Ads and page level analytics aren’t the only thing gathering data.

There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner.

It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.

It's kind of crazy that a popup like "we and our 1244 partners want to share your data to better serve you". That's the kind of dystopian event you would think only visible as caricatural SF, but it's the kind of thing one can actually see on a daily level just browsing around.

> It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.

Imagine all the data Cloudflare vacuums.

Tell us more about the web ad based trojan!

Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)

For almost all purposes and users this is the same as saying "just close your eyes"/"just stay offline".

Why do people make posts like this?

You know that your long-winded and patronizing response in no way is a solution to the problem that you claim it is for the audience you're talking about.

Why do you pawn off an obviously non-solution as a solution? What does this get you?

I use a text-only browser as an offline HTML reader

I make HTTP requests with a TCP client

There are no "false positives"

I only request the resources that I want, e.g., the HTML from the primary domain, JSON from the API domain, etc.

I also use custom filters written in C to extract the information I want from the retreived HTML or JSON and transform it into SQL or "pretty print"

There is nothing to "block" because I'm not using software that automatically tries to request resources I do not want from domains I never indicated I wanted to contact

Using a text-only browser is equivalent to using an ad blocker that has a lot of false positives.

If you’re happy with it, carry on. But you are using the equivalent of an ad blocker.

Original web clients were not designed for (today's) ads. Graphics were optional. There was no Javascript

I even still use the original line mode browser and other utilties in the 1995 w3c-libwww from time to time

The "modern" protocols are handled by the local forward proxy not the client

TLS1.3, HTTP/2, QUIC, etc.

In terms of majorities and minorities, HN commenters do not represent "almost all users"

There are some web users who are online 24/7

There are others who may prefer to stay offline

A wide variety of people use the web for a wide variety of purposes

HN commenters are a tiny sliver of "all users" and "all purposes"

As such, HN commenters are not qualified to opine on behalf of "almost all users" as almost all users do not comment on HN or elsewhere on the web. Almost all users prefer to express their opinions about the web, if any, offline

"When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary"

So you browser as if it were 1999? Yup, no ads back then.

It's definitely better than nothing, and greatly improves things, but UBO is better. Try watching a youtube video in a browser with UBO, and the android app on a network with pi-hole, etc.

I ran AdGuard Home for a while but it was causing too many problems for everyone else at home so I stopped.

These days I’m using AdGuard on iOS and ublock origin with Firefox on everything else.

How many limit themselves to a few apps owned by the GAFAM?

Trillions of flies eat shit...

Except by that point you've executed all their JavaScript. The FBI recommends ad blockers as a safety measure. Bouncing on the site still exposes you to risk.

Relax, man. It's perfectly reasonable to say that you would stop using a browser if they killed adblock support. Saying so is not "tough guy" syndrome because switching which browser you use is not a tough thing to do.

Constantly Fantasizing? I was responding to a hypothetical based on interpretations of real statements made by the new CEO. It's a public forum for discussion. Firefox is something that is central and essential to my digital life.

I think the only person fantasizing here is you, about what random strangers on discussion forums do all day when not responding directly to topics at hand.

ublock origin lite is the knee-capped version that is also available in chrome. I haven't tried it, but it is technically not able to block all ads.

I developed and tested my personal site on Firefox. If I were a professional web developer, I'd work just like you do.

But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.

Set `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb` and/or `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_percent` to something you'd prefer, and confirm that `browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory` is set (I think it is by default).

The default settings are to allow it to acquire memory until memory pressure on the system reaches 5% free, at which point it will begin freeing memory. You can set a custom percentage or a specific amount of memory.

That or just run it in a cgroup with a memory limit.

Are you sure it is not malware? When was the last time you changed the profile?

Also, I have a ton of bookmarks and as I been slowly deleting them Firefox's performance has improved. This same giant size of bookmarks Chrome seems to sync out of order causing their placement to change.

Ublock origin also does slow down the browser a bit on websites that.. don't.. have ads.

Do you use Auto Tab Discard?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Go to about:processes and kill whichever website's subprocess is using the most memory. Sometimes it's the main process but more commonly it's a specific site. Looking at You, Tube.

seconded

Must be hard to resist letting some ads through for life changing money...

Not the same author.

It's Chromium-based, sure. But it blocks ads and does it well

You can disable all that stuff. We used to have email clients, newsgroup clients, HTML editors, etc. built into our browsers. It used to be about creating a suite of tools to meet all your needs on the web. Since then, all that stuff just moved to web apps that you access using the browser so that's mostly all that remains. Vivaldi still has an email client available. A crypto wallet isn't the end of the world. I look at it as sort of a modern throwback to Netscape Communicator, which Brendan Eich helped create.

The BAT stuff is definitely more controversial, but mostly only because Brave blocks others' ads in lieu of their own. It was an interesting idea to present an alternative method for a privacy-respecting ad-supported web. Personally, I wouldn't be as aggressive in blocking ads if they weren't so intrusive and didn't compromise my privacy or security. I look at that whole thing as a swing and miss. I'm not going to beat them up for trying something new when we can all see that the modern web is a cesspool.

You can still turn all that crap off, which is what I do when I use Brave, and you have a pretty solid browser.

Not really. You can use Brave completely ignoring crypto side, and it won't complain.

[flagged]

It seems they have listened to users and allow pinned tabs to navigate to any url.

Initially this is how pinning worked, and along the way they changed it so that if you navigated to a different domain from the one you pinned, it opened in a new (unpinned) tab, which was jarring.

Now it seems they have reverted that change. So they seem to vacillate on the implementation.

Yeah, I don't get why I'd want to pin a tab and then change the url (which I do accidentally for a pinned tab every couple of weeks or so). When it's not the site I pinned, it's just...a tab?

I definitely heard there was a risk of that happening, but you're right that it seems not to have materialized. I'm honestly not sure what remedy they landed on or if they are still deliberating but I think a fascinating option that follows precedent would be a pop-up browser picker in Android instead of rolling Chrome as default, as that has precedent in other antitrust cases and could potentially change the market share issue overnight.

Another interesting one would be truly spinning off Chrome, but paying a search licensing fee to them, too. Actually, that's fascinating to consider in this context, because I know that option (spinning off the browser into its own company) has been criticized on the grounds that it would be unrealistic to assume a browser can simply monetize itself. Ironic given the Mozilla criticism.

Google wouldn't spend $150m to block adblockers if nobody was using adblockers.

Get the OneTab extension. It'll save and close all those tabs. That way you won't have Firefox crashing during startup once you exceed the number of tabs it can handle (a few thousand).

Amateur numbers... I've tested over 10000 (not right now)... It used to get really slow after 9000, but things seem to have improved.

I use Chrome and have 1500 tabs on my MacBook Pro. I'm a packrat.

Its the same kind of people that claim Linux is too unstable for them, and when you ask when they tried it they say 15 years ago.

Same. I mean, I'm sure there have been cases where I've switched to Chrome for certain things. I just got a custom viewfinder for my partner for Christmas, is showing a bunch of photos of the cruise that we went on. And they have an online editor for it, but the editor seemed to be glitching when using Firefox. So I moved to Chrome. Later I realized I was just misunderstanding and it actually just worked fine in Firefox.

And I'm able to access my bank, my credit cards, my utility bills, in Firefox without issue. So I'm not sure what people are talking about.

One thing I am familiar with though in the aftermath of gamergate was a bunch of motivated reasoning to complain about games and insist that they had design flaws or bugs, when really? The bugs weren't real but were kind of just a different way of saying We Don't Like This Game. And so reports of perceived bugs in some cases are as much a social phenomenon as they are a sincere representation of software functionality.

I don't want to say there's no bugs but for every one person's unsubstantiated anecdote, I seem to be able to find two people able to reproduce a functional version of the experience without issue. And just to zoom in on the bank login issue in particular, I use a credit union with an old decrepit HTTP site that was recently updated to a slightly less old and decrepit HTTP site. Plaid is unable to successfully log in, but the web interface works perfectly fine on Firefox mobile.

Yes, I wonder if the rise of the Web Platform Tests have made browser behaviour much more consistent?

It happens so rarely, I don’t keep Chrome installed and have to download a new version of Ungoogled Chromium when I need to see if something only works in Chrome, which I can only remember doing about twice in the last year!

It's not page rendering issues, usually, since Firefox and Chrome pretty much support all the same things.

What you run into the most is the website saying, hey, it looks like you are not using a browser we have tested against, so we are not going to let you log in. Please come back when you have Chrome, edge, or Safari.

Never had this problem - so far - on Linux. Maybe it has something to do with using a sucker operating systems.

I've been using Orion browser (WebKit-based with support for Chrome and Firefox extensions) for quite some time and haven't had this issue with YouTube, but I've definitely experienced the same with Firefox. If it's an issue of artificial slowdowns, you'd think they'd apply it to anything not running on Chrome's engine, which makes me think it's specifically Firefox's rendering causing this issue.

In which country are you seeing that?

For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and that are still on the "Supports Firefox" side because, well, they are just always late to everything.

Seems really dumb to let a crappy bank site dictate what browser you use for everything else.

I think you're right, but it's important to emphasize many of these attempts to tell the story of market share get major facts catastrophically wrong. The decline in Firefox market share from like 33% to below 10% is mostly because the world pivoted to mobile, and Firefox "dominance" was in a world of desktop browsers. It was defaults and distribution lock-in as the world pivoted to mobile that led to the change in market share. As well as the web as a whole effectively tripling in number of users, and Google leveraging its search monopoly and pushing out Chromebooks effectively at cost.

For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.

What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.

Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition?

You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.

Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).

Yes, because in this case "the right way" is to do nothing.

I'm inclined to think that "people visiting wikipedia" skews heavily towards "people who like facts" which is distinctly not a normal web viewer.

Maybe because they don't know any better.

If it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software.

I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.

The last time uBlock Origin caused me any pain was a on a toys r us rewards management site.

> which I guess is true in a certain basic level...

Which is the level he's acknowledging it on. Short term profit that cannibalises product value and user goodwill is all-too-common in the modern corporate climate, and he's acknowledging the elephant in the room.

> ...but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet

Presumably, that would be the reason "he considers it "off-mission""

While I agree that him phrasing his reason not to so weakly instead of "doing so would kill firefox" is a little concerning, a CEO probably doesn't want to be overly honest about the other, less investor-friendly elephant in the room, "the only reason anyone uses Firefox is for uBO".

But also, we don't actually know how exactly he said it, since it's not a direct quote. For all we know, it was an offhanded remark, or he said it in a tone that meant he knew what a terrible idea it was. We're trying to read tea-leaves from a single paraphrased remark.