<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;chrome-users-beware-ma...</a>

It nerfs adblockers so the current net convenience of using Chromium vs Firefox becomes a net inconvenience. Manifest v2 disablement day might as well be Firefox Switching Day.

&gt;The microsecond manifest v3 is forced upon me,Protest before if even happens by switching now, maybe?

Your loyalty is commendable. But we all forgive you if you make the switch now.

#LibreWolf much more lightweight; bloat, telemetry removed.

Happy to chime in regarding LibreWolf and Waterfox, as it comes up alot in our support forums[1]:This question comes up every now and then, I&#x27;ll base my currently updated reply starting with my previous response[2]:&gt; Now, ignoring feature differences between all the forks out there, I&#x27;d like to present a different perspective and consideration that I think gets overlooked when comparing forks like Waterfox to other forks (if I am incorrect regarding Librewolf, someone please correct me).&gt; Waterfox provides signed binaries for download. Librewolf (and most of the rest) do not. Checksum&#x27;s are all well and good, but IMO, not enough. Code signing provides trust.&gt; Librewolf does not provide auto-updates. There are 3rd party tools out there, but IMHO that brings in its own set of problems, and breaks the chain-of-trust.&gt; The most important one that I believe, maybe apart from Pale Moon, only Waterfox does, is offers _accountability_. There is (and has been since 2012) a legal entity behind Waterfox. That used to be Waterfox Limited, then it was System1 and now BrowserWorks (the entity I control). Laws must be abided and the end user actually has an entity to hold accountable. GDPR, CCPA, the rest are things that _actually_ need to be followed. The other projects, who are you _really_ going to hold accountable if things go wrong? To me this is super important because a browser is used for sensitive information. It&#x27;s just not worth the risk otherwise. This also goes hand in hand with the code signing.&gt; Above all else, Waterfox has been around for 12 years&gt; Don&#x27;t get me wrong, things like EV code signing certs are a bit of a racket, and yeah you can jump in and code audit all those other forks too. But really, push comes to shove, they can just disappear into the aether.Separately, I&#x27;d say the end goals of each browser are different. Librewolf seems to aim for privacy on a rolling release. Tor and Mull will both target ESR (extended support releases, which is where Mozilla aim for my enterprise friendly releases of features being set and instead security&#x2F;bug patches applied only). All of them will sacrifice compatibility for privacy&#x2F;security. From my above comment, I&#x27;d go with Tor if you&#x27;re willing to sacrifice speed, Mull if you want better speed but broken websites. After all a web browser probably accesses the most _sensitive_ data it can, I&#x27;d put my faith in a piece of a software run by a legal entity so you can have some legal recourse on matters.Waterfox&#x27;s goal in terms of privacy is a usable web that still leans heavily to privacy but doesn&#x27;t want to sacrifice the web experience for that to work.Waterfox has done a lot to reach that, from careful curation of preferences to supplemental infrastructure such as DNS over Oblivious HTTP (DoOH). These aren&#x27;t just features that &quot;might&quot; help; there&#x27;s real benefit to it. For example, users have reported being able to access censored websites when using Waterfox. In my opinion, I&#x27;ve reached Waterfox&#x27;s goal perfectly here: privacy and web compatibility.Then, there&#x27;s all the other &quot;sugar&quot; on top:- Customization- Reverting features removed by Mozilla but are genuinely useful&#x2F;should&#x27;ve remained in Firefox.- Adding features when Mozilla is slow to do so (better JPEG-XL support for one).- The only fork that AFAIK that supports DRM content, for watching Netflix, Prime Video etc. Considering how difficult this was to achieve I doubt any will get support any time soon either.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;waterfox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;18g8tez&#x2F;comment&#x2F;kd0nhf3&#x2F;?context=3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;waterfox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;18g8tez&#x2F;comment&#x2F;k...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;waterfox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;14seevh&#x2F;comment&#x2F;jqwuan8&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;waterfox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;14seevh&#x2F;comment&#x2F;j...</a>

Why wait until the final nail has been hammered before escaping your coffin?

&gt; LibreWolfWhy are FOSS names always so bad...

The microsecond manifest v3 is forced upon me, I will switch. And I&#x27;ll be bringing my entire family tree and friends along with me!What does everyone think about LibreWolf vs mainline FF? It reminds me of Waterfox: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librewolf.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librewolf.net</a>

I agree with the implicit point. From the ethics standpoint, regardless of what happens at the top, Mozilla&#x27;s waywardness isn&#x27;t reflected in the browser, unlike Google&#x27;s web and user hostility with Chrome (manifest v3 etc).

I use Firefox because it&#x27;s the least bad option remaining, certainly not because I believe it&#x27;s the last remaining ethical web browser. I have no confidence in Mozilla&#x27;s ethics or mission, and no longer contribute directly or financially for that reason.

Around 86% of Firefox’s income is from Google, yes.

Are they still receiving funds from Google?

Are you talking about the payment Mozilla receives for keeping Google the default search engine on Firefox? Just change it.

I believe Mozilla falls into a difficult non-profit grey area. Having another browser on the market isn’t as critical to humanity as providing anti-malarial medicine to millions of Africans, yet I think we can all agree that a world without any browser competition would suck for people rich enough to use a browser in the first place. It would be hard for Mozilla to attract $400M&#x2F;yr of relatively strings-free cash from anyone other than Google.Google’s search dominance won’t be cured by Mozilla ending its partnership. It will only be cured by innovative competitors who discover an even better way of organizing the internet’s information (perhaps OpenAI or LLMs generally?), or by government regulation. In the meantime, I like to think of Mozilla’s siphoning of cash from Google as a good thing while we all wait for a proper long term solution that may never arrive.A similar philosophical question ought to confront us every day about many things we use without thinking, both on the internet and off.

Maybe if they don’t align with Google agenda so much, I’ll switch.What’s the ethical of switching if Mozilla is just the non-profit arm of Google?

Any site that is on the edge of performance (often due to bad engineering, which you can blame on time constraints) will perform vastly better in Chromium.

This prompted me to check LinkedIn after months of having it parked in a tab and it worked with no problems.When I have problems with a site it&#x27;s usually because I&#x27;m blocking most JavaScript with uMatrix and I have to find the correct combination of scripts to make the site work for me without having to give away my soul to the gods of tracking.As a software developer, it&#x27;s been years since a customer told me that the sites I develop on Firefox don&#x27;t work on Chrome or Safari. I don&#x27;t even bother to check anymore. I couldn&#x27;t check with Safari anyway and they are OK with that. The point is that if it works in Firefox it works everywhere. Of course we&#x27;re not using any Chrome-only API but we never had to use one of them as far as I can remember.

Bigquery studio is an absolute dog in Firefox even on S-tier desktop hardware. It works better in chrome. Go figure.

The only site I&#x27;ve found behaves terribly in Firefox is LinkedIn. Weird pauses on page load that lock the whole browser (not just the tab) for like 5-10 seconds. No idea what they&#x27;re doing to make this happen, but it&#x27;s odd.Which is, well, fine, because LinkedIn is mostly a dumpster anyways.

I don&#x27;t mind breaking websites, if I can fix them on my own terms.

Nah, there&#x27;s plenty of examples of sites breaking on Firefox. For example, the recent degraded performance on Youtube linked to Firefox User Agent strings.

Firefox doesn&#x27;t. But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does. I keep Chrome up for VirusTotal to scan PortableApps.com releases. In Firefox, it&#x27;ll throw broken ReCaptcha prompts over and over and over after a certain number of scans per day (pick the thing, next, pick the thing, next x10, etc). And that&#x27;s with all extensions disabled. Possibly related: VirusTotal and ReCaptcha are owned by Google.

I have chrome installed. In the rare occasion that Firefox does not do a good job I just switch to chrome for that website and then go back.This is usually the case if there might be forms or something like that. It&#x27;s minor enough that it doesn&#x27;t bother me.Now, on the other hand, tab management is so much better with chrome and I&#x27;ve considered using Chrome for that reason alone. At work I do use chrome because I usually have 10-15 websites open at a time (for example I like to keep one tab group per ticket and every related item to it there).I do use simple tab groups on Firefox but it&#x27;s not good enough at least to replace my workflow at work.

&quot;Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites&quot; .. for you.I regulary ran across something that does not work or has a broken style. And I know how to turn UO off.And why should that be a surprise? FF has way less manpower than Chrome. (And even fired lots of engineers, to raise the CEO bonus)Chrome leads the way and probably the vast majority developes for chrome and with chrome dev tools. So most of the time FF works, but not always. And performance is just worse, but not noticable on a desktop and on mobile it is offset by the working adblock. Meaning perceived performance is usually better, because ads are blocked, unlike in chrome mobile.

&gt; Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites.There are definitely websites that don&#x27;t work with Firefox out of the box. Just one example that annoys me is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mtgarena-support.wizards.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mtgarena-support.wizards.com</a>. &quot;Firefox users: Firefox&#x27;s Enhanced Tracking Protection may interfere with Sign In. Temporarily disable it in Firefox Privacy Settings to load the sign in screen.&quot;

&gt; However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with &quot;Multi-Account Containers&quot;, &quot;Temporary Containers&quot;Never even heard of these... hmm

It’s probably the ublock origin breaking websites and not the multi-account containers, right?

Shouldn&#x27;t we say &quot;Some sites break user browsing experience&quot;?

I use Firefox with uBlock Origin. I don&#x27;t use containers but I do use profiles.Yes some sites are &quot;broken&quot; with uBlock Origin. I don&#x27;t find it to be many, however. I run into paywalls much more often than I do problems with my browser settings.

There&#x27;s some more you should do to increase privacy: Disable Firefox sending each keystroke into the address bar to all the numerous search engines (includes google). Best to just enable the separate bar for search and disable search suggestions entirely.

&gt; Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites.Firefox doesn&#x27;t cause broken websites. Websites developers that target only Chrome cause websites to inadvertently become broken in Firefox.

&gt; Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and &quot;ClearURLs&quot;, &quot;Consent-o-matic&quot;, and a few others) occasionally break websites.I have good luck just using a private window, since that has no extensions by default. Bonus: It&#x27;s really fast; ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-c enter

I have had sites that are definitely broken in Firefox even after a stock install with every last toggle&#x2F;extension&#x2F;script blocker turned off. It&#x27;s fairly rare, but there are a slowly growing list of sites that don&#x27;t behave properly under Firefox but work in Chromium.

Yeah im still a bit surprised that Github doesnt work in firefox for me. It wont load a repository page, its just blank with nothing but the navigation on the page. This happens after turning off all plugins. dont know if github has made it so only chrome works but thats a pretty major site for firefox to not work with.

i also use ublock matrix so i get to play &quot;which third party hosts are needed to make this page work&quot; for every new website

Not sure about the others but uBlock Origin allows you to disable it for specific websites and remember the setting.

I have two profiles for firefox dorkily called &quot;hax0r mode&quot; and &quot;normie mode&quot;, each with different theming so I can tell the diff.
I try to do as much as I can in hax0r mode, which has uBlock O, NoScript, auto cookie delete and a few other privacy settings like no 3rd party cookies. Sites usually start pretty broken before I tweak NoScript for them, which I&#x27;m OK with.Occasionally, sites are obstinate and I need to use Normie mode (e.g. for Maps)Normie mode just has uBlock O, containers. I really have zero problems with sites breaking here.

Multi-account-containers doesn&#x27;t really break websites in my opinion. It&#x27;s just like running a separate browser (in fact it&#x27;s simply a firefox profile under the hood).What can go wrong is if you&#x27;ve set a certain site to always open in a certain container and another site redirects you to this site. This can happen with Identity Providers like Okta, ADFS etc. They will then open in a different container (the assigned one) and lose context. Especially microsoft services have an annoying habit of redirecting through 25 different URLs on every sign-in. But if configured correctly it&#x27;s a godsend, you can use this tool to sign into multiple MS tenants at the same time, something with chrome and not even Edge can do right now (switching teams between multiple tenants is a nightmare).But I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s the multi accounts containers at fault here, it&#x27;s the user. Just don&#x27;t do that :P

consent-o-matic lets a lot of them through.... I need to find an alternative that works better

I also had problems recently with an online notary service... they forced me to use Chrome...Not the same problem, but I wonder when faxes will disappear... For example, Progressive Insurance wanted me fax, mail pictures or bring them in person... email didn&#x27;t work... Of course they didn&#x27;t have a safe way to transfer them digitally but I would not care if everyone in the world saw those emails.The useless requirements that they set just proves that they don&#x27;t understand technology.

In general, browsers do not cause broken websitesThis, again, can be restated as incompetent developers cause broken websites (!)(&quot;... do not attribute to bad faith that which can be explained by stupidity&quot;)

you might want to try<pre><code> about:profiles
</code></pre>
create a new profile and use that for testing

Zero broken websites here, and I use those and more extensions. I also use FF on Android and iPadOS (although that&#x27;s a Safari reskin, it provides some niceties on top like send tab to device).

Temporary and Multi-Account containers do not break websites.

Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites. However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with &quot;Multi-Account Containers&quot;, &quot;Temporary Containers&quot;, &quot;uBlock Origin&quot;, and a few more. These are amazing for privacy and productivity, but will occasionally cause broken websites.Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and &quot;ClearURLs&quot;, &quot;Consent-o-matic&quot;, and a few others) occasionally break websites.

If GP is anything like me, they used Firefox before Chrome was released. The Mozilla&#x2F;Netscape suite that spawned Firefox is older than Google itself.For a time, Firefox performed worse than a rabid dog. Chrome ate their lunch and gained market share fast. I and many of my colleagues switched around that time.

In my case: Because Opera stopped using Presto and switched to Chromium. That does says a bit about when I switched.I used Firefox pretty extensively, then switch to Chrome when Firefox fell behind on speed, but the developer tools absolutely sucks in Chrome, so I tried Opera which had a great feature set, speed and wonderful developer tools. It was a pretty sad day when Opera dropped Presto, and more so when they where bought by some Chinese company.

This is a funny comment - why&#x27;d you leave Firefox to have to come back to it?

&gt; Some websites still will just not work in FireFoxI run into this as well, but I just use Safari as my backup browser and that usually is good enough. The only thing I still need to use Chrome for is my Nest thermostat.

&gt; Especially since they&#x27;re the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company.You know, it&#x27;s not necessarily a bad thing that another enormous company is competing with Chrome. It might be less than ideal than Firefox having Safari&#x27;s share, but it still eats at Google&#x27;s monopoly more effectively.

Unfortunately I had to move over to Vivaldi after using Firefox more than a decade due to performance.On Linux, it consumes so much memory it actually slows down my machine...

I&#x27;ve been using FireFox for about 4.5 years now, but I have to have Chrome installed for a few reasons unfortunately.- Some websites still will just not work in FireFox. It&#x27;s not super common anymore, but if I sense something is fishy, I pop open the console and see some strange error and swap over to Chrome. Things will just work then. All extensions disabled even. I even ran into this on Vanguard&#x27;s website, albeit for some obscure forms.- When I worked at a company that had a larger web app presence, I would have to test in Chrome. That&#x27;s a given, but my Chrome counterparts did not do the same with FireFox. I would fairly regularly (few times a quarter) find things that were completely broked on FireFox.All that said, I don&#x27;t really care about my choice in browser very much, but I&#x27;d rather support Mozilla over Google still. Especially since they&#x27;re the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company. I&#x27;d like to help support a more open web, even if it&#x27;s just a little bit.

I know it’s mentioned elsewhere, but this does it for me:* Try the same site in a private window (assuming plugins are disabled when in private)* If on dev or nightly, try those sites on the regular release.I haven’t bumped into anything in GCP that fails to work on ff, though likely don’t use the console as extensively.

What do those sites say about the problem when you report the error to them? Do any of them acknowledge their error?

did you check if you have any funky plugins enabled?

I unfortunately switched back to Chrome last week after having used Firefox for years due to not being able to use sites I frequent.  I constantly ran into issues with Heroku, GCP (go figure), and a few financial sites I&#x27;d log into regularly.

Brave is really good and always surprising me with features while largely staying lean and out of my way.They recently added a chatbot that runs locally they call Leo based on llama2. It&#x27;s pretty impressive that you can perform LLM tasks on the current page without the use of any 3rd party service. And of course you can pay them for the souped up version. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brave.com&#x2F;leo-release&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brave.com&#x2F;leo-release&#x2F;</a>Feels like I am alone in thinking the crypto features of Brave are cool. And not because I think that industry generally isn&#x27;t full of slime. But micropayments for content has been a good, latent idea for a generation, and here they&#x27;ve simply built it as a default feature.I still use FF and Brave equally because of my experience with the first browser wars and my mistrust of Chrome, having become the new IE.

Brave and Edge are just chromium.Bro. You’re still using chrome.

I use FF on my desktop and Brave on mobile. I tried FF on mobile and it has too many issues, unlike its desktop counterpart. And there are no good maintained de-googled chromium alternatives on Android other than Brave.

Brave is my primary also, but Orion is creeping up. It’s still a little buggy, but nested tree tabs is very nice.

Brave on iOS uses the WebKit engine right ? How can it be so different from Safari ?

&gt;\ Hot take:I tried FF for a long time but finally switched to Brave. Yes, I&#x27;ll be downvoted for saying this but it&#x27;s objectively one of my top 3 favorite browsers rn.1. Brave2. Edge3. SafariI like each of them for different reasons. Brave (after disabling annoying features such as crypto and VPN) is awesome and its iOS app is the only one which can play videos in the background, has dark mode, and syncs really well with the desktop app.Edge is so tempting esp. with recent Microsoft Copilot which makes it so useful (I can summarize pages right in the browser, organize my tabs by telling so to the Copilot, etc.)Safari is not a good browser per se and lacks many features and plugins, but it&#x27;s minimal and doesn&#x27;t drain the battery like Brave and FF.I really wanted to like FF but it&#x27;s just not cutting it anymore.

I just switched back to firefox yesterday.  Not a long sample period, but so far I completely agree, less painful than chrome.

I&#x27;ve been using Chrome for years and I never have to start Firefox for something.

Firefox became better, Chrome became worse. Every week one time I have to start Chrome for something.

We need an updated version of this video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9sKppwrLBY8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9sKppwrLBY8</a>

Which parts of office365? I don&#x27;t have any issues using it on FF. That said I&#x27;m not a heavy user (mainly outlook, word, sometimes PowerPoint).

I&#x27;m a FF-first user but I definitely have had to keep Chrome around for a few things— my investment banking doesn&#x27;t load in FF nor do some parts of Office 365.

I&#x27;m fully switching to FF at home now. I&#x27;d half done it but had a large collection of tabs open in Chrome which kept pulling me back as I couldn&#x27;t be bothered with reassessing them all (a fair I should have closed) and recording the ones I still wanted to keep elsewhere. Chrome gave me the final push the other day by completely forgetting most of those open items during an update.I&#x27;d not encountered anything broken in Chrome that was fixed by FF though.I&#x27;ll still be primarily Chrome in DayJob though, as most of our clients&#x27; users are (with some on Edge, a few using FF, and a couple of idiots still not off IE though we don&#x27;t officially support that) so that makes sense even though I very rarely touch anything front-end these days.

I&#x27;m slowly migrating a lot of my browsing out of Safari and into LibreWolf, and using the opportunity to document accounts&#x2F;passwords that i want to keep.If i were willing to get an iPhone, then i&#x27;d be quite happy with Safari (i don&#x27;t have Chrome installed on my Mac), but I want the ability to have my bookmarks available on multiple phones &amp; computers... so firefox profiles (in LibreWolf) is the mechanism i&#x27;ve decided to use for that (for now)

I&#x27;ve been using Firefox for regular browsing for years now,  but I use Chrome for streaming videos (Firefox streaming quality is noticably worse) and LibreWolf for YouTube (blocks ads). It&#x27;s annoying to have 3 browsers open basically all of the time.

I love &amp; support Firefox but feel nervous about going all in on it when Mozilla appears to be pivoting away from investing in it.

What would be really cool is a Firefox plugin that allowed you to replace the entire browser tab with a Chromium renderer on a specific website if you so wish, and remember that setting. That way there would really be no need to install Chrome for a few one-off websites.Considering both Firefox and Chromium are open-source it should be entirely possible.

Same here. Chrome was just too buggy for me. This year was when I finally made the switch.What helped me was that I switched my phone browser to DuckDuckGo browser. This kind of opened my horizons.

I switched back to firefox last year and haven&#x27;t looked back. I still use chrome on another laptop sometimes, the performance difference from my human perspective is literally zero.These days, it&#x27;s much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.

Firefox’s default search engine is also Google Search, full of ads and spam.

Firefox has ads doesn&#x27;t it ? for the homepage links.(I am not complaining. long time firefox user)

Brave’s internal ads and crypto weirdness are enough for me to be uncomfortable with it.

&gt; weaker protections against fingerprinting and ad blockingCitation?

Brave runs on Chrome and has some of the highest privacy protections.I love Firefox, but just questioning if there aren’t good solutions available on Chrome.And while Apple may
not have a business model as focused on selling data, they still have a growing ad business + weaker protections against fingerprinting and ad blocking

Not doubting you, but do you have a source for that? Best I could find was their last quarterly earnings report which does have “Services” ahead of everything but iPhone, but I would imagine includes some big money makers like AppleCare.

Apple makes money from ads in their App Store. Do they make ad money from Safari? I couldn’t find that info.

Just a small correction. Large parts of revenue are obtained though sharing ad revenue between Mozilla and a search engine, not for being the default search engine.

Apple definitely makes a lot of money from advertising...probably more than they make from selling Macs (based on 2022 results).Also I think this quote might be technically right, but Mozilla&#x27;s revenue is almost entirely paid from advertising companies who pay royalties to have their search engines by default in Firefox. So they are very much coupled to the dynamics of the ads industry.

&gt; Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and&#x2F;or selling your personal dataThis is true for Google, etc, but definitely not for Apple. Not saying Apple is perfect in every way, but they actually have a track record for privacy protection.

And after that&#x27;s normalized, then Google will enhance your user experience by bringing &quot;Android Webview security&quot; to Chrome on android, you know, it makes you really secure, it&#x27;s really to help you keep safe.A few years down the road, a surprising amount of companies insist you can only use their product on those secure smartphone browsers because of it&#x27;s enhanced security, so Google helps you out by adding a special &quot;Android Secure Mode&quot; to desktop Chrome.

After all the intense backlash they faced, they made it a &#x27;limited&#x27; webview feature rather that dropping it entirely. Now that it&#x27;s away from a standardization body, what&#x27;s to prevent it from being developed unimpeded by public opposition? What&#x27;s to stop them from expanding it to browsers once the &#x27;feature&#x27; is ready? After all, this is exactly the pattern we saw with FLoC, &#x27;privacy&#x27; sandbox and the Topics API.

Yes, but it&#x27;s the sort of creepy that they can&#x27;t just undo by saying &quot;nevermind&quot;.

It will come back again and again, and each time there will be less public outcry. It&#x27;ll end up being normalized and eventually accepted. General purpose computers give the unwashed masses too much power.

This was reworked to be a more limited proposal specific for Android Webviews, IIRC. Fairly recently (last month)?

This reads like someone hopelessly out of touch with actual users.Most users don&#x27;t give a shit if their client is &quot;honest&quot;, or if it&#x27;s respects intellectual property. These are concerns of web admins and media companies. Users just want something to load websites.

&quot;Users often depend on websites trusting the client environment they run in. This trust may assume that the client environment is honest about certain aspects of itself, keeps user data and intellectual property secure, and is transparent about whether or not a human is using it.&quot;Double-plus-good rights management!

I admire how they barely try to hide the fact that it&#x27;s just a way to bombard you even more with ads.  They don&#x27;t even care to pretend at this point.

First they required attestation on Facebook but I did not speak up because I do not use Facebook.Then they required attestation for Amazon but I did not speak up because I do not use Amazon.And finally they required attestation for Uber Eats, but there was nobody left to speak up for me.

I am fine not browsing websites that require this bullshit and fully embrace the small selection of niche communities that will be Internet 2.0

If you keep feeding the Google monster you soon won&#x27;t be able to browse the internet without a 3rd party attesting that your computer is worth browsing that site.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;googles-web-integrit...</a>

I&#x27;ve been using Firefox for about as long as I can remember, and really don&#x27;t notice sites not working. I do notice, however, that using any browser without UBO makes my eyes bleed in an unending agony of capitalist garbage. It&#x27;s like using a browser and then putting sand in your eyeballs.

Brave&#x27;s built-in Adblock is just as good as Firefox+UBO in my experience.

&quot;better&quot; is completely subjective. From my point of view dev tools are way better in Blink-based browsers, so Chrome is my default dev browser. The browsing experience is really good in Safari, I love the compact tabs and minimalist UI, so that&#x27;s my default on macOS. Edge has a really nice productivity feature that lets you split a window to see two different pages at the same time, so that&#x27;s my default on Windows. Other than being open source I don&#x27;t see what would compel me to go back to Firefox in 2024, the competition improved a lot. Also I personally lost faith in the Mozilla Foundation.

IMHO, Brave Browser + uBlock origin is far better than any other browser without UBO.So, perhaps the real difference isn&#x27;t so much the browser as it is UBO?(I Know that BB is basically Chromium with some changes, just like Chrome. And, that Chromium is not Chrome)

Firefox + uBlock origin is far better than any other browser without UBO.

What Adblock do you use with Safari? I would also like to try switching from Firefox to Safari but I haven’t found anything that can compete with uBO

Talking about complaining: On iOS I find it an absolute no-go not to have the choice of which browser I use because technically it is Safari anyway. So yes, you can&#x27;t complain that Safari is worse than Firefox because Firefox is no real Firefox on iOS.However, I guess you are talking about MacOS.

Yeah, I actually switched from Firefox to Safari this month. I didn&#x27;t know Safari had tab groups, the feature I missed from Chrome when using Firefox. No speed differences and Safari has less of a battery impact so far.Hard to complain about a browser that still cares about privacy, but with tighter OS integration.

It is the default browser on many phones though.

&gt; Defaults are powerful.This is true, though the current dominance of Chrome is evidence that a lot of people will switch. Chrome isn&#x27;t the default browser on any desktop, after all, and yet a majority of non-technical users have deliberately switched to it...

Orion, which is based on Safari [1], supports uBlock Origin [2].[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.kagi.com&#x2F;orion&#x2F;why-orion&#x2F;orion-vs-safari.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.kagi.com&#x2F;orion&#x2F;why-orion&#x2F;orion-vs-safari.html</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.kagi.com&#x2F;orion&#x2F;browser-extensions&#x2F;ublock-origin.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.kagi.com&#x2F;orion&#x2F;browser-extensions&#x2F;ublock-origin...</a>

&gt; Better battery lifedo you have metrics for that or it&#x27;s just a feeling?&gt; it’s just as good for privacy.ublock origin isn&#x27;t available for safari, which greatly increases the probability of safari not being just as good for privacy

&gt; Entreaties and ‘trying to make Fetch (firefox) happen’ won’t work, evidently.Pop culture references aside, `fetch` was also a browser! Sort of. `fetch` was a CLI predecessor to `wget` and `curl`.

If battery life is all you care about, I&#x27;d argue you are not &quot;core market&quot; for FF. You&#x27;re core-market for OS vendors, who will always be able to give you a better battery life by leveraging all the tips and (typically undocumented) tricks that a cross-platform project cannot touch.

Google&#x27;s got a major conflict of interest with adsense and I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll eventually ramp up the war on adblockers to a degree that will make manifest v3 look like a joke.If Firefox decides to not implement blocking restrictions they will then have the chance to be the only browser people will still be able to normally use the internet with. That&#x27;s the only chance they have for any kind of resurgence from their currently laughable 3% market share.Small gimmicks like privacy, battery life, customizability, stability, etc. are frankly what 99.9% of people don&#x27;t give a half a shit about. They will only make the switch from default once they&#x27;re genuinely annoyed to the point where they can no longer use Chrome&#x2F;ium. For Firefox users that moment unfortunately happens every time a government website doesn&#x27;t work.

Quoting myself:&gt; Hmm.&gt; Using Firefox because it has a particular technological feature is a political choice. That political stance would lead users to turn to other browsers as fast as tech is added or removed.&gt; I use Firefox for political reasons and for what it stands.&gt; Which means that when Firefox gets worse I still use it and support what it stands for.&gt; It&#x27;s very Stallmanesque and let it be clear I am not saying the choice to favour superior tech over ethic concerns is wrong. It&#x27;s just a different choice.&gt; That&#x27;s what I tell people when talking about Signal and messenger, Chrome and Firefox.&gt; Also, I don&#x27;t think Mozilla is a white knight and in my opinion they fucked up some good things over the years (tech or ethic). But the good still largely surpasses the bad.Let&#x27;s say Firefox was the open platform it is today but with the exception of, hmmm, tabs ? No tabs. Well, using Chrome because FF has not tabs if fine of course but you are trading convenience for a Google controlled Internet viewer. At some point Microsoft tried the EEE tactics with web browsers (jscript and box models and the whole DHTML hell, etc.) and the argument was the same: &quot;do we want a web that is controlled by MS, a web where MS is the only gateway to how content should be displayed&#x2F;accessed and where MS totally control the evolution of the tech ?&quot;

Instead of trying to figure out exactly what features would accomplish that, I wish they would focus on making it embeddable. Personally, I like the UX of Arc. Arc uses Chrome under the hood. And if anyone else wants to make a browser specifically for some small subset of users, they&#x27;re going to pick Chrome.Why not make it easer for developers to embed Firefox and let a thousand small, weird browsers bloom? Some will be terrible, but a few might be brilliant.If they don&#x27;t do this, I&#x27;m holding out hope for Servo.

We all switched to Firefox back in the day because it was better.Better than IE, there was no chrome and safari was a joke.Entreaties and ‘trying to make Fetch (firefox) happen’ won’t work, evidently.How do we make Firefox obviously better?I’m core market for Firefox and just use Safari. Better battery life. And it’s just as good for privacy.At least that’s my impression. Is it wrong?If I don’t use it there’s very little chance people will change the defaults.Defaults are powerful.

Just fork it. I don&#x27;t have a problem with the tech I have a problem with the corp that governs it. Because in their last Annual Report they see the future of Mozilla in AI services...and that&#x27;s not what&#x27;s going to get usershare back.

The thing is we can hardly have something new.A new browser engine is an incredibly hard thing to program and historically they have always been financed by multi-millions (now billions) companies. Even Firefox via Google.If you want another engine that is not WebKit or Gecko and you want it open source, you are asking for something that the free software community failed to deliver for the last 30 years and that is harder to deliver everyday.If Firefox happens to die, we are basically stuck with a Webkit-only internet. We may have open source browsers but nobody is going to pay for the Gecko development (which is not just maintenance but keeping it up to date with the web specs) and nobody is going to pay for a new engine.

These fear-mongers that make everyone hate needs to stop. Multi-millionaires that give their own agenda and anything else is anti-this or stupid needs to stop.You also probably say you hate &quot;Cancel Culture&quot; while cancelling things including coke.

Just let it die. We need something new or at least a CEO with a vision that is not steered by the tides of LinkedIn hype

Archive PageBypass Paywalls CleanCSS Exfil ProtectionDecentraleyesDDG Privacy EssentialsGhosteryNoScriptPrivacy BadgerPrivacy-Oriented Origin PolicyStylusTampermonkeyuBlock OriginuMatrixYes, there is overkill in there but that&#x27;s fine. It does not impact my browsing experience.

do you have any other recs for firefox extensions?

For extensions, I recommend people follow the recommendations[1] in the arkenfox repo and either harden their firefox or use librewolf. Umatrix is unmaintained since 2019.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;arkenfox&#x2F;user.js&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;4.1-Extensions">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;arkenfox&#x2F;user.js&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;4.1-Extensions</a>

Firefox user since before it was Firefox.Daily: Firefox with probably too many blockers, tampermonkey, umatrix, Stylus. I aggressively block any and every element on sites I visit regularly. You get no stats from me.Also daily: Firefox Developer Ed for frequently visited sites where I need to login and every site is in a container tab.Brave - my daily puzzle fix for Wordle, Wordiply, Travle, Tradle (no logins, clears data on exit).Edge, in Private mode, if and only if I cannot get a site to otherwise work.Also nextdns.io to block as much as I can including all Google, all facebook, all Automattic properties and more.While I&#x27;m sure some data is being collected I am very happy with how my internet looks.

&gt; &quot;Its happened before&quot;&gt; That&#x27;s not an argumentIt&#x27;s a subheading to &quot;2. Browser engine monopoly&quot;. The subsection&#x27;s purpose is describing how bad things were during the IE monopoly to reinforce that it&#x27;s something to be avoided.&gt; in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debtThat would be agreeing with the article, unless I misunderstand what you mean.&gt; On top of that, the internet was very different back then.In a way that now makes it harder for truly new competing engines to pop up due to increased complexity of the web.&gt; I&#x27;m still not convinced, why would I change my browser?The points made in the article are:* Increased privacy, opposed to willingly giving your data to an ad-tech company* Helps avoid a browser engine monopoly which would effectively let Google dictate web standards* It’s fast and has a nice user interfaceOnto which I&#x27;d add:* Content blockers work best on Firefox (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-works-b...</a>), doubly so once Manifest V3 rolls out* Allows more customization of interface and home page* UX improvements, like the clutter-free reader mode, aren&#x27;t vetoed to protect ad revenue as with Chrome (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37675467">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37675467</a>)

While i wholeheartedly agree, these aren&#x27;t really reasons. Playing devil&#x27;s advocate reveals nothing useful.&quot;Its happened before&quot;That&#x27;s not an argument, in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt. On top of that, the internet was very different back then.&quot;Its actually good&quot;I&#x27;m still not convinced, why would I change my browser? I&#x27;m very comfortable in my opera&#x2F;edge&#x2F;chrome browser and I&#x27;d have to change my workflow.

Eh, I tried unfortunately and it&#x27;s not the same. Especially with video processing, my older Macbook Pro heats up very quickly when using Firefox vs Chrome.Firefox&#x27;s history bar is still superior though

It does not. Those binaries are signed by your distribution and the same for everyone.

does that apply to installations from apt?

My best guess: &lt;1% so statistically not relevant.

I&#x27;m honestly curious why they don&#x27;t also track the FTP server downloads.

Here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;</a><pre><code> Firefox by default also sends marketing campaign data to Adjust, our analytics vendor, which has its own privacy policy. Campaign data includes a Google advertising ID or Android ID, IP address, timestamp, country, language&#x2F;locale, operating system, and app version.
</code></pre>
Smells like a sale, but by not using the word sell, they get all the benefits of sowing doubt without having put in any of the work necessary to have an actual problem about selling it.

&gt; (sells?)An accusation like this would benefit from some evidence.By not offering any evidence, you get all the benefits of sowing doubt without having put in any of the work necessary to have an actual discussion about it.

Can you explain the process by which Mozilla gives the unique identifier to Google?The article quotes Mozilla saying they can correlate the two, but it doesn&#x27;t state how.

I do appreciate the moral consistency of at least supporting alternative revenue models.

I use to be a supporter and I am a customer of Mozilla Relay, but I refuse to use their browser while they are financed by Google. It makes them nothing but controlled opposition.

Any Firefox user who is concerned about privacy should definitely read the Firefox Privacy Notice:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;</a>The name &quot;Google&quot; appears multiple times, sometimes within the phrase &quot;data to Google&quot;.There are also currently references to &quot;third-party ad platform&quot; and &quot;a third-party referral platform&quot;, along with other companies&#x2F;organizations.Some people will claim that it doesn&#x27;t matter because some of this Firefox functionality that involves data collection and&#x2F;or third-parties can be disabled, or that it&#x27;s fine because it has been disclosed, or it&#x27;s somehow acceptable because Firefox maybe doesn&#x27;t send as much info as some of its competitors do, and so on.I don&#x27;t buy into those arguments. If Firefox was truly privacy-respecting, it would never collect nor send any data beyond that necessary to provide its core web browsing functionality.Any functionality that might compromise a user&#x27;s privacy should not be bundled by default, and would have to be explicitly opted into by manually installing an extension that provides such functionality. This would include Firefox&#x27;s&#x2F;Mozilla&#x27;s own &quot;telemetry&quot;.

That&#x27;s bad. But not as bad as a binary blob from Google that is the browser.Since I use Linux I don&#x27;t download FF manually.

&gt;1. Privacy
Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and&#x2F;or selling your personal data.Mozilla tracks and gives (sells?) unique information about every download to Google unless you choose to grab it from the FTP servers.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghacks.net&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;each-firefox-download-has-a-unique-identifier&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghacks.net&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;each-firefox-download-has-...</a>

at the time he made the donation, it was the majority opinion in California.  He even said that he had changed his mind&#x2F;opinion had evolved.  But it wasn&#x27;t enough

They have customers all over the world. It was a bad business decision, regardless of the local liability. They could have just swept it under the rug like they do at almost every other company.

Being publicly against same sex marriage is a business liability in San Francisco.

It was more than a personal view. He paid a lobbying campaign for a policy that is diametrically opposed to Mozilla&#x27;s organisational views on diversity.A CEO should stand for the values their organisation represents.

I am not going back to Firefox anytime soon after they kicked out Brendan Eich for his personal views. Whether we agree or not with his personal views, open source should not be influenced by political agenda, neither by wokeness

This sounds great, but for web developers I feel it’s a risky change if you want to see your sites as your users do.

One UI feature that I love that Firefox lets you change is the scrollbars.  I forget the precise settings, but I set them up so that they are always present and always big enough for me to see how far down a page I am (yes, like I&#x27;m using Windows 95!).  That might only be something that matters to a few people, but the fact that it is customizable to that level is one of Firefox&#x27;s greatest strengths.

It took a long time, but the situation improved a couple weeks ago. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;addons&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;28&#x2F;open-extensions-on-firefox-for-android-debut-december-14-but-you-can-get-a-sneak-peek-today&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;addons&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;28&#x2F;open-extensions-o...</a>

Unless you&#x27;re on mobile, in which case you&#x27;d find it to confusing, so they removed the option, unless you&#x27;re on nightly, with all the issues that entails.

Brave. Seriously. Turn off a few things at first boot, it won&#x27;t bother you after and is just nice and clean:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;tuMGc3c.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;tuMGc3c.png</a>

Sane defaults are always good, (which firefox has, IMHO), but not allowing the user to tweak basic stuff is a pain.

At the risk of losing credibility in this community, I&#x27;m going to voice an opinion which I think belongs to the silent majority: I do not want to customize anything. I want to read the news and check my bank account with as little drama as possible. More customizable settings always means more things that can break. If the best feature of Firefox is that it has lots of things to configure, that&#x27;s a negative for me.But this is coming from somebody who really would like to embrace better privacy...sigh...Holding out hope for the DuckDuckGo browser on Windows. The current beta is decent, but extensions are yet to come, which means no ad blocking at the moment. That makes it essentially unusable with today&#x27;s internet

I switched to Firefox earlier this year, having used Chrome since 2008&#x2F;2009, previously having used Firefox. Mostly out of laziness.Can&#x27;t believe how good Firefox is now, and how great it is on Android (addons, config).Being able to control anything on the browser is fantastic. Want to increase a certain UI elements font size just a tad? Sure! Want to tweak every aspect of the UI? sure! Want a myriad of config options, sure go ahead! Love the concept of Nightly, has worked great for me.

The easiest way to get the easy of use of Safari&#x27;s password manager in a different browser would be to use a different password manager that works in other browsers. Common recommendations are 1Password (my personal favorite), BitWarden, etc.This might not fulfill your needs though, since it sounds like you&#x27;d like to use the Safari password manager in a different browser, which is not possible outside of the Chrome extension [0] that Apple provides. This means that it wouldn&#x27;t work on Firefox.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;icloud-wachtwoorden&#x2F;pejdijmoenmkgeppbflobdenhhabjlaj?pli=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromewebstore.google.com&#x2F;detail&#x2F;icloud-wachtwoorden...</a>

There is not, unfortunately.Apple has an extension for Chrome (&quot;iCloud Passwords&quot;) that lets you use the keychain passwords there, but nothing for Firefox. It&#x27;s less-restrictive than it used to be, since the extension used to only support Chrome on Windows, but they gave in back in July of this year and made it easier to use Chrome on Mac.Apparently, Firefox removed a bunch of password-related APIs back in Firefox 57 that broke some existing keychain extensions[1], so it might not be Apple&#x27;s fault that they&#x27;ve not provided a Firefox extension. There&#x27;s no progress on Firefox bugs related to making such an extension possible again, that I could see.[2][1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jfitzell&#x2F;mozilla-keychain&#x2F;issues&#x2F;88">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jfitzell&#x2F;mozilla-keychain&#x2F;issues&#x2F;88</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1650212" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1650212</a>

My family uses Apple&#x27;s keypass for everything password. Is there an easy way to get passwords working like Safari?I currently do Search Passwords, Search website, Copy password, Paste in Firefox manually.

&gt; I finally got sick of a lot of the crap that was getting added to edge (like the stupid button on the right that opens the right toolbar)FYI you can disable it, along with most of the additional button things.

I finally got sick of a lot of the crap that was getting added to edge (like the stupid button on the right that opens the right toolbar), plus I didn’t like MS stealing my data.Not a day goes by that I don’t strongly miss vertical tabs though.

I&#x27;ll switch to Firefox when they get proper vertical tabs like Edge&#x27;s. I know Microsoft Edge has a really bad reputation, but damn it I can&#x27;t live without its vertical tabs, and I can disable most of the idiotic AI crap. I know there are plugins, but they all feel quite hacky and are simply not as good.

You&#x27;ll have to ask them. I left Chrome in an exasperated huff several years ago.The browser ecosystem as we know it is in a tenuous state. It is unhealthy for the web that Chromium has become so dominant. It is a symptom of this imbalance that users line up to defend Apple&#x27;s choice to lock out other browser engines from iOS. This kind of popular user sentiment would have been unthinkable to me in the era when Firefox first rose up to fight back against the IE singularity. Yet, here we are.

Is that a common belief on the Google Chrome team?

Is Fairphone 5 such an inconvenience you describe it? On paper, it seems pretty usable

Case in point, Nvidia video super resolution is buggy in Firefox, it will randomly stop working until you restart the whole browser.

&gt; This is annoying if you want to try out new web platform features.You meant Blink platform?

Maybe not dying (yet) but it is technologically behind with a lot of things by now. This is annoying if you want to try out new web platform features. Sometimes, there isn&#x27;t even a signal from Mozilla while Google marks a feature as stable.Average people probably don&#x27;t care about the latest features but Google pushes Chrome very aggressively, so they end up using it anyway.What annoys me the most, however, is that several things simply don&#x27;t work in Firefox and the associated report is over a decade old, so with close to zero chances of ever getting addressed. Copying the content of a canvas element as an image to the clipboard is one of these things. In Chrome, this takes a right and a left click. Firefox didn&#x27;t have such a basic feature last time I checked. There used to be a workaround, opening a blob URL in a new tab and then copy that, but this got broken later, I believe by a stricter security policy.Firefox is essentially the browser equivalent of Fairphone. It&#x27;s the most ethical option but it inconveniences you left, right, and center.

I feel like Google breaking ad blockers on chrome will ensure survival of browsers like Firefox.

Firefox is the web browser equivalent a dying language. It will be a tragic loss for the culture of the web for Firefox to fade away. But, there are powerful macro forces pushing us to that outcome. &quot;Switch, please,&quot; calls to action are a noble but insufficient countermeasure.

Not as good for networking and performance as chrome dev tools, but the visualizations for styling are notably better.

for css they are best in class IMHO, especially the visualizations of flex and grid

About as good as Chrome in most areas, but the performance is poorer. They&#x27;re serviceable.

How are the Firefox dev tools these days? I feel like every time I try to switch, the dev tooling has felt subpar compared to Chrome, and I don&#x27;t like using one browser for regular use and one for development. It&#x27;s been a couple years since I tried though.

If it weren’t for the unique to Firefox audio&#x2F;video sync problem, I would.

&gt; Firefox and Safari do not support installing PWAs on any desktop operating systems... Chrome and Edge support installing PWAs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks.That&#x27;s not actually true, MDN needs updating. PWAs are installable as standalone apps since macOS Sonoma and Safari 17 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;14445&#x2F;webkit-features-in-safari-17-0&#x2F;#:~:text=Web%20apps%20on%20Mac" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;14445&#x2F;webkit-features-in-safari-17-0...</a>.

There are workarounds for using Firefox web apps: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.puri.sm&#x2F;t&#x2F;firefox-web-apps&#x2F;21499&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.puri.sm&#x2F;t&#x2F;firefox-web-apps&#x2F;21499&#x2F;</a>

Indeed:&gt; Firefox and Safari do not support installing PWAs on any desktop operating systems... Chrome and Edge support installing PWAs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks. [1]Any idea what Mozilla&#x27;s motivation is here? (Apple&#x27;s at least is easy to understand, even if you disagree.)[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;Progressive_web_apps&#x2F;Guides&#x2F;Making_PWAs_installable#sites-as-apps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;Progressive_web...</a>

When I need webusb or webserial, I use edge or chrome. So far, that&#x27;s been twice, ever.I don&#x27;t know anything in detail about those protocols though, and don&#x27;t know why Firefox doesn&#x27;t have them.

I have tried to switch out of curiosity, but the lack of PWA support in addition to missing features like WebUSB really limits how useful the browser is to me.

I like to see Firefox the browser as something that will have a life independent of Mozilla the (crappily managed) corporation. When they finally go down in flames, the open source community will continue to work on it in some fashion. It started as a skunkworks project, and I expect it will continue to have a life after Mozilla.That, or something else will fill the void (maybe something built off Servo, I dunno), but that seems less likely.

we really need a wealthy tech founder type (especially one who made their millions or billions on the web) to start a new foundation that will actually care about Firefox rather than see it as a liability.  Mozilla has completely lost my trust and support

&gt; What&#x27;s the real use case of PWAs?Letting companies save money while still claiming they have &quot;desktop apps&quot;.

&gt; They just seem like another way to attempt to shift users from the &#x27;proper web&#x27; into a place where blocking ads is more difficult.Extensions still run in PWAs on Chromium-based browsers, so I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s the intent behind implementing them.&gt; Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of &#x27;apps&#x27; from the worldOut of curiosity, where do you draw the distinction between an app and a website? PWAs are largely just websites with an OS shortcut, and in some cases more integration via platform APIs. I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;re familiar with the term &quot;web app&quot;, which perfectly highlights how muddied the line is with modern tooling.

I used to be the maintainer for Nativefier (which made web apps into native apps via Electron). It was very popular because many people don’t want certain sites to be one of X tabs in one app, especially when those sites act like they’re own apps. So we gave users the ability to treat these web “apps” like any other apps.We actually shut down the project because a good PWA implementation does this better than we ever could. PWAs can have extensions like ad blockers (very difficult to impossible in Electron). PWAs get automatic browser updates (very difficult with Electron).PWAs are great, and FF’s implementation of them is not.

On Windows the Twitter, Instagram, TikTok apps are PWAs. I like to use them because I can pin them to the start menu, have them start on a separate window by default and remember the window position.

&gt; What&#x27;s the real use case of PWAs?Having apps that works as well as native ones, while using the same codebase and open technologies, and that is naturally as decentralized, safe and accessible as the web.Also not needing to be politically correct, approved by Google and Apple or share large percent of revenue and marketing data with them.It could be happening if Firefox took it more seriously and Apple didn&#x27;t prevent it from happening.

I use Elk Mastodon client - being able to install it as a PWA is great - I get a nice icon on my mobile screen same as any other app, and it runs full screen without an address bar. I can switch between it and other apps, I don&#x27;t see the downside really

Cmd&#x2F;Alt+TabOn macOS this is even more important because switching windows within an app does not use most recently used order.

Getting a full screen view without having to go through the insane hassle of Ionic and the Play store every time you make a one line change? Really useful for various offline control web apps, though I admit it&#x27;s a rounding error use case that most browsers are more hostile to every year with arbitrary restrictions around HTTP connections (did you know Safari&#x27;s ATS policy now blocks fetch over unsecure connections, lmao). Web games come to mind as well I guess?I&#x27;m still baffled that mobile browsers don&#x27;t have the desktop equivalent of F11. Or a console for that matter, the ADB is good and all but it&#x27;s not always an option.

What&#x27;s the real use case of PWAs?They just seem like another way to attempt to shift users from the &#x27;proper web&#x27; into a place where blocking ads is more difficult.Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of &#x27;apps&#x27; from the world, they shouldn&#x27;t be apps in the first place, most have no need to run native code, they should be links to websites, sites that can work on more-or-less any device in any browser.

Poorly built ones, sure.But in all fairness, it’s easier to build one poorly, and there isn’t much incentive not to.

I personally hate PWAs even the ones I use on mobile (with firefox). Not being able to open a link in a second tab for example. I much rather just open the web app in a normal browser. PWAs just seem to reduce functionality over a normal web page.

Along those lines, does macOS 14&#x27;s Safari&#x27;s support for &quot;Add to Dock&quot; count as installing a PWA? I have a couple frequently used websites in my dock, acting more or less like regular Mac apps (or at least like Electron apps). What would a &quot;proper&quot; PWA add to that?(Not a leading question. I&#x27;m genuinely asking people who like and use PWAs: is there something cool I&#x27;m missing out on?)

I use PWAs for YouTube Music, Slack, and Readwise Reader.Sometimes there is a standalone app available, like with Slack, but often the PWA has the same features and doesn&#x27;t duplicate the entire Web Platform stack (Electron), which saves some battery.

Any online IDE is a much nicer experience as an installed PWA compared to as a browser tab. VS code server for instance, since you don&#x27;t get a the address bar at top like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;docs&#x2F;remote&#x2F;vscode-server&#x2F;server-connected.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;docs&#x2F;remote&#x2F;vscode-serv...</a> (without having to go Full screen on browser), and you get a standalone icon in task bar, and standalone window so you can Alt-Tab between it and other apps like web browser of choice quickly.

Photopea, it&#x27;s a web based photo editor that is really really great. If you install it as a PWA, it works offline. Similarly, excalidraw, monkeytype, google calendar all work offline if you install it as a PWA.Apart from that, I have youtube music, slack, discord, whatsapp web just for convenience of having it in alt+tab rather than cycle through a thousand tabs (admittedly, this usecase is nullified by tab search)

Curious, can you give some examples of PWAs you use, and why? I&#x27;ve rarely seen any benefit of actually installing a PWA vs just bookmarking the site.On mobile, I could see privacy reasons for wanting to use a PWA vs a native app, but every time I&#x27;ve seen a site that supports a PWA, they also support a native app and the PWA is usually a sad substitute in comparison.

It&#x27;s decidedly non-ideal that it requires an extension and a native helper, but <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;pwas-for-firefox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;pwas-for-fire...</a> works.

I didn&#x27;t follow this PWA stuff very closely, but from what I understand, Mozilla didn&#x27;t want to implement the PWA protocol proposed by Google because it contained things that weren&#x27;t compatible with the open web view focused on the benefit of the users which Firefox has. I&#x27;m happy there is a browser that takes this stance.

I use PWAs extensively and Firefox decided they won&#x27;t bother to implement them, so that&#x27;s going to be a no from me.Rather than wanting the web platform to be first class, they really want it to languish as a second-class citizen. Really sad, seeing as they also fired devs, and invested in &quot;AI&quot; instead.

Yes. The auth part should not be displayed when you hover over a bookmark. Chromium does not display it.In the end, every security mechanism is &quot;plain text&quot;. Even ssh keys. When someone gains access to your ssh key, which is just an ascii string, they can log in as you.

You save passwords in plain text (bookmarks) and then complain that people can read the plain text over your shoulder?

I&#x27;m not typing them in my terminal. I have scripts that automate my workflow. And part of it is logging me into websites.Regarding storing them in plain text: That&#x27;s not much different from ssh keys. When someone can read your ssh key, they can log in as you.If you know a better way to automatically log a user into a website, let us know!

You&#x27;re literally putting the password in plain-text into the (unencrypted) browser bookmarks (and also into your terminal where it&#x27;s likely logged to your ~&#x2F;.bash_history).That is the bigger security issue you have, not how Firefox is handling the display of the URL.If anything, Firefox is highlighting your insecure security practice.

I have a hard time believing you even do what you&#x27;re claiming. The number of sites that support logging in that way is basically (pun intended) 0. In fact, firefox is the only browser that warned me that someone is probably trying to scam me with a url like that, the other browsers just dropped the auth part and went to the site without logging in.

I would like to, but Firefox behaves problematic in regard to auth urls like<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;name:password@news.ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;name:password@news.ycombinator.com</a>1: When you bookmark them, it shows the auth part when you hover the bookmark with the mouse.2: When you open them from the command line<pre><code> firefox https:&#x2F;&#x2F;name:password@news.ycombinator.com
</code></pre>
And then ctrl+click links on the site, it opens the new tab and shows the auth part in the tab title as long as the link loads. It seems the &quot;current url&quot; in Firefox code is stored with the auth part, and it passes that part on to local links.These issues make it insecure to use auth urls because as soon as someone looks over your shoulder (or there is a camera like in many cafes), you are p0wned.I wish we had a better way to log into a website from the command line, like ssh keys. But for now, we are stuck with what we have. And Firefox makes it insecure to use it. So for now, I continue to use Chromium.

In 2024, please switch to Firefox