As always, I really don't get continuing to support the chrome/chromium monopoly, and everything else is pretty much secondary. I use FF on everything, except my phone, where I have FF and Orion...
As always, I really don't get continuing to support the chrome/chromium monopoly, and everything else is pretty much secondary. I use FF on everything, except my phone, where I have FF and Orion (mainly because orion seems to be the only way to get good adblock on iphone), and I'll jump back to FF or Safari at the first sign of that not being the case.
That's before we get into any controversies or dodgy practices or anything else. It's just not good to have a full chromium monopoly on browsers, and I get that yes FF is basically what mac was during the windows early era, in that google is throwing money at them so they can say "see, we're not really a monopoly", but I think it's a super easy thing to support.
This is reason enough for me to never use any chromium based browser. I just wish more people realized how bad the situation actually is. A single company controlling the only engine to access the...
continuing to support the chrome/chromium monopoly
This is reason enough for me to never use any chromium based browser. I just wish more people realized how bad the situation actually is. A single company controlling the only engine to access the internet (at least for the average person) is extremely bad for society.
As of now, Safari is essentially the only competitor. But even that is only on apple devices.
I put a little bit of the blame for Blink + V8 being virtually the only technologies any new browsers use on Mozilla. Gecko is just not designed to be decoupled from Firefox and embedded into...
I put a little bit of the blame for Blink + V8 being virtually the only technologies any new browsers use on Mozilla. Gecko is just not designed to be decoupled from Firefox and embedded into other applications the way that Blink is. If you've ever wondered why it seems like all the projects that use Gecko are more like forks of Firefox than an fresh application that just depends on some of it's core components, that's probably because they are.
We need a proper competitor to Blink, but Gecko just doesn't provide it. So this leaves the reasonable-ish options for building a browser as: build your own thing from scratch and probably never ship due to the size of the web standards, fork Firefox and hope to not be sunk by fighting against decisions that are different from how you want your browser to work, or make your own application and just embed Blink.
Actually it originally was — it is an entire application framework. That’s why Thunderbird is a Gecko-based application on desktop operating systems. Also, Gecko is still embeddable on Android....
Gecko is just not designed to be decoupled from Firefox and embedded into other applications the way that Blink is.
Actually it originally was — it is an entire application framework. That’s why Thunderbird is a Gecko-based application on desktop operating systems. Also, Gecko is still embeddable on Android.
The issue is really that Mozilla stopped maintaining XULRunner, which simplified building third-party desktop apps atop Gecko.
Yeah, I thought that was a shame. Having extensions no longer able to make a lot of changes to the browser UI was a let down. It bothers me that I can use an awesome extension like tree style tabs...
Yeah, I thought that was a shame. Having extensions no longer able to make a lot of changes to the browser UI was a let down. It bothers me that I can use an awesome extension like tree style tabs to give me vertical tabs but I can’t get rid of the built in horizontal tabs without manually modifying the browser. And even then, because TST is now a sidebar instead of its own distinct feature, I can’t have it open at the same time as the bookmarks or history sidebar.
FYI, Firefox has native vertical tabs now and it removes horizontal tab bar without modifying userChrome.css https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-sidebar-access-tools-and-vertical-tabs
I’ll check it out, but unless it has the main functionality of tree style tabs I’m unlikely to change. I tried it. It's still not as good as tree style tabs because it takes too much vertical...
I’ll check it out, but unless it has the main functionality of tree style tabs I’m unlikely to change.
I tried it. It's still not as good as tree style tabs because it takes too much vertical space and it doesn't have the hierarchical organization to it. Worse, after enabling it, it put a permanant additional sidebar in the sidebar that took up more space which I could not remove.
I say that, but somehow I have managed to do it after fiddling with the settings in several different ways it somehow worked, and now I have neither the additional sidebar nor the horizontal tab bar, so it's kind of perfect now, in a way?
My tinfoil hat theory is that someone at Mozilla realized that because there's no money in the engine portion of a browser it is a poor investment to actively feed their competition. What I mean...
My tinfoil hat theory is that someone at Mozilla realized that because there's no money in the engine portion of a browser it is a poor investment to actively feed their competition. What I mean by this is that Mozilla wants to draw funding from Firefox installs, not Gecko or Servo embeds, and that empowering competitors to provide yet more options that aren't Firefox is shooting themselves in the foot when they're so desperate to validate their existence.
I haven’t read the article, but I just wanted to say that I sometimes wish that I was a software engineer by profession or something like that, so that one of the side projects that I would invest...
I haven’t read the article, but I just wanted to say that I sometimes wish that I was a software engineer by profession or something like that, so that one of the side projects that I would invest my spare time in, would be to develop a FOSS browser from complete scratch, and work to gather other people around me to contribute to the project. It would probably take years before the first working release could be made available, but I believe that once the ball gets rolling, and a critical mass of word-of-mouth was reached, the project would take off. I wouldn’t even care to compete with Chromium’s market share. The purpose would be to serve privacy-conscious users who simply want a non-corporate, FOSS, and fully independent alternative. Finally, I would work on releasing a mobile version for Android and iOS with a one-time payment for lifelong access ($5 or less), to cover the costs of keeping it up on the app stores. But maybe someone is already working on something like that somewhere out there and I’m just not aware of it.
I was trying to remember Ladybird. I was going to bring it up as an example but couldn’t remember it’s name. It’s a great project. I hope that it reaches maturity someday.
I was trying to remember Ladybird. I was going to bring it up as an example but couldn’t remember it’s name. It’s a great project. I hope that it reaches maturity someday.
There are a lot of small projects in the FOSS space that more-or-less try what you described across a variety of domains. The majority never go anywhere for a variety of reasons. The absolute...
There are a lot of small projects in the FOSS space that more-or-less try what you described across a variety of domains. The majority never go anywhere for a variety of reasons. The absolute biggest is that the amount of work involved in an endeavor like you just described is massive. Talking at least tens of millions of dollars worth of man hours that need to be volunteered before you've really even got anything anyone is even going to be willing to give a try, and it'll still be incomplete and complained about a lot with a high uninstall rate.
That doesn't make it impossible. Some big protects do make it through, but not very many. And critically the ones that do generally get to define their own standards, like how Blender and Godot aren't really bound by what their competition is doing nor do they have advancing compatibility targets to hit. With a small team of volunteers and something like a browser you'd likely find that by the time you thought you'd finally fully implemented the entire CSS standard the standard now has new features your architecture didn't plan for.
There also is one other extra hurdle for targeting the privacy savvy: they don't like to install random stuff of unknown origin to fill critical roles like being literally the application you type every password into. So you also have to manage to build a lot of trust.
oof You’re right. I guess that there are just a lot of boxes that a new browser needs to tick right off the bat for it to be able to gain any significant install base.
So you also have to manage to build a lot of trust.
oof You’re right. I guess that there are just a lot of boxes that a new browser needs to tick right off the bat for it to be able to gain any significant install base.
One shortcut that’s proven itself somewhat is to be sufficiently novel/opinionated. Arc got a surprisingly large following in a very short timeframe, and while their marketing is at least...
One shortcut that’s proven itself somewhat is to be sufficiently novel/opinionated.
Arc got a surprisingly large following in a very short timeframe, and while their marketing is at least partially responsible, I think the bigger factor is that it’s just so different from anything else out there. It unapologetically makes vertical tabs a centerpiece of its UX, not even offering traditional tabs as an option, for example. That caught peoples’ attention and resonated with many of them in a way that an otherwise unremarkable fork of Chromium or Firefox never could.
Now that The Browser Company has officially put Arc into maintenance mode, its userbase is now jumping over to Zen Browser, which prior had been a Firefox fork that nobody heard of but since adopting a strategy of cloning Arc has seen a boom in popularity.
I think you're underestimating the amount of effort required to build a modern browser by three or four orders of magnitude. Microsoft, of all the bloated, overresourced organizations, declared...
I think you're underestimating the amount of effort required to build a modern browser by three or four orders of magnitude. Microsoft, of all the bloated, overresourced organizations, declared bankruptcy on it, and Edge is just a Chrome skin. Ladybird and Servo are great efforts, and I hope they succeed, but my strong prediction is that they won't: if either project ever reaches the point of making releases, I think that from the web user perspective, they'll be an awful lot closer to Dillo than real competition for Chrome or Firefox.
Indeed: browser engines are insanely complex and vast. Just look at the many, many modern web features that need to be built. Omitting any (non-experimental) feature is non-optional because it'll...
Indeed: browser engines are insanely complex and vast.
Just look at the many, many modern web features that need to be built. Omitting any (non-experimental) feature is non-optional because it'll break the web experience for the user.
The first web browser was invented in 1990. Since then there have been 35 years of nonstop, intense innovation and development to catch up on. A lot of features have been deprecated, but there are still tons of legacy features to implement.
Building a layout renderer that can render modern HTML and CSS (after they have been 'rendered' by JS) into their correct appearance is a grand challenge in itself. Once that is accomplished, there is only 99.8% of the mountain left to climb.
There are only 3 serious browser engines, maybe soon to be only 2, because it'd take monumental engineering resources to create a viable competitor. And after all that effort and money, you get an engine that—at best—does exactly what the existing engines do.
Oh man, this page bugs me every time I see it. The modern web should be the single example in the dictionary under the term "scope creep". The World Wide Web was supposed to be a system of...
Oh man, this page bugs me every time I see it. The modern web should be the single example in the dictionary under the term "scope creep". The World Wide Web was supposed to be a system of documents with hyperlinks between them. Nowadays I would venture that the majority of clickable items are not links, but buttons that do whatever interactive dohickey that keeps people largely on the same small collection of pages, if not the exact same page. And even then, the pages I'm refering to are not actually documents. When I go to https://tildes.net/~tech/1mvx/why_i_recommend_against_brave, I am not retrieving a document; I'm requesting a server to assemble a brand new page that is unique to me based on various bits of data that gets passed along with the request.
Yeah, web apps are neat, but I don't think they're entirely necessary, and I find it irritating when it's the only option. My Keychron keyboard comes with firmware configurable with Via, and if I want to configure it, the only option they give me is to use the webapp, which uses an API that only works on Chrome, and maybe some Chromium-based browsers. The API basically lets the browser have direct access to hardware on the computer, and although they've taken a lot of security measures, it just sounds on it's face to be a bad idea. The browser is supposed to be a sandbox, and tying it to your real hardware seems both unnecessary and unwise.
Google very clearly wanted to make the browser the center of a person's computing world. There's a reason why they invested so much in Chromebook, a glorified Linux distro that initially only ran Chrome. That's probably the reason why there are so many odd APIs that do things like grant direct access to hardware, and other things that were traditionally sandboxed away. But for reasons I won't get into, that wasn't really a great idea, so they relented by making them run Android apps. And funny enough, that still wasn't enough so now they can run Linux applications.
Regardless of my hot take, Pandora never could put the woes of the world back into the box. So I don't expect that to happen to the web. The closest scenario to that I can think of would be if Google would decide to play strict daddy and take some of those toys away, but I can't even imagine that working for APIs that are not already exclusive to Chrome.
Although it may have come from an unexpected source, personally I really enjoy the fact that the web has become what java applets promised to be. It's the first truly practical, universal VM. You...
Although it may have come from an unexpected source, personally I really enjoy the fact that the web has become what java applets promised to be. It's the first truly practical, universal VM. You can run fully featured, completely sandboxed applications that work the same on mobile and computers and anything in between.
There are so many apps which would have required a sketchy download in the past, which are now just webpages you can go on and then forget about - as it should be.
It's far more useful than a simple document retrieval protocol, which is why that is now a fairly rare use of the web. Which is fine. Things people don't really care about can fade into obscurity.
Honestly, I almost put in a shoutout to Java Web Start. I don't think that it's entirely accurate to say that everything is better now than it was before. We don't want to deal with an appeal to...
Honestly, I almost put in a shoutout to Java Web Start.
I don't think that it's entirely accurate to say that everything is better now than it was before. We don't want to deal with an appeal to novelty. Things are different, though; things are better in some ways but worse in others. For instance, web apps are more-or-less server-dependant and proprietary, which means that they are a big target for hacking and data leaks, so users no longer have the same expectations of privacy or security they had before. Previously a little knowhow would be enough to keep your data private and secure; now your security is largely just hopes and prayers that all the companies you deal with are secure, and most webapps will refuse to work without some degree of private information. Right now, for instance, I am trying to get access to exercise videos that my health plan offers through ClassPass, but they are refusing to allow me access without giving them a working credit card even though the health plan is supposed to be paying for it. And when I do get access, I won't be able to download them to use as I see fit; they will be locked inside their online streaming jail.
There is one critical difference between Trident/EdgeHTML (as used in IE and originally Edge) and Ladybird/Servo, though: the former were hard-tethered to Microsoft platforms. That alone basically...
There is one critical difference between Trident/EdgeHTML (as used in IE and originally Edge) and Ladybird/Servo, though: the former were hard-tethered to Microsoft platforms. That alone basically sealed the engine’s fate as a niche oddity, not being able to run on Android, Apple platforms, or Linux.
Ladybird and Servo on the other hand make portability a chief goal. Additionally, they aim to be highly embedding-friendly like WebKit is, the lack of which has turned out to be a severe weakness for Gecko.
I have decent success with Wipr for blocking ads in Safari. It even gets YouTube ads reliably. I can't say it's really worse than the uBlock Origin results I'm accustomed to on desktop.
I have decent success with Wipr for blocking ads in Safari. It even gets YouTube ads reliably.
I can't say it's really worse than the uBlock Origin results I'm accustomed to on desktop.
I used to be on the anti-Chromium-monopoly bandwagon, but as time goes on it's feeling more and more like a lost cause. Even as a tech savvy person, if you want to use a browser other than Chrome...
I used to be on the anti-Chromium-monopoly bandwagon, but as time goes on it's feeling more and more like a lost cause.
Even as a tech savvy person, if you want to use a browser other than Chrome you've got a lot of choices, but pretty much all of them other than FireFox are Chromium with a different color hat on. The only thing that could begin to shake Chrome from its roost is not another browser, but another browser engine that can be ported around and wrapped in new shells the same way Chromium can. The problem is that building a compliant html/javascript engine is hard and not very sexy or rewarding and anyone working on such a project would be banking on far-from-assured adoption by other browser projects down the road for their work to come to any kind of fruition. Probably something like Ladybird where a whole new browser and engine are being developed from scratch together are the best bet to give us something like that, so I have my fingers crossed for that to succeed down the road and hopefully lead to a new explosion of alternate non-Chromium-based browsers, but for the time being I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to weigh FireFox equally against the full myriad of Chromium-based browsers when considering a non-Chrome browser to use.
My unrealistic nerd pipe-dream future sees Chrome losing not to alternate browsers and browser engines, but a whole new protocol that replaces the god awful janky mess that the world wide web has become. Maybe a resurgence of the Gopherspace or some other medium that's more constrained and focused and simpler to write clients for.
I love the idea of Ladybird but it’s not realistic to think that a small upstart team will ever be able to catch up to the decades and millions Google has already invested. I’m completely naive...
Probably something like Ladybird where a whole new browser and engine are being developed from scratch together are the best bet
I love the idea of Ladybird but it’s not realistic to think that a small upstart team will ever be able to catch up to the decades and millions Google has already invested.
I’m completely naive about the internals of a modern browser engine, but an idea’s been kicking around in my head lately, wondering if there’s a way to break the work down into smaller chunks that can be tackled by independent dev teams. Basically, what if there was a spec to describe the APIs needed to knit together a modular engine from disparate, interoperable components?
Seems to me that small teams might have a chance if each one’s only responsible for maintaining one part of an engine. Teams could compete with each other to make the best module of a particular class, but the actual browsers people would use would be assembled from a variety of those.
On the plus side, I think that would create some really good market incentives for browser engine diversity and innovation. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s actually possible for a modular system to achieve the same kind of performance that a fully integrated one can. If there are bottlenecks between all the parts that could really slow things down, not to mention introduce a raft of new security issues like those the Chrome team (and Mozilla, to be fair) have worked so hard to eliminate from the current generation. But it would still be a worthwhile experiment to try, I think.
It would be swell if Apple would bring Safari back to windows. It's not like they don't have loads of cash and talent and have itunes still there. But alas. And of course they would never bring it...
It would be swell if Apple would bring Safari back to windows. It's not like they don't have loads of cash and talent and have itunes still there. But alas. And of course they would never bring it to Android.
My memories of Safari on Windows was that it was extremely buggy, crash-prone, and had terrible performance. I think they stopped supporting it because it just wasn't good and they didn't want to...
My memories of Safari on Windows was that it was extremely buggy, crash-prone, and had terrible performance. I think they stopped supporting it because it just wasn't good and they didn't want to besmirch their name any longer.
Okay, I have been looking at your comment for a day now not sure if I wanted to reply. Because, in principle I sort of do agree with you. In practice I do have some other thoughts but those aren't...
Okay, I have been looking at your comment for a day now not sure if I wanted to reply. Because, in principle I sort of do agree with you. In practice I do have some other thoughts but those aren't really relevant for why I am replying.
Even if you do not agree with implicitly supporting the chromium monopoly, people for now will keep using chromium browsers. Of all the choices available within that specific eco system there are still choices to be made. I think it is still valuable to be aware of what these different browsers offer and, maybe more importantly, how the companies behind them act. In this context it has become very clear to me that if Brave ever gets really big, big enough to start flexing muscles and influence things, it will not be with actual user interest in mind. Putting it pretty much in the same category as Google itself in as far as their actual user interest.
Making people aware of this fact might just steer them to a different Chromium flavor. At the same time, if they are already fed up with Google, Microsoft and other Chromium vendors it might actually drive them to exploring firefox.
So, even if you don't get people talking about these browsers, I still think it is necesairy to talk about these sorts of things. Possibly more productive than just loudly proclaiming that people should just use firefox. Because a bit monopoly in itself is such an abstract that it isn't going to convince people. That much has become very clear. What is left is talking about the actual details which includes things as highlighted by the article.
There is one more thing I can add to the list, though it wasn't as widely published about. At some point the team behind Brave decided to implement browser extension support from scratch and only...
There is one more thing I can add to the list, though it wasn't as widely published about. At some point the team behind Brave decided to implement browser extension support from scratch and only support specific extensions. Which sounds okay in theory until you realize how they did so. Without involving the extension creator they would fork a version of the extension and bake that into Brave. They did so without informing the extension creator, meanwhile users would still go to the extension creator for support who couldn't fix a thing.
Every time one of these things come up, the Brave team either is irked (but changes it anyway) or goes "oh, yeah we'll remove it in the future". This to me indicates a company culture where there is no thinking ahead about the impact of features or where they simply don't care as long as they aren't called out on it.
This consistent pattern over a period of years has, to me anyway, shown that issues such as privacy or even being user centered are not a core part of their thinking but merely a marketing gimmick.
Edit:
The article itself includes a perfect example of the attitude I am talking about
That said, the VP of Brave decided to go on twitter and claim that it was photoshopped. Even thought multiple independent people were claiming it was true, and posting screenshots about it. Did he… not know about his ad campaign? Was he lying? I'm deeply confused.
Firefox does the same thing. My home tab has sponsored links to Jet2Holidays, Vodafone and Hotels.com. I've also definitely seen some shady sponsored "news articles" below these frequently visited...
2020 — Brave puts ads in user's home screens
What is the absolute funniest thing a browser whose main selling point is having a strong built-in adblocker could do? If you thought "serving ads right in its UI" would be up there, you thought well.
In January 2020, Brave officially introduced the Sponsored Image program, directing its presentation to partner businesses and advertisers. By default, Brave Browser would start to display sponsored images as the background for the home and new tab pages.
Firefox does the same thing.
My home tab has sponsored links to Jet2Holidays, Vodafone and Hotels.com. I've also definitely seen some shady sponsored "news articles" below these frequently visited links, including advertisers like G2A, who have been known to openly facilitate the reselling of stolen game keys.
I believe Brave is a decent browser, but it was placed under greater scrutiny for labeling itself as a safe, private, and ad-free option by default. To my knowledge, Firefox never had builtin...
I believe Brave is a decent browser, but it was placed under greater scrutiny for labeling itself as a safe, private, and ad-free option by default. To my knowledge, Firefox never had builtin adblock. Much of what makes Firefox a good browser does not ship with Firefox.
Well yeah, because through the actions of the company it has become clear that these are mostly marketing terms and not actually at the core of how the company operates.
greater scrutiny for labeling itself as a safe, private, and ad-free option.
Well yeah, because through the actions of the company it has become clear that these are mostly marketing terms and not actually at the core of how the company operates.
Of course. I merely wanted to highlight that a company that advertises itself as uniquely ethical will naturally receive more criticism when they behave unethically.
Of course. I merely wanted to highlight that a company that advertises itself as uniquely ethical will naturally receive more criticism when they behave unethically.
You can turn off these sponsored links and news stories in your settings tab: Settings -> Home -> Deselect 'Sponsored Shortcuts' and 'Sponsored Stories' Not defending Firefox at all for this, I...
You can turn off these sponsored links and news stories in your settings tab:
Settings -> Home -> Deselect 'Sponsored Shortcuts' and 'Sponsored Stories'
Not defending Firefox at all for this, I hate that it's the default and these settings clearly aren't made to be found easily. But a couple clicks and they're gone forever.
True, of the entire list this might be one of the more “benign” things as this practice is fairly common in a lot of browsers. But, of course, this isn't the only point on the list, and it is just...
True, of the entire list this might be one of the more “benign” things as this practice is fairly common in a lot of browsers. But, of course, this isn't the only point on the list, and it is just part of the bigger context.
I specifically switched away from Android Firefox because it was literally the worst browser I've ever used. A slow buggy mess. I'm not a fan of Brave, but couldn't find any other alternative.
I specifically switched away from Android Firefox because it was literally the worst browser I've ever used. A slow buggy mess. I'm not a fan of Brave, but couldn't find any other alternative.
I personally can recommend Vivaldi, also comes with an ad blocker build in and the company behind it doesn't have the same shitty/shady record. https://vivaldi.com As a bit of background, Vivaldi...
I personally can recommend Vivaldi, also comes with an ad blocker build in and the company behind it doesn't have the same shitty/shady record.
As a bit of background, Vivaldi was founded by one of the founders of the original Opera.
From wikipedia:
Vivaldi began as a virtual community website that replaced My Opera, which was shut down by Opera Software in March 2014. Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner was angered by this decision because he believed that this community helped make the Opera web browser what it was. Tetzchner then launched the Vivaldi Community—a virtual community focused on providing registered users with a discussion forum, blogging service, and numerous other practical web services—to make up for My Opera's closure. Later, on January 27, 2015, Vivaldi Technologies launched the first technical preview of the Vivaldi web browser.
As far as I am aware, it is one of the few Chromium-based browsers where the company behind it actually puts the user first and does not use it as the product. For example, Vivaldi is pretty clear about their source of income: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
I've never really had any problems with bugs in Firefox, but the slowness is real. On some phones. My two previous Androids were budget phones, and on them Firefox was so slow it was barely...
I've never really had any problems with bugs in Firefox, but the slowness is real. On some phones.
My two previous Androids were budget phones, and on them Firefox was so slow it was barely usable. I recently bought my first ever mid-range phone, and on it Firefox is blazing fast.
Yup, my phone isn't expensive (Samsung A33), I'm certain that plays a role. But other browsers don't have the slowness issue, so it's not like the hardware can't handle it. I did experience actual...
Yup, my phone isn't expensive (Samsung A33), I'm certain that plays a role. But other browsers don't have the slowness issue, so it's not like the hardware can't handle it.
I did experience actual bugs though. The final straw that made me switch away was an issue with bluetooth playback - the audio would stutter. I wasted 2 hours trying to troubleshoot it thinking it's some issue with the headphones or bluetooth itself - until I realized the problem is in the browser and doesn't happen elsewhere. That was the last time I allowed FF to waste my time. So I switched to Brave for browsing and Revanced for ad-free YT. It felt like I was using a new phone lol, everything was so fast and seamless, and just worked!
Also I found the FF community extremely alienating. I wanted to install an add-on for background playback, but due to poor design Firefox wouldn't let me even though it is supported. The community made me do a work-around where I install Firefox Nightly then use something called "Collections" to actually install the addon (why does something so simple need to be so complicated?). I wasted so much time until I finally got it to work. But then I was experiencing other issues (some awful glitchy redesign crap), so when I complained, the community basically called me stupid for using Nightly and complaining about bugs.
I didn't want to use Nightly! You made me waste my time setting it up because you told me that workaround is necessary, now I'm wasting more time going back to regular Firefox, and you are blaming me for it! I don't know why the FOSS community is always like that, they make janky product and then blame the user when the user is unhappy.
Similar experience here. I use a Xiaomi phone, those are somewhat known for having a bit too aggressive battery management, which may interfere with apps running in the background. However in...
Similar experience here. I use a Xiaomi phone, those are somewhat known for having a bit too aggressive battery management, which may interfere with apps running in the background.
However in reality the only app that I used which had a problem with this (and it happened all the time) was Firefox.
There are few things more infuriating than when you have to login to some place that uses 2-factor authentization, so you switch away from Firefox into a 2-factor app for literally no more than 15 seconds to confirm, and as you switch back you find out that Firefox apparently stopped, started, loaded a cached version of the page and promptly reloaded it, interrupting the login process and forcing me to do the whole thing again, sometimes three times before it worked. This also caused some minor annoyance regularly in sites like reddit - I put the phone away, reopened it 10 minutes later and it showed the cached version but immediately after reloaded the whole page, completely losing the position on the page, which sometimes changed in the meantime (as votes changed and new comments appeared).
This has been a known bug for years.
On top of that tabs sometimes straight up crashed when loading specific sites.
As always, I really don't get continuing to support the chrome/chromium monopoly, and everything else is pretty much secondary. I use FF on everything, except my phone, where I have FF and Orion (mainly because orion seems to be the only way to get good adblock on iphone), and I'll jump back to FF or Safari at the first sign of that not being the case.
That's before we get into any controversies or dodgy practices or anything else. It's just not good to have a full chromium monopoly on browsers, and I get that yes FF is basically what mac was during the windows early era, in that google is throwing money at them so they can say "see, we're not really a monopoly", but I think it's a super easy thing to support.
This is reason enough for me to never use any chromium based browser. I just wish more people realized how bad the situation actually is. A single company controlling the only engine to access the internet (at least for the average person) is extremely bad for society.
As of now, Safari is essentially the only competitor. But even that is only on apple devices.
I put a little bit of the blame for Blink + V8 being virtually the only technologies any new browsers use on Mozilla. Gecko is just not designed to be decoupled from Firefox and embedded into other applications the way that Blink is. If you've ever wondered why it seems like all the projects that use Gecko are more like forks of Firefox than an fresh application that just depends on some of it's core components, that's probably because they are.
We need a proper competitor to Blink, but Gecko just doesn't provide it. So this leaves the reasonable-ish options for building a browser as: build your own thing from scratch and probably never ship due to the size of the web standards, fork Firefox and hope to not be sunk by fighting against decisions that are different from how you want your browser to work, or make your own application and just embed Blink.
Actually it originally was — it is an entire application framework. That’s why Thunderbird is a Gecko-based application on desktop operating systems. Also, Gecko is still embeddable on Android.
The issue is really that Mozilla stopped maintaining XULRunner, which simplified building third-party desktop apps atop Gecko.
Afaik, this is fairly new and a result of the entire rewrite of firefox for android a few years ago. So it isn't as much "still" but "again"
Yeah, I thought that was a shame. Having extensions no longer able to make a lot of changes to the browser UI was a let down. It bothers me that I can use an awesome extension like tree style tabs to give me vertical tabs but I can’t get rid of the built in horizontal tabs without manually modifying the browser. And even then, because TST is now a sidebar instead of its own distinct feature, I can’t have it open at the same time as the bookmarks or history sidebar.
FYI, Firefox has native vertical tabs now and it removes horizontal tab bar without modifying userChrome.css
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-sidebar-access-tools-and-vertical-tabs
I’ll check it out, but unless it has the main functionality of tree style tabs I’m unlikely to change.
I tried it. It's still not as good as tree style tabs because it takes too much vertical space and it doesn't have the hierarchical organization to it. Worse, after enabling it, it put a permanant additional sidebar in the sidebar that took up more space which I could not remove.
I say that, but somehow I have managed to do it after fiddling with the settings in several different ways it somehow worked, and now I have neither the additional sidebar nor the horizontal tab bar, so it's kind of perfect now, in a way?
This makes me really wonder why Mozilla abandoned Servo, if Gecko is so limited.
My tinfoil hat theory is that someone at Mozilla realized that because there's no money in the engine portion of a browser it is a poor investment to actively feed their competition. What I mean by this is that Mozilla wants to draw funding from Firefox installs, not Gecko or Servo embeds, and that empowering competitors to provide yet more options that aren't Firefox is shooting themselves in the foot when they're so desperate to validate their existence.
This was never the case during my time there.
I haven’t read the article, but I just wanted to say that I sometimes wish that I was a software engineer by profession or something like that, so that one of the side projects that I would invest my spare time in, would be to develop a FOSS browser from complete scratch, and work to gather other people around me to contribute to the project. It would probably take years before the first working release could be made available, but I believe that once the ball gets rolling, and a critical mass of word-of-mouth was reached, the project would take off. I wouldn’t even care to compete with Chromium’s market share. The purpose would be to serve privacy-conscious users who simply want a non-corporate, FOSS, and fully independent alternative. Finally, I would work on releasing a mobile version for Android and iOS with a one-time payment for lifelong access ($5 or less), to cover the costs of keeping it up on the app stores. But maybe someone is already working on something like that somewhere out there and I’m just not aware of it.
Up until your monetization strategy, I think you just described Ladybird
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
I was trying to remember Ladybird. I was going to bring it up as an example but couldn’t remember it’s name. It’s a great project. I hope that it reaches maturity someday.
There are a lot of small projects in the FOSS space that more-or-less try what you described across a variety of domains. The majority never go anywhere for a variety of reasons. The absolute biggest is that the amount of work involved in an endeavor like you just described is massive. Talking at least tens of millions of dollars worth of man hours that need to be volunteered before you've really even got anything anyone is even going to be willing to give a try, and it'll still be incomplete and complained about a lot with a high uninstall rate.
That doesn't make it impossible. Some big protects do make it through, but not very many. And critically the ones that do generally get to define their own standards, like how Blender and Godot aren't really bound by what their competition is doing nor do they have advancing compatibility targets to hit. With a small team of volunteers and something like a browser you'd likely find that by the time you thought you'd finally fully implemented the entire CSS standard the standard now has new features your architecture didn't plan for.
There also is one other extra hurdle for targeting the privacy savvy: they don't like to install random stuff of unknown origin to fill critical roles like being literally the application you type every password into. So you also have to manage to build a lot of trust.
oof You’re right. I guess that there are just a lot of boxes that a new browser needs to tick right off the bat for it to be able to gain any significant install base.
One shortcut that’s proven itself somewhat is to be sufficiently novel/opinionated.
Arc got a surprisingly large following in a very short timeframe, and while their marketing is at least partially responsible, I think the bigger factor is that it’s just so different from anything else out there. It unapologetically makes vertical tabs a centerpiece of its UX, not even offering traditional tabs as an option, for example. That caught peoples’ attention and resonated with many of them in a way that an otherwise unremarkable fork of Chromium or Firefox never could.
Now that The Browser Company has officially put Arc into maintenance mode, its userbase is now jumping over to Zen Browser, which prior had been a Firefox fork that nobody heard of but since adopting a strategy of cloning Arc has seen a boom in popularity.
I think you're underestimating the amount of effort required to build a modern browser by three or four orders of magnitude. Microsoft, of all the bloated, overresourced organizations, declared bankruptcy on it, and Edge is just a Chrome skin. Ladybird and Servo are great efforts, and I hope they succeed, but my strong prediction is that they won't: if either project ever reaches the point of making releases, I think that from the web user perspective, they'll be an awful lot closer to Dillo than real competition for Chrome or Firefox.
Indeed: browser engines are insanely complex and vast.
Just look at the many, many modern web features that need to be built. Omitting any (non-experimental) feature is non-optional because it'll break the web experience for the user.
The first web browser was invented in 1990. Since then there have been 35 years of nonstop, intense innovation and development to catch up on. A lot of features have been deprecated, but there are still tons of legacy features to implement.
Building a layout renderer that can render modern HTML and CSS (after they have been 'rendered' by JS) into their correct appearance is a grand challenge in itself. Once that is accomplished, there is only 99.8% of the mountain left to climb.
There are only 3 serious browser engines, maybe soon to be only 2, because it'd take monumental engineering resources to create a viable competitor. And after all that effort and money, you get an engine that—at best—does exactly what the existing engines do.
Oh man, this page bugs me every time I see it. The modern web should be the single example in the dictionary under the term "scope creep". The World Wide Web was supposed to be a system of documents with hyperlinks between them. Nowadays I would venture that the majority of clickable items are not links, but buttons that do whatever interactive dohickey that keeps people largely on the same small collection of pages, if not the exact same page. And even then, the pages I'm refering to are not actually documents. When I go to https://tildes.net/~tech/1mvx/why_i_recommend_against_brave, I am not retrieving a document; I'm requesting a server to assemble a brand new page that is unique to me based on various bits of data that gets passed along with the request.
Yeah, web apps are neat, but I don't think they're entirely necessary, and I find it irritating when it's the only option. My Keychron keyboard comes with firmware configurable with Via, and if I want to configure it, the only option they give me is to use the webapp, which uses an API that only works on Chrome, and maybe some Chromium-based browsers. The API basically lets the browser have direct access to hardware on the computer, and although they've taken a lot of security measures, it just sounds on it's face to be a bad idea. The browser is supposed to be a sandbox, and tying it to your real hardware seems both unnecessary and unwise.
Google very clearly wanted to make the browser the center of a person's computing world. There's a reason why they invested so much in Chromebook, a glorified Linux distro that initially only ran Chrome. That's probably the reason why there are so many odd APIs that do things like grant direct access to hardware, and other things that were traditionally sandboxed away. But for reasons I won't get into, that wasn't really a great idea, so they relented by making them run Android apps. And funny enough, that still wasn't enough so now they can run Linux applications.
Regardless of my hot take, Pandora never could put the woes of the world back into the box. So I don't expect that to happen to the web. The closest scenario to that I can think of would be if Google would decide to play strict daddy and take some of those toys away, but I can't even imagine that working for APIs that are not already exclusive to Chrome.
Although it may have come from an unexpected source, personally I really enjoy the fact that the web has become what java applets promised to be. It's the first truly practical, universal VM. You can run fully featured, completely sandboxed applications that work the same on mobile and computers and anything in between.
There are so many apps which would have required a sketchy download in the past, which are now just webpages you can go on and then forget about - as it should be.
It's far more useful than a simple document retrieval protocol, which is why that is now a fairly rare use of the web. Which is fine. Things people don't really care about can fade into obscurity.
Honestly, I almost put in a shoutout to Java Web Start.
I don't think that it's entirely accurate to say that everything is better now than it was before. We don't want to deal with an appeal to novelty. Things are different, though; things are better in some ways but worse in others. For instance, web apps are more-or-less server-dependant and proprietary, which means that they are a big target for hacking and data leaks, so users no longer have the same expectations of privacy or security they had before. Previously a little knowhow would be enough to keep your data private and secure; now your security is largely just hopes and prayers that all the companies you deal with are secure, and most webapps will refuse to work without some degree of private information. Right now, for instance, I am trying to get access to exercise videos that my health plan offers through ClassPass, but they are refusing to allow me access without giving them a working credit card even though the health plan is supposed to be paying for it. And when I do get access, I won't be able to download them to use as I see fit; they will be locked inside their online streaming jail.
There is one critical difference between Trident/EdgeHTML (as used in IE and originally Edge) and Ladybird/Servo, though: the former were hard-tethered to Microsoft platforms. That alone basically sealed the engine’s fate as a niche oddity, not being able to run on Android, Apple platforms, or Linux.
Ladybird and Servo on the other hand make portability a chief goal. Additionally, they aim to be highly embedding-friendly like WebKit is, the lack of which has turned out to be a severe weakness for Gecko.
I have decent success with Wipr for blocking ads in Safari. It even gets YouTube ads reliably.
I can't say it's really worse than the uBlock Origin results I'm accustomed to on desktop.
I just discovered Wipr and saw a huge difference.
I used to be on the anti-Chromium-monopoly bandwagon, but as time goes on it's feeling more and more like a lost cause.
Even as a tech savvy person, if you want to use a browser other than Chrome you've got a lot of choices, but pretty much all of them other than FireFox are Chromium with a different color hat on. The only thing that could begin to shake Chrome from its roost is not another browser, but another browser engine that can be ported around and wrapped in new shells the same way Chromium can. The problem is that building a compliant html/javascript engine is hard and not very sexy or rewarding and anyone working on such a project would be banking on far-from-assured adoption by other browser projects down the road for their work to come to any kind of fruition. Probably something like Ladybird where a whole new browser and engine are being developed from scratch together are the best bet to give us something like that, so I have my fingers crossed for that to succeed down the road and hopefully lead to a new explosion of alternate non-Chromium-based browsers, but for the time being I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to weigh FireFox equally against the full myriad of Chromium-based browsers when considering a non-Chrome browser to use.
My unrealistic nerd pipe-dream future sees Chrome losing not to alternate browsers and browser engines, but a whole new protocol that replaces the god awful janky mess that the world wide web has become. Maybe a resurgence of the Gopherspace or some other medium that's more constrained and focused and simpler to write clients for.
I love the idea of Ladybird but it’s not realistic to think that a small upstart team will ever be able to catch up to the decades and millions Google has already invested.
I’m completely naive about the internals of a modern browser engine, but an idea’s been kicking around in my head lately, wondering if there’s a way to break the work down into smaller chunks that can be tackled by independent dev teams. Basically, what if there was a spec to describe the APIs needed to knit together a modular engine from disparate, interoperable components?
Seems to me that small teams might have a chance if each one’s only responsible for maintaining one part of an engine. Teams could compete with each other to make the best module of a particular class, but the actual browsers people would use would be assembled from a variety of those.
On the plus side, I think that would create some really good market incentives for browser engine diversity and innovation. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s actually possible for a modular system to achieve the same kind of performance that a fully integrated one can. If there are bottlenecks between all the parts that could really slow things down, not to mention introduce a raft of new security issues like those the Chrome team (and Mozilla, to be fair) have worked so hard to eliminate from the current generation. But it would still be a worthwhile experiment to try, I think.
It would be swell if Apple would bring Safari back to windows. It's not like they don't have loads of cash and talent and have itunes still there. But alas. And of course they would never bring it to Android.
My memories of Safari on Windows was that it was extremely buggy, crash-prone, and had terrible performance. I think they stopped supporting it because it just wasn't good and they didn't want to besmirch their name any longer.
Okay, I have been looking at your comment for a day now not sure if I wanted to reply. Because, in principle I sort of do agree with you. In practice I do have some other thoughts but those aren't really relevant for why I am replying.
Even if you do not agree with implicitly supporting the chromium monopoly, people for now will keep using chromium browsers. Of all the choices available within that specific eco system there are still choices to be made. I think it is still valuable to be aware of what these different browsers offer and, maybe more importantly, how the companies behind them act. In this context it has become very clear to me that if Brave ever gets really big, big enough to start flexing muscles and influence things, it will not be with actual user interest in mind. Putting it pretty much in the same category as Google itself in as far as their actual user interest.
Making people aware of this fact might just steer them to a different Chromium flavor. At the same time, if they are already fed up with Google, Microsoft and other Chromium vendors it might actually drive them to exploring firefox.
So, even if you don't get people talking about these browsers, I still think it is necesairy to talk about these sorts of things. Possibly more productive than just loudly proclaiming that people should just use firefox. Because a bit monopoly in itself is such an abstract that it isn't going to convince people. That much has become very clear. What is left is talking about the actual details which includes things as highlighted by the article.
There is one more thing I can add to the list, though it wasn't as widely published about. At some point the team behind Brave decided to implement browser extension support from scratch and only support specific extensions. Which sounds okay in theory until you realize how they did so. Without involving the extension creator they would fork a version of the extension and bake that into Brave. They did so without informing the extension creator, meanwhile users would still go to the extension creator for support who couldn't fix a thing.
Every time one of these things come up, the Brave team either is irked (but changes it anyway) or goes "oh, yeah we'll remove it in the future". This to me indicates a company culture where there is no thinking ahead about the impact of features or where they simply don't care as long as they aren't called out on it.
This consistent pattern over a period of years has, to me anyway, shown that issues such as privacy or even being user centered are not a core part of their thinking but merely a marketing gimmick.
Edit:
The article itself includes a perfect example of the attitude I am talking about
Doesn't Orion do that too?
Orion doesn’t have any baked in extensions, so no. They just support installing extensions from the Mozilla and chrome web stores.
Firefox does the same thing.
My home tab has sponsored links to Jet2Holidays, Vodafone and Hotels.com. I've also definitely seen some shady sponsored "news articles" below these frequently visited links, including advertisers like G2A, who have been known to openly facilitate the reselling of stolen game keys.
I believe Brave is a decent browser, but it was placed under greater scrutiny for labeling itself as a safe, private, and ad-free option by default. To my knowledge, Firefox never had builtin adblock. Much of what makes Firefox a good browser does not ship with Firefox.
Well yeah, because through the actions of the company it has become clear that these are mostly marketing terms and not actually at the core of how the company operates.
Of course. I merely wanted to highlight that a company that advertises itself as uniquely ethical will naturally receive more criticism when they behave unethically.
Ah, fair enough :)
You can turn off these sponsored links and news stories in your settings tab:
Settings -> Home -> Deselect 'Sponsored Shortcuts' and 'Sponsored Stories'
Not defending Firefox at all for this, I hate that it's the default and these settings clearly aren't made to be found easily. But a couple clicks and they're gone forever.
True, of the entire list this might be one of the more “benign” things as this practice is fairly common in a lot of browsers. But, of course, this isn't the only point on the list, and it is just part of the bigger context.
The article is a transcript of this video if you'd prefer to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pektPYhM7pw
I am using Brave on my phone because it supports ad-blocking. Firefox on Android is so bad, it's unusable.
So add the ublock origin extension. I have zero issues with Firefox on my 6 year old android.
I specifically switched away from Android Firefox because it was literally the worst browser I've ever used. A slow buggy mess. I'm not a fan of Brave, but couldn't find any other alternative.
I personally can recommend Vivaldi, also comes with an ad blocker build in and the company behind it doesn't have the same shitty/shady record.
https://vivaldi.com
As a bit of background, Vivaldi was founded by one of the founders of the original Opera.
From wikipedia:
As far as I am aware, it is one of the few Chromium-based browsers where the company behind it actually puts the user first and does not use it as the product. For example, Vivaldi is pretty clear about their source of income: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
Regarding privacy:
Thank you for the recommendation, I am installing it and giving it a try!
When was the last time you used Firefox on Android? I use it every day and have zero complaints.
I've never really had any problems with bugs in Firefox, but the slowness is real. On some phones.
My two previous Androids were budget phones, and on them Firefox was so slow it was barely usable. I recently bought my first ever mid-range phone, and on it Firefox is blazing fast.
Yup, my phone isn't expensive (Samsung A33), I'm certain that plays a role. But other browsers don't have the slowness issue, so it's not like the hardware can't handle it.
I did experience actual bugs though. The final straw that made me switch away was an issue with bluetooth playback - the audio would stutter. I wasted 2 hours trying to troubleshoot it thinking it's some issue with the headphones or bluetooth itself - until I realized the problem is in the browser and doesn't happen elsewhere. That was the last time I allowed FF to waste my time. So I switched to Brave for browsing and Revanced for ad-free YT. It felt like I was using a new phone lol, everything was so fast and seamless, and just worked!
Also I found the FF community extremely alienating. I wanted to install an add-on for background playback, but due to poor design Firefox wouldn't let me even though it is supported. The community made me do a work-around where I install Firefox Nightly then use something called "Collections" to actually install the addon (why does something so simple need to be so complicated?). I wasted so much time until I finally got it to work. But then I was experiencing other issues (some awful glitchy redesign crap), so when I complained, the community basically called me stupid for using Nightly and complaining about bugs.
I didn't want to use Nightly! You made me waste my time setting it up because you told me that workaround is necessary, now I'm wasting more time going back to regular Firefox, and you are blaming me for it! I don't know why the FOSS community is always like that, they make janky product and then blame the user when the user is unhappy.
I gave up on it about 3-4 months ago.
Similar experience here. I use a Xiaomi phone, those are somewhat known for having a bit too aggressive battery management, which may interfere with apps running in the background.
However in reality the only app that I used which had a problem with this (and it happened all the time) was Firefox.
There are few things more infuriating than when you have to login to some place that uses 2-factor authentization, so you switch away from Firefox into a 2-factor app for literally no more than 15 seconds to confirm, and as you switch back you find out that Firefox apparently stopped, started, loaded a cached version of the page and promptly reloaded it, interrupting the login process and forcing me to do the whole thing again, sometimes three times before it worked. This also caused some minor annoyance regularly in sites like reddit - I put the phone away, reopened it 10 minutes later and it showed the cached version but immediately after reloaded the whole page, completely losing the position on the page, which sometimes changed in the meantime (as votes changed and new comments appeared).
This has been a known bug for years.
On top of that tabs sometimes straight up crashed when loading specific sites.
Switched to Brave and I've had zero issues since.
I recommend Waterfox it's really solid and has ad-block I'm loving it firefox sync works incredibly well!
That's just a fork of Firefox, I am not interested in using anything related to FF ever again.