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  • Hacker News
  • I'm hoping that Mozilla Firefox can adopt a similar foundation/donation strategy as Signal has proven to work quite well.

    We really need independence from Google in the browser landscape if we want the open web to survive.

    by monneyboi
  • There is a very easy solution to this problem, it's called FireFox. Now if only Mozilla would stop messing with it and instead would turn it into a class example of speed and memory efficiency I'd be even happier. But it's pretty good and I'm running it routinely with way too many tabs open (in the 100's, on a 32G laptop). I do have to be careful about unloading stuff. So, kick the Chrome habit.
    by jacquesm
  • Switch to firefox
    by malfist
  • I’ve had quite a few issues with Firefox crashing or otherwise behaving poorly in recent years.

    Switched over to Brave and have had perhaps a day or two of failed ad blocking on YT. Otherwise it’s been a rock solid experience and the built in Tor is nice when I need to quickly test geo rules.

    by antonymoose
  • AND try to not use Google, Facebook, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Oracle and other similar products made by asshole companies.
    by abroszka33
  • I’m irrationally angry with Mozilla for the way they’ve handled Firefox over the past few years. Clearly we need an independent, safe browser and there are no major alternatives for the common folk. Just let me pay a monthly fee to keep Firefox lean and fast instead of jamming AI tools and 3rd party integrations.
    by Karupan
  • There's never been a better time to switch to Firefox. Hopefully soon we'll have another player in this space with Ladybird but for now, Firefox is almost necessary to use the internet unimpeded.

    There are also some good Firefox forks out there, and I have been daily driving Zen for nearly a year. However, Librewolf and Floorp are both good options if you don't like Firefox's defaults or their push for more AI features (which you can turn off, to be fair).

    by chrysoprace
  • One Google doom over, another to go: https://keepandroidopen.org/
    by mrd3v0
  • Blame the brain damaged judge that literally told Google

    "The Apple app store is not a monopoly because Apple has no competitors on their platform."

    Google is just doing what they need to do to stop being a monopoly....by becoming a monopoly, because of a ruling that the internet actually celebrated. Which we can trace back to Epic not being happy that sideloading on Android wasn't perfectly frictionless.

    (Note: Epic also sued Apple, but lost, because the Apple app store is not a monopoly.)

    by WarmWash
  • Can't wait until we are forced to actually make Linux Phone systems actually good, but no one will invest until Android is closed
    by good8675309
  • I'm fairly happy with uBlock Origin Lite. Sure the original was better but this one does the job as well. uBlock Origin Lite is a MV3 extension, by the same author.
    by rickette
  • Isn’t the idea that over time chrome will limit what ubo lite blocks? It will phase out all of its own ad networks so they’re not blocked first, but it’s possible they also start allowing third party ads through for a price.
    by skizm
  • The main reason uBlock on Firefox works better is because of CNAME de-cloaking. All the tracking shit that appears to load as first-party, but isn't, can be correctly detected and blocked on Firefox. On Chrome it cannot, and with Google, Facebook, et al. encouraging site owners to move to these fake first-party conversion tracking solutions, your exposure to profiling has increased dramatically. You may see fewer ads but it does not do the same job.
    by Walf
  • Yeah I don’t seem to feel any performance or functionality degradation myself. What <X> ad blocking related feature has been made impossible with MV3?
    by judge2020
  • The solution is to use Firefox. uBlock Origin always worked best in Firefox anyway:

    https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

    by cisc
  • AFAIK firefox also will remove MV2
    by mococa
  • Or just run pihole or any other dns blocking service
    by qudat
  • Few years ago when google announced their MV2 plan I moved to Firefox. I don't think in all this time I ever missed Chrome for anything in particular outside of maybe 1 or 2 websites that didn't have proper support.

    Switch to Firefox if you haven't already really.

    by Lovesong
  • Most office IT actively blocks it.
    by dartharva
  • I switched to Firefox and have regular problems with sites not supporting it. I wound up having to cave and download Chrome for backup.
    by lelandfe
  • I would question if those sites only worked with Chrome or just had some user agent filtering in place. There are Chrome only websites, but thankfully most things I encounter are just requiring a blessed id, which can be easily faked.
    by 0cf8612b2e1e
  • For Work they actively deactivate Linux users for "security reasons", or Microsoft makes their web apps intentionally hostile like disabling copy/paste or disabling photo/picture or file uploads for Linux users when you're allowed in the policies.

    Turns out, it's bypassable. They just check the User Agent and Sec-CH headers, so I built a small browser extension for Chrome that allows to modify those headers.

    On top of that I built chromium-profiles [1], my tool for managing those isolated sandboxes so that I can tweak/change them based on the stupid policies per O365 tenant I have to work with.

    So I use 3 different profiles for 3 different customers with 3 different security policies set for their organization... For being allowed to use a freaking web app.

    That, for me, is the only reason I still have to have chromium installed. Microsoft stupidity.

    I wish Firefox would focus on this sort of use case, like the "--pwa" and "--user-data" CLI flags and preinstallable extensions for those profiles. But it can't be done due to how they manage extensions with their own signing cert, how dev mode extensions are always cleared etc. Well, apart from Microsoft intentionally making webapps unusable in Firefox.

    [1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/chromium-profiles

    by cookiengineer
  • Firefox is genuinely quite a good option. There are some Google-driven web proposals that they've refused to implement[0] (I'm sure I disagreed with some of them, though I forget which), but overall I've found that I've never really had to think about the browser: it's just a medium for the web.

    They do offer some integrated services (which some would denote as bloat), though unlike Chrome, they do let you actually turn things off, which I'm very appreciative of -- they don't seem to be nearly as forceful as Google, who recently added a 4GB download to every Chrome install[0].

    As I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more appreciative of platforms which don't try to redefine the problem scope, and instead just provide a platform for other things. GrapheneOS does this perfectly too.

    [0]: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ [1]: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/05/google-chrome...

    by tentacleuno
  • I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to use it.

    Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.

    by gardnr
  • No it didn’t? People(web devs) jumped to Chrome because Google advertised it heavily.

    I never did because I remember internet explorer and lack of transparent PNG support.

    by Gud
  • It was astonishing how you fell for it back then.

    In a company that size, you move around a few buttons and hundreds of millions come out. You delete some feature and poof BILLIONS are made. Who care if it upsets some % of the user base? It's billions with a B!

    It was also astonishing to see HN cheer on the Great Firewall of the USA and make excuses for it.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35408837

    Here google has inserted it self between you and the www. It has ruled it self judge and executioner without any disclosure or accountability while simultaneously receiving your entire browser history in real time.

    When they pull the plug on some website because they don't like the content it is immediately replaced by a scary red screen lying about malware that doesn't have a skip button. There use to be a button in the firefox settings to disable it but hey! Even when they reinstate it, say a week later, your website is pretty much officially dead already. Customers should take their business to someone who doesn't install malware on their computer.

    If my business was to sell ads and I could simply disable your means to not view my ads I wouldn't be able to explain it to my investors. They would be like, Billions with a B! it would be hard for them to listen to the positive side of disabling my product. But lets take it to a vote...

    A - Billions

    B - not Billions

    by 6510
  • Is 2010 when people started to like it? I remember, in 2008, being in a computer science course at university when Chrome launched. It was not liked at that time, at least within the computer users I knew. I remember it being mostly described as "that awful browser that Google made".
    by protimewaster
  • Yep, Chrome was great but the past few years they're obviously moving the wrong way. I'm completely off of Chrome, back to Firefox and Brave.
    by burnte
  • I remember when my friends were singing the praises of Chrome and Gmail and I was telling them it's a trap.

    Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.

    by Gibbon1
  • Funny enough I never left Firefox. It’s always been great.
    by testing22321