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Comment by alcover | Hacker News Reader

So.. Chrome is too big to fork. Then why don't we make a bare-bones OSS no-DRM browser with only a subset of JS and CSS and promote at the same time an old-school webring of 'virtous' websites.

If it catches on (and it could since it'd be free and fast), maybe some big sites would evolve to advertise themselves as 'virtous'.

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I don't get it, Firefox already exists and is a complete OSS reimplementation of everything Chrome does (and works better imo). Only thing to do is convince sites to test more on Firefox. This strategy worked last time around.

Firefox gives up 40-60% of the performance of Chrome on my platform, using common browser benchmarks. I don't see Firefox as a substitute good for Chrome. It has much worse performance, worse security, and lacks features I want. Its performance is equivalent to using Chrome on an 8-year-old CPU. The only thing it has going for it is being perceived as counter-cultural, despite the fact that it is 100% funded by Google.

Your claim is that you suffer a _40 to 60_% performance impact by using Firefox from Chrome? Would you like to try that again? I see egregious comments like this of Firefox every so often and I always have to wonder if the last time people making these remarks actually used Firefox was in the pre-Quantum era (assuming one charitable interpretation). To claim that its performance is equivalent to using Chrome on a CPU from 2013 is disingenuous at best.

Firefox is not just perceived as 'counter-cultural', its importance lies in the fact that not using Chrome and similar browsers is also a vote not to support a browser monoculture online.

I invite you to try Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on an Apple Silicon CPU right now. Firefox is the slowest of these by a HUGE margin.

Not only the slowest, it also uses the most energy of all browsers on Mac. Scrolling the old Reddit spikes the CPU to 10x more than Brave.

I've been using Firefox forever but the problem is - it's now too big. Because it's - like you mention - following Chrome. To stay relevant, FF implements all the bloat Chrome churns out. Even worse, it's tempted to follow Chromes' extension manifest to stay compatible.

So I meant it looks like a lost battle. And it may be better to reboot to a smaller, nifter browser that a small team/community can handle.

edit: and of course cut all ties with Google financing.

Firefox may work great for many people, but it certainly doesn't for me. I finally gave up completely on it late last year.

Something like Ladybird? https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird

I think it wants to implement all of JS eventually though.

  it wants to implement all of JS

ES6 why not. But the whole Web API is crazy. Bluetooth ? Barcode ? Geolocation ? What the hell. Let's go back to a documents web.

Also small JS engines already exist, like QuickJS.

dillo.org

More recently, Ladybird, which was discussed last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809126

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