Websites already can barely be assed to care about supporting Firefox users, doing adblocking by default is a great way to get websites to start putting up banners that say "our website does not work with your browser, please switch to Chrome" en-masse.
And Mozilla did develop anti-fingerprinting tech, but they can't enable it by default because it breaks lots of websites and when a website doesn't work they're not going to appreciate Mozilla for protecting them, they're going to be pissed that it doesn't work.
It would be executed by anyone who experiences a problem using a site with Firefox and asks for help about it in a forum, or chat AI, or finds a YT video about it, etc.
Non-technical people do follow recommendations like installing an extension to help with a problem. Especially if they see the same recommendation from multiple sources, and testimonials as to its efficacy.
In practice, it'd probably look like switching to chrome for the majority of users. A lot of tech saavy users would install a plugin but that's a lot of friction especially for random sites or even for an important site. Using chrome or edge would be easier for most users.
Brave has native ad-block and anti finger-printing, enabled by default, and the web works excellently as in I don't know of a single site that doesn't work with it.
Brave is based on Chromium and inherits basically all compability, that this brings.
Firefox with Gecko is a different engine entirely and that sometimes causes compatibility issues or different behaviour, that websites have to account for.
Brave's ad block is pretty ineffectual by itself. For example it doesn't block youtube adverts. Recently switched to Firefox with Ublock origin, and loving it. So much more efficient and quick than it was back in the day when we all switched to Chrome.
I don't know what to tell you... It most definitely does not block youtube adverts for me and never had / did... Also, I found Ublock origin updates less reliable / frequent on Brave. Since switching zero issues.
Perhaps you were disabling their adblocker by trying to use ublock? In general there's no reason for additional plugins - they also have native custom filters, scriptlets, and so on.
No... As tech helper for various family and friends, I've been the one to clean install brave on a variety of machines. I typically demonstrate youtube before and after ublock for them, so they can see its effects. Never once not had adverts on a clean brave install. Not a representative sample obviously, but I've installed it for a fair few folks over the years.
Similar experience with firefox and ublock origin. I make the cut early, when chrome was threatening to make the change originally and have had a really good experience. Many, many things just work with the ads stripped out. Youtube and other streaming services - I don't know how people can even use them without proper filtering.
The final death of IE6 was because corporates finally stopped using it⁰ and the reason for that had nothing to do with sites/apps refusing to work. If we'd said "we don't support IE6" they'd either say "the contract we signed years ago somehow says otherwise" or "fair enough, we'll use someone else's solution then".
What killed it was IE6 not supporting TLS1.0 out of the box or TLS1.1+ at all, and that started to make them fail external audits. After years of telling them IE6 was holding us back implementing best-practise security on their instances of our apps¹ and being ignored because doing anything about it their side was too much hassle, external auditors started refusing to give them relevant certificates & such because of their systems not being up to best practise (or even good practise by that point!) and suddenly they made the effort to no longer have anyone in their orgs using IE6.
--------
[0] source: I was working on software serving the banking industry (customer facing & investment sides, not trading) around that time and years either side
[1] Even having annual conversations like:
! The pen test results say you should disable anything below TLS1.0 (and later 1.1), and you haven't. Please do.
? Are you sure? We'd *really* like to, as we've repeatedly mentioned, but that will block your IE6 users.
! Yes! You must follow the recommendations!
? Excellent. Done.
[a short time passes]
! Your application is broken for some of our users!
? Yep. They are using IE6 without TLS enabled.
? Either you need to upgrade their configurations or tell us, in writing please, to break from best practise and reenable the older protocols.
[another short time later]
! Please reenable the older protocols.
Oh that certainly did the trick for home users, but I was having to deal with IE6 for our clients (at least one of them was IE6 only), as were people I knew working in or otherwise supporting other corporate environments, for several years after that.
Some management types might have even seen YouTube potentially blocking IE6 users as an advantage for keeping with IE6 to save bandwidth on their creaking external network links!
With a normal Firefox on desktop on Linux, I get unsolvable recaptchas all the time, especially on cloudflare pages.
Ironically, if I fake instead a chromium to be on Windows (UA and Sec-CH headers), I am allowed most of the time even though my TCP fingerprint must mismatch then.
It's annoying to see what the normal web has become. Can't even read news anymore.
Ironically, all these bot defenses make it easier for bots to scrape their website, but make it harder for actual users to use them.
The only bot defense web app firewall that still works with Firefox seems to be Anubis. Pretty much all others autoflag Linux users as bot users, which feels insane if you think about less web developers must know about how botnets work.
> I get unsolvable recaptchas all the time, especially on cloudflare pages.
If you really mean reCAPTCHA (the one with a “select all squares that have X” kinda challenges), then Cloudflare hasn’t used that for quite a while now. archive.today uses a Cloudflare-looking (old style) page with a reCAPTCHA (and they do serve it quite often), but I don’t think I’ve seen other sites do that.
No you can get literally unsolveable captchas with cloudflare. You tick the box and it just refreshes and displays the unticked box again. Or people it on gateway endpoints that just return plain text errors (Humble does this).
There's code that makes it do something different after 100+ failed retries but you can speed it up by editing the _cf_chl_rc_* cookie (which is just a number). I haven't yet worked out what it does differently.
> I get unsolvable recaptchas all the time, especially on cloudflare pages
Repeated problems with cf and similar like this seem to be more common for users behind CGNAT (most mobile users for example). Presumably all the other hosts sharing the same final outgoing address(es), some of which will be running bots either deliberately or because they've been infiltrated by malware, confuse the heuristics that decide how often checks should be made.
we have clause in deal with clients about browser support (IIRC 5% or something like that). FF was just mismanaged so badly that the usage dropped so far into low single digit % it's not the question of maliciously not supporting it, it's the question of not wasting time on browser barely anyone of actual users use.
So, most sites work, but are never tested on FF, because there is no point, client won't pay for it.
The level of mental gymnastics in this thread denying the extent to which companies like Google (and their puppets like Mozilla) control the internet is too damn high.
Fortunately if projects like Ladybird gain enough momentum, websites might be forced to cater to it. Time will tell.
People on here love to moan about Firefox because Mozilla did one thing at some point in the existence of the company they didn't like. But then just cede the Internet to Google and chromium clones because at some point when they were a crappy junior JS dev, Chrome had some better tooling over Firebug so they just got used to testing in one browser. Maybe they also like to remember how Firefox, a decade ago, couldn't handle 1000 tab sessions.
I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.
For starters, they notoriously make configuration a difficult and shifting game of whac-o-mole to do simple things such as disabling the AI that nobody asked for:
It's also become more unstable in recent years, and I'm not even talking about 1000 tab sessions. It will crash with only a handful of tabs fairly regularly on linux.
For more flaws, look at everything LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc do to make up for them.
But you would still be left with all of the other issues pointed out by me and others. Plus, the parent seemed to be referring to FF, not just its core, so I replied accordingly.
It's not modular, for example. You can't just use the Gecko engine in your project. To do so, you have to deal and hack through the whole codebase of the Firefox browser.
It's been many years since Firefox dropped support for XUL extensions and XUL itself. It even lead to Firefox being forked, and Palemoon browser (amongst other forks of it) now carry the legacy of XUL ( https://udn.realityripple.com/ ). Also, that hasn't stopped Firefox from offering stand alone Gecko on Android ( https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ ) now, has it? If they can do it for Android, why not all the other desktop platforms? Start redirecting the 300+ million dollars they have earned from Firefox to the developers instead of the CEO et al and maybe we will see some good innovation happening in Firefox ...
Look how few people use it. Do you still want to claim that firefox is perfect? Because if not I suggest to read up on the last 15 years why people stopped using Firefox. Not all of which has to do with Google.
> I hope Firefox keeps up the fight but HN loves to crap all over them for not being perfect.
This shows a total lack of understanding. You assume that Firefox is perfect. It is not. It is a pretty bad browser. There is a reason why adChromium won. I wish it would be different but it is not.
Can’t speak for all users, but at least as of about six months ago, there appears to be a bug in Firefox in NixOS where the shader cache doesn’t appear to be able to write properly, and as such video acceleration doesn’t work. It became most evident when I was trying to watch 360-degree videos in Immich.
Entirely possible that this is an issue specific to NixOS or my machine, but because of that issue I switched over to Brave.
I would like to go back to Firefox at some point. Maybe I’ll see if I can make a patch to fix video acceleration on NixOS.
the obvious thing to do is keep using firefox as your daily driver, and load up the other browser as needed for the video etc.
I'm being tongue-in-cheek here because it seems most people just give up on safari/firefox if one thing doesn't work and go to some chromium-based browser as their default driver. That's sad.
I don't understand it. I do keep an ungoogled chromium install around for the few times when I suspect a site is intentionally breaking itself for firefox, and it's not a big deal to open on occasion. Otherwise, if you value customization at all, you have to use firefox.
I am not going to use two separate browsers purely so that a larger percentage of my time is spent in Firefox. That’s not a solution; the solution is to fix Firefox.
I would rather spend 100% of my time in Firefox but that’s not doable right now.
Thats what I do - that 1 page in 100, if at all, goes to chrome. But basically 100% of pages I ever use work fine.
They will have to pry with significant force firefox with ublock origin from my old dusty finger bones... fuck the rest for selling us all out.
Even if it won't move the needle a bit, I can look at myself in the mirror in this specific regard and be content that I didnt bow my head like bland masses did and didnt work towards massive enshittification of our global society from now on.
Because thats what its all about, nothing less. With our choices, we shape future for our kids and grandkids. Shame on you, all you rich faangs who are directly helping this. Godwin's law is never too far in such cases and history wont be kind to you, no reason to be
> You know you can make a browser based on Firefox's core and don't need to make a new one from scratch that'll never get past Cloudflare?
Under some definitions, the browser IS the core. You are bound at a fundamental level to your parent if you build on someone else's foundations. Firefox is probably a great one to do it but worth knowing that someone else owns the land upon which you stand.
They literally didn't deny that. They made a separate point you appear not to have actually read.
Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either. They'd absolutely end up allowing their own "acceptable" telemetry and ads. Even if they didn't, it would be unlikely to ever be as effective as Ublock Origin. Much like how Chromium browsers' built-in adblocking is barely anything in comparison, even on Manifest V2.
And yet, for now, Firefox and Mozilla is by far the lesser evil. I like a few of the Chromium browsers well enough, but they are ultimately at the mercy of Google.
Their separate point was ignored because it was an irrelevant tangent.
> Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either.
This is in a thread about how we should be happy that FF is vetting code for us. Do we trust them or don't we?
> And yet, for now, Firefox and Mozilla is by far the lesser evil.
I'm instinctively tempted to agree, but the difference is so negligible at this point that the only sign I would is the fact I'm still using FF due to momentum (as well as Ladybird not being ready from prime time yet).
FF/Mozilla has proven itself to be controlled opposition, so I'm not very interested in games of "lesser-of-two-evils" abuser logic that has infected politics and many other spheres in a race to the bottom.
GP trusts them for reviewing external extension code, and ensure that it does not contain malware, but not for not inserting exception to their own telemetry if they wrote the code themselves.
Or, more likely, they feel that having two independent actors collaborating on the extension (one by writing and the other by reviewing) yields a more trustworthy outcome than either actor on their own.
Mozilla have given us plenty of reasons to not trust them, which makes it hilarious that anybody would think it's noteworthy they're reviewing the code of Raymond Hill of all people.
>> Regardless, I don't want baked-in Firefox adblocking in part because I don't trust Mozilla with that task either.
> This is in a thread about how we should be happy that FF is vetting code for us. Do we trust them or don't we?
Are you joking? You brought the claim to the table, and now that people see the flaws in it you deny them talking about it? You're some mental gymnast..
> Fortunately if projects like Ladybird gain enough momentum, websites might be forced to cater to it. Time will tell.
Ladybird has corporate sponsors too. Sponsorship is influence. Obviously, the more sponsorships you have the less influence an individual one have but it is worth knowing.
True, but it ultimately depends on the terms of the sponsorship.
One would hope that a project like Ladybird (which is motivated to compete with a product which was ruined by Google's sponsorship) would choose those terms carefully.
And Mozilla did develop anti-fingerprinting tech, but they can't enable it by default because it breaks lots of websites and when a website doesn't work they're not going to appreciate Mozilla for protecting them, they're going to be pissed that it doesn't work.