This is the right answer, and more people (especially technical people like frequent HN) should be pointing this out.

"What ads? Oh you must be running Chrome" needs to be the common refrain.

Really hope this ends up being a surprising tide shift. Firefox has dipped really hard in marketshare, but there's no reason it can't start to gain again/grow steadily.

It's really too bad the Firefox tent wasn't big enough for all the alternative browsers that exist (though of course they're not scratching the surface of real usage either). I skipped the whole Arc wave and I'm glad I did -- it's a distraction from Firefox.

Highly recommend Zen Browser: https://github.com/zen-browser

I wish Firefox would at least implement a basic adblocker on iOS.

Without it, browsing is unbearable. I wonder if they're not allowed to do so because of their contract with Google?

I left Firefox a few months ago because there was a bug in their shader cache, so a lot of stuff was laggy. I was willing to put up with until I got a 360 camera and videos were playing at like 2 fps. This was about six months ago, it’s possible that it’s been fixed, I haven’t checked.

I am using Brave right now, which seems fine. I have no idea if it actually respects privacy but they at least claim it does.

Go with Pale Moon, if you want a privacy-respecting fork of Firefox.

Apparently no one remembers when Firefox changed their terms of service literally this year to become adversarial toward their own users.

Librewolf is the way to go now.

It crashes every few days for me and has since the last several major releases... enough that I can't rely on it anymore. (UG) Chromium has never crashed on me once.

Errrr....https://winaero.com/mozilla-has-removed-the-do-not-sell-user...

But Firefox is so dependent on google (money, code) that it's absolutely impossible they won't also remove manifest v2. It will just take a little while, for appearances...

In current chromium source, it seems still possible to force manifest v2 extensions with `kAllowLegacyMV2Extensions` feature flag?

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...

This however is a good time to export any extension preferences, because once it's removed you won't be able to access them.

The plausible deniability reason is that Manifest V2 gave way too much power to extensions, which is true.

... except that we already execute remote JavaScript on our browsers constantly. And we do it, usually, unconsentually. Versus extensions, which are a deliberate thing you need to install.

Users clicks feed the creation of value

Can you expand on the "best devtools" comparing to Chrome's?

Chrome launched in an era where IE didn't stop the gazillion pop ups and crashed pretty often losing dozens of windows, before tabbed browsing and with no restore. Firefox was a resource hog due to memory fragmentation.

Google was also the company that espoused, "Do no evil" and contributed a bunch to open source. A lot has changed since then.

Children who were born when Chrome came out can vote in the midterms next year. If your prediction takes as long to mature as a newborn baby, it's maybe _too_ prescient.

Everyone was hyped when Chrome came out. This is hard to believe but the world was different 20 years ago

It's been a good 16 years, though.

I’m sure ublock keeps gorhill busy enough already. Maintaining a browser fork is a gargantuan task.

Yeah but it's always a fork of firefox or chrome. I have seen nothing to indicate they are not all in on surveillance advertising. They are looking into "anonymous group advertising" by interest, now can someday reverse engineer that and figure out that you like boutique spicy pickles? maybe? I have my doubts.

I did, a few months ago when they disabled uBlock on my Chrome.

The experience has been a delight. It runs smoothly, I can customize it more than Chrome (compact mode being one example [1]), and with the official iCloud Passwords extension I get to use the same password manager I use on my iPhone.

I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Best part being, if I need something that Chrome provides and Firefox doesn’t, I can potentially implement it myself, and contribute to a proper open source project while I’m at it.

1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compact-mode-workaround...

I gave Firefox a try for a month, but ran into enough issues that I ended up switching back to Chrome about a week ago. Here are some of the problems I encountered that I can recall at the moment and doesn't include the many issues I managed to fix:

Copying content doesn’t always work on certain sites. For example, you can't copy an image from Photopea.com, which I rely on frequently. Saving the image to a file instead slows down my workflow too much. This is a known bug which has been around for a long time.

Password autofill was inconsistent. It didn’t work on some sites, like when accessing a Pi-hole dashboard. Maybe there’s an about:config tweak to fix this, but by that point I had already spent a lot of time troubleshooting other issues.

The bookmark menu closes after opening a single bookmark. If you like opening multiple bookmarks in a row, you have to keep reopening the menu and navigating to the next one each time, which is frustrating.

Twitch videos loaded slowly. I managed to fix this by deleting a specific file, re-creating it as a blank file, and setting it to read-only. This appears to be a known bug the developers are aware of.

Loading custom extensions is inconvenient. You can only load them temporarily unless you launch Firefox with a command-line option for each extension.

It's a little bit slower, but I've been using Firefox on all my personal machines for ten years and finally switched my work web dev machine when Firefox introduced tab groups recently.

It's fine. My issues with it are few and far between. It's a little worse on android but small price to pay for ublock and dark reader imo

I've used Firefox for a few months now and it's generally fine, but noticeably slow and janky compared to Chrome. Several websites just didn't work right and required Chrome. The dev tools seem unreliable, with the network tab often failing to capture requests correctly.

I miss Chrome but won't go back without UBlock.

Hoping Kagi's Orion browser gets better.

You will lose the password manager, but switch to 1Password -- it's way better anyway. Also, if you use Android, Firefox Mobile, with ad-blocking there, is the real killer advantage of Firefox.

You can export your passwords from chrome as a CSV and then import them into Firefox's password manager. Although, best would be using an external password manager that always keeps your passwords encrypted, like bitwarden. Remember to delete the file (shred even) and reboot so your passwords aren't hanging around in disk/memory. Same goes for bookmarks, although those are less sensitive.

Yes. Firefox has its own password manager and profile system. Once I copied the chrome settings to firefox, I closed chrome and rarely open it these days.

Sure, years ago, and it's been great. I do keep Vivaldi around as a Chrome-variant for those sites that need it, and appreciate their general approach. However, Firefox has the things I need, e.g.:

- Various integrations, such as password managers. - uBlock Origin - Temporary containers - so even those sites that save cookies, are really saving them ephemerally until that container closes.

Switching from chrome password manager to bitwarden is as easy as clicking export and then import.

In the past Microsoft said they would. It would be a large engineering effort to preserve Manifestv2

what service by Vivaldi did you pay for?

You might as well use uBlock Origin Lite. The point is that all of these options are less powerful because of the limitations of manifest v3. Instead of downgrading the effectiveness, they’ve opted to release a separate less powerful option so that it’s clear to the end user that it’s less effective than what was available with manifest v2.

adguard is a way to go. their app kills these ads perfectly

It dies in 139

It’s the principle. When they’ve shown they’ll jank one extension because it doesn’t align with their business model, they’ve shown they’ll jank any extension in the future as they see fit.

I’m voting with my feet.

Same. I didn't even enable complete blocking just default one. I'm not too concerned about invisible trackers, I use meta products daily. Just the visible ads.

Yeah, I switched a while ago and it’s has 0 impact on my browsing.

Install Firefox and add Social Fixer on there.

What OS? I use it under Windows 10 and it's never crashed or been slow. I';ve never had more than six tabs open, though.

Zen browser is pretty minimal in terms of bloat carried from FF

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41303974

Just use LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox on Android.

They basically strip out all the anti-privacy, anti-user "features" from Firefox.

@dang this looks like a spam. I saw 2 more posts

I’m excited to see what Ladybird becomes, but it’s not exactly ready to be a daily driver.

Ladybird doesn't support ublock origin either, nor does it even allow for ad blockers extentions like Chrome still does.