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Comment by timetraveller26 | Hacker News Reader

Firefox, after 20 years, once again has an advantage over the other browsers.

Let's hope for new generations to get tired of so many ads to finally ditch chrome.

Unfortunately, new generations seem to be completely fine with this. People in general, they're just so completely captured by the dark patterns that I get the impression they cannot even imagine a world without them.

I install uBlock Origin on every browser I come across. Everybody notices. The internet just feels better, somehow. People can't quite explain what changed, but they know.

And now you'll no longer be able to wake people up and show them the real world.

It's funny. Over 20 years ago, I got people to switch to Firefox because of the AdBlock extension.

In case people don't know, Firefox was the first major browser to even have extensions.

There is only XUL!

Long dead. Now there is no XUL, only (private user) data (that Mozilla sells for revenue)

I think they're making a Ghostbusters joke, btw

Mozilla made the joke themselves, about Firefox. "There is no data, there is only XUL" was an official XUL catchphrase. But now there is no XUL, and Mozilla sells private user data, so it's reversed.

Also, Firebug showed what was possible with developer tools. Inspecting elements or network requests or whatever else wasn't really a thing before that extension.

I wonder if new generations will just get better and better at visually blocking off ads when they read. So many layouts are so common that I read a lot of sites and have absolutely no idea what ads they're running because 30-odd years of browsing rendered HTML pages has trained my brain to block off and not process certain areas of the page.

I'm not an advertising apologist, just pointing out that I can remember what ads were on a freemium TV station I watched two nights ago and what ads were on a radio station I listened to this afternoon but I can't remember a single web ad since...I don't know when. This might be because the TV ads have audio and visual, and with radio my alternative at the moment was looking out the window of my car, but web ads just seem very easy to mentally filter.

uBlock Origin Lite works decently on Chrome so I doubt this will help migration to Firefox.

Exactly. The difference between the two is not qualitatively different for 99% of users.

I noticed that UBO Lite doesn't cause the ad boxes to vanish like UBO does. You see this on the likes of the weather.com webpage.

That's manifest V3 working as intended.

Exactly. The Lite version is basically "hiding" ads rather than blocking. The MV2 version stops the requests themselves from being made which save your bandwidth and battery. The light version lacks those benefits

Advertisers get to pretend their ads are being seen.

Websites get paid.

Users don't see ads.

Sounds like a win-win-win?

Users are still being tracked and your websites are still slower to load. More of your bandwidth and CPU is being used.

If you want a sophisticated version of what you think this is, see Ad Nauseum. It's uBlock Origin except they create a fake "profile" for you and selectively click ads under the hood to throw advertisers off

It doesn't block tracking.

New generations don't 'browse' web anymore. They 'consume' YouTube, Instagram, Android TV and other walled gardens. These generation don't even know they could change contents being displayed on their device to their wish. For them it's just whatever the app shows. They don't understand Web, extensions, DNS etc. I don't have hope for new generations. We're are the old men now yelling at AI and App Stores.

If only they focused on making Firefox the definitive good browser instead of a platform for their AI efforts.

Firefox will never convince people to leave chrome on philosophy alone. I detest Chrome with a passion and refuse to touch it with a ten-foot pole, but cannot in good faith recommend Firefox to anyone in today’s world. “It kinda works” is about as far a compliment you can give it.

What doesn’t work? It’s my daily driver and it renders every website I visit.

What do you think doesn’t work on Firefox? Aside from Google products purposely crippled, everything works just fine in my experience. It’s fast and stable. If there’s a bunch of AI stuff in it, I’ve not seen it. Of course I believe it exists, I just don’t ever read popups anyways. To be fair, I probably use 5% of the browser’s capability (I imagine many are like me). I browse websites and I have UBO installed.

In the last few months, I've seen a huge upsurge of sites that simply won't work for me in Firefox.

Not sure if it's the FF + Linux combination. Should probably try with a fresh profile to confirm.

It sucks, but I'm in on FF all the way. If much of the web stops working for me, it just means I have more time on my hands!

Anecdotally my own experience is consistent with this with the same platform+browser combination.

It appears that there are now significant numbers of sites - or at least noticeable parts or features of sites - that rely on Google-specific APIs and haven't been tested on other browsers.

However visiting those sites from Apple devices is often similarly frustrating. I'm not sure this is an anti-Firefox thing. It seems more of a not realising there are other browsers apart from Chromium-based ones thing.

I kinda wondered myself if this was some kind of coordinated effort to make Firefox not work. It wouldn't surprise me if it was later discovered that Google paid some Linux subsystem maintainer to slip in some nefarious code somewhere that altered the way Linux implements rendering specifications ever so slightly such that Firefox appeared broken. Just the conspiracy theorist in me.

You can change your UA and add Sec-CH-UA to match Chromium if you want to avoid the (non-ADA compliant) browser bias.

Slack "huddles" (video chat) work on everything except Firefox+Linux. Haven't tried changing my user agent yet, only just got onto Slack for work.

This one is specifically Linux (Wayland). if you set your user agent to Macintosh it will work; or at least it did a few months ago when I came across this. I've since resigned to using the electron bundle.

Google meet, Discord, Zoom all handle Mozilla/Linux. Slack hasn't figured it out yet.

name any of them?

"It kinda works" is factually incorrect.

I have used Firefox exclusively every day on macOS for the past year, several hours a day, and have not one single time had to open another browser. None of the customers of my B2B saas use Firefox. Not once have I needed to test in their browsers except quick smoke testing to prove to myself that the rendering and details are identical. All my other browsing is indistinguishable from before when I used Chrome, and from on mobile where I (tragically) am forced by Apple's monopoly to use Safari.

Do you have evidence to support your false claim?

Agreed, I can't understand where these experiences come from.

I only ever use Firefox, at work, at home, mobile. Since forever, as long as there has been a Firefox (and Mozilla before that, Netscape prior).

There was one time about 8-10 years ago that I encountered a site that didn't work in Firefox, was some weird proprietary training module at work.

So yes, I did encounter one site that didn't work in Firefox in the last ~20 years. One.

I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if it was Google astroturfing every single thread relating to FF. Yes, Mozilla isn't perfect and had some questionable decisions, but we're somehow okay with the worse option out of the two? Somehow, Mozilla's decisions are enough to never use FF, but Google's infinitely many horrible ones are acceptable for.... What reason?

> Somehow, Mozilla's decisions are enough to never use FF, but Google's infinitely many horrible ones are acceptable for.... What reason?

I think these people are real and predate AI. I think it comes down to a fundamental psychology in how the two browsers are marketed online. Firefox users would say "Firefox is better than Chrome." Chrome users would say "Chrome is good." Firefox is touted as a better browser on the principle of the freedom it gives its users, and paradoxically, that draws heavy scrutiny.

I don't think I am doing a Goomba fallacy here. People that claim to care about privacy and browser freedom will express disgust with Mozilla then, in the same breath, say they are opting into Chrome out of spite, which is 100x worse.

> say they are opting into Chrome out of spite, which is 100x worse.

That is what is frustrating, indeed.

Firefox is not perfect. Nothing is perfect. There have been changes in Firefox over the years that I don't like. (I'm still hurting from it moving the tabs to the top, so annoying.)

In a scale of 1 (100% user-hostile) to 10 (absolutely perfect user-centered browser), Firefox only scores a, let's say, eight.

But chrome scores a solid 2, so obviously I'm not going to use it, ever, no matter if Firefox makes the occasional mis-step.

I concur that it is strange seeing the FF/Mozilla vs chrome arguments. Its almost as if some large percentage of users here relied on web ads for their income.

Weird!

I would imagine a very small number of people on here rely on ads for income, but I could be wrong. That's just not the shape of company most devs work for.

> I would imagine a very small number of people on here rely on ads for income, but I could be wrong. That's just not the shape of company most devs work for.

Who do you think most developers work for?

Google, Facebook, two massive developer employers which are advertising companies.

There is a reason the quote “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" is famous.

Because so many developers are doing nothing but that, pushing advertising.

Just take a look at some other people kinda trying to refute me but confirming my point that there’s an increasingly frustrating wave of websites and features that simply refuse to work on Firefox (or Firefox+Linux).

I know when you’re balls deep in your own little box it’s hard to see the cracks in the foundation. But they’re very much there.

> Just take a look at

> some other people

"Look around, it's everywhere" isn't evidence, it's misdirection.

I will not be made to go find evidence of your false claim. That's on you.

I daily Zen (Firefox under the hood) and the only thing that I consistently need to open other browsers for is direct USB support (mouse/keyboard drivers in the browser). Other than that, I don't remember when was the last time something wasn't working in Firefox.

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