itself. I would imagine
| this applies to the web just as well -- a web browser
| implements an open spec (just like a C++ compiler), at the
| same time being much more complicated than a C++ compiler.
| xnx wrote:
| Couldn't this be said about the Linux kernel?
| tux3 wrote:
| Everything that makes Firefox different would be lost, and have
| to be rebuilt. But let's talk about a different reason why
| forking Chromium to keep the features you like isn't as simple
| as it sounds.
|
| Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping
| Manifest V2 (hypothetically).
|
| At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and
| keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging,
| refactor after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge
| conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being
| able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream
| Chrome.
|
| Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong
| direction does not always get you to your destination quicker.
| Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.
| _bent wrote:
| How is solving merge conflicts harder than developing an
| entire browser engine?
|
| Plus Igalia, MS, Mozilla, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi etc could
| maintain a shared fork that kept stuff like Manifestv2 if
| they wanted.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The problem is that the difficult not only increases with
| time unbounded, but is on a steep curve. Eventually the
| manpower and resource required to keep up with upstream
| will eventually match and outstrip that required to develop
| and maintain a new engine.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Have you ever met a team that maintained a fork of a legacy
| codebase with more than 6 figures of code?
| regularjack wrote:
| Having all the eggs in the same basket is not a good thing.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Linux users should just switch to Windows too.
| xnx wrote:
| Why would they do that?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Exactly my point! They wouldn't, and shouldn't.
| timbit42 wrote:
| They left off the sarcasm tag.
| bad_user wrote:
| Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any
| better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as
| Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their ads. In that sense,
| Microsoft's interests align very well with those of Google's.
|
| Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is
| Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even
| though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be
| forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but
| doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies
| can't afford.
|
| To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied
| in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their
| ground and proposed Asm.js:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js -- out of all this effort
| came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least
| smells like a good standard.
|
| Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto
| standards -- Dart, and AMP:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
|
| Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you
| might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as
| well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest
| (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and
| Windows.
|
| Yet another example that should speak for itself -- the
| deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers
| work: https://ublockorigin.com/
|
| And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports
| extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium
| fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's
| discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
| andix wrote:
| Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating
| upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own
| browser based on one specific Chromium release.
| bad_user wrote:
| > Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome
|
| Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so
| why would they?
| andix wrote:
| They gave up their own engine because it wasn't good
| enough.
|
| If Google turns into a direction Microsoft doesn't like,
| they can develop their own engine based on the best one
| currently available. As long as Google's direction ist
| satisfactory to Microsoft, they can just save a lot of
| money by just using it.
| bad_user wrote:
| I don't disagree, and yes, you make a good point, and I
| added that the interests of Google and Microsoft
| coincide, which is also bad for us. The banning of ad-
| blockers, for instance, is also in the interest of
| Microsoft.
| andix wrote:
| I think Microsoft just doesn't care about ad-blockers.
| They probably don't have a strong position on it. If they
| work it's fine for them, if they don't its also fine.
|
| They need to ship a good browser with Windows, because a
| lot of their enterprise customers rely heavily on web
| applications. A lot of Microsoft enterprise applications
| are browser apps. The purpose of Edge is not primarily
| web browsing.
| bad_user wrote:
| I don't think we should guess.
|
| In 2024, Microsoft generated 12.58 billion dollars in
| revenue from advertising, which is nothing to scoff at.
|
| And we also have to look at future opportunities -- the
| share of the advertising market may be small, but they
| represent THE alternative to Google's ads, including on
| all alternative search engines.
|
| If they aren't concerned about ads or ad-blockers, then
| why are they so aggressive about pushing Edge on Windows
| users? And in the EU, when people first open up the Edge
| browser, why do they inform people that Edge will share
| their data with the entire advertising industry?
| andix wrote:
| Thanks for those insights. So they might have good
| reasons to support Google's position.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > They gave up their own engine because it wasn't good
| enough.
|
| It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not
| because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it
| good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a
| moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had
| worked. That was not going to work against Google, who
| had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike
| Microsoft at that point.
|
| IE at a fairly early point became purely a market
| manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more
| cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy
| browser with Windows that kept every muggle's
| installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one
| of the primary marketing points for their competitor,
| Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly
| blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of
| IE and for Windows Defender.
|
| I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even
| fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.
|
| My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and
| on some level they're already working together. Apple
| holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft
| alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem,
| built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified
| people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to
| them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and
| not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the
| objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet.
| And written in Swift.
| andix wrote:
| It's hard to tell if they neglected the original Edge or
| if they just couldn't keep up with Chrome.
|
| IE was a completely different story, it was full of
| proprietary Microsoft technology (ActiveX) and a lot of
| Enterprise applications used it heavily.
|
| Microsoft didn't care about browsers maybe 15 years ago,
| but this changed a lot. A lot of Microsoft software is
| just available in the browser, they migrated a lot of
| things to web technology. That's also the reason they
| switched their browser to Chromium, they needed to ship
| something that actually works.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level
| they're already working together.
|
| Even without (conspiratorial) intent this seems to be
| happening unintentionally- Andreas is ex-Apple, after
| all, and that's why he switched development away from his
| own language to Swift. I wonder if it's analogous to
| Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza inevitably eventually ending
| up at Microsoft.
|
| That said,
|
| > Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in
| the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best
| choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in
| Swift.
|
| Sounds like too good a no-brainer to actually happen, at
| least under current leadership. Few of these "dream
| mergers" ever actually happen. Another example, Apple
| buying DuckDuckGo as a counter against the Google search
| monopoly, has never come close to happening after years
| of speculation.
| yndoendo wrote:
| I see these statements as "Everyone should be like me!". Same
| statement is always applied to KDE & Gnome & Xfce and of all
| the numerous open source solutions.
|
| Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code
| branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium
| is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers.
| They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla
| / Firefox is proving them wrong.
|
| Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition?
| I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a
| stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when
| everyone things and does the exact same thing.
|
| China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and
| why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be
| looked down upon.
| Propelloni wrote:
| Why did Google in 2008 chose to built its own browser instead
| of helping to improve Firefox, which was around since 2002?
| layer8 wrote:
| They wanted a browser they have full control over. And you
| can move much faster when you don't have to negotiate every
| change with third parties. Also, Firefox 1.0 and Chrome 1.0
| were released within months of each other (though Firefox 0.x
| had existed for a little while), so Firefox wasn't that
| established yet. The main competition at the time was
| Microsoft Internet Explorer with over 90% market share.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I'm fairly sure pretty much everything at google since the
| doubleclick acquisition has been a loss-leader in order to
| give users good 'viewers' for advertisements, there's some
| nice byproducts along the way of course.
| kasabali wrote:
| Firefox 1.0: 2004 Chrome 1.0: 2008
| layer8 wrote:
| Whoops, you are right, I misread one source.
| culi wrote:
| > They wanted a browser they have full control over
|
| Yup and they got it. Now we see them using that power and
| market dominance to further their business goals with their
| attempts to kill Manifest V2
| xnx wrote:
| You can read the comic that explains some of the reasoning
| here: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html
|
| IIRC one of the biggest reasons was a single misbehaving tab
| in Firefox being able to take down the whole browser.
| culi wrote:
| Wow you really don't remember what it was like to have a single
| browser engine dominate the landscape.
|
| Imagine a world where the state of the web ecosystem's faith is
| down to just Google and Apple.
| xnx wrote:
| > Wow you really don't remember what it was like to have a
| single browser engine dominate the landscape.
|
| My memory is definitely fuzzy, but I remember Netscape
| Navigator 4 wasting years on a scratch rewrite, and Internet
| Explorer becoming complacent.
|
| Why would it be a problem for an open source browser engine
| to become dominant? At what point should we be worried if
| Linux becomes too popular?
| Dwedit wrote:
| I read in a few places that LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting
| features are breaking websites. One person complained that their
| meeting got scheduled incorrectly because the browser was messing
| with the user's time zone (for privacy reasons).
| saintfire wrote:
| It does break many sites. Especially if you disable WebGL. You
| do get used to it but that's a tall task for most users.
|
| It has been complained/asked about to have the ability to
| enable webgl on whitelisted sites but the devs have a fetish
| with all or nothing privacy.
|
| Unfortunately if I'm using a site that, say, distributes 3D
| models then I'm likely going to need it enabled, privacy aside.
|
| The time zone thing causes confusion with office 365, as well.
| It displays when meetings are in your time zone which did catch
| me off guard once.
| pixxel wrote:
| > devs have a fetish with all or nothing privacy
|
| It's a position, not a fetish.
| mixermachine wrote:
| You are free to enable WebGl in the settings and install a
| Plugin that allows for blocking/allowing WebGl.
|
| The default should be privacy if you install a browser that
| focuses on privacy.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Would you expect a "privacy focused" browser to offer you
| networking disabled by default but the ability to enable
| completely unrestricted networking in the settings (you can
| install a plugin for CORS and the like if you want) or to
| natively provide the privacy controls you need to actually
| use the browser? If the latter, why is it different
| depending which attack surface you ask about? If the
| former, why not just make that plugin part of the browser
| itself?
| shiomiru wrote:
| > Would you expect a "privacy focused" browser to offer
| you networking disabled by default
|
| Obviously not, because at that point it can no longer be
| used to browse the web. (That said, "do no network
| requests" should be the default idle state of the browser
| until appropriate user interaction. Allowing CORS is also
| a horrible default but that ship has long sailed.)
|
| I also disable WebGL in my Firefox profile and this does
| not inconvenience me in any way. So I do not think WebGL
| support is as instrumental to browsing the web as you
| claim; it entirely depends on what sites you visit. (And
| let's be honest here, a very significant majority of
| websites does not need WebGL.)
| zamadatix wrote:
| Everyone is welcome to have their own definition of what
| browsing the web requires be supported but if it wasn't
| part of browsing the web it shouldn't be part of the
| browser you can enable in the first place. That it is
| part of the browser you can enable is why it should have
| privacy support by the same browser, not because I
| personally think it should be part of what browsing the
| web requires.
| mixermachine wrote:
| I have left WebGl disabled and do not miss anything so
| far (maybe in the future?). Just not my use case.
|
| Network disabled is a straw man argument.
|
| If somebody already has made the effort of creating an
| extension and maintaining it, why not use that?
| zamadatix wrote:
| If WebGL is a straw man to browsing the web why is the
| feature still included in the browser itself at all then?
| You certainly don't have to utilize every feature of the
| browser yourself but it is part of that browser
| nonetheless, it's just not a natively securable part.
| mfro wrote:
| It does that. Users have the simple option of disabling it in
| settings with one checkbox.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Where is this 'one checkbox'?
| mfro wrote:
| There is a search bar in the settings page. Search
| 'fingerprint', uncheck 'Enable ResistFingerprinting'
| 0hijinks wrote:
| I found on 136.0.0-ish that some settings persist despite
| checking/unchecking that box and restarting LibreWolf,
| but YMMV. I also manually inspect 'about:config' and
| search there for relevant settings (like 'fingerprint').
| For fingerprinting, browser breakage is unlikely so
| toggling these hidden flags is easy.
| lxn wrote:
| I can confirm that. I switched to using LibreWolf as a work-
| dedicated browser parallel to Firefox Developer Edition.
|
| In two weeks of using it, I got annoyed by the following: - no
| automatic dark-mode (against fingerprinting, some websites
| don't have a setting to switch it on - not sure if you can turn
| it off) - timezone is always UTC (can be worked-around with an
| extension, messed up my time tracking app and some log viewer)
| - login on some websites/tools is broken altogether by the
| strict privacy settings (did not even bother to debug, I
| switched to Firefox) - WebGL off by default (you can turn it on
| via config flag)
|
| I switched from Firefox to Chrome and back and never had to
| debug and work-around so many issues. It's a decent browser,
| but I'm not sure the value it brings justifies the costs of
| time spent debugging and the inconveniences.
|
| I will continue to use it for work, but I will not switch
| entirely from Firefox because I want my history available
| across devices.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I used to have terrible time with forgetting my keys, or
| letting the cleaner in when I wasn't home. Then I just
| stopped locking the door and never looked back. It's so
| convenient and saves me precious time. What can I say, it
| just works!
| bmacho wrote:
| Unironically tho when were the last time you see people
| trying random doors if they are unlocked. There is
| absolutely no need to lock your door if you are not vocal
| about it.
| piperswe wrote:
| That kind of thinking (neglecting a broken lock on the
| back door, because I figured chances were low that
| someone would take advantage) got my apartment "broken"
| in to a few years ago.
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| This is heavily dependent on your neighborhood,
| obviously. I've never seen people trying random doors
| because I'm always asleep when they do it.
| accelbred wrote:
| Unchecking resistFingerprinting in the settings disables
| these. You can also use the new firefox FPP settings to
| enable most if RFP stuff but opt out of specific stuff like
| dark mode, timezone, etc. You can even add per-site
| exceptions.
|
| For example, my config is at
| https://codeberg.org/accelbread/config-
| flake/src/branch/mast...
| KetoManx64 wrote:
| Are you not using librewold-overrides.cfg to disable/enable
| features that you want/need? All of the things you mentioned
| are just flags you can set in the file to turn them on or
| off. https://librewolf.net/docs/settings/
| pndy wrote:
| Amazon equivalent in Poland - Allegro was notoriously blocking
| me in Librewolf; I was served puzzle captcha or blocked from
| browsing at all due to "suspicious activity" 98% of the time.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Try a spoofed user-agent, if disabling ETP and RFP doesn't
| help.
|
| Also, fuck companies that do this. I just start permanently
| deleting accounts whenever services do this.
| klauserc wrote:
| As someone responsible for login/registration at a large
| online retailer, I see so much bot traffic and attacks.
| Attackers try to enumerate registered users, try to mass-
| login with credentials from password dumps, try to register
| accounts controlled by bots.
|
| Login forms are a war zone. Looking for patterns that
| indicate the other party is a bot and serve them (and only
| them) a captcha is a technique that is quite effective. But
| it is not perfect. Especially business customers often get
| forced to solve captchas in our system.
|
| If you know of a better solution (other than: don't be a
| big online shop), I'm all ears.
| immibis wrote:
| What is wrong with a bot creating an account? Is their
| money not as green?
| voytec wrote:
| I'd guess that their problem is data pollution (marketing
| unhappy, ads impressions unaligned, data needs to be
| cleaned anyway before PowerPoint presentations for
| shareholders are made). And technically: unnecessary
| database growth which impacts migration efficiency,
| backup size and duration and stuff like that.
| pndy wrote:
| I'm currently testing out Floorp and so far no issues with
| sites - beside twitch but that site doesn't like anything
| that isn't "default"
| voytec wrote:
| > Also, fuck companies that do this. I just start
| permanently deleting accounts whenever services do this.
|
| On the one hand yes, on the other - these times call for
| ditching US companies and switching to local (EU) ones. So
| it's better to tell these local ones to be more welcome /
| less hostile.
|
| I have just yesterday asked Amazon to delete my account and
| all my personal data and stop processing it, quoting
| "Article 17 and Article 18 of the General Data Protection
| Regulation".
|
| I'm also planning (as in: technically planning) to move all
| my data off AWS reasonably ASAP, too. It's personal stuff;
| mostly S3, domains registered and parked at Route53, some
| CloudFront distributions fronting static files, SQS/SNS -
| not much overall - and domains are the main PITA.
| don-code wrote:
| I've run into this (it's in Librewolf, but is more obnoxious in
| Mull/IronFox on Android where I actually use this), where the
| privacy protections prevent the Jackbox games like Drawful from
| sending the contents of a drawing to Jackbox's servers. Both
| browsers don't fail - they just upload a rainbow pattern every
| time.
|
| I use IronFox and LibreWolf as my daily drivers, but I keep
| Firefox installed alongside them for the inevitable site that
| just doesn't behave correctly. Not unlike having to reach for
| the big blue "E" in the bad old days.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Can definitely attest to this. Librewolf is my daily and I
| run it pretty aggressively (uBO options/lists, strict
| blocking DNS, etc) and sometimes I'm left scratching my head
| where things break. Recently had an aha-moment that felt
| triumphant when disabling the limit cross-origin referers, as
| silly as it sounds. Alas, I guess I prefer it this way.
| anonym29 wrote:
| For graphical stuff like this, try enabling WebGL, just
| understand that you break a lot of anti-fingerprinting
| efforts if you do this.
| colordrops wrote:
| Librewolf is pretty aggressive. That would be ok if it was just
| defaults that you could disable if you wish but I couldn't find
| out how. Too opinionated.
| Throwthrowbob wrote:
| I remember being thrown off by this.
|
| A user.js entry may help. user.js runs on startup of
| Firefox/Librewolf, so keep this in mind for your usage
| application.
|
| the setting is: "privacy.resistFingerprinting", as in:
| user_pref("privacy.resistFingerprinting", true);
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are breaking
| websites
|
| I parse this not as LibreWolf breaking _anything_ , but instead
| as,
|
| "LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are working against
| broken, dark-pattern websites"
| kemayo wrote:
| I'm not convinced that "trusting the browser about the
| timezone it says it's in" is a dark pattern when it's done in
| service of scheduling meetings that the user directly
| requested.
| sandreas wrote:
| I also ran into this, but it was manageable (after a bit of
| research of course).
|
| Would love to see a "startup"-Dialog, where they explain these
| features in a bit of detail with a choice of three modes...
|
| Finger printing and privacy protection:
|
| - [x] Full - best for privacy (default)
|
| - [ ] Moderate - most features work, but may break some
| websites
|
| - [ ] Off - just behave like normal Firefox
|
| The last option would be for firefox users who just want a
| browser working like before. Although this might not be the
| target audience, I think this could support funding.
|
| However, I also ran into the issue of Librewolf deleting ALL
| cookies by default when it closes. I would also love to have
| Domain whitelist for this:
|
| - Delete all cookies except the following websites: a.org,
| b.com, c.net
|
| Oh, and another tip: Don't go to there matrix channel with your
| first class account, they have a spam problem and Element is
| nowhere near prepared for it with any settings to prevent
| getting spam invitations. Once you were in, you get spam
| invitations all the time.
| spookie wrote:
| You can have a whitelist. Just go to cookie settings and set
| the exceptions.
| sandreas wrote:
| Thanks, I did not know that :-)
| eudhxhdhsb32 wrote:
| It uses UTC, as everyone should.
| mjevans wrote:
| Librewolf Lite / Light REALLY should be a release too. Less
| aggressive, more friendly to people who are moving towards a
| more secure experience. E.G. let session managers work
| properly, allow that 10 year old password database in the
| browser to be used during the 30 year transition* (I
| exaggerate, but until there's a bulk import tool to MIGRATE) to
| a stronger password manager. Generally don't enable the tiny
| fingerprint gains (~1/20th of world population, but they can
| already fingerprint that from the IP you're using and/or ping
| ANYWAY, so just leave the damned time zone on!) which have a
| huge trade off in annoyance for the end user.
|
| Yes, I want a 'de enshitified' version of Firefox. Not a
| browser for someone trying to write impactful news stories who
| needs to follow a strong opsec.
| j1elo wrote:
| That is, as so many things with tech, a matter of giving proper
| UI for humans as much priority as the feature itself.
|
| It would be solved with something as simple as a "Privacy
| Blocks" drop-down menu that was prominently shown in the
| browser, that could visually warn about which feature is being
| accessed by a website (WebGL, UTC time, scripting...), and that
| let the user enable/disable that feature in that specific
| website with just 1 click.
|
| A bit of telemetry (albeit kinda contradictory in this case)
| would allow to collect data on which sites tend to require
| which permissions, and proactively warn the users, like "Hey it
| seems most users of Google Calendar .com tend to disable time
| clock privacy; would you like to do so too?", that'd remove a
| lot of worries from users upon accessing an important site and
| not knowing which privacy settings might be breaking it.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| The biggest issue with forks, which is pointed out in the
| article, is Mozilla still does the heavy lifting. None of the
| forks have the resources (and probably interest) to fully fork
| Firefox and make it their own codebase to maintain.
|
| Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they
| can keep up to date well into the future.
| pndy wrote:
| These projects to my knowledge do not release patches by
| themselves but as you said, rely on Mozilla's work - they take
| Firefox, strip it out of few features - namely one's that
| raised concerns, toss in additional stuff from other projects
| and include own branding. So perhaps these are more "customized
| derivatives" or "spin-offs"?
|
| Not that work of these projects isn't good - on contrary.
| Mozilla has violated the trust of its users in last years with
| features nobody ask for and those folks pluck that stuff out.
|
| Stil, perhaps it's a time for a proper fork that provides own
| code maintenance, before things will go worse at Mozilla.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Mozilla do more then just the code base -- There are larger
| eco-system for HTTP, HTML5, CSS, Certificate Authority, etc.
|
| The effort for entry is quite high for those...
| rrgok wrote:
| The browser engine landscape presents an interesting paradox: we
| have an open specification, yet multiple implementations with
| their own quirks and incompatibilities. This seems to undermine
| the very purpose of standardization.
|
| Consider our current situation:
|
| - The spec is largely influenced by the same big tech companies
| that develop the engines
|
| - Major engines (Blink, WebKit, Gecko) are all open source
|
| - Significant engineering resources are dedicated to maintaining
| compatibility
|
| What's the actual benefit of this redundancy? In other domains,
| we often consolidate around reference implementations. While I
| understand the historical and theoretical arguments for
| implementation diversity (preventing monoculture, fostering
| innovation, avoiding vendor lock-in), I wonder if these benefits
| still outweigh the costs in 2025.
|
| I'd be interested in hearing perspectives on whether maintaining
| multiple engines is still the optimal approach for the web
| ecosystem, or if we're just perpetuating technical debt from an
| earlier era.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| If there was a group/vendor you could trust to develop such a
| universal engine to rule them all, that could work out. But,
| alas, no big tech company could ever be trusted with such a
| task (they would try to push their agenda, e.g. by preventing
| ad blockers).
| rrgok wrote:
| How is that any different from now? Look what happened
| recently with Mozilla and Firefox...
| bad_user wrote:
| I think that people should look at what happened recently
| and realize that absolute nothing noteworthy happened.
|
| And Firefox is still the only browser engine with support
| for uBlock Origin, on Android too.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Whoa, slow down there. You can't just go around asking
| people to read first-party sources and think critically
| on their own about an issue without getting their opinion
| from their feed or influencer of choice. That's an
| unreasonable and insane expectation! /s
| immibis wrote:
| The first-party source is Mozilla themselves skirting
| around saying, but very heavily implying they are now
| selling unspecified data about me to unspecified actors,
| in a legally binding way, then walking it back with a
| pinky promise that is not legally binding, so doesn't
| actually mean anything.
|
| Have _you_ read the first-party sources?
| anonym29 wrote:
| The narrative you gave above is by definition not a first
| party source.
|
| Here's a first party source explaining _your_
| misunderstanding of the situation:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-
| terms...
|
| And here's another credible source explaining _Mozilla
| 's_ mistake in making this decision based on language
| that was only present in a draft version of the CCPA, as
| opposed to the final version, but which also made it to
| Wikipedia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276624
|
| Most of the conversation on this topic never moved past
| the first misunderstanding, just a bunch of irrational
| kvetching at Mozilla by people who read an (incorrect)
| summary of the situation.
| immibis wrote:
| Why do you trust everything the allegedly bad guys say?
| By reading it and _thinking critically_ as you said we
| all should, I can easily see that they are following the
| pattern that many bad guys follow: write some legalese
| allowing them to do bad stuff, then write some non-
| binding non-legalese saying they won 't. Then only point
| at the latter to silence complaints. And then, the next
| step in the pattern is to actually do the bad stuff,
| while continuing to point at the non-binding non-
| legalese.
|
| Whereas you seem to be taking what they said at face
| value, which is not critical thinking.
| bad_user wrote:
| Not much changed on Mozilla's side, only the law (e.g.,
| CCPA, GDPR), because technically speaking (as far as CCPA
| is concerned), Firefox has already been "selling" users'
| data.
|
| Furthermore, at this point, that legalese talks about
| features that the user expects. Otherwise, in the EU,
| Firefox would be forced to ask for explicit consent. GDPR
| is so strong that when Firefox will actually sell your
| data, you'll know it because in the EU it will have to
| tell users exactly how or why.
|
| Note that Mozilla was already hit with a privacy
| complaint in the EU due to PPA [1] because it's opt-out
| instead of opt-in. Whether they'll be found guilty by
| EU's DPAs, it really depends on whether they actually
| anonymize that data, as they claim to do, or not. Note
| here that the GDPR doesn't accept pseudo-anonymization as
| being valid anonymization.
|
| Of course, it may take a while to find the outcome of
| such complaints, just note that as far as the GDPR is
| concerned, that Privacy Policy of theirs doesn't count
| for squat. It really doesn't matter what they claim in
| their Privacy Policy, unless they are lying, i.e., if
| they actually "sell the data" of users in a way that
| users don't expect as part of the service, then the GDPR
| asks for explicit consent (opt-in).
|
| Technically speaking, they've already sold user data
| since 2006 because they've been installing Google's
| Search as the default, used, for example, for search
| suggestions. So everything you type in that address bar,
| goes to Google, and they get paid for it. Of course,
| search suggestions are part of the service that the user
| expects, but note that the user's search history can also
| be used for user profiling by Google. So as far as the
| CCPA is concerned, that's selling user data. And, very
| importantly, _Firefox has been funded by ad-tech since
| 2006_ , much like all Chromiums and even Safari.
|
| What's actually new is that Mozilla wants to diversify.
| Which is good, as the Search deal is in jeopardy and
| those hundreds of millions of $ they need to fund the
| browser aren't going to come from donations. So they
| would like an alternative to cut the middleman, i.e.,
| Google. If that alternative is also privacy preserving
| and at the very least opt-out (though I'd prefer opt-in),
| then that's even better than the status quo.
|
| People unhappy with this deal are people that hate
| advertising, or any reasonable monetization strategy, as
| if a viable browser with an independent engine could be
| funded via the donations of people that ad-block YouTube
| instead of paying for Premium.
|
| ---
|
| TLDR:
|
| 1. Nothing actually changed, and that Privacy Policy
| doesn't count for squat.
|
| 2. Results matter, not words, results such as that
| wonderful offline translation feature, which is a great
| showcase of privacy preserving AI tech that only Mozilla
| pulled ;-)
|
| PS: Isn't it odd that whenever the underdogs get
| boycotted, the winners are always the Big Tech solutions
| that are far worse in every aspect?
|
| [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/25/mozilla-hit-with-
| privacy-c...
| anonym29 wrote:
| First of all, while many valuable perspectives are
| offered here, the legal nuances of the CCPA are complex
| and usually best assessed by those with formal legal
| expertise. It seems to me that individuals without legal
| training are the primary source of the allegation, so I
| believe that allegation itself needs to be taken with a
| grain of salt, as those making the accusation are quite
| possibly missing key legal context. This isn't intended
| as an insult, rather, just an objective observation from
| my perspective. Please ask a lawyer or law school friend
| to review all of this, including both the blog post and
| other HN post I linked above, as well as the links in
| that HN post, which include a law blog citing the
| drafting error. I encourage everyone with legal expertise
| to review these points and share additional insights. I
| am offering numerous, reputable, cross-checked sources
| for my position, something I haven't seen or heard from
| the people arguing for your position. If you have more
| information to share, please do share it. I want to have
| as holistic an understanding as possible here, after all.
|
| Second, Mozilla as an entity has a lengthy track record
| of being the only big _good guy_ in the "browser wars"
| for a long time. The entire ethos of Mozilla - both the
| foundation and the corporation (not the same business
| entity, another detail the many voices weighing in on
| this subject aren't even aware that they didn't know, but
| which is directly relevant to the legalese of the CCPA) -
| was to preserve a free, open-source, less untrustworthy
| major browser, in the face of IE and Chrome, both
| products of companies have taken a more opaque approach
| to their proprietary code and have been involved in
| decades worth of controversial experiments on (and
| changes to) user privacy, unlike Mozilla. Microsoft and
| Alphabet (Google) want to hide their code from you
| because their code contains a bunch of functionality that
| is optimal for the business' interests, but malicious
| from the perspective of end users who value privacy,
| freedom, and their right to determine what code runs on
| their own machine.
|
| This brings me to my third point, that Mozilla's Firefox
| is COMPLETELY open source. If Mozilla _was_ trying to
| slurp up user data to sell it, they wouldn 't keep their
| product open-source, because the community would just
| strip out all the bits they don't like. Contrast to
| Alphabet (Google), who are literally deprecating Manifest
| V2 to prevent the community from developing ad blockers
| that actually block all ads, or Microsoft's documented
| historical practice of waging war on open standards
| through "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Lengthy, obvious,
| and well-documented patterns of abuse like that exist for
| both Microsoft / Alphabet (Google). Contrast to the
| lengthy pattern of standing up against that very same
| abuse from Mozilla. Keeping Firefox open source is
| antithetical to the interests of an entity which was
| trying to surreptitiously slurp up user data the way
| Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) do. While each
| organization has merits of their own, the availability of
| transparent, open source code (specifically, for the
| final product - not just an open core like Chromium) can
| help ensure that power users and developers like us have
| ways to verify and challenge any potentially problematic
| practices - something that Mozilla has remained committed
| to, but which Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) had never
| fully embraced to begin with.
|
| Fourth, If you've read Firefox's blog posts, if you've
| read the discussion I linked to above, if you've read the
| articles about the CCPA drafting error, if you've read
| the Wikipedia article, confirming that it did contain the
| incorrect draft language, if you understand that lawyers
| interpret everything legalistically (not the way ordinary
| people do), I believe this all paints a picture of an
| honest misinterpretation on Mozilla's part of the
| obligations the CCPA might put on them, in the least
| generous interpretation of the draft language of the
| CCPA. This does make me sympathetic to the possibility
| that Mozilla made an honest mistake, but sympathy and
| trust are not the same, which brings me to my fifth point
| below.
|
| I'm not "trusting" _anything_ Mozilla says. I 'm reading
| into, understanding, and verifying all of it. And again,
| even if Mozilla _was_ trying to do such a thing, their
| current open-source architecture makes those efforts
| completely irrelevant to developers like myself and many
| others here who can read, understand, and make
| modifications to, and rebuild from source. Given the
| established track record of Mozilla and the documented
| shortcomings with proprietary browsers in this regard,
| one might consider whether some of the criticisms (that
| are encouraging people to trust a narrative that results
| in a snap judgement against Mozilla without reading into
| the details) could be influenced by broader competitive
| dynamics. Nonetheless, it's important to evaluate each
| claim on its validated merits.
|
| This brings me to addressing your concerns directly: you
| make a perfectly valid argument in favor of remaining
| vigilant, and I support this! Keeping an eye on Firefox
| source code modifications, monitoring the situation over
| time, and so on. These can be done while simultaneously
| assuming Mozilla made a genuine mistake here, and isn't
| secretly plotting against our interests. The narrative
| that Mozilla has suddenly turned evil is broadly
| inconsistent with Mozilla's lengthy track record of
| standing AGAINST such abuses from Microsoft and Alphabet
| (Google). That narrative alone is also NOT a reason to
| spread FUD about a browser that, as of this moment,
| remains WAY more trustworthy than the "main" alternatives
| that most uninformed users would migrate to, should they
| leave Firefox.
|
| A good-faith, open, evidence-based discussion is key to
| ensuring our whole community understands these complex
| issues, and I'd accordingly invite you to share more
| evidence to support your interpretation, which I will
| read and consider in good faith.
| mimasama wrote:
| Besides, it will just end up being an xkcd 927, lol.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Because reference implementations are often less efficient.
|
| If the standard exists as an abstract interface then future
| implementors can make different tradeoffs.
| robin_reala wrote:
| There was a reference implementation called Amaya.[1] It died,
| because the set of web standards is vast and sprawling, and
| without a business model implementing them has been seen
| historically as overly expensive.
|
| In the absence of a reference implementation, the only other
| suggestion for consolidation is to take an existing
| implementation and crown that as the winner. The problem is
| that implementation, regardless of open source, remains under
| the control of its altruistic parent company. That company then
| effectively gains sole control over the direction of the web,
| which we typically agree is a bad thing. The web is (and always
| has been) bigger than one engine.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_(web_editor)
| mrweasel wrote:
| The issue is that if someone found a major issue in Blink,
| would it even be feasible to get every Chrome, Brave, Edge and
| Vivaldi user to switch to Firefox while the issue is fixed?
|
| The argument is still the same as with OpenSSH and OpenSSL.
| Having a single dominant code base is a security risk. The risk
| of OpenSSL has been realized and we now have good alternatives.
| OpenSSH have alternatives, but we're one major security issue
| away from having to shutdown remote management for potentially
| days. If anything we need even more browser engines, Blink is
| 90% or more of the market. Ideally no engine would be more than
| 20% of all users.
|
| Personally I still think it's worth it to have multiple
| engines, both for security, but also to ensure that enough
| people maintain the skills to keep development active. Or if
| the US government forces Google to sell Chrome, then there's no
| guarantee that the buyer would spend the same resource on Blink
| as Google does. Now I'm all for slowing down browser
| development (allowing alternative engines to develop and give
| web technologies a chance to settle down a bit) but with the
| wrong buyer it not only slows down, it stops, IE6 style. Having
| WebKit, Gecko, and more, helps push things forward in that
| case.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| For those as confused as I, Blink is the webkit fork that
| powers the chromium-style browsers. Sort of like chrome's
| gecko.
| anonym29 wrote:
| What's the alternative? Threatening Gecko developers or
| contributors into quitting their work on Gecko and demanding
| they work on Blink or WebKit instead?
|
| Some of us passionately hate Google and Apple for their
| unethical business practices and would rather cease OSS
| contributions altogether than contribute to these tyrants.
| waltbosz wrote:
| This recent Mozilla stuff has got me wondering if one could fork
| Firefox, strip out the AI/adware code, then sell the binaries.
| How much would people pay (who would pay for a web browser)? Just
| Firefox, minus the crap. Would it generate enough revenue to
| cover the maintenance costs? Etc, etc.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Arguably that's what Librewolf, Waterfox, and Palemoon are
| doing, except via donations.
|
| Considering how quickly Netscape died once IE appeared, I think
| the market is so small that sites will never test against them
| and they'll never get a seat on a standards board.
| mmooss wrote:
| If you take enough users from Firefox, who will do the
| expensive, hard work of updating and maintaining a browser
| engine?
| pjerem wrote:
| If you take so much users from Firefox but they are paid
| users then you basically have the money to do the expensive
| hard work.
| mmooss wrote:
| It costs over $200M per year. That's a lot of paying users.
| gkbrk wrote:
| "Mozilla spends $200M on it per year" does not mean it
| costs $200M per year. Considering Mozilla overspends on
| everything else, it's not a stretch to think they might
| be overspending on this too.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Considering Mozilla overspends on everything else
|
| That something is repeated endlessly does not make it
| true. In fact, it's a signal of disinformation (which
| doesn't make it false). And when words are used like
| "everything", it suggests 'nothing' specific is really
| known. And even to the degree it's true, the inference is
| weak; the question is, how much does web browser
| development cost?
|
| $200M seems reasonable to me. Comparisons I've seen make
| it quite a bit less than estimates of Google's costs, for
| example.
| immibis wrote:
| That bridge will be crossed when we get to it. Thunderbird
| _improved substantially_ after Mozilla _stopped_ maintaining
| it. Thunderbird was _held back_ by Mozilla.
| mmooss wrote:
| Thunderbird began improving, as far as I know, after
| multiple post-Mozilla iterations, including returning to
| the Mozilla fold in a different relationship, which is
| where it is now. Its improvement was not correlated with
| the Mozilla breakup.
|
| Mozilla and the Thunderbird teams knew, however, that a
| breakup was needed for both Thunderbird and for Firefox
| (Thunderbird compatibility requirements were holding back
| Firefox).
|
| The reason was that Thunderbird was a low priority for an
| organization that has a much more successful application in
| Firefox. Low priority projects don't do well; the
| organization naturally structures, invests in equipment,
| hires, manages, etc. for the high priority. You want to be
| a high priority wherever you are - better to be the big app
| in a small org than a small app in a big org (as a very
| general statement).
|
| If you don't know these things, why make up sh-t about
| Mozilla? What do you get out of it?
| tmtvl wrote:
| There's an article about insecurities in Firefox
| (<https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-
| chromium.ht...>), which is a few years old now, but it made me
| curious as to whether it actually is better to run a Firefox
| fork, like Librewolf; Firefox itself; or a Chromium fork like
| Ungoogled Chromium.
|
| Unfortunately I don't really understand the implications about
| the security issues and I don't know whether any of the issues
| have been solved, so I don't know how to evaluate the security
| risks versus the privacy risks.
| smjburton wrote:
| If Mozilla needs additional funding, I'd much rather contribute
| to the project with an "opt-out" subscription plan (say for
| $20/year) to help support the project without giving away
| personal data. The author correctly points out that these forks
| are dependent on Firefox's continued upstream development;
| however, having this option would provide people with the choice
| to support the project without giving up personal data, and
| Firefox and its forks could continue to be sustainably developed.
| slindsey wrote:
| For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is
| _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The
| money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to
| work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the
| Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not
| people are willing to pay for Firefox.
|
| The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational
| structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you
| can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that
| they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".
| fresh_geezer wrote:
| I thought it would funny to buy the Netscape brand off AOL and
| start a fork using that name. Maybe combined with your idea,
| then when/if there's enough funding coming in it can become the
| main entity developing the browser.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I don't know that this idea would work for literally just
| Firefox, but I strongly believe that people would be willing to
| pay for a Firefox fork that has a laser focus on fit and finish
| and poweruser features. Think a "Firefox Pro" of sorts.
|
| Why do I think this? Three reasons:
|
| - It elevates the browser into a higher category of tool, where
| currently Firefox inhabits the same space as OS-bundled
| calculators and text editors, making it being paid more
| justifiable in peoples' minds.
|
| - Firefox has long had issues with rough edges and papercuts,
| which I believe frustrates users more than Mozilla probably
| realizes.
|
| - Much of Firefox's original claim to fame came from its highly
| flexible, power user friendly nature which was abandoned in
| favor of chasing mass appeal.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| If someone was building "Arc but for Firefox" I'd gladly pay
| for that. Firefox is, because of its position in the market,
| incapable of doing anything broadly interesting that's not
| "Be as Chrome-like as possible." They sneak in features that
| are nice, but I simply don't think we'll ever see Mozilla put
| out something that does anything that really sets Firefox
| apart. We'll only ever just get marginally better privacy
| settings or whatever the next Pocket ends up being.
|
| Browsers are _user agents_. I want my user agent to serve me
| by being as frictionless as possible when I use it. I simply
| can't accept that what Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari/Opera have
| provided as the standard web browsing experience for the last
| two decades is a global maximum. We use the web in very
| different ways than we did a generation ago and yet Firefox
| 136 looks impressively similar to both Firefox 36 and Firefox
| 3.6. Take the gradients away from Chrome 1.0 and you could
| convince me a screenshot of it was their next version. If the
| browser is a tool, it's astounding that the tool has hardly
| evolved _at all_.
|
| I miss the days when Opera did all sorts of weird and wacky
| shit. Opera 9 was a magical time, and brought us things like
| tabs and per-tab private browsing and a proper download
| manager and real developer tools. Firefox should be that, but
| they're too scared to actually do anything that isn't going
| to be a totally safe business decision.
| osener wrote:
| Zen browser is exactly this. It has a growing ecosystem of
| "Zen mods" and has a great Arc-like out-of-box experience.
|
| https://zen-browser.app/
| eikenberry wrote:
| Does Zen plan on taking payments at some point? Key part
| of the idea is paid development.
| keerthiko wrote:
| they have a ko-fi and a patreon, with about a 1000
| "subscribers" across both at <unknown> amounts at the
| moment. it's not exactly enough to promise indefinite
| support, but tbh i don't really much reason to have that
| faith from products i've paid for but are closed-source
| either.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| The project's main owner said that the income from the
| project is enough for him to make it his main job after
| he finishes university.
| Semaphor wrote:
| After a short time with it, I find it kinda funny. Back
| then, power users were up in arms about things like the
| omnibar, and chrome removing more and more parts of the
| actual URL. And here is a browser marketed at power users
| that goes beyond that, showing only a small fraction.
| There doesn't even seem to be a Zen mod that restores a
| real usable URL bar.
|
| For me, I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and
| private usage. Zen disqualified itself for my type of
| power usage very quickly, giving me a feeling of being on
| a small mobile device instead of a desktop PC.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| There's an option under Settings > Look and Feel for a
| full length URL bar.
| cevn wrote:
| Perfect.. the real hacks always in the comments!
| Semaphor wrote:
| I had checked there before, just checked again, and I
| still only see an option for a smallish bar with the two
| floating options. Where there exactly?
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Settings - Look and Feel - Multiple Toolbars or Collapsed
| Toolbar as shown in the screenshot[0].
|
| [0]: https://i.ibb.co/BVmkmkLC/Screenshot-2025-03-15-at-1
| 2-34-26-...
| curun1r wrote:
| > I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private
| usage
|
| Zen/Arc are actually much better for this use case,
| albeit after an adjustment period for people who've
| become accustomed to the way Firefox/Chrome do it.
|
| The idea is that URLs are out of your way when you don't
| need them and front-and-center when you do. Instead of
| simply focusing on the URL bar when you CMD+L or CMD+T,
| it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen
| where you're free to do everything you can do in a normal
| location bar and more. It's modeled after the command
| palette design in code editors or application launchers.
| So, for example, not only can you edit URLs, but you can
| search for commands instead of hunting for them in the
| browser's menus. As an example, I'd never memorize the
| keyboard shortcut to take a whole-page screenshot because
| I don't use it enough. But the other day I needed it, so
| I typed "CMD+L, screen" and it was the second result.
| Task completed in under 2 sec.
|
| It took a few days to get used to, but now I never want
| to go back to the sort of location bar that Chrome and
| Firefox use. It just takes up space that I'd rather
| devote to the sites I'm visiting. Even the tab pane is
| easily toggled to get out of my way when I don't care
| about it, which is especially useful when I'm tiling
| websites. I've developed a fondness for keeping
| documentation open in one panel alongside the website I'm
| developing, which means recapturing the width I lose from
| the tab pane is valuable.
|
| I highly recommend pushing through the awkward phase
| where you're sure you're going to hate this browser
| design. Because once you get past it, you'll wonder how
| you ever thought the old way could be better.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen
|
| Incredibly tiny modal dialog. I just tried checked one,
| and it fit 65 characters. Compared to firefox right now,
| after 112 characters the URL bar is slightly over halfway
| filled.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| Fits 212 characters on mine.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Manual URL editing is unbelievably painful on mobile and
| all the kids only use their phones these days - I guess
| this includes all the cool kid engineers making browsers.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Totally agree. Even core features like bookmarks have
| barely improved in decades. All the emphasis has been on
| skin-deep UI refreshes, gimmicks, ways to monetize the
| user, and ways for developers to control the user's
| experience.
|
| I used to be a big fan of OmniWeb back in its day because
| it pushed the envelope in adding utility and emphasized its
| role as a powerful tool that put _the user_ in control. It
| included things like per-page user CSS years before
| userstyles became popular in Firefox and Chrome.
|
| It was paid however, and at least in that point in time
| there was little appetite for a paid browser, and so now
| it's a hobby project that Omni Group devs occasionally
| tinker on and hasn't been actively maintained in some time.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > . Even core features like bookmarks have barely
| improved in decades.
|
| I agree. In the same time firefox' bookmarks are still
| better than what chrome or edge offer.
| unavoidable wrote:
| 100%. I would say, even on the UI/UX side - Microsoft(!)
| has done a way better job on Edge (even though it's
| Chromium), with lots of new features on tab grouping,
| split screen browsing, note taking, syncing, and app
| integrations. Love it or hate it, at least they are doing
| some new features.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| > skin-deep UI refresh
|
| Colorways anyone? How about tabs that now look like
| buttons for no conceivable purpose but fashion?
|
| I would pay for an exploer-like sidebar with folders and
| containers as the top-level folders. Almost have that now
| with "tree tabs" extension and containers, but the
| interface is kludgy.
|
| This plus a privacy guarantee would be worth paying for.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| Bookmarks and tabs are a good example of how easily you
| could accidentally step on the core userbases' toes.
| There are absolutely stellar tab and bookmark addons that
| essentially completely change how those systems work.
| They are also vastly more complex (but in a way that
| serves powerusers).
|
| If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get
| closer to those tools they risk breaking those very
| addons (leading to pissed off users and devs). Likewise
| if they change in another direction.
|
| The only real solution that avoids that would be to
| promote some addons to first class implementations and
| allow you to mix and match them. But that of course
| increases maintenance burden permanently and even then
| it's likely to piss off some chunk of users.
|
| Both tabs and bookmarks currently work well in the simple
| usecase and can be extended to the power users' use
| cases. There are unfortunately though a ton of other
| things that take priority over that. Namely rustifying
| code (to reduce maintenance burden and reduce bugs) and
| maintaining feature parity with chrome.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and
| Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they're awkwardly
| bolted onto the browser's UI and the best you as a user
| can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome
| and then pray that your hacks won't be broken in some
| upcoming browser update.
|
| Personally I think the solution is to treat mainline
| browsers like Firefox as reference implementations that
| several highly specialized forks are developed on top of.
| Only users with the most general/basic of needs would use
| the "vanilla" version of the browser, while everybody
| else would have a favorite fork that fits their needs
| very closely.
|
| Arc and Zen are a decent example of this model in play.
| They're very opinionated and not everybody's cup of tea,
| but that's fine, because there's literally every other
| browser if something more conducive to general audiences
| is what you're looking for. Browsers don't need to be one
| size fits all and in fact I think are being held back by
| trying to be that way.
| johnny22 wrote:
| > The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and
| Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they're awkwardly
| bolted onto the browser's UI and the best you as a user
| can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome
| and then pray that your hacks won't be broken in some
| upcoming browser update.
|
| Now that firefox has native vertical tabs it's possible
| that the the integration can get better in the nearer
| future since I doubt the vertical tabs feature (which i
| haven't used yet) has tabs on the top AND side.
| valunord wrote:
| I would rather see Orion on Firefox.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| What would that entail?
| rewgs wrote:
| "Arc but for Firefox" is called Zen and it's been my daily
| driver for months. Fantastic browser.
| Izkata wrote:
| > They sneak in features that are nice, but I simply don't
| think we'll ever see Mozilla put out something that does
| anything that really sets Firefox apart.
|
| > and yet Firefox 136 looks impressively similar to both
| Firefox 36 and Firefox 3.6.
|
| Firefox 36 and 3.6 were pre-Quantum/Electrolysis. In those
| days, the XUL addons had an insane amount of control and
| could do so many things simply not possible nowadays, that
| if you took advantage of made a browser that looks nothing
| like modern Firefox.
| emaro wrote:
| TBF, I like the browser doesn't change that much. I install
| it for / recommend it to friends/family/etc and big changes
| would only increase the support I have to do. I think forks
| are much better suited to try out new concepts, which
| eventually might end up in the browser (I enabled the
| vertical tabs in 136 and I love them).
| hyperbrainer wrote:
| isn't Zen exactly that? Arc, but firefox
| evo_9 wrote:
| That's exactly what Zen Browser is - Arc but off a fork of
| FF.
|
| https://zen-browser.app/
| 0x457 wrote:
| I think in todays world, when everything is a subscription,
| payment for a browser doesn't look so far-fetched.
| TylerE wrote:
| Getting people to pay for something that has always been
| free is a tall ask. Most people are barely aware of what a
| browser is. They just think it's part of the OS.
| bmacho wrote:
| People pay for youtube and random youtubers now. They are
| fine paying for things.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Sure, for _those_ things.
|
| However when it comes to web browsers, there's been a
| looong history of failed attempts at selling commercial
| browsers.
|
| I wouldn't be at all surprised if the only people who've
| ever made any serious and sustained income from browsers
| have been Google; and even that's been indirectly via
| upselling their other services.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is what people said about Search before Kagi. And,
| incidentally, those folks are also working on a paid
| browser that real people do buy.
|
| Times change. Subscriptions are normalized, and tech
| people are increasingly aware of the hazards of "free".
| TylerE wrote:
| Content is something that is traditionally paid.
| immibis wrote:
| Not on YouTube.
| lolinder wrote:
| Enough people pay for Nebula and Kagi and Fastmail to
| make them profitable, even though YouTube and Google and
| Gmail are free. You don't need to get everyone in the
| world who uses the free service to be willing to pay,
| just enough of them to fund your project.
|
| There's actually an advantage to the paid business model
| vs ads in that you don't have to appeal to N million
| people in order to pay the bills: you only have to appeal
| to `expenses / subscriptionPrice` people. This means you
| can cater to those people more aggressively and turn them
| into fans rather than just users, while also saving time
| on the features they don't need (reducing `expenses`).
|
| (I'm a happy subscriber to all three above-mentioned
| services and would immediately sign on for a paid Firefox
| fork like OP suggests.)
| n42 wrote:
| it's true. I never in a million years could have imagined
| that I would be paying for a search engine. now you can
| pry Kagi out of my cold dead hands.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| gmail is only free for a subset of its users, as are
| other google services.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| then why not modzilla themselves offering their pro version
| lolinder wrote:
| That is the question I ask myself every time this comes up,
| and the only answer I've been able to come up with is
| "because Google pays them not to".
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| Inevitably, I'd want any feature worth paying for to be
| freely accessible. Presumably I'm not just trying to support
| the devs but also fund other people accessing the same
| features that draw me to firefox in the first place.
| gausswho wrote:
| Please someone make a Firefox that makes profile portability
| readable and with sensible defaults.
| maccard wrote:
| That's not what OP is suggesting - that's a Firefox fork.
| glenstein wrote:
| I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being
| a panacea.
|
| Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would
| come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes
| development resources toward the core browser, which are
| already more substantial than what would be raised by direct
| donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now
| the revenue is something on the order of $500 million a year
| and I believe that software development is 50 to 60% and then
| infrastructure that supports the development which is under
| like administration and operations is another double digit
| percent.
|
| As far as I know, when it comes to crowdsourcing resources for
| software development, there's basically no precedent for
| raising the amount of revenue necessary. The closest analog I
| can think of is Tor, which gives something on the order of $10
| million a year. And the best crowd-sourced online fundraising
| for any project over all that I can think of as Wikipedia,
| which I believe is around like 280 million or so, which is
| slightly more than half of the revenue that Mosia already gets.
| But of course, Wikipedia leverages a vast user base. A kind of
| existing compact between themselves and users that I think has
| given them momentum, and because it's about content consumption
| rather than software, I think has a different relationship with
| its user base where it's hard to gauge how transferable it is
| as an example to Firefox.
|
| I don't think assumptions that starting from scratch, they
| would eclipse Wikipedia are realistic. And I think the upshot
| of it is that the suggestion is that Firefox would be better
| off raising less revenue than they already do to maintain
| focused developer attention on the browser, which contrasts
| with a reality where they already invest more resources in that
| then would plausibly come from user donations, which seems to
| undercut the point that user donations would 'restore' focus on
| the browser.
|
| I have nothing against user donations, but I just think for
| practical impact, especially in the short term, is quite
| limited and more about being invoked as a rhetorical point to
| imply an insufficient commitment to developing the core browser
| at present. I think despite being a big Firefox cheerleader, at
| present I do have concerns about their wandering direction, but
| I don't think it's realistic to think that direct user
| donations would have any impact on market share or would even
| substantially change the amount of resources available to
| invest in the browser.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Thunderbird received close to $10 million in donations in
| 2023. And I'm willing to bet far more people use Firefox. If
| funding development directly, that's not too shabby.
| glenstein wrote:
| Wow, I honestly had no idea about that and you're exactly
| right, and everything I can see suggests that those were
| small donors to Thunderbird. It's hard to extrapolate, but
| it certainly seems like 10 to 20 million per year could be
| in play.
| maccard wrote:
| I think the scale you're thinking of is unnecessary. Call it
| a million a year, and that's enough to comfortably employ 4-5
| programmers to work on something full time, with enough left
| over to cover the lulls in income. Make it 1.2 and there's
| enough for an admin person to prioritise, liaise with
| Mozilla, and do the financials. That's 150x less than
| Wikipedia.
|
| I also agree with you that direct donations won't solve this,
| whether it's 100k or 100M
| glenstein wrote:
| >I think the scale you're thinking of is unnecessary.
|
| Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a
| year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software
| development, so something on the order of 250 million. So
| it sounds like you're saying an additional 1 million is a
| difference between 3% market share and 30% market share.
|
| We seem to be on the same page about what plausibly could
| come in from revenue, but I just don't see how that moves
| the needle in ways that people seem to be expecting. I feel
| like the psychological comfort from pointing to that as an
| underutilized option is intended to make the point that
| there's not enough resources for software development. But
| if you compare it to what they're already spending, they're
| spending more than would ever be generated from such
| revenue. Which admittedly is a little bit off-track from
| the point you're making. It'll be interesting to see if
| Lady Bird does well with economics along the lines of what
| you're describing.
| maccard wrote:
| > Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million
| a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to
| software development, so something on the order of 250
| million.
|
| Lots of peoples "supposed" problem is giving money to
| Mozilla, not Firefox. If the goal is to give people a way
| to support FF development, then this does achieve that.
| But FF doesn't need _that_ (which I think you and I both
| agree on).
|
| > but I just don't see how that moves the needle in ways
| that people seem to be expecting
|
| Agreed. I think if it was 1M, it wouldn't have any
| impact, but and if it was 100M then people would complain
| that it's not being used on $INSERT_THING_THEY_WANT_HERE.
|
| > It'll be interesting to see if Lady Bird does well with
| economics along the lines of what you're describing.
|
| What Firefox is doing isn't growing their market share,
| so hitching another $1/10/100M isn't going to do anything
| to that without a strategy to actually make it happen. I
| think, honestly, there's a decent chance for a new
| project to survive in here. It could even be a Firefox
| fork, but it needs to be free of the baggage and strategy
| of Mozilla, and Firefox IMO - just as Edge has somehow
| made a resurgance as a chromium browser. I think Ladybird
| could work out too, if they can find a way to break
| through.
|
| Spoken as a die hard FF user for almost 20 years!
| glenstein wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree with most or all of this and it's
| refreshing to see thoughtful commentary amidst a tidal
| wave of crazy speculation. I actually think it would be
| much more fair, in the event that FF raised $100MM from
| donations, to have to be accountable to user perceptions
| of where those resources are going. Although my
| experience from hn commentary is that people are
| extremely confused about this and vocal minorities create
| an illusion of consensus, and express their concerns in
| drive-by fashion that isn't super amenable to a focused
| conversation that could be tied to a credible strategy.
|
| The best version of the argument I think one can make
| relates to Firefox OS. There, at long last, in contrast
| to spurious complaints about the VPN, Pocket, etc. etc.,
| it seems like Mozilla really did invest serious resources
| in it at the expense of browser development, and it _did_
| happen during the critical period of time where they
| collapsed from 35ish percent to 3 percent. But it was on
| behalf of a major bet of the kind that I would like to
| think everyone welcomed, so, a real risk, but for a
| respectable strategy. And, they _did_ produce Quantum, a
| rewrite from the ground up with spectacular improvements
| in speed and stability (which makes the present day
| arguments feel like they are at least vestigal echoes of
| an old argument that was, in its time, legitimate). But
| you never hear critics talk in a measured way like that.
|
| I do agree that the vocal minority would claim the
| donations are not being used on $INSERT_THING, which is
| always a different thing every time you ask (I recently
| heard that it was all the VC fund's fault which was a new
| one), and they're already talking like that right now.
| But I suppose it wouldn't hurt to be open to that
| revenue. I think it's plausible they could pull something
| on the order of $10MM or multiple tens of millions which
| I have to imagine is as good as what they're getting from
| Pocket and the VPN etc.
|
| I suppose the only disagreement, or frustration I have
| here is with the perception of "baggage" which has, in my
| opinion, largely been manufactured in hn comment
| sections, every bit as detached from a strategy to grow
| market share as Mozilla's actual strategy.
| maccard wrote:
| I actually agree with you fully.
|
| > with the perception of "baggage" which has, in my
| opinion, largely been manufactured in hn comment sections
|
| To bring this back full circle, the same group are the
| ones who want to fund Firefox-not-Mozilla. And if every
| comment in this thread cost $200 to post and went
| straight to Firefox development, it wouldn't fund a
| single developer for a year.
| devit wrote:
| The use for donations could be for a single person whose job
| is to check the upstream code for any antifeatures
| (telemetry, ads, product placements, online service defaults,
| Google as paid default search engine, etc.) not in the user's
| interest and revert them, as well as bundling any useful
| extension like uBlock Origin and verifying them.
|
| That needs minimal effort compared to building a browser,
| because it doesn't involve doing any of the hard work, but
| just removing code that serves to line the pockets of those
| doing most of the work at the expense of the user.
| glenstein wrote:
| Do I understand correctly that you believe Mozilla doesn't
| currently have the resources necessary to do that from
| their $500MM in annual revenue? It sounds like you are
| talking about an ombudsman or something, which highlights
| my point here, which is that these are philosophical
| criticisms disguised as commentary on raising revenue.
|
| Also the mission you are describing sounds like something
| that you might expect from a Chromium browser that has to
| regularly revert Google-driven changes. At Mozilla, they
| already own the browser and they could account for this in
| their ground-level philosophy.
| kiicia wrote:
| Web browser is something I would pay subscription in a
| heartbeat, and I mean it, it is my actual OS now
| matheist wrote:
| > _intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox_
|
| This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be
| accepted.
|
| I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three
| months from submission to merge, including one round of code
| review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large
| patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the
| reality that my priorities are not their priorities.
|
| They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in
| accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| > This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality
| that my priorities are not their priorities.
|
| I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more
| willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a
| whole...
|
| > They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in
| accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.
|
| I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches
| being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project
| goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in
| theory would be considered.
|
| However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much
| different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s.
| When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I
| interacted with who openly valued community interaction and
| encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to
| mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had
| died off by the late 2010s.
| lolinder wrote:
| When you left, do you have a sense for how many developers
| were actually working on Firefox full-time? I'm curious
| because people always say that Firefox would be impossible
| to fund, pointing to Mozilla's expenses, but I've never
| seen someone actually put forward the math for what portion
| of those expenses are actually Firefox.
| prox wrote:
| This is really telling of the current vibe I get from
| Firefox, and why I feel resistant to support them beyond
| "It's a bit more private than default Chrome"
|
| Companies gonna company and expand in the wrong direction
| if they forget were they come frome.
| maccard wrote:
| That doesn't seem unreasonable for a drive by PR to an
| enormous project. I contributed go an open source rust
| project a few years back and my first PR took weeks of back
| and forth. My second and following ones were merged in days.
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| FWIW, when Waterfox was part of S1, I'd make sure all work we
| did was open and there were the odd times I had our dept push
| upstream patches if/when needed.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| The problem with most non profits like Mozilla is that a big %
| of their budget goes to leeches that flood said companies, and
| then to justify their job as the company crashes down from
| bloat, they start introducing garbage like what Mozilla tried
| to do.
|
| Riot games is a perfect example, company filled with
| nepobabies, game is losing players at an alarming rate so now
| the ever growing company nepobabies try to justify their job by
| trying to destroy every free 2 play reward, to the point where
| players started boycotting (they had to backtrack).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It could be interesting to do this and raise money in the same
| way that Mozilla does -- by selling the default search engine.
| The difference being that all of the money would go to
| improving Firefox instead of all the random not-Firefox things
| Mozilla currently does with it.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| If you can get your organisation registered as a deductible
| gift recipient (DGR) in Australia, then I'll bet a few people
| here -- myself included -- would contribute. Being able to help
| out _and_ reduce ones tax bill at the same time seems to have a
| magical effect on some people -- again, myself included.
| maccard wrote:
| Herein lies the problem. Multiply this by 10 countries, add
| in accountant fees and legal fees, HCOL adjustments, and
| you've spent $20k very very quickly before you've written a
| line of code. You might suggest "only do this if there are
| more than X donations from a country", but now I need to
| bookkerp this which again takes away from the core goal of
| writing code for Firefox. Maybe I hire a fractional
| accountant to manage it? Now there's an annual overhead to
| cover.
|
| How much would you be willing to spot, $20 a year? To pay
| someone in Europe full time you'd need about 6k people to
| donate that annually. My experience here is that what people
| say they value and what they actually value when asked to
| open their wallets are two very different things
| guy234 wrote:
| why wouldn't those people just donate to Mozilla?
| rwmj wrote:
| Because historically that money has been squandered on
| C-suite salaries, irrelevant acquisitions (Pocket), and
| development that has nothing to do with the browser (like
| failing to make a phone OS).
| Narishma wrote:
| AFAICT donations to Mozilla aren't used to fund Firefox
| development.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" The money brought in would be used to pay an open source
| developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent
| upstream to the Mozilla Firefox."_
|
| For years I've advocated a system that's a halfway measure
| between normal commercial for-profit software and free open-
| source. The organizational structure would be a nonprofit
| revenue-neutral company or cooperative society (depending on
| company law in the domiciled country) where either full or
| part-time programmers would be compensated for their work.
|
| As I see it, this would have a number of advantages over both
| traditional for-profit software and open-source. For instance,
| (a) a revenue-neutral structure would mean a program's purchase
| price would be much cheaper (and there'd be less pirating given
| the perception the user wasn't getting ripped off), (b) new
| features and updates would be more timely than is the case with
| much open-source software, (c) hard jobs such as overhauling
| outdated software (and restructuring or modernizing large
| spaghetti code developed over years by many developers who've
| only worked on small sections of the code, etc.) would more
| likely to be tackled than with free open-source projects
| (LibreOffice, GIMP for instance), (d) bugs and user
| queries/requests would be tackled in a more timely manner.
|
| Programs would come as either compiled binaries for a minimal
| cost or as free open-source code. The license could be
| structured so that only the user who compiles the code would be
| licensed to used it (general distribution would be prohibited).
| This would provide an incentive to buy the binary but still
| keep code open for general inspection/security etc.
|
| Likely there are variations on this model that could also work.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The license could be structured so that only the user who
| compiles the code would be licensed to used it (general
| distribution would be prohibited).
|
| Firefox is already GPL'ed, such a license change would
| violate that (along with many libraries it depends on also
| being GPL'ed). This is not possible.
|
| Here at ardour.org, we use this:
|
| > either compiled binaries for a minimal cost or as free
| open-source code.
|
| (technically, name your own price for the binaries)
|
| and retain the GPL. It works fine for us.
| IAmLiterallyAB wrote:
| Firefox is under the MPL, not the GPL
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Oops, thanks for the correction.
| ta8645 wrote:
| The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year
| is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone
| justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money
| would be going to this one person?
| lolinder wrote:
| You can't donate to Firefox anyway--you can only donate to
| the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on
| Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can
| only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation.
|
| So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has
| actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is
| working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.
| prox wrote:
| This structure sounds completely broken. So the people who
| work on it answer only to the people who hold the purse,
| but not the people (the Foundation). Do I get that right?
| lolinder wrote:
| The Foundation owns the Corporation, so technically the
| Corporation answers to the Foundation, but because the
| Foundation is a non-profit it can't actually transfer
| resources to its for-profit arm, only the other way
| around.
|
| Usually the theory with this kind of setup is that the
| Corporation is profitable and forwards funds to the
| Foundation so that the foundation can accomplish its
| work. But putting Firefox in the Foundation implies that
| someone somewhere thought that Firefox would be
| profitable rather than being the core mission that needs
| subsidization. I believe this was someone related to the
| Google deal, but it's definitely been a major problem
| ever since.
| infinitifall wrote:
| Let me get this straight, NOT A SINGLE DOLLAR of
| donations are used to fund development for Firefox!?
|
| How many are under the false impression of "helping
| Firefox" when in reality their donations are used to fund
| advocacy campaigns [0] and managerial bloat [1]?
|
| [0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#freque
| ntly-as...
|
| [1] https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-
| money-invest...
| stefan_ wrote:
| Wait until you hear how many Wikipedia editors and
| servers are paid from the many millions of donations they
| aggressively beg for every year..
| lolinder wrote:
| To the best of my knowledge that is correct, yes. The way
| that they've structured it they can't legally do
| otherwise.
| culi wrote:
| To be fair, Mozilla has come out with a lot of new services
| that have dramatically decreased their dependency on
| Google. They went from over 95% of their revenue being
| google royalties to less than 70% just in the past half
| decade
| taftster wrote:
| Still though. 70% is a lot to be dependent on Google for.
| And the way Google operates these days, I'm honestly
| surprised that their interest in Firefox remains.
| Olreich wrote:
| Google wants Firefox to remain viable (or at least one
| other browser) so that they can avoid monopoly issues
| with Chrome. If they pay Firefox to keep Google as
| default search engine, they keep 80% of the money they'd
| get by having those users use Chrome, and they keep the
| other browser alive, but not enough to really keep up
| with Chrome's feature set.
|
| That's the most likely bet they are making, similar to
| Apple/Android or Safari/Chrome. Spending a minor fraction
| of your revenue to avoid anti-trust probably makes sense
| for them.
| lolinder wrote:
| That's progress, but also: why is this the structure? It
| makes no sense to not send donations to the thing they
| think they're donating to, and I really can't believe
| that there's no way they could have structured it to make
| that work.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per
| year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was_
|
| Mozilla's donations are roughly equal to their CEO's
| compensation [1][2].
|
| (I've donated to Mozilla before and recently brought in
| friends who gave 6+ figures. I've been encouraging them to,
| and they've been successful so far in, charging back for
| those donations.)
|
| [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-
| US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... "$7.8M in donations from
| the public, grants from foundations, and government funding"
| in 2023
|
| [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-
| fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7
| intelVISA wrote:
| Surely to avoid the org dysfunction that sunk Firefox the
| person 'creating' this fork would also be actively building it?
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you're rich you should consider this a menu. Chrome is about
| to be split from Google which will be a soft reboot that could go
| badly or really well, but at the least will lead into an awkward
| period for them. Alternatively, they won't be split, which will
| create public anger and likely true accusations of quid pro quo,
| and possibly a tiny bluesky-sized stampede to alternatives.
|
| Chrome will be told they can't pay Firefox for nothing anymore,
| and Firefox will reply with a not-uninstallable crypto casino or
| something (why are you complaining, you can turn it off by simply
| changing 6 unintelligible about:settings, hiding the banner with
| CSS, and blocking the telemetry and auto-updates at your
| router...)
|
| Grab one of these, and run a TV commercial for a week or two.
| You'll get 20% market share in a couple months. Hire all of these
| fork developers, and let them keep running their own projects as
| forks of yours. Pick up people who get laid off from Firefox.
|
| Zen and Floorp look interesting, and _librewolf.overrides.cfg_ is
| new to me. Making Zen your main sell for marketing purposes, but
| also distributing LibreWolf for people who prefer a classic setup
| would make sense. Or if you speak Japanese, replace Zen with
| Floorp.
|
| If you think you can do better than Mozilla, here's your chance!
| One day we'll be explaining to people that Apache Firefox is
| unmaintained buggy garbage, and that when old people say
| "Firefox" they mean Zen.
| b0dhimind wrote:
| I'd still take the crypto casino Firefox over Chrome :-D JK.
| But yeah my main issue is performance. I honestly like the AI
| features, dunno why people so triggered over that. Don't think
| it affects performance at all. The privacy invasion I need to
| look into more, maybe only inasfar as it affects performance as
| well.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > The Floorp project is a much newer entrant. It is developed by
| a community of Japanese students called Ablaze. Development is
| hosted on GitHub, and the project solicits donations via GitHub
| donations. According to its donations page, donors who contribute
| at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page--
| but the ads, which are displayed as shortcuts with a "sponsored"
| label, can be turned off in the settings. I've been unable to
| find any information about the project governance or legal
| structure of Ablaze.
|
| So a group of contributors, presumably upset about Mozilla making
| "user-hostile" changes like displaying ads in the new tab page,
| create a fork of Firefox, and then solicit donations for their
| fork using the _exact same_ revenue model?
| sedatk wrote:
| Sponsored ads and donations are different revenue models.
| Mozilla has always been collecting donations and nobody had a
| problem with it.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Mozilla has always been collecting donations and nobody had
| a problem with it.
|
| There are a ton of people who complain about Mozilla taking
| donations. It shows up in most HN threads about the
| mismanagement of Firefox.
| mimasama wrote:
| I think the issue is that the donations Mozilla receive
| don't go to Firefox's development. This is not the case
| with Floorp, Ladybird and Pale Moon where donations and
| sponsorship money (PM used to accept sponsors but they
| don't now) do go to development.
| mimasama wrote:
| It's not the exact same revenue model. Floorp doesn't use
| tracking whatsoever for sponsored ads in the home page. And
| donations to Floorp directly goes to development, unlike in
| Mozilla.
| tcfunk wrote:
| I've been using zen lately mostly for the combination of
| "essentials" + "workspace" tab management scheme. I love having a
| space for tabs while also having a spot to pin stuff like email
| and bluesky which doesn't necessarily fit into one category or
| other.
|
| Admittedly I haven't tried many other options, except sidebery
| which was good but not quite there for me.
| atulvi wrote:
| OK, this is it. The perfect firefox fork. The last thing I need
| is the ability to self host a ff sync server so my bookmarks
| are synced with my phone.
| Propelloni wrote:
| Lucky us, you can do this today, because, of course, it is
| Mozilla, so it is open source: https://github.com/mozilla-
| services/syncstorage-rs
| jofzar wrote:
| These are arc features (which were copied/ported to zen) and
| are the main reason I use ARC atm on my Mac. On PC I use zen
| because arc sucks on PC. It's hard to lose these features imo.
| nicoty wrote:
| In case you didn't know, Arc isn't being developed since 5
| months now. The company has moved on to another project
| called Dia.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| Firefox has vertical tabs and tab groups now; those aren't
| specific to Zen
| paldepind2 wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but neither vertical tabs nor tab
| groups are fully ready and shipped.
|
| From a quick search, it seems that you need to make edits in
| `about:config` to enable tab groups and use nightly to access
| vertical tabs.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Vertical tabs are available in the latest stable release.
| They're pretty basic compared to tree style tabs and
| sideberry, though.
| impalallama wrote:
| Zen seems interesting but their website crashes when I try and
| visit which is a bit of deal breaker when it comes to a web
| browser
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| IMO no real need for anything but Firefox Beta and Nightly now. A
| bit faster, faster features. Finally, native vertical tabs. Fully
| functioning Ublock origin. Browsing life is good.
| chasil wrote:
| Are the rhel RPM distributions of Firefox considered forks at
| all?
|
| They are maintained for a _very_ long time.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Probably not. However, I do believe Fedora and Debian configure
| and patch out the most egregious Mozilla-isms that infect
| Firefox already.
| jzb wrote:
| IIRC Red Hat now just ships the Firefox ESRs and does not
| support a single version for the entire life of a RHEL release.
| You probably wouldn't want a 10-year old browser anyway. And,
| in RHEL 10, they have stopped packaging Firefox in favor of a
| Flatpak.
| nathabonfim59 wrote:
| I've been using Zen since it's first public release and I must
| say, the development peace is simply incredible!
|
| It's rough around the edges sometimes, but the quality of life
| features are chef's kiss:
|
| <Ctrl + Shift + C> to copy the current webpage, workspaces, even
| an easier profile manager (just like chrome's).
| lucb1e wrote:
| How does one "copy a webpage"? Do you mean taking a screenshot
| or the equivalent of Ctrl+AC?
| nguyenkien wrote:
| No, just copy url
| lucb1e wrote:
| Same number of keys in any other browser: Ctrl+LC
| amelius wrote:
| If we can't even trust Firefox anymore, how can we trust these
| other browsers?
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| > Waterfox is a browser that began in 2011 as an independent
| project by Alex Kontos while he was a student. It was acquired
| and then un-acquired by Internet-advertising company System1. Its
| site does not, at least at the moment, have enough specifics
| about the browser's differences and features to compel me to take
| it for a test drive. Are the others that much more descriptive in
| their features on their website?
|
| IMO Waterfox being around for 14 years warrants a bit of a closer
| look as to why it's still around after so long...
| broadsidepicnic wrote:
| well, a browser owned (and de-owned) by an internet advertising
| company is enough for me not to ever touch that. We already
| have a chrome, which is one of the reasons we're in this mess
| to start with.
|
| And yea, I did use waterfox like a decade ago.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yeah, I'm pretty uncomfortable with Waterfox because of that
| episode. In the HN thread the creator responded to complaints
| about this privacy-unfriendly turn by saying that they "tried
| to stay away from branding Waterfox as" being about privacy
| or user control. That's fine, but an immediate turnoff for me
| even now that the advertising company is apparently out of
| the picture.
|
| If Waterfox isn't about privacy or user control, who knows
| where it gets sold next or what the dev adds to it next?
|
| Edit: I just realized that the dev is the one who wrote the
| grandparent comment. Maybe you have an explanation that would
| help?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22343476
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| Well the issue I've always found is that privacy is a
| sliding scale. At the time especially, everyone was after
| "absolute" privacy - i.e. everything Tor offers. But people
| were coming in to use Waterfox with that expectation and it
| wasn't meeting it - but communicating how "much" privacy
| you're being offered is difficult. I did settle on the
| current terminology and when people ask in user forums I
| try and make it clear that it's a balance of usability and
| privacy - as much as possible without breaking websites.
|
| Not sure I agree with your understanding wrt Waterfox not
| being about user control? Always has been and the feature
| set matches that and that hasn't changed.
| lolinder wrote:
| Well, this is the opening line from that comment:
|
| > > Those needs are privacy related and having control
| over the software you use.
|
| > That's fair enough, but I've tried to stay away from
| branding Waterfox as such to try and avoid issues like
| this.
|
| I guess maybe you were only talking about privacy and not
| about "having control over the software"?
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| Well, System1 was/is a search aggregator. That falls under
| ad-tech but at the time no-one cared about the former and
| only the latter.
|
| Lots of browsers make search engines and lots of search
| engines make browsers, so it made (and still does) make a lot
| of sense.
|
| I understand seeing ad-tech and immediately expecting the
| worst, but a quick Look into what it actually meant and I
| never understood why people were so in arms about it?
| homebrewer wrote:
| FWIW, I too bounced after looking around the website and not
| seeing any concrete information about how it's different from
| upstream (long before reading this article). Maybe you could
| add a short bullet point list right on the home page, it
| shouldn't require much work?
| culi wrote:
| Wait, aren't you a developer of Waterfox? Why don't you just
| tell us...
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43206110
|
| (Just to avoid c+p massive blocks of text)
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > The Floorp project is a much newer entrant.... According to its
| donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may
| submit ads to feature in the new tab page
|
| So if I get it right, people can 'donate' money to floorp project
| in exchange for service (advertisement).
|
| Like when I go to the grocery shop and I make a donation, in
| exchange I get back home with a pack of beer.
|
| I didn't know I was donating so much, my dumb ass thought I was
| just buying stuff. Got to put that on my Tax sheet.
| dv_dt wrote:
| A more insidious aspect of grocery shoppings is that companies
| can pay for better placement on the store shelves & floor.
| joshuaturner wrote:
| can donate* for better placement
| labster wrote:
| Sounds like a good way to increase donations to
| shareholders.
| rswail wrote:
| Our local grocery duopoly (Australia) not only charge for
| placement, but are now demanding that suppliers pay for
| transport between the supermarkets central and regional
| distribution warehouses, but will only take delivery
| centrally.
|
| That's on top of some products (eg bread) being actually
| stocked on the shelves by the supplier.
|
| Basically supermarkets are just local distribution warehouses
| with everything else either paid for by the supplier or the
| purchaser (eg shelf picking/checkout).
| notpushkin wrote:
| > I didn't know I was donating so much, my dumb ass thought I
| was just buying stuff. Got to put that on my Tax sheet.
|
| It's not tax deductible, though (and even if you didn't get
| anything in return, I don't think Floorp is a registred charity
| anyway).
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| It was a joke, i know it's not deductible :)
|
| Made me realize I never deduced all the open source project i
| gave to tho.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I take your point, but it is worth noting that gifts, services,
| and goods are often exchanged for money and termed "donations"
| when the dollar amount greatly exceeds what one would normally
| pay, with the understanding that the proceeds go to a certain
| cause/group/organization.
| culi wrote:
| $100 for an ad generally seems like a steal of a deal. If
| anything it's underpaying
| mimasama wrote:
| Yeah "donations" is not the right word, it's more like
| "sponsorship"... It does work though, I haven't heard of
| CubeSoft before I used Floorp and I have one of its PDF tools
| installed now. This is how advertising should work, not the
| tracking ads Mozilla (and idc if they're trying to make it
| "privacy-preserving" or the data aggregated, it's still
| tracking), Google, and co. want
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| I'm rockin the LibreWolf on my laptop and gosh darnit I kinda
| like it.
|
| Also Waterfox on the surveillance phone. Seems AOK so far.
| nialv7 wrote:
| Honestly I just wish mozilla can get their act together,
| fragmentation is usually a bad idea...
| rk06 wrote:
| Is there any fork which disables firefox's auto upgrade? I am not
| able disable it on Firefox or zen browser.
| 418tpot wrote:
| You can do this with vanilla Firefox using policies.json[1].
| Check out `DisableAppUpdate` attribute.
|
| If you're using Firefox from nixpkgs this is already disabled
| by default[2].
|
| [1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-
| usi...
|
| [2]:
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.11/pkgs/appli...
| ksynwa wrote:
| The problem with Firefox forks I have: - you don't know when they
| are gonna keel over and die. - non-existent support from distro
| package repositories. Void Linux for example has an
| understandable policy of not providing Firefox and Chromium
| forks. I really don't wanna install them from appimages or
| fatpak.
|
| I have found using firefox provided by my distro with something
| like arkenfox to be a decent medium but it sucks that this is
| required in the first place. I wonder if distro repository
| maintainers try to package Firefox with better defaults but I
| don't know how to look for that.
| creesch wrote:
| That, and in many cases they get "stuck" at the firefox version
| they are based on which means that newer things might not work
| and more importantly security fixes might not be applied.
| criddell wrote:
| > you don't know when they are gonna keel over and die
|
| Would it really matter? Browsers are pretty much a commodity
| item. Of all the big pieces of software in your life, I can't
| imagine one easier to replace than a browser.
| ksynwa wrote:
| You have to then go through the trouble of redoing persistent
| logins, transferring bookmarks, history, plugins, etc. That's
| a nontrivial amount of effort right there.
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| Zen looks like Arc Browser, but Firefox-based and open-source.
| Exactly what I'm looking for!
|
| The UX pattern for tabs in Arc is amazing. No, it's not just
| "vertical tabs". It's an innovative blend of the concepts of
| bookmarks and open tabs. Sort of like files: they can be open or
| closed, and live in a folder hierarchy.
|
| But the development of Arc stopped half a year ago (except
| security Chromium updates), with a well-working Mac version, but
| Windows version which is barely usable and no Linux support. The
| creators decided to focus on some sort of "AI agent" browser.
|
| So I came looking for alternatives that would be cross-platform,
| have working adblockers, and preferably be open-source. There are
| some "Firefox transformation" projects like ArcFox, but they are
| clumsy to set up and usually only copy the general look, not the
| actually useful features like nested folders. There are
| extensions like "Tree style tabs" but they work a different way
| than Arc.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Try Sidebery extension. It has nested tabs, workspaces and much
| much more.
| majesticmerc wrote:
| I tried Sidebery for a couple of months off the back of
| multiple recommendations and while it has some decent
| features, I found it surprisingly lacking in terms of basic
| features like "close multiple tabs". I also found it
| regularly would semi-regularly prevent me from clicking on
| tabs which was frustrating until I restarted the extension or
| Firefox.
|
| In the end I found good old Tree Style Tabs was better. I
| just wish it had an easier UX for creating named tab groups.
| Pesopes wrote:
| I use Sidebery a lot and I'd like to know what exactly you
| mean by "close multiple tabs"? I currently drag with right
| click in Sidebery and then click close tabs in the popup
| menu, however I don't really like doing this way. How is it
| done in Tree Style Tabs?
| aquariusDue wrote:
| Oh! As another Sideberry user thanks for sharing this. I
| usually Ctrl+click or Shift+click tabs before middle
| mouse clicking to delete all selected.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I've been using Zen for a few months now and love it. There are
| some rough edges (the article mentions how customizing it is
| confusing because multiple mechanisms affect different parts of
| the app). However, it's getting regular updates, and once it's
| set up, it's really a pleasure to use.
|
| Apart from the elegant, minimalist user interface, I
| particularly like how it implements workspaces. It makes it
| super easy to switch between personal and work contexts.
|
| I highly recommend it.
| askvictor wrote:
| Same here. My main gripe has been address in the latest
| update - the icon! The old stylised 'Z' just didn't look a
| like a browser icon when alt-tabbing, and I had to think
| about where my browser is, rather than instinctively going
| straight to it. At this point my brain only seems to accept
| that browser icons are circle-based.
|
| The vertical tabs and side-by-side tabs are fantastic
| zamalek wrote:
| Honestly, Zen should be upstreamed. It would be a great way to
| introduce FOMO.
| eviks wrote:
| Not a single fork with the basic convenience of changing
| keybinds?
| Mossy9 wrote:
| Zen has quite a nice array of keybinds available in their basic
| settings menu. Just had a conflict of ctrl+shift+l opening some
| dev tools window instead of BitWarden, and the browser hotkey
| was easy to change. Speaking of keyboards, Tridactyl
| (https://docs.zen-browser.app/faq#how-can-i-sync-my-data-
| acro...) works out of the box in Zen as well
| eviks wrote:
| Better than the default, but not a nice one - the basics of
| tab navigation (previous/next) are missing, and you can't
| assign multiple shortcuts to a command.
|
| And extensions don't cover it since they fail outside of a
| webpage context, so if you have a key to change tabs, you
| can't just (reliably) use it - it will break your changing
| sequence once you switch to a protected Settings tab
| jaggs wrote:
| I used LibreWolf for a long time, and Waterfox before that. Had
| to leave LibreWolf though because the audio quality was so awful
| (videos etc).
| rocketvole wrote:
| huh, I haven't noticed this, although I wasn't actually
| listening for poor audio quality. What is your OS?
| jaggs wrote:
| Windows 10. I didn't notice it until I had to switch mid-way
| through a YouTube video to Chrome, and suddenly the audio was
| significantly louder and clearer. Shocked me.
| deeter72 wrote:
| Not released yet, but honorable mention to ladybird:
| https://ladybird.org/
| kruuuder wrote:
| Unrelated to Firefox though.
| jbaber wrote:
| I am a bit confused by their moving from C++ to Swift instead
| of Rust. It sounds a bit Apple-first. I get that it ports to
| Linux okay, but will it be hard to make it work with Windows
| some day?
| whytevuhuni wrote:
| Rust makes more sense if you were to start from scratch, but
| the Ladybird devs said that their code is already heavily
| OOP, so it maps to Swift a lot better.
|
| Also, variety is good, we have Servo in Rust (although I wish
| they'd make an actual browser around it too).
| slekker wrote:
| Yeah I guess it's the same story as with the TSC port to Go
| ndiddy wrote:
| The main reasons were that Swift supports OOP and Rust
| doesn't (useful because web standards are object-oriented and
| it's easier to follow the specs when you can model them in
| your code), and that Swift supports C++ interoperability
| instead of just C interoperability like Rust (makes it easier
| to incrementally move to Swift in an existing C++ codebase).
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Stock Firefox + Siebery extension is all I need.
| immibis wrote:
| Even though Mozilla tracks you and sells your tracking data?
| adhamsalama wrote:
| I do toggle off all the telemetry settings I can find. But
| you're talking as if there's a browser company that doesn't
| do that, or at least less than Mozilla, so can you suggest
| any of those?
| culi wrote:
| What browser do you use?
|
| You can turn off all Firefox telemetry in the settings.
| alok-g wrote:
| In Firefox, you can choose a local html file as your home page,
| but not as a new tab page. This is allegedly because of some
| security concerns. Using extentions allows for a limited
| workaround where the page needs to be re-imported each time it is
| edited.
|
| The surprising part to me is that the same applies to the forks
| too.
|
| If opening a local file for the home page not a security concern,
| why should it be for the new tab page. I understand that giving
| local files access to extensions could lead to issues, however,
| it should not need an extension to use a local file as a new tab
| page.
|
| Note: I maintain my bookmarks in a local html file, which I make
| into my home page, new tab page, across browsers, and then sync
| this file across devices using Syncthing.
| Xaphiosis wrote:
| These restrictions are super-annoying indeed, especially with
| no way to override them. Example: I like mouse gestures. People
| say oh yes, you can have mouse gestures in Firefox, here, there
| are several extensions. Well, open a new tab with a mouse
| gesture. Cool. Now try close it. Same goes for any other
| "special" page.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| Gnu IceCat for me with Privacy Badger and libreJS. I would pay
| 10$ every month for Gnu IceCat, the _ONLY_ firefox fork with no
| telemetry.
|
| _the ONLY webkit based zero telemetry browser is Kagis Orion_
| eudhxhdhsb32 wrote:
| > Gnu IceCat, the ONLY firefox fork with no telemetry.
|
| Why would you think that? Plenty of other forks like LibreWolf
| and IronFox have removed all telemetry.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I like the idea of using a Firefox fork, but one thing in
| particular keeps me tied to Firefox - my Firefox account and the
| sync feature.
|
| I make heavy use of bookmarks and switch between devices
| frequently. Manually keeping those synced would be a bit of a
| nightmare.
|
| Assuming that Firefox forks can use Firefox extensions, I imagine
| I could get around this problem by using some kind of bookmark
| extension. I don't know what options are available for that,
| though.
| eloisius wrote:
| I'm using Sync on LibreWolf just fine. I am interested in self
| hosting sync, but not there yet. I think it would be cool if
| someone could set up a sync server and charge a small fee for
| accounts. It's all OSS and setting it up doesn't look
| impossible. Just tedious.
| Croftengea wrote:
| I use two forks on a daily basis - Floorp and Waterfox. Both
| sync FF accounts just fine.
| Mossy9 wrote:
| Zen supports FF sync out of the box. Just started trying it
| out, and it synced at least all the extensions without issue
| https://docs.zen-browser.app/faq#how-can-i-sync-my-data-acro...
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I held off for a long time and tried to find multiple ways to
| "make Firefox work" and eventually just gave up on that. There
| are multiple ways to preserve the rights of web users and Mozilla
| isn't doing a great job there, so stop trying to save something
| that isn't working and redirect those efforts into something that
| will.
| voytec wrote:
| I've tried using LibreWolf on MacOS but there's a few annoying
| bugs.
|
| HN has a really small text size for me and I usually read HN at
| 120-133% text size. LibreWolf does not remember this setting on
| per-site basis and even opening HN-to-HN link in a new tab
| doesn't preserve text size and I need to increase text size
| constantly.
|
| In addition, posting images to Bluesky doesn't work. Every
| attempt results in an image of proper size but consisting of only
| vertical lines. For this, I need to fall back to Firefox or use
| Safari.
|
| Even if the first of above problems is a "feature", the latter is
| definitely a bug. I haven't filled a report yet. But for now, I'm
| planning to test Zen.
| Daunk wrote:
| You can use the Stylus extension to get HN to look any way you
| want. There are some good community made styles for HN as well.
| culi wrote:
| Take me back to when user stylesheets were a normal browser
| feature and not a special extension
| saint_yossarian wrote:
| Check `browser.zoom.siteSpecific` in `about:config`, in Firefox
| it defaults to true.
| voytec wrote:
| Firefox, LibreWolf and Zen, all have this value set to true
| by default. This behavior is only present in LibreWolf.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| I switched to GNU IceCat about a week ago, following the ToS /
| privacy changes in FF. I have never used chrome, and never will
| on principle, in fact I now use zero google services, or best I
| can. Disabling webfonts / google fonts has been interesting.
| Anyway, IceCat is growing on me, once I figured out how to
| gradually enable bits of js for the sites I frequent (not many
| left at this point). I have a physical aversion to adverts, so I
| feel better that my limited browsing data is not being sold by
| mozilla. One thing I havent yet worked out is enabling webGL in
| IceCat, since I want to get back into my Zig/wasm/WebGL stuff
| soon.
|
| I'm interested if HN has stats for visitor browser-agent, but
| also for account-holders. Since I wonder how many users actually
| switched in the last month, or if it was all just huff and puff.
| phatfish wrote:
| Huff and puff i hope, considering it was a case of Firefox
| being nit-picked to death again by the privacy crowd that get a
| Chrome alternative for free.
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...
|
| I understand that a donation on the Mozilla Foundation is not a
| way to fund Firefox development, but i believe that the
| services that get sold through Firefox like Mozilla VPN do fund
| development. Maybe you could sign up for one (you don't have to
| use it) to ensure IceCat continues to exist?
|
| Full disclosure, I have a 1 year sub to Mozilla VPN, I even
| used it once or twice.
| uoaei wrote:
| Tangential, but what are folks' opinions on Vivaldi?
| odiroot wrote:
| I'm generally happy with the "original" Firefox. Just wished it
| played better with KDE Plasma, especially on Wayland. It ignores
| the window decoration settings among other things.
| johnkizer wrote:
| Go to Customize Toolbar, check "Title Bar" at the bottom - that
| gives a Plasma-native title bar with window controls.
| odiroot wrote:
| Sure but then you lose the screen estate. I guess you can't
| have it all.
| RKFADU_UOFCCLEL wrote:
| > Mozilla's actions have been rubbing many Firefox fans the wrong
| way as of late
|
| Just wait until they discover that the web doesn't allow
| arbitrary browsers anymore, due to a certain "security" company
| doing deep inspection and blocking anything that isn't Safari,
| Firefox or Chrome.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Only a matter of time. Remote attestation is one of the most
| subversive technologies ever invented and they have already
| tried to make it a web standard, it's only a matter of time
| before they try again and succeed.
|
| We have all this free and open source software and it doesn't
| matter because they'll refuse us service if we use it. Only
| corporation owned computers will pass attestation. If you own
| your machine you will be turned away from every web site.
| culi wrote:
| I recently did this exercise as well. There are a lot of browsers
| not mentioned that you can find here,[0] but there's one big
| missing one imo.
|
| The Tor browser is forked from Firefox to support the Tor
| Network. On top of the actual tor network it's filled to the brim
| with novel and unique privacy enhancing features. Mullvad (the
| VPN company) recently did a partnership with Tor to create the
| Mullvad Browser.[1] It's exactly the Tor browser but without the
| onion protocol part. Instead it just has all the anti-
| fingerprinting and privacy enhancing features.
|
| I ended up going with that browser as it's the strongest privacy-
| focused Firefox fork option
|
| [0] https://alternativeto.net/software/firefox/
|
| [1] https://support.torproject.org/mullvad-browser/
| bizzyb wrote:
| Haven't seen this mentioned yet, not a fork but a suite of
| configs and mods for Firefox.
|
| https://codeberg.org/celenity/Phoenix
| quickslowdown wrote:
| This looks cool, am I missing the Windows client, or is it only
| available on *nix systems?
| jug wrote:
| The ecosystem of forks is currently healthy but what concerns me
| is a lack of Firefox browser support leading to lagging in
| standards support over time as the browser goes out of fashion
| for ideological or marketing reasons that this article touches
| upon.
|
| All forks depend on a strong Firefox base and no fork seems to do
| heavy lifting in terms of web standards, or as a prioritized
| feature. Instead, they focus on enhancing UX or adhering to open
| source ideals, but this does little to improve the core browser.
| :-/
|
| It remains to be seen if we'll have a new Phoenix moment out of
| Firefox...? Or does that future belong to Ladybird?
| worewood wrote:
| Seamonkey needs more love. The best one for me, does not try to
| be "modern" - keeps the interface unchanged and only updates real
| functionality.
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