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ews
Moved to firefox and I am glad I did, I want to use a browser that respects my privacy choices
hardwaresofton
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.
xaerise
Sadly more than just ads. my ublock/pihole rules is mostly tracking ( +80% ) and very little ad rules.
b0ner_t0ner
Highly recommend Zen Browser: https://github.com/zen-browser
qmmmur
What do you like about it?
nickthegreek
its got stronger privacy out of the box than stock firefox, modern design, big fan of vertical tabs myself and it now has basic tab folders if enabled by flags. ubo/bpc both work nicely.
tombert
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.
nar001
That doesn't solve the issue of ManifestV2 being removed though, Brave will have it removed at the same time as Chrome, when it's pulled from the code base
dotcoma
Brave have not promised to continue to support uBlock Origin ?
zulban
Every browser has occasional big issues. If you haven't seen one yet in (insert browser name here) then you just haven't been around long enough.
tombert
Sure, but there is a limit to bullshit I'm willing to put up with. When that bullshit level is past its threshold I don't think you can blame someone for jumping ship.
EasyMark
This is a good reason to stick with LTS vesions of firefox
Madmallard
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.
DavideNL
The binaries aren't signed… :’(
Also, it seems quite vague to me exactly who/what company/entity is behind it.
oceanhaiyang
What does the binaries not being signed mean?
It seems waterfox (?) has a legal entity behind it for your exact reason!
ranger_danger
No thanks. Their own devs have gladly called the project "very woke", and a "certainly quite political project".
queenkjuul
Wow, a political free software project? Who could imagine such a thing.
Anyway sounds like you're trying to convince me to use it
GuinansEyebrows
You’ll find that has absolutely nothing to do with the way you choose to use the free software they produce for your benefit.
Laihela
These days the term "woke" has lost almost all meaning. It used to mean being "awake" i.e. aware of socio-economic factors in society. Today, as far as I can tell, it simply refers to whatever the big corporations/alt-right doesn't like. Just like how they refer to anything left of oligarchy as "communism". To me them calling themselves "very woke" reads as "we are against anti-human behavior", which is a good thing.
EasyMark
I never had firefox pop up and tell me to attend a drag show or that I need to surf more diverse websites than my usual sports and news sites. how is it woke? I don't care what mozilla the org does. They jsut took a big revenue hit because of the decision against google, they won't have much money for any political endeavors other than maybe privacy and free speech on the web very soon
jacknews
so? is the browser any good?
dlcarrier
Go with Pale Moon, if you want a privacy-respecting fork of Firefox.
EasyMark
I like librewolf, but it has made similar choices as a fork
OptionOfT
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?
comprev
NextDNS [0] has proven very useful for me on iOS. Firefox is 99% ad-free. Only for YouTube do I switch to Brave Browser.
I use Firefox on other devices and use the sync functionality so prefer to use it where possible.
My home router (Draytek) is also configured to force any connected devices to use NextDNS too.
Definitely worth the €20 annual subscription.
DavideNL
I agree; i use Firefox on all my Desktop devices. But on iOS it’s the worst. I never use it, except to quickly check for a (synced) bookmark.
wltr
Ditto!
cassianoleal
Firefox Focus can be used as an ad-blocker.
ProtoAES256
IIRC Firefox on iOS is basically a wrapper around Safari since it's not "opened up"?
ranger_danger
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.
paulryanrogers
Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration? I've heard some graphics drivers can be crashy when apps push the boundaries.
I have had crashes with Firefox in a long time.
paulryanrogers
^have not
M95D
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...
93po
About a year ago FF said they had no current plans to remove V2 support, and if they did, they'd give at least 12 month notice. Which to me is basically language saying they absolutely will remove it at some point, otherwise they'd just say "no we'll never remove it, fuck google".
I've moved to LibreWolf personally
slumberlust
It seems disingenuous to penalize a company for something that hasn't happened and is based on an assumption of interest.
In the same way we should chastise the platforms that choose to enshitify, we should praise those that hold out.
M95D
> assumption of interest
But there's no assumption of interest. It's a fact. Not only that, but they did it before. Remember when they removed XUL?
dossy
There's still a way to load it under Chrome 138, but when Chrome 139 lands, that's when MV2 will finally be removed.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
> Just as before, Enterprises using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy will continue to be exempt from any browser changes until at least June 2025. Starting in June, the branch for Chrome 139 will begin, in which support for Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from Chrome. Unlike the previous changes to disable Manifest V2 extensions which gradually rolled out to users, this change will impact all users on Chrome 139 at once. As a result, Chrome 138 is the final version of Chrome to support Manifest V2 extensions (when paired with the ExtensionManifestV2Availability key). You can find the release information about Chrome 138 and 139, include ChromeOS's LTS support, on the Chromium release schedule
krackers
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.
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bigbuppo
Advertising company forcibly disables software that stops the spread of malware.
Why would they do that?
const_cast
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.
xtracto
That's what i find stupid of current browsers. When Firefox was first created by "stripping" all the bloat from Netscape navigator, the idea was that Extensions would allow end users to add optional functionality . It put the user in control of their browser experience.
There should be a browser that doesn't assume their users are stupid. I want to turn off CORS I want to be able to modify the DOM and inject whatever the heck I want.
KevinMS
HN was so hyped when chrome came out. Pushing it hard. A few people were saying, um guys, chrome is made by a company that sells ads, this is not going to work out well.
mkozlows
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.
wting
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.
whoisyc
I remember Firefox crashing on me nearly daily around the time Chrome came out. I didn’t need anyone to push Chrome on me. Chrome was just simply technologically superior.
But of course today there is little reason to not use Firefox.
queenkjuul
Everyone was hyped when Chrome came out. This is hard to believe but the world was different 20 years ago
gargron
Firefox is still a great browser with probably the best devtools.
rrgok
Can you expand on the "best devtools" comparing to Chrome's?
1vuio0pswjnm7
Seems everyone is releasing a browser nowadays. (Not literally, this is a figure of speech.)
Perhaps uBlock/uMatrix needs its own browser.
Mozilla is "all in" on surveillance advertising. From its press releases and strategic initiatives (for lack of a better term), it appears to believe online advertising is essential for the www to exist. Whereas, it has never stated that "ad blockers" are essential for the www to exist.
EasyMark
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.
giingyui
[dead]
WaltPurvis
FWIW, these instructions allow you to re-enable uBlock in Chrome 138. A temporary fix, but I needed a temporary fix so I could export my hundreds of custom filters (so I can load them into uBlock in Firefox).
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1itw1bz/end_o...
RandyOrion
Not to defend chrome or chromium, there is a way for chrome users to use manifest v2 in version 138 and above. See the link below.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/29...
For me, I choose not to manually update my ungoogled chromium to version 138 and above.
ranger_danger
I think uBO Lite works just fine for 99% of users.
mparramon
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.
adithyassekhar
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.
angrydev
Yeah, I switched a while ago and it’s has 0 impact on my browsing.
Springtime
Among the neater features of the full-featured uBO is its ability to load userscripts from external sources.
While there's much talk about uBlock Origin with Mv2 other losses include the last remaining Javascript managers for Chromium like ScriptSafe that have no Mv3 counterpart.
p_ing
uBlock Origin Lite is still there
chis
Has anyone made the switch to firefox? I’d be sad to lose my nice google profile integration to chrome and the password manager. And whenever I try Firefox it feels a little bit jankier and slower, but that might just be in my head
mparramon
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...
mkozlows
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.
Teslazar
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.
trelliscoded
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.
cagey
Ditto. I installed CrunchBang++ Linux[1] on a couple of out-of-support 4GB-RAM Chromebooks about 6 months ago, and they (with Firefox (w/shared account) and uBlock Origin) basically continue to fill the Chromebook role (my morning before-work lazy web-surfing guided by Inoreader) with aplomb: occasionally I go a little too tab-crazy (or open one too many YouTube tabs) and it freezes, but simply restarting (holding the power button down until it reboots) gets me going again. I save+close excess tabs to OneTab and life goes on. Extremely utilitarian.
const_cast
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.
tlavoie
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.
solardev
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.
queenkjuul
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
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The latest version of Chrome (138) removes Manifest v2 and all extensions that rely on it.