Ask HN: With trust in Firefox gone, is Chrome-ish the only option? As a privacy conscious user that loves open source software, I'm really puzzled regarding browsers right now. It's confusing. It feels like basically everything is Chrome nowadays. Are there any alternatives to Chrome-based browsers? Best wishes and have a wonderful week |
The idea that using a chrome fork is somehow better is ridiculous.
long answer, firefox have a strong community and solid product but lacking a sustainable business model and a comeptitive pr team. their tech is really good, the people in charge just really suck.
This "you can use Chrome without Google tracking" is an illusion. Sure, right now, you can have ungoogled Chrome, but what happens a few years down the line when Firefox is dead and we only have one engine, mostly backed by a questionnable corp, to use the internet?
In long run: I hope Ladybird will become usable in the next couple of years.
You’ll get accustomed to where things are as you go. After a few days or weeks, chances are you’re not going to even think about it again, or miss the old dev tools.
What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than the other players?
Google did give us a lot of warning that they would greatly restrict ad-blocking and tracker-blocking, so most of that angst has already been and gone.
HN used to gush over how great Chrome was. Some of us were saying, um guys, you know google is in the business of selling advertising right? Nobody seemed to care. Now mozilla's lawyers have them change some legalese and they are instantly the bad guys.
Because anyone who cared knew this was coming in the near future after they published manifest v3 several years ago. Back then there was a huge kerfuffle, but since then anyone who cared has moved on.
But FF was supposed to remain the shiny counterexample (despite acting also shady since years).
Personally, even though my trust in Firefox (and especially Mozilla) has been eroding rapidly in recent years, it's still so much greater than what I have for Google and Chrome that it's not even a choice.
Therefore, I agree with GP that this rhetoric is exhausting.
Bringing up the issues with FF and Mozilla is important and deserves attention. This kind of misleading FUD is not and does not.
Hm, my lived experience is the inverse, and both seem sort of important to talk about.
We've been hearing about Chrome implementing the same privacy protections as Safari as a transgression for years, years, and years, as it was delayed again and again.
It was ex-Mozilla people who brought to my attention that they were deeply alarmed by the privacy-concious-Do-Not-Track people making this pivot and that it was a really bad sign.
Generally, I try to avoid loaded questions phrased like "why is X considered as A while Y is considered as B?" because it suffers from high failure rates
(likelihood you're the first person to realize the truth; likelihood these things ended up sorted neatly into opposing binaries; undecidability of 'how come everyone believes the wrong thing?'; uncomfortable conversation when someone starts from 'how come everyone believes the wrong thing?' and you have to sort of lead them gently to 'is it possible you are missing something, not everyone else?' without making it obvious)
Well Apple didn’t turn around and try to push the Topics API..
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Topics_API
(Just to be clear. Mozilla is opposed to it too. They are just documenting it and don’t plan to implement the API)
I will never understand why people attack Firefox so eagerly at every given opportunity.
[0]: https://circuitbulletin.com/what-is-global-privacy-control-t... [1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control
10 posts daily about it on HN.
Having worked there, it's concerning, since if you saw the discussions that go on with regard to user data, you'd know they are trying to make sure they word things correctly, not... insert weasel words to grab your data.
At this writing, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43322922 has 962 points and 485 comments, and is the latest in a long line of posts. What are you on about?
> What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than the other players?
There is the thing where Mozilla explicitly claimed to uphold a higher standard.
It's not the resources. It's their holier than thou attitude.
Particularly given the browser itself is open source and already has many eyes on it.
I’m going to wait and see what Mozilla’s next few releases are like before passing judgement.
For what is worth, I still use Firefox.
If you fear Mozilla's telemetry going forward, you could pick a fork that disables it. E.g., Mullvad or Zen seem pretty good.
But on the other hand, if you really want to get off the Firefox bandwagon, yes, Chromium-based browsers are a viable alternative. Although, in my view, there are only 2 Chromium-based browsers that are fairly trustworthy (i.e., well updated, not insecure) and that are not full-on spyware: Vivaldi and Brave.
Regardless, the “forks” are good only for disabling features that you don't want. But keep in mind that the hard work is still done by Mozilla, Google or Apple, it costs a shit ton of money to maintain a browser engine and all of them are financed by ad-tech (Google's ad-tech to be more specific).
Firefox also still supports Manifest V2, which lets you use the full, ultra-powerful version of uBlock Origin. There's no better privacy protection than uBlock.
Firefox is a much better choice than any Chromium based browser for the privacy conscious.
I don't get why you needed to mention this, when the story became viral before Brendan Eich communicated it.
Do you feel that people misunderstood that, in fact, Mozilla does intend to sell user data?
Note that I'm still using and advocating for Firefox, I just found this offtopic attack odd.
Mozilla is apparently run by corporate drones who made a blunder (as drones do). It happens. They corrected it. No need to attack or dismiss Firefox in general. Firefox is excellent.
yes, mozilla's TOS update is a bad thing, but switching to chrome (or chromium-based) for it is really cutting your nose to spite your face.
Probably rage-bait.
I will continue supporting Mozilla and using Firefox.
I don't think trust in Firefox should be gone.
If anything, it's worse, in that they EXPLICITLY admit that they are getting kickbacks—“'monetary' or 'other valuable consideration'”—for providing your user information.
- Leaving firefox for chrome due to privacy concerns only makes sense if chrome has better privacy, which it definitely doesn't. Recent changes might bring them closer together, but firefox is very far from catching up.
- We should compare firefox to chrome or firefox-based to chromium-based. Browsers like waterfox, pale moon, edge, brave all use source code from one browser but with different privacy, so it doesn't make sense to say "I don't like firefox so I'll use a chromium based one".
- Bonus extra point just because this is hacker news, check out Ladybird, it's making awesome progress!
Is the browser ecosystem supposed to get better if we collapse it to just webkit and blink? Websites track us, browsers track us, web extensions track us, ISPs track us, OSs track us, cell networks track us.
Government passing legit privacy laws is the literal only way to prevent this - not browser choice. Unfortunately gov is fully captured by corporate interests most places in the world.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...
Holy smokes. Mozilla is slowly tightening their grip on Firefox. We're looking at another SourceForge/StackOverflow/Reddit type of private equity takeover, I'm sure.
Edit. Forgot: StackOverflow and Trello on that list.
Now that solar panels have been shown increase the risk of people falling off rooftops, is coal the only option?
(Solar disaster: 100,000 litres of sun rays leaked out of photovoltaic system)
Stick with Firefox and WebKit based browsers.
Browser engines[1] are hard to get right. But not impossible.
Google did a great job with the Blink engine. So much so that even Microsoft caved in and is using it now. So Chrome-ish might seem the better option.
So should we cry that Mozilla is imploding under years of bad leadership? Yes! They are the main driver behind Gecko engine and it will likely suffer for it over time.
The good news is that we like with chrome-ish (blink based) browsers (such as Thorium) have a number of options. Librewolf, Waterfox and Floorp are all nice and usable cross platform implementations using the Gecko engine. On your Android device you can stay on Gecko with Waterfox or IronWolf.
Gecko will not implode from one day to another even if Mozilla does. And even if Mozilla does then maybe the community can pick up the pieces. But it will be a tough job.
There is then a risk of monopoly which is never good. It is then very positive as you state that Ladybird is getting velocity[2]. They target alpha in 2026, beta in 2027 with general release in 2028. This is seriously good news which cannot be understated. We have hope! People who care should really follow Andreas updates on Youtube[3]. So while 2028 seems far away you will see that they have already gotten very far and have a good trajectory.
A few years ago when Microsoft gave up and went with Blink I was really worried as Mozilla has been in a downwards spiral for years. But Ladybird (and by extension LibWeb) gives me reason for optimism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser) [3] https://www.youtube.com/@LadybirdBrowser/videos
There have been a several episodes of online uproar against Mozilla over the last couple decades. IMO they’ve either been mountains out of molehills (because the feature is still privacy-protecting or can be disabled etc) or Mozilla apologized and changed course.
It is — AFAIK, Google pays Apple enough money for the default search engine deal to cover Safari development along with all its components.
Though I guess it's not extensible so you'll have to get some other way to block ads.
Both work well with Firefox Sync, and also support addons, which is great.
To be fair, OP asked if "Chrome-ish" is the only option, i.e. Chromium-based browsers - not Chrome itself.
Even so, I don't think the implication is that Chromium is better than Firefox, but that without Firefox only Chromium-based browsers remain. "If I don't want to use Firefox, is it really only Chrome-clones available?"
I'm a founder of Mozilla (not latecomer or looter). The McKinseyites now running it into the ground deserve criticism from me as well as others who see what is going on. If you don't want to see it, keep using Firefox. Their terms and privacy policy changes still stink, they are integrating Anonym, and they're turning things on by default that we at Brave do not.
Try engaging with the substance of the arguments, not attacking the person making them.
Well, if by "corrected" you mean "acknowledged that the public perception of the change was correct", then I agree.
That said, I agree that Firefox is still the least worst option.
However, I must admit I am intrigued by seeing Topics posited as a stain.
I strongly believe we would have been obviously better off as consumers with topics, than the status quo, a wild west of tracking, but AFAIK, weakly, it could have entrenched incumbents further.*
Selfishly, for my individual interests, I wish Apple had proposed it.
I have a feeling it would have been more dogged in working through it, rather than Google's laissez-faire "oh well! guess we get to keep tracking" when the bottom feeders complained.**
That's probably why it seems unachievable to me to rank on Goodness, opinions abound and they're all reasonable.
* i.e. even if the topics are retrievable via JS by any page, I'd assume there's some clever way for Google to do something strictly superior from an advertiser perspective leveraging some E2E integration, ex. perhaps most pages have to wait till load to get topics, but Google can do a special preflight request given a special HEAD tag, idk
** My weak understanding is this essentially was put on pause/shit-canned after UK competition authorities relayed general concern, and I don't remember Google giving up so easily on anything ever
Despite the outcry of manifest v3, if I understand it correctly it’s a standardize version of how Apple implements content blocking on the web, similar functionality works well in Safari.
The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”
Don't get me wrong, even after this I still use Firefox and I think it's better than Chrome in the privacy axis. But it's really annoying that they're still trying to paint themselves treating your privacy as sacred when that's obviously not the case.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...