Firefox has lost about 20 million users since the announcement of Chrome moving to Manifest v3. It can't avoid the monopoly even with the press in their favor.
Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium at this point and create a vendor-neutral platform that everyone can rally behind.
Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile web standards, but clearly, mozilla just isn't doing enough
Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault that the GIANT corp sitting in front of the internet, being the homepage of 90% of computers, that nags users to install chrome "for a better experience" on every single web site it can, is able to get onto more systems than firefox?
How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?
Faster on one benchmark, but they don't have a consistent history of performance wins. The bigger issue is that nobody is embedding Gecko. Every Electron app is another developer targeting Chrome. Applications that embed a webview? Chrome. Any new web browser that wants to deliver a new experience (like Arc, or even Brave) is built atop Chromium.
The problem is that "not pushing hostile web standards" and "more flexible ad blocking" clearly isn't stopping the insane bleeding of the userbase. These are people actively migrating away from Firefox in droves.
I would argue that Electron webapps shouldn’t really count towards the browser marketshare. If would be nice to have a Firefox version, but it doesn’t matter precisely because the end user is not choosing the browser - the company pushing the product is. And let’s be honest: nerdy HN users aside, Joe Schmoe has no clue Teams is a web app running in an emasculated browser at all.
> I would argue that Electron webapps shouldn’t really count towards the browser marketshare.
Perhaps not, but if you're writing your desktop app in Electron, you'll be benchmarking your performance optimizations against the Chrome engine. If that same code is used for your web app, you're optimizing your website for Chrome.
Mozilla can pour resources into making Firefox more performance, but the real-world ecosystem will change behavior to improve Chrome's performance on their webapp with little concern as to whether it hurts Firefox's performance.
(I assume people use largely the same code between Electron and their webapps, and that optimizations for Electron translate reasonably well to optimizations for Chrome.)
every time someone uses electron they buy into the chrome ecosystem -- when they run into problems they write mailing list posts or stack overflow questions that other people can read to help them when they have the same problem, and if they actually want to contribute bugfixes or features upstream they go into chrome not firefox. also if they have a webapp version the webapp version that's running in chrome works exactly the same as the same code running in electron without really having to do any separate testing so which browser are they going to push to be used internally?
1. I use firefox in Windows, Linux, and Android. I am NOT suffering.
2. Most people aren't actively choosing their web browser. For example, my wife uses the Samsung web browser on her phone because that is the default.
3. Most people think Google is the internet, can't distinguish between the browser and the google webpage, etc.
4. A dwindling marketshare percentage does not directly imply old userspe are moving from Firefox to another browser, it could imply that new users don't know/use firefox
>4. A dwindling marketshare percentage does not directly imply old userspe are moving from Firefox to another browser, it could imply that new users don't know/use firefox
You're right that it could theoretically mean that, but unfortunately monthly active users have actually fallen by ~20% since 2019 according to Mozilla:
It may also just mean more users are opting out of telemetry. Given Mozilla's privacy focus in their marketing and their UX, it may not be a shock that a large number of users are also opting out of even Mozilla's telemetry.
Keep moving the goalposts, Firefox is going to go real far this way.
Google is _forcing_ Chrome, onto everyone. Gecko is fully embeddable on Android, through GeckoView. Nobody uses it, because the default WebView is chrome. androidx.browser is Chrome. And if you want to delegate to the browser while still staying in an app context, the feature is called Chrome Custom Tabs. Everything is made to make people forget about Firefox's existence. Google actively harms Firefox performance on their websites, while happily displaying a "it's better on Chrome" everywhere you browser. They force the WHATWG's hand on 90% of features. There's articles every month on new-obscure-feature-that-is-only-implemented-by-chrome-and-requires-an-army-to-implement, pushed and paid for by Google, which dumbass webshits are going to go and implement because obviously their VC backed startup _really_ needs WebUSB and WebMIDI, as well as Google's shitty, unfinished implementation of WebGPU.
Google is a cancer that grows everywhere, killing everything it touches. Firefox smoking a cigarette from time to time is not responsible for that.
maybe don't forget that firefox probably would have died a much sooner death if mozilla hadn't been google's pet charity project though. mozilla has yet to demonstrate really being a self sustaining organization
Corporations (and the wealthy in general) don't do charity. The tacit objetive of every corporation is and will always be profits über alles. Every time you see a corporation donating money to some cause there's an ulterior motive that ultimately grows their bottom line. The most common motives are: pay less taxes (or none at all), PR move to improve their public image, and, finally, publicity (sometimes because of controversy).
Now, of course, Google's financial relationship with Mozilla is no exception. The stated reason is that they give money to Mozilla in exchange for having Google as the default search engine, but its actual purpose is to mitigate claims about Google having a monopoly on the browser market and thereby avoid anti-trust laws.
If Firefox were to gain the majority of the marketshare Google would no longer have an incentive to give them money. Mozilla wouldn't be happy about that because they'd lose their biggest source of income. And Google wouldn't be happy either because they make money through web ads and harvesting data to sell it to ad companies, and there's no better way to go about doing that than creating their own web browser and a whole ecosystem surrounding it, and then making sure it's the most popular one.
Google sucks. Your position seems to be, though, that because Google sucks, we can't talk about the self-inflicted wounding of Firefox and other buffoonery that happens under the Mozilla Corp umbrella—since Google sucks so much more. There's a word for that: whataboutism.
This makes no sense. The parent argument is that Chrome wins due to aggressive bundling and free ads on Google. Neither of those are self-inflicted wounds. The claim is that Mozilla doesn't actually have self-inflicted wounds.
The claim is that we have to blame Firefox's failure on bundling and google.com banners, and can't discuss how hostile and bizarre they've been. We also can't discuss that 80% of their revenue comes from Google, for nothing, and that the other 20% of their revenue is the entire return on 100% of their investment in the browser.
> The claim is that Mozilla doesn't actually have self-inflicted wounds.
Not in the comment I was responding to; you would have to be arguing that "Firefox smoking a cigarette from time to time" doesn't describe a type of self-inflicted wound—and for you to be right—for that to be true. (Whether you genuinely think that or not is one thing, but you definitely wouldn't be right about it, in any case.)
The entire comment I responded to belongs to the flavor of apologia that takes the form, "it doesn't matter if X is bad, because Y is worse".
>it doesn't matter if X is bad, because Y is worse
In the case of Mozilla and Google, yes. Mozilla's leadership fucking sucks, and I've written at length about how the entire Foundation board is a bunch of useless MBA clowns that are here to suck from the golden teat.
But it doesn't matter, when the alternative is Google having absolute and total control of the web. Mozilla, for what they're still worth today, still have a weight. Write an article titled "Mozilla opposes API proposal X from Google for privacy reasons" and people will at the very least give it a listen. RFCs from them are listened to. The WHATWG has to at least pretend to hear them out.
Go on. Let Mozilla die. See what the web looks like when Google can push every API they want, unopposed. WEI would look like a walk in the park. Apple could say nuh uh we don't want to, and Google would do the exact same thing they did with Firefox: snuff it out. Microsoft wouldn't even need to be pressured to work with them, pissing off Apple sounds like a lovely distraction for them. Little by little, websites would stop working on Safari (not that they work quite well currently, most Safari users are doing it because of a complete lack of technical knowledge and it's the default browser, with three nerds on HN saying it's because it's better for their battery life), APIs unsupported because Apple isn't interested in the open web.
At best, you end up with an Apple Web, and a Google Web, both of them sucking ass in their own right. At worst, Apple becomes irrelevant because of their focus on native apps. Most of which are already Chromium wrappers anyways.
So yes. Pinch your nose and go in. Mozilla is worth the support, no matter what. Their leadership already sucks, what's the worst that could happen ? They keep sucking, but take back marketshare ? Good. For once, give them support instead of being the worst user in the world, the one the just shits on them for not being good enough, while flocking to Google anyways.
Faster on sunspider. In practice, on real web pages, as someone who occasionally browses the web using a low end tablet PC (Surface Go 2 with linux. The CPU is downright anemic but good enough for treating it like a reading device/video stream platform), I experienced many more stutters on Firefox that I did not on Chrome and it has become one of the reasons I stopped using it (the syncing is also way worse and often breaks. "Read latest tab from other device" is almost useless if you don't manually trigger a sync because it sure won't do it by itself in any reasonable time frame).
The performance difference is much less visible on my main computer though. But yall really need to try firefox on low end devices before you make generic statements about its performance. Or the android version.. lord, firefox on android is just unpleasant.
By stuttering, if you mean video stuttering, I used to experience those a lot; I installed Brave for that very reason, because Netflix, Twitch, etc. were performing pretty poorly on Firefox (on a 4GB RAM low end laptop). But I very rarely experience that these days, to the point I've switched back to Firefox for those sites too.
But general performance-wise, Firefox is so easily better than Chromium in my experience, it's not even a competition. Firefox with hundreds of tabs open performs better than Chromium with 10-20 tabs. It's more responsive to interactions, uses less memory, and is much less likely to freeze up. With Chromium, I have to constantly keep a watch over open tabs, and close them mercilessly, or suffer from overall system slowdown and a browser that's almost a slideshow.
Firefox still runs great on my ThinkPad T420s running Linux, which is 12 years old at this point.
And while I never use Firefox on Android without uBlock Origin, I don't get how it can be described as unpleasant after the rewrite a few years ago. The combo makes browsing bearable compared to Chrome.
The sync tabs thing used to be flaky, I agree, but now sending tabs to and from Linux and Android always works for me.
It's about 12 months ago now, but I worked on a GL project where Firefox was significantly slower than Chrome – and, agreed, it was often on lower end devices. This was to the point it was easier to just drop features wholesale from Firefox, in order to ensure a steady 30 FPS (with Chrome solidly performing 60). I believe a large amount of it related to WebAudio APIs.
Funny, I use Mull on my Android, which is basically Firefox on Android but even more heavily restricted. Have for at least a year. Didn't know people considered it unpleasant.
I have the exact opposite experience. Streaming video is stuttering and buffering so bad that I can't use Chrome at all on those sites (Brave isn't any better). It was the reason I switched to Firefox and the performance was so much better.
Your experience is not "exact opposite" since for me video in FF with VAAPI-based hardware decoding also works better than in Chrome. However, FF can stutter while scrolling animation-heavy sites or when open/closing tabs.
I use Firefox fork as main because anything else is worse on QubesOS. Both WebKit and Chromium have scroll lags, while Librewolf is smooth almost as on bare metal. I don’t know what’s the difference on normal websites, but I can use it and there are almost no lags on it when running few VMs on 8GB RAM.
Android variant is actually shit, but it’s getting only better. It’s much faster now than 5 years ago. Hopefully they will improve it further.
Somehow they managed to have a huge market share when Microsoft was fighting tooth and nail in courts and out to tell people to use IE, and Microsoft WAS home computers.
Websites arent made with firefox, so they are not optimized for firefox.
They also can be buggy, firefox is my daily browser, yet, multiple times per year, a website is simply bugged on firefox.
Google Chrome was recommended by power user, and that how they took the market lead, not because they are the internet, but because power users told regular users to use chrome.
Folks mistakenly associate "breaking" with "not being completely compatible with an illegal streaming website with improper TLS/cyphers." That's just an example but you know what I mean.
Those are the types of websites that have issues with firefox, because mozilla maintains it's own root trust store held to various standards/compliances, and many..less savory web addresses use not HTTPS content on their HTTPS pages.
This is a feature/value added bonus, but because it "breaks" sites for people....back to chrome.
Most are due to the firefox tracking protection.
Others (with everything disabled) were for an airline company, some french governements website, and recently an SVG editor that just call to use chrome and doesn't works on firefox.
That never stopped Phoenix in the early days, or Chrome itself in its early days. Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome and breaks a lot of sites. And over the last decade it kept pushing crapware and spam on you, right in the browser.
Mozilla mismanaged it to hell. They don't even really care about the browser anymore.
>Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome
Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal tabs are clearly inferior.
Brave and Edge can do vertical tabs natively, but chrome doesn't. The extensions I have tried in Chrome are as unusable as Safari's native vertical tabs implementation.
I didn't have websites outright breaking on FF like solardev, but I had other issues with it, like cloudflare getting me into an infinite loop of asking me if I'm human and not letting me browse the website. This happened even if I deleted my firefox profile and started fresh with no extension. Note that this behavior of Cloudflare is highly dependent on the settings of their anti-ddos stuff, some websites have it set on a higher level of defensive behavior than others, I didn't have this issue everywhere.
This wasn't due to my computer's IP, the problem went away the moment I browsed the same website with Chrome, and this time I wasn't even asked to click the checkbox to prove that I'm human.
Sadly I don't remember anymore. I ran into plenty of them 3 or 4 years ago (every week or so), then I stopped using Firefox altogether because of that. At work, some coworkers were using Firefox last year and it broke various third party libraries (especially graphics heavy ones). Rather than trying to fix the bugs, we just decided to deprecate Firefox support altogether because its usage was down to like 2 or 3 percent. Those resources were better spent on, say, improving mobile usability and performance for everyone.
Edit: I wish Mozilla would just fork Chromium and add/delete whatever privacy things they want, like Brave. There's no reason to maintain Gecko anymore.
Firefox is still hostile to vertical tabs, adding a useless sidebar header that can be hidden with css, but you have to know that and spend the possible hours it could take to figure out how. Then, since that's unsupported, you have to prepare for it to possibly be broken after every update.
Anecdote: I tried that back in the Netcaptor days but it didn't really stick (or something like it, anyway). Having to read a long list isn't particularly fast for me, personally, so I just use a combination of multiple windows (one per context, and easy to switch between on Mac) and the search engines feature (where you can make custom keyword lookups for Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, etc.) to quickly look things up. Chrome also has collapsible tab groups and pinnable tabs now, but it's not particularly great.
I never have more than 4 or 5 tabs open at a time, closing them as I'm done with them. If I need to recover them later they're always in the history.
I'm sure Firefox and other browsers offer some power user features that's good for some folks. I just don't care enough.
As a user I just want to see the information I need without tinkering with settings, and Chrome does that well. As a web dev I'd much rather focus on UX than cross browser compatibility, and the Blink/Webkit duopoly makes that possible in a way that standards never did (and still don't). So there's just no need for Firefox in my personal or work life. YMMV of course.
What Firefox definitely offers is uBlock Origin on Android. Augment it with anti-paywall blocklists and the experience is basically a killer feature for Android over iOS. I use Chrome on desktop (mostly for better sandboxing) but on mobile there is no real competition between Firefox and Chrome: Firefox just wins.
You can get the same experience (but across all apps) using Adguard, which acts as a fake VPN and MITM certificate. No more ads in any app, while still keeping your Chrome synced tabs and logins and such between devices.
Is the experience really equal? E.g. uBlock Origin operates at the DOM layer so it can and does block dynamically generated content using CSS selectors. Does Adguard simply inject the same DOM-aware JS in every page?
I dunno, but it's good enough. And way more useful to block in app ads than to be limited to the browser only. Of course you can use both if you want, but then you'd have to use Firefox or another browser.
Except there's no way to export your bookmarks on android out of Firefox without using their sync service. I think this omission (a simple export!) speaks volumes about Mozilla's true goal of browser lock-in and another example of their chronic mismanagement.
Ah yes browser lock in, from the company that makes zero dollars selling their browser, compared to the company that wants to actively harm the open internet.
What's wrong with you guys? Could google stab you in the face and you still swear up and down that firefox is negligibly slower than chrome? What will it take? Google is pushing a "feature" to completely lock down the internet, take away all meaning from "user-agent", and make blocking ads functionally impossible! When will you stop aiding and abetting this behavior because you feel mozilla is "not perfect"
In truth I just don't really care? We've gone through this cycle so many times with various kinds of DRM, from DVD CSS to Denovo to WideVine to Adobe Cloud to various other schemes that at the end of the day just aren't big deals.
A lot of the tech echo chamber bandwagons and freaks out about things like this, but I bet in a few years it'll turn out either a non issue or else alternate browsers will naturally rise to popularity. No point fussing about it beforehand. In the meantime Chrome just works, Google is whatever, Firefox is annoying, and Mozilla just feels irrelevant.
Shrug. I feel way more annoyed by Firefox than anything Google's ever done. Whatever their ideology, their product just isn't great.
I am a tab hoarder, and on multiple different operating systems, with different installs, etc.
Firefox ALWAYS seems to have random leaks after weeks that other browsers don't have, once I saw Firefox taking 24GBs of RAM, while Edge and Brave on the same or more tabs and time were taking only ~2-3gb of RAM.
This has been going on since at least 2019-2020 or so, when I started dropping Firefox because of this behavior. It is just random websites that seem to cause leaks but this has never happened with Edge or Brave and no website should really be breaking a browser like this, the system becomes unusable after a while.
They are seemingly unable to fix the issue or pretend it doesn't exist even when its reported so I basically had to stop using FF as my main browser.
>Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile web standards, but clearly, mozilla just isn't doing enough
>How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?
A hard lesson I learned at my last company was that it's not enough to have the better product. Better marketing and better relationships will, more often than not, trump a better fitting solution to a problem. It sucks, but it's real.
Yeah! In fact, I would say a large portion of this is every android phone coming with Chrome pre-installed, and you know, that entire decade google spent with literal super bowl advertisements and THE GOOGLE DOT COM WEBSITE URGING YOU TO INSTALL CHROME with a mountain of dark patterns that plenty of smarter people than I have written about.
Can you imagine the fucking fit HN would throw if mozilla dared to buy a super bowl ad?
It’s not about speed, compatibility with Firefox is actually getting worse. I switched (back) to FF and DDG a few months ago and FF is having trouble with multiple websites I use on occasion (for an example off the top of my head, if I want to log-in to Haaretz.co.il to get past pay walls I have to use safari as FF doesn’t manage to log in).
This is still the small minority of sites but I keep safari and chrome around as it still happens often enough.
Uh, clearly you don’t know anybody who actually worked there? Management is very very very unpopular and they’ve been facing a massive brain drain for years.
Because they do have a great browser, but have a horrible strategy and have wasted money in any number of ways, and made themselves wholly dependent on Google for handouts.
Note that in the Phoronix post it also mentions in the modern and demanding Jetstream benchmark, Firefox is still way behind. While seeing improvements is good, Sunspider is a very old microbenchmark not sure how relevant it is.
> Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault
Clearly it is Mozilla fault: the world is not fair, if they are where they are they should crunch their resources and win. Google haven't started being the home of most computers. It is the nature of competition. Is it hard? Sure.
"The world is not fair" in part because we refuse to punish Google for their blatantly anti-consumer practice of purposely making their websites work worse on non-chrome browsers and advertising chrome on every google property.
How the fuck is mozilla supposed to compete with a GIANT that is nearly everyone's homepage? Even if they had comparable budgets (Which they don't) mozilla still wouldn't get the free advertising that google gives chrome
> purposely making their websites work worse on non-chrome browsers
This is wild exaggeration that I never hear about except from people defending the mismanagement of Firefox. I've used Firefox since forever, and I don't have much trouble anywhere that I can remember. The browser works. This is an article showing that it's outperforming Chrome on some metrics. It's Firefox's business and design decisions that wreck their browser. It went from being awesome to being janky Chrome that calls you abusive when you complain that they put an ad for a tv show in your browser.
I think the Mozilla foundation has enough money to lobby about monopolistic practices. Did they?
If your argument would be 100% true there will be no innovation or market dynamics. Business history has proven that one day you are at the top and another you aren't anymore.
If firefox sued google over monopolistic practices, that lawsuit would have to be funded completely by google. Google is 80% of firefox's revenue and 0% of its expenditure.
I find it amazing how people forget that being a monopolistic power doesn't help if your product sucks: Google has, time and time again, failed to gain traction in the messaging app market on Android, the market being entirely occupied by competitors like WhatsApp.
Chrome won partly because of the marketing and being preinstalled, sure, but also by being a good product.
If nagging people to install Chrome was all it took to win, then why is Edge in such a precarious position on Windows with all the nagging Windows 10 and 11 brought? Microsoft failed to succeed time and time again.
People on HN have weird preconceptions about how suggestion and marketing works.
I don't know where you are from but you seem very biased to your own friend or country bubble. For reference I don't know anyone at all who use WhatsApp. I use Google Chat and Facebook Messenger with a few but SMS with Google's RCS with everyone else, including my younger and much older family members.
I live in France, and WhatsApp has a pretty big presence. Not a monopoly style one though, there's plenty of other apps used: Facebook Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, Discord.. I have friends who have family in other countries and some different apps will be dominant, like Viber, but the common theme is that the only time I've seen people use SMS is when they're unsure as to whether the other person has any other means of communication. Most importantly, I've never seen someone use Google's own non-RCS chat apps, like Google Chat, Google Hangout, Google Allo, Google Talk.. Google has had many chat apps, sometimes just different names for the same thing, but in the end, they have no users here. Google continuously tried to make a dent in that market and failed.
RCS is a non-starter if you need to do group chats with iPhone users or send them pictures without a massive loss in quality, as iPhones do not support RCS. As long as Apple refuses to support it, it will continue being a terrible choice in any country with significant Apple user base. An Android user with WhatsApp shares an identical experience with an iPhone user with WhatsApp. RCS on the other hand will drop you back to what cell phone messaging was many decades ago.
According to statista.com 12% use WhatsApp in Denmark. As I said, living in a bubble if one believes everyone uses it.
Edit: A quick search said this from the same source:
>Using WhatsApp less often than once a month was the most common usage frequency among Danes in 2019, according to 23 percent of the service users. 15 percent used the app weekly and 13 percent used it several times a day.
>I find it amazing how people forget that being a monopolistic power doesn't help if your product sucks:
Which is why none of our companies use microsoft teams, right? Or wait, maybe when it comes to products that aren't that different, what comes with the package matters.
I wouldn't expect Manifest V3 to have any effect until Manifest V2 is actually disabled and ad blockers stop working. Approximately 0% of Chrome users are following technical browser announcements, they won't care until their stuff actually breaks.
Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons installed in the first place: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior So 59% of current Firefox users could switch to Chrome without being affected by the Manifest V3 change at all.
I don't know how many Chrome users use add-ons that would become less useful after the change, so it'll definitely be interesting to see whether Firefox's numbers will show a sudden uptick at some point.
I expect that number to be biased since more tech-savvy users tend to disable/block telemetry, and they're also the sort of people who install add-ons. I have no idea if it's biased by 1%, 10%, or 50% though.
> Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons installed in the first place
This seems like surprisingly low percentage. I wonder whether these stats count people who disable telemetry or install add-ons from their distro's repository.
Not really. Firefox blocks more things out of the box for a better browsing experience than Chrome does. But I admit that there’s a good chance that at least some not-insignificant percentage of those 41% wouldn’t notice and realize that they would need to install uBlock to use Chrome comparably.
There was a huge wave of anti-chrome propaganda about how manifest v3 would prevent all ad-blocking* on Reddit and Tumblr (and probably tiktok) and such. Even if none of them read the actual announcements, the low-info folks still learn about it from the outrage machine.
*Which isn't actually true; "cosmetic" blocking (altering the DOM), the original type and the one most users actually care about, will still work just fine. It's only privacy tracking which is going to be totally broken, and frankly, outside of the unreality bubble of HN, most users care much less about "privacy" than you'd think.
Just because people don't care doesn't mean it's unimportant.
So these limitations of manifest V3 don't exist?:
>One of the main issues with Manifest V3 is its limitation to filter lists: an extension can only include up to 50 static lists, and only 10 of them can be active at the same time.
>There are also limitations to the number of filter rules inside these lists: installed extensions cannot collectively exceed 300,000 static filters and it is no longer possible to update
I never said it wasn't important, but it is misinformation. Case and point: to answer your question, no, those aren't limitations on DOM-manipulation ad removal; those are limitations on the new declarativeNetRequest API, and they ONLY apply to blocked web requests.
Also, even that part isn't as catastrophic as you'd think; ad blocking, like most things on the internet, roughly follows the 90-10 rule: 90% of the ads are blocked by 10% of the rules. So even with a tenfold reduction, you should still see the vast majority of the ads blocked by even the intentionally-gimped declarativeNetRequest API.
Yes, it's going to make ad blockers slightly less effective and make your page loads slightly slower. But that doesn't get as many clicks as "Chrome is banning adblockers!!1". And it's important to note the difference because when v3 rolls around, all those users that were lied to are going to see that their ad blockers still mostly work, and lose even more trust in whistle blowing.
You forgot the part where Google postponed the original timetable for the deprecation of manifest v2. Without that postponement, developers would not have had enough time to change the extension so that there would have been a time when adblockers were banned. The outcry prevented that.
> It's only privacy tracking which is going to be totally broken, and frankly, outside of the unreality bubble of HN, most users care much less about "privacy" than you'd think.
explaining this distinction is actually enough to drive me to switch thanks
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I agree, I myself was waiting for ublock to stop working before I migrated to Firefox but now that I’m hearing it will still mostly work… I just don’t care that much. So they collect all this info on me… as long as I don’t see ads I just don’t care
> We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium
Why is the answer always more chromium?
And for a userbase nominally so positively biased towards open source it is weird to see how google gets a pass on pretty much everything, while mozilla/firefox has this incredibly carefully curated list of offenses that is maintained and spread by the community, doing most of the work at ensuring that firefox never goes anywhere. There's a lot of Linux proponents here who are doing all the heavy work of carrying water for Google when it comes to chrome dominance.
Yeah, so every time you actually restart firefox after it updates you probably get an ad for mozilla VPN. Okay compare that to Google literally being the central advertising and spyware hub of the entire internet. "I'll just have to use the worst option possible, because the alternative isn't 100% ideologically pure".
Manifest v3 announcement feels like a pretty arbitrary line to draw in the sand.
> I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium
Ah, yes, Linux, the OS used on something like 3% of desktop machines! I'm sorry but I don't see the logic at work here at all. Chrome dominates because Google pushes it and they have the means to reach basically every internet user out there. Switching out Mozilla for the Linux Foundation would do absolutely zero to counter that. Case in point: by most measures ChromeOS has a higher desktop market share than vanilla Linux already.
Public clouds don't dictate what people use. You can freely run windows or any other OS on an AWS or Google VPS, it's just people very seldom choose to do so, because (this is the punchline), linux is just that much more popular and developer-friendly.
The domination of linux in the hosting / server world predates the existence of public clouds. I was there, I remember.
At the turn of the millennium for a very very brief time there were a lot of windows servers running ASP.NET. That was it. Nothing has come close to linux since then, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what AWS/GCP offers. What they offer is entirely beholding to what developers like.
That makes no sense. 82% of the market is using Linux not because of the inherent goodness of the OS, it’s because Google chose to use it. If they change their mind tomorrow (see Project Fuschia and all that) there isn’t anything the Linux Foundation would be able to do about that.
This isn't true at all. Most people are using containers anyway, and guess what they're running in those containers...
ASP.net had it's day, and everyone wanted to instead run their .NET apps on linux rather than deal with windows licensing and security issues, which is why mono was so popular
Other things had their chance too, like MacOS-based hosting, and it never really took off, again because people don't want to manage closed-source production systems that they can't simply patch themselves.
I’m confused why people would move away from Firefox to Chrome because of Manifest v3. If anything, it should convince one to move even harder in the other direction.
Indeed, the point OP is trying to make is that despite Manifest v3, Firefox is nevertheless still losing users (to highlight how dire the situation for Firefox is).
I really wish the timing of FxOS was better as well as the marketing. I’d certainly choose it over Android, but we’re now sort of locked into the duopoly with terrible decisions from apps like Signal requiring you have a Android or iOS primary device or no service for you.
Because they've already taken the media heat for the switch a half dozen times, each time less intensely. Eventually, when they finally switch it off, there will be one article about it on the Register, and it will be mostly jokes.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium at this point and create a vendor-neutral platform that everyone can rally behind.