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Comment by cmcaleer | Hacker News Reader

Man, I want to be able to work for the Mozilla of yore too. But it simply just isn't what it was, and over the years its true purpose has become more and more clear.

After their alarming treatment of security researchers documented here [0], I've been doubting whether to continue using Firefox at all. For what it's worth I still do, because I think not using Chrome is a fight worth fighting and that alarming behaviour was just from the VPN team, but if any similar behaviour happens with the Firefox team I'm just going to drop it altogether.

I want Mozilla and Firefox to succeed. I want diversity in browser engines. I want to see the culture change happen. It still can! But the debt created with each passing year and each percentage point of market share lost makes it harder and harder.

[0]: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/08/03/1

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I went all-in a couple of years ago, switching almost all of my computers from macOS to Linux (Fedora Workstation and Arch), and where I still have macOS, I use Firefox, not even having Chrome installed. Now I doubt it's worth it. But what else do we have these days? Safari? (Limited to just one OS.)

I remember these old-days of Linux with other browsers pre-installed. Like Konqueror (I see it's still in development), or others even more niche ones. Cannot even remember their names.

Chrome was originally based on Apple WebKit (before they forked it), which was originally based on KHTML, Konqueror's engine.

It's still worth it because you really don't even have to think about it.

I don't use any Google products/services except when I need to at work. Firefox is perfectly fine for now; I agree that Mozilla's future is concerning but there is absolutely no downside to sticking with Firefox for now.

It's too bad that Mozilla doesn't push for more adoption; the vast majority of users would never know the difference between Firefox and Chrome once they're browsing. It's not like it's an inferior product.

Except for all of those sites that use chrome specific features so the site puts up an alert saying best viewed in chrome

I have never seen a "best viewed in Chrome" alert. Maybe in a tech demo or something like that. Even Google products work fine in Firefox.

I’ve never seen an alert either, but I’ve seen plenty of sites and pages that only work in Chrome. Just yesterday I was trying to pay a credit card bill and the page kept breaking in Firefox. Out of desperation I tried it in Chrome and it worked.

Do Slack huddles still require Chrome? That was the most recent one I recall bumping into

I've almost exclusively seen them on "luxury" apartment websites, where they're completely ignorable . oh, and tidepool, a diabetes data visualization website, where it is actually required.

A bank I use rewrote all their sites, bigger fonts, much slower and blocks firefox, and it's not just user-agent.

There are a few government website where I live that block Firefox, although those are just checking the user-agent so easy to work around.

And yes I complain all the time about it.

It's exceedingly rare and you can almost always discard the warning with no adverse outcome.

> Safari? (Limited to just one OS.)

The underlying WebKit engine is the interesting part and is portable, with multiple other browsers using it.

Why wouldn't it be worth it?

- The only non-Chrome browser available across 3 operating systems I use.

- The only mobile browser that supports extensions.

These two alone make it an objectively a better solution for me than Chrome or Safari, regardless of how I feel about any of them. If I was on iOS and didn't run Linux on my personal computer, then Safari might've been a worthy alternative. Since I'm not, Firefox is really the only one that satisfies both of those criteria, no "ideological" reasons necessary.

If those arguments are supposed to be slam dunks, then it's probably worth being pedantic about the second - standard Firefox, as downloaded from app stores, allows fewer than 2 dozen officially vetted Add-ons to be installed. [1]

It's not a great state of affairs. This is speaking as someone who's used Firefox as primary browser for many, many years.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?promoted=re...

Is there any other way of running full uBO on a phone?

Open a website in Firefox, click on three dots, click on "install", and you have an ad-free version of the app you'd otherwise find in the Play Store.

Just that one extension alone makes Firefox objectively better than Chrome or any of its Android forks. It is a slam dunk. Having all extensions available is a nice cherry on top, but no other desktop extension is as important as uBO.

I switched from iOS to Android so I could use Firefox, but looked for alternatives when their extension support got so bad. Kiwi Browser has been a huge improvement over Firefox for me: supports extensions, fast, frequent updates. I wouldn't recommend Firefox to anyone, but I would recommend Kiwi Browser to everyone. I really wish I could find another open source Chromium-based Android browser that supported extensions though.

IMHO, Safari has been consistently good for 20 years, and the need for defacto iOS support, and defacto chrome desktop support means the desktop version is generally supported most places.

I tend to use Firefox elsewhere too, primarily because of my disdain/distrust for/of Google and Microsoft. I know the WebKit/Konqueror relationship soured after a few years of Apple giving them massive, untenable patch sets, but haven’t kept up with their development. In the early 2000s it was really impressive what they were doing compared to the Mozilla bohemoth of the day.

I also find it sad that Opera and other implementations are out of the running. I’m sure one day some Blink challenger will arrive, just like some Gecko challenger arrived, just like some IE challenger arrived, but table stakes are so much higher than they were 15 years ago.

> But what else do we have these days? Safari?

Safari in WSL

Edge Linux :P

I just run Degoogled Chromium forks (Cromite/Thorium) these days. Maybe its still Chrome underneath, but if I'm blocking Google Ads and their native browser tracking, at least its still a middle finger to Google's business model.

> Safari in WSL

How? There is no Safari for Linux and never has been, AFAIK.

There was Safari for Windows until 5.x and it was good -- I liked it and used a Windows XP VM just to run it on Linux. Dead and gone now.

You can run Epiphany on WSL and get a Webkit browser that way, but that is not at all what you said.

Sorry I meant in Wine.

If you mean running the 2012 release of Safari 5 under WINE today, I think that using such an old browser is probably a bad plan.

For the entire life of Mozilla, the tech has been fantastic and the leadership... suboptimal. It's always been my greatest frustration with them, they're permanently unable to accept and change from criticism. They simply ignore it or brush it off.

Alarming treatment of security researchers made me think threats. Not communicating is bad. But is it more alarming than how Google handled the libwebp vulnerability for instance?

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